Dhaka, Feb 14 (IANS) Bangladesh’s fact-checking organisation Dismislab, through data analysis, has debunked a coordinated social media campaign alleging that “deep state” manipulation cost radical Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami and its allies dozens of seats through “election engineering”, a report said on Saturday.
It added that the narratives, which surfaced on February 13 – the day after the vote – claimed that Jamaat candidates lost in 53 different constituencies by margins of fewer than 5,000 votes.
According to a report in the ‘Times of Bangladesh’, a viral post questioned why Jamