In his paper, titled "Sand and the politics of plunder in Tamil Nadu, India," Indian economist Dr J Jeyaranjan describes how the sand mafia has been plundering the common property resource in Tamil Nadu with the support of political patronage since the late 1980s, at the onset of a real estate boom. The state's public works department justifies sand extraction in the name of removing excess sand deposits from riverbeds to ensure unhindered river flow. But indiscriminate sand mining and transportation leads to enormous ecological and social problems at riverbed quarries where water tables are depleted, irrigation is affected, and agricultural production is affected.

In Bangladesh, too, illegal and indiscriminate sand extraction from the rivers is rising alongside growing urbanisation, with the backing of ruling party politicians, causing massive erosion of riverbanks and destruction of rural settlements and farmlands. Every year, certain areas of different rivers are officially declared as balumohal (sand estate), and lease is given out for sand lifting through open tenders. In some cases, sand is extracted from outside the defined boundaries of a balumohal, in violation of lease terms. In other cases, sand is extracted from the rivers without taking a lease.

As per the Balumohal and Soil Management Act, 2010 (amended in 2023), sand mining is banned within one kilometre of bridges, culverts, dams, barrages, roads, highways, forests, railway lines, and other important public and private infrastructures or residential areas. Moreover, if a river faces the risk of damage to its ecosystem or riverbank erosion, sand cannot be mined from it. In practice, however, political influentials ignore these restrictions, which aids rampant sand lifting from the rivers leading to massive erosion of riverbanks and the subsequent destruction of various structures, settlements, and agricultural land.

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Of illegal sand lifting and Dipu Moni’s 15 letters

For example, according to reports published in The Daily Star and Prothom Alo, ruling party men are killing the Someshwari River, which flows through Netrakona district, by extracting sand from it indiscriminately. They took lease for five balumohal, covering an area of only 1,914 acres, but are extracting sand from a 22-kilometre stretch of the river illegally. Also, instead of using cutter suction dredgers, which are capable of extracting sand in a uniform way from the riverbed, the AL men are using "Bangla pump dredger," which extracts sand by digging deep holes in the riverbed. This illegal and unscientific method of sand extraction damages the river's ecosystem and accelerates riverbank erosion.

What's more, the sand miners have blocked the mouth of Atrakhali River, a tributary of Someshwari, by dumping sand to facilitate transportation of the extracted sand by lorries. As a result, Someshwari's water cannot flow to Atrakhali, causing it to dry up. Thus, aggressive and unregulated sand extraction from the Someshwari River is destroying plant and fish habitats, depriving fishermen of their livelihoods and decimating the riverbanks.

The case of Selim Khan, known as balukheko (sand-eater) chairman from a Chandpur union parishad, is perhaps the biggest example of sand mafia, looting thousands of crores of taka by extracting sand illegally under the administration's nose with political patronage, destroying the river ecosystem in the process. For eight years, Selim has illegally mined sand from the Meghna River in Chandpur with 200 dredgers, using the pretext of improving the river's navigability.

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Shall we just bow to illegal sand lifters?

An investigation by The Daily Star indicates that Selim Khan could not have run his illegal sand business without the support of Education Minister Dipu Moni, who wrote at least 15 demi official letters, known as DO letters, between 2015 and 2021, to various government offices so that Selim and his family members could expand their sand business. Between 2018 and 2022 alone, he lifted more than 668 crore cubic feet of sand, which is worth at least Tk 1,337 crore, but did not pay a single taka to the government exchequer. As a result, the government has been deprived of a huge amount of revenue. Additionally, due to indiscriminate sand extraction, riverbank erosion has increased at the Meghna, the dam to protect Chandpur city has been damaged at several places, and hilsa breeding has been endangered.

The extent of political patronage that illegal sand miners get became more evident when the government scrapped the appointment of Manjur Ahmed Chowdhury as the chairman of National River Conservation Commission (NRCC) in October, less than a month after he said a "female minister from Chandpur" was lending support to a syndicate extracting sand from the Meghna River.

Illegal sand extraction under political patronage is so rampant that sometimes the sand mafia does not even feel the need to officially take a lease out on the balumohal. Tenders were called seven times from March 12 to September 4 this year for the lease of 53 balumohal in 36 rivers and canals in Chattogram, but no one responded. The sand mafia, however, did not stop extracting thousands of tonnes of sand from Feni, Dolu, and Karnaphuli rivers and endangering the rivers and nearby roads and bridges every day. According to a study conducted by the River and Delta Research Centre (RDRC) this year, at least 265 people are illegally extracting sand from 132 unauthorised sites in 77 rivers. And out of the 265 individuals, at least 54 are local public representatives, 193 are influentials, 12 are dredger owners, and six are businessmen.

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Our rivers are being robbed

Not only are the rivers and their ecosystems damaged due to illegal sand mining, but thousands of people also lose their land and homes due to river erosion every year. This process of killing the rivers and pauperising the rural population, while supplying sand for housing and infrastructure construction for the urban people must be stopped immediately. It is not enough to seize the dredger machines and fine the sand lifters through occasional mobile court drives. Those who extract sand illegally and their political patronisers must be punished as well. If sand is mined illegally from any river, officials of the concerned local administration should be brought under accountability. In addition, the annual demand of sand in the country should be determined, and the places from where sand can be extracted should be fixed in a scientific manner. Participation of the local people should also be ensured in the supervision of sand mining activities.

Kallol Mustafa is an engineer and writer who focuses on power, energy, environment and development economics.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own.

Follow The Daily Star Opinion on Facebook for the latest opinions, commentaries and analyses by experts and professionals. To contribute your article or letter to The Daily Star Opinion, see our guidelines for submission.

The way the events unfolded on Saturday has given the Awami League rank and file a confidence boost, claim leaders of the ruling party.

They said the kind of momentum BNP tried to gather with its grand rally did not come to pass, and it has "hurt the morale of the party activists".

The violence that took place that day was mostly between BNP and the police, leaving the opposition party pitted against law enforcers, said several AL leaders contacted by The Daily Star yesterday.

They said the pressure that the AL has been facing from the West for the last couple of months may now ease a little after Saturday's events.

AFM Bahauddin Nasim, AL joint general secretary, said, "By beating a cop to death, attacking journalists, torching police box and ambulances and throwing brickbats at the chief justice's residence, BNP itself has exposed its true nature, which is of a terrorist organisation."

Visa policy should now take immediate effect on them, he added, citing the the US embassy statement that read it will be "reviewing all violent incidents for possible visa restrictions".

The AL leaders also said the violence has left a dent in the image the BNP has been trying to project over the last few years -- that it believes in peaceful demonstrations.

Addressing a press conference yesterday, AL General Secretary Obaidul Quader alleged that the BNP-Jamaat alliance once again indulged in "brutal activities" to disrupt the country's democratic process.

"Though BNP talked about a democratic movement, in secret it was preparing to implement its terrorist-style politics. It was just biding its time to get back to its old ways, its terrible politics," Quader said at the party president's Dhanmondi office.

AL leaders are also of the opinion that the scale of the violence shows that BNP didn't have control over its own people.

They said they believe the opposition doesn't stand a chance against them and it's apparent especially after the way BNP central leaders left the dias soon after police action,

The AL leaders admitted there was some unease within the ruling party about the final phase in the BNP's oust-government agitation, but Saturday's events made it clear that toppling the government with street demonstrations will be nearly impossible.

Talking to reporters at his office at the Secretariat yesterday, Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal hinted that law enforcers will go tough on BNP following Saturday's clashes.

He said BNP has showed their original character by "killing and beating policemen, journalists and innocent people and they must be brought to book".

The AL, meantime, will remain on the streets with various programmes till the 12th national polls slated for early January. It will not concede an inch to the BNP, said party sources.

The party will hold peace rally in every district, upazila and thana apart from its programmes in the capital to counter the three-day "countrywide blockade" that BNP will enforce on October 31, November 1 and 2.

On those three days, the ruling party men will take position at every unit office across the country to resist BNP if the latter resorts to violence centering on its blockade programme.

In 1978, a book edited by Guy Hermet, Richard Rose and Alain Rouquie was published with an interesting title, Elections without Choice. The book drew some attention soon after its publication, but little did we know that, decades later, the notion of "elections without choice" would become so relevant to the world in general but more so for Bangladesh. As the country is heading towards an exercise that the incumbent is calling an election, it is imperative that we understand what is in the making.

The edited volume of Elections without Choice was an outcome of a research project initiated by the Committee on Political Sociology, composed of the International Political Science Association and the International Sociological Association. The editors quite rightly noted that political scientists deliberately avoid discussing non-competitive elections, because those elections do not meet the fundamental criterion of a liberal democracy. Not only did they underscore the need for understanding non-competitive elections, but also insisted that such elections are important in tracing the trajectory of each country.

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Placing dummies as alternatives disenfranchises voters

The book was published at a time when the world was witnessing a gradual shift towards democracy, one country at a time. The Carnation Revolution in 1974 in Portugal and the death of Francisco Franco in 1975 in Spain started a wave, identified as the "Third Wave of Democracy" by Samuel Huntington in 1991. In the early days of democratisation, promoted by Western countries, it was assumed that an election was a key indicator of the political liberalisation process.

In the 1990s, with the demise of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, democracy proliferated globally. It was believed that democratic regimes would be the norm and there could be only a few holdouts of autocratic regimes. But within less than a decade, two features became evident. The first one was that elections by themselves do not demonstrate democratisation, because authoritarian regimes also hold elections that are manipulated. The second feature was the emergence of a new kind of regime, with some apparent democratic traits but which are essentially autocratic; they were called hybrid regimes.

The 2014 election was boycotted by the opposition, yet strategies such as packing the Election Commission, or harassing the opposition, or changing electoral rules were used by the incumbent. In the 2018 election, another tool was added—keeping opposition candidates off the ballot—and this was done both by confining leaders and cancelling their nominations on flimsy grounds, making the candidates spend time at the courthouse, which has not been helpful to the candidates.

Subsequently, these regimes, which often hold elections and win at ease, were described as "electoral authoritarianism." These regimes tend to hold regular elections, but these elections are engineered in a fashion that opposition parties have little to no chance to win. In both closed autocracy and hybrid regimes, these exercises are essentially "elections without choice." Consequently, the attention of political scientists and observers shifted to the "quality" of elections.

Evidence mounted in the 2000s that autocrats and rulers of the hybrid regimes manipulate elections. Election manipulation was not a new phenomenon. However, from the 1970s through the 1990s, manipulation of elections was easily detectable: there was blatant rigging, which included capturing polling booths on election day and weapon-wielding party loyalists scaring voters away from polling stations and stuffing the ballot boxes.

But as these hybrid regimes emerged and the despots needed to have some semblance of legitimacy to continue their rule, rigging of an election took a different route. This is the period of regression of democracy, often described as "democratic backsliding," which political scientist Nancy Bermeo defined as "the state-led debilitation or elimination of any of the political institutions that sustain an existing democracy." These political institutions, Bermeo reminded us in an essay, include "all the institutions that enable people to formulate and signify preferences and then have them weighed by their elected representatives."

Two years after Bermeo's essay was published, a seminal book by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt published in 2018, titled How Democracies Die, unequivocally stated that sometimes democracy dies with a bang, with coups, quickly and forcefully. But lately it happens slowly, incrementally; "democratic backsliding today begins at the ballot box." The would-be autocrats rise through the elections, and then they change the rules of the game. Levitsky and Ziblatt use the analogy of a football game. "To consolidate power, the would-be authoritarians must capture the referees, sideline at least some of the other side's star players, and rewrite the rules of the game to lock in their advantage, in effect tilting the playing field against their opponent." When they talk of a referee, in the political context, who are they referring to? "These include the judicial system, law enforcement bodies, and intelligence, tax and regulatory agencies," they write.

Election, in a tilted field, is already rigged in such a manner that it can deliver only one result—a victory for the incumbent. The manipulation of elections, Bermeo told us, is one of the three key features of democratic backsliding. But such manipulation is not like how the classical autocrats used to do it—blatantly. Instead, these are "strategic manipulation," which includes "a range of actions aimed at tilting the electoral playing field in favor of incumbents." Bermeo provides a list of these actions: "keeping opposition candidates off the ballot," "packing electoral commissions," "changing electoral rules to favor incumbents," and "harassing opponents." Usually, these are done "in such a way that the elections themselves do not appear fraudulent" and are intended to fool election observers and the international community.

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How constitutional is the 15th amendment?

As for these practices, perhaps nobody else has identified them better than Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas. Their book, published in 2018, is titled How to Rig an Election. The name sounds like a manual. In some measures, it is so. Only that they have dissected the manual or the playbook of the autocrats drawing on elections around the world. Cheeseman and Klaas identified the leaders who go for rigging: "Leaders are most likely to try and stay in power when they believe that their presence is essential to maintain political stability; in cases when they are less committed to plural politics; when they have engaged in high-level corruption and/or human rights abuses; when they lack trust in rival leaders and political institutions; when they have been in power for a longer period of time; and when they control geostrategically important states with natural resources, effective security forces, weak institutions and high levels of distrust."

They looked at six strategies that autocrats use to manipulate elections: gerrymandering (shaping electoral constituencies to the incumbent's benefit), vote buying, repression of opposition, hacking the election, stuffing the ballot box, and playing the international community. Interestingly, while ballot box stuffing is the most effective strategy, considering the risk of exposure, often autocrats use other strategies ahead of the election to ensure a victory. This is how elections are held by autocratic regimes.

Since the 2014 election, none of these strategies have been in short supply in Bangladesh. That election was boycotted by the opposition, yet strategies such as packing the Election Commission, or harassing the opposition, or changing electoral rules were used by the incumbent. In the 2018 election, another tool was added—keeping opposition candidates off the ballot—and this was done both by confining leaders and cancelling their nominations on flimsy grounds, making the candidates spend time at the courthouse, which has not been helpful to the candidates.

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How to judge the Election Commission’s performance

These have delivered victory, not only a hollow one but something more than that, if we borrow from Cheeseman and Klass: "so one sided as to beggar belief, exposing the ruling party to ridicule." The ruling Awami League has not, by any means, abandoned its 2014 and 2018 strategies, but instead has become further audacious. The violent crackdown on opposition since October 28, arrests of BNP leaders, convictions of BNP leaders and activists at lightning speed, and shutting down party offices are testimonies to the continuation of these strategies. They also show how referees have been captured.

But in search of a way to avoid the ridiculous situations of winning 153 seats unopposed in 2014 or winning 96 percent of seats with allies in 2018, and additionally to "play the international community," it has invented a new way called fielding "dummy candidates." The so-called 'dummies" are candidates who belong to the ruling party but are contesting the election as "independents" with the approval of the party. Besides, the smaller parties, "king's parties," and individuals who have been cajoled or coerced into participating in the election, thanks to state apparatuses, would like to run under the symbol of the ruling AL.

Ironically, these have not saved the party from being a subject of ridicule, but made it more embarrassing for it long before a single vote has been cast. Importantly, all these have laid bare that the ruling AL is moving towards an "election without choice."

Ali Riaz is distinguished professor of political science at Illinois State University in the US, non-resident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council, and president of the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies (AIBS). His forthcoming book is titled 'Pathways of Autocratization: The tumultuous journey of Bangladeshi politics.'

Views expressed in this comment are the author's own.

Follow The Daily Star Opinion on Facebook for the latest opinions, commentaries and analyses by experts and professionals. To contribute your article or letter to The Daily Star Opinion, see our guidelines for submission.