Bangladesh Election 2008 And Cyber Activism

Bangladesh goes into poll on December 29, 2008 for a much awaited parliamentary election. The scenario is lot different than the recent US presidential election where citizen media and Internet campaigning and fund raising were extensively used. With a penetration of 1% of the total population of 145 million, Internet is still not a media that reaches mass people. The new generation of bloggers and facebook users are trying to harness the power of the new media. Bangla Blogging platforms like Somewhere In, Sachalayatan, Amar Blog, Muktangan are buzzing with election related posts - from constructive debates to mundane bickering of acrimony between political ideologies. But how can they affect the politics as the decision makers such as the bureaucrats and the politicians mostly keep themselves away from the digital media and Internet and are not connected to the conversation. The traditional media still dictate in Bangladesh and many are losing the trust of common people for biased reporting. The websites of the political parties are not interactive. Only a few out of thousands of candidates were seen using Internet in their campaign.

Bangladesh politics is traditional, rhetoric and propaganda based and there is little scope for interaction with the leaders asking for accountability. The grass root activists and the general people have little to say in the decision making processes. However Jagoree, a non-partisan platform for Bangladeshi youth, is using facebook and blog to to engage in the political and policy making processes by developing themselves as informed and responsible citizens.

What are we? Image courtesy: Jagoree.

Jagoree is currently running a campaign called 'Amader Vote, Amader Kotha' (Our Vote, Our Voices). Learn more about the campaign from their facebook page.

Planning and mobilizing processes of Jagoree. Image courtesy Jagoree

The notable success of Jagoree in recent days was the making of a documentary and publishing it in YouTube for wider audience [bn]:



The aim of this 5 minutes 44 second documentary is to inspire Bangladeshis to cast an informed vote in the coming election. It shows the frustration with the current politics and at the same time frames the hope of the young Bangladeshis that a change will come.

This time around much information on the candidates and the election are available on the Internet. What the Bangladeshis need is to look for the facts and be informed for making the right decision regarding whom to vote.

SHUJAN, a non-profit organization in Bangladesh dedicated to good governance, has an award winning site [bn] which provides much background information on the candidates. The site has different sections like general information on election, constituency wise copmarative information of the candidates and much more. SHUJAN has also something unique to offer. They have an archive of over 4000 entries of news of Corruption of politicians (browseable by name) of whom many are contesting in the 2008 election.

Bangladesh Election commission has also detailed information including voter list and the candidate profiles in pdf format (to be downloaded and distributed) and guidelines for observers.

E-Bangladesh is providing links to all the important news regarding Bangladesh election and posting analysis and breaking news from citizen journalists in their constant coverage of Election 2008 (in English). The site also posts links to resources for the election including candidate lists and election manifestos of the parties. Its sister initiative, the Bangla Blogging platform Amar Blog has started its election coverage in Bangla language which is providing news and citizen journalists' views on the election.

The popular English language group blog Unheard Voice is also providing analysis and commentaries on the recent election.

The largest Bangla blogging platform somwhereinblog.net has started a group blog on Bangladesh election in collaboration with the English language news paper The New Age. The news daily has recently started an election portal which will feature selected blog posts from the group blog and news/analysis from its daily newspaper publications. This is the first instance in the country where a major print media is collaborating with a blog platform outside its management. The portal will provide live results of the election. It has an user-friendly interactive map plotting the previous results.

Quite against the tide of the digital divide among the candidates, blogger and journalist Maskwaith Ahsan, who is running as a MP candidate in the Rajshahi -6 constituency, has started using facebook to run his campaign.

It remains to be seen how Bangladeshis use citizen media like blog, videos (e.g. YouTube), photographs (e.g. Flickr), twitter etc. during the election.

(First published in Global Voices Online)

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Clean Voter List, Clean Polls

The Bangladesh general election on December 29, 2008 will be remarkable in many ways. First of all the national ID card project with biometric data hindered the inclusion of false voters which was a regular affair in previous elections. See the comparative voter lists since the birth of Bangladesh:

What is remarkable is that for the first time we have more women voters (51%) than the previous lists. Another thing to note is that from 1996 to 2001 there was an increase of voters by 32.24%. Now there may be two reasons for that in 1996 less eligible voters were counted (exclusion of minority voters) and in 2001 some false voter were included.

This time around the growth is only 8% in 7 years. This has surely stripped away all those anomalies in the voters list, hopefully. There are also 33% young voters who will vote for the first time.

Another interesting aspect is the money part of this election. This time the election commission has restricted spending by candidates (Taka per voter 5 and 1.5 million Taka per constituency), banning vote buying or influence peddling and outlawing cash giveaways.

A recent AFP article looks at the impacts:

An election in Bangladesh is usually a chance for an ordinary voter to make a quick buck, enjoy a free meal and perhaps even grab a souvenir t-shirt at a campaign rally.

This year things are different.

"No-one is offering us money or anything else this time," said Abdul Jalil, a rickshaw puller in the capital, Dhaka. "Previously, we would get cash or other gifts during elections."

Now it will be interesting to see what a clean voter list and reducing the vote purchase phenomena can bring to the results of the election.

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Disconnected...

Calls to and from Bangladesh have been seriously effected today. In case you are wondering why this happened here is the reason:

Internet and telephone traffic between Europe and the Middle East and Asia was hampered Friday after three major underwater data lines were cut, according to France Telecom.

The cut occurred on lines between 07:28 and 08:06 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) on lines in the Mediterranean sea that connect Sicily to Tunisia and Egypt, the telecommunications company said.

The cuts were to the Sea Me We 4 and Sea Me We 3 lines, which connect countries between Singapore and France as well as the Flag cable route, which stretches from the U.K. to Japan, a France Telecom spokeswoman who asked not to be named said.

J of Shadakalo blog writes in E-Bangladesh that it may not return to normal levels until the end of the year and it will impact Bangladesh hardly:

The immediate impact is being felt by expatriates trying to call Bangladesh, or people trying to call out of Bangladesh to international destinations. Instead of gigabytes of bandwidth over the submarine cable, BTCL (former BTTB) and the three other International telecom gateways are working with only megabytes of capacity through VSATs. In BTCLs case, the capacity dropped from 1800 MBps to 240 MBps. BTCL and the other IGWs carry about 5 million minutes per day under normal conditions, which dropped to about 650,000 minutes. The result? Inconvenience for callers, lost revenue for BTCL and the other IGWs, and a near-fatal blow for the nascent call center industry in Bangladesh.

10 to 50 seat call centers have been in operation in Bangladesh for the last few months, and some of them were serving international customers. Now most of those call centers, without dedicated VSAT connections, have fallen silent. And when Monday comes, the hapless call center owners will have to answer to some very irate clients–clients who will not care that this was a global connectivity problem. Many of those clients will go to other call centers in other countries and never return, leaving our call center owners stuck with their investments.

The typical culprit in these undersea cuts are anchors from ships but this time Egypt is claiming there were no ships in the vicinity this time.



J adds:

lots of other countries are facing connectivity loss too. But there is a big difference: they are not connected to only one cable, so while they may lose 50% or 33% of their connectivity if one cable goes down, they don’t experience the 87% capacity loss experienced by Bangladesh.

As per Beta News the hardest hit countries by telecom traffic disruptions are:

Estimates given for voice-service disruptions indicate Maldives (100% out of service), India (82% out of service), Qatar (73%), Djibouti (71%), and United Arab Emirates (68%).

There was a debate about redundancy and be connected to a second submarine cable so that outages like this don't affect at this scale. In January this year the submarine cable was cut also almost near the same point in Alexandria.

In last February we heard that the Bangladesh Government will allow a second cable to be commissioned by the private sector. But we have not heard about it for a while. This should be the priority for the newly elected government.

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Facebook and Terrorism

From the AllFaceBook blog:

We’ve covered extensively how Facebook has been impacting the global political landscape and much of what we’ve discussed has been about the spreading of democracy. Now for the first time, it appears that Islamic terrorists are preparing to spread Jihad through the largest global social network. In a post entitled “Invading Facebook: Theory and Practice”, Umar Abd al-Hakim of Syria covers how Facebook can be used to spread Jihadi media to the masses.

Major General Muniruzzaman, a former military advisor and Chief of Staff to the President of Bangladesh, mentioned that the young people from Asian communities in Britain are often more radicalized that their counterparts in South Asia.

"We are interested in studying the Facebook generation, to see how the Facebook generation is shifting radical thoughts from one country to another, " he said.

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Understanding Flow Charts

Courtesy Xkcd

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TIME person of the year Barack Obama

Time magazine named US president-elect Barack Obama its 2008 "Person of the Year.

I think this is one selection everybody around the world will agree. There was a survey once which showed if the world could vote, Obama would win over McCain in a landslide. So no surprises here.

David Von Drehle writes:

It's unlikely that you were surprised to see Obama's face on the cover. He has come to dominate the public sphere so completely that it beggars belief to recall that half the people in America had never heard of him two years ago — that even his campaign manager, at the outset, wasn't sure Obama had what it would take to win the election. He hit the American scene like a thunderclap, upended our politics, shattered decades of conventional wisdom and overcame centuries of the social pecking order. Understandably, you may be thinking Obama is on the cover for these big and flashy reasons: for ushering the country across a momentous symbolic line, for infusing our democracy with a new intensity of participation, for showing the world and ourselves that our most cherished myth — the one about boundless opportunity — has plenty of juice left in it.

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AFP defends its hyped up story!!!!‏

The story that a Bangladeshi film producer has claimed that he has spent 58 million dollars building an exact replica of the "Taj Mahal" was first reported by AFP and then quickly picked up by the MSM in Bangladesh, India and International media.

Some Bangladeshi bloggers went to see what the fuss is all about and were disappointed with the findings and claimed this as a money making scam to milk the visitors with exorbitant prices. Aparna's post at Global Voices reveals all that which ends with:

"With Bangladeshi bloggers uploading their first-hand experience of visiting the site through posts, pictures and videos, it is only now we are getting the real picture of the “fake Taj” story."

Ethan Zuckerman noted in his blog:

"It’s pretty common for professional journalists to complain about poor fact checking in blogs, and the possibility that bloggers will hype stories that professional journalists would have quickly and easily debunked. Here’s a classic counter-example: an international press agency hyped a story which helped rip off Bangladeshis, who used blogs to debunk the story. Here’s hoping the international outlets hyping the story will pick up on the corrections as quickly as they seized on the story."

Yesterday AFP published a followup article which defended their first story!! Its notable that this time they have placed the claims of the cost and the materials within quotes to indicate that it is a claim by the builder. Earlier they had reported it as if it was a fact.

However they quoted visitors reactions including the Global Voices report this time:

Bloggers too have reacted angrily to Moni's replica, which he claims is life-size. Aparna Ray concluded that the hype surrounding the attraction was a gimmick. "[It's] a money-making scam in the name of the Taj," Ray wrote. "The tiles look like the type you'd use in a bathroom. We've been cheated by this guy," another blogger wrote.

Apparently they finally went there and interviewed the producer. "There's nothing I can do if a visitor is disappointed," he said and AFP reported as it is. And AFP also reported that he will next month raise the entry fee from 50 taka to 100 taka.

I like many disappointed Bangladeshis want to see those "imported marble and granite from Italy, diamonds from Belgium and used 160 kilogrammes (353 pounds) of bronze for the dome" as reported by AFP (did they check those?). And I would also like to see how much tax this guy has paid for the income(?) of "$58million (an unbelievable some for Bangladesh -per capita income $1400)" he spent on this Taj Mahal as he claims.

May be the bloggers will have do it for us again.

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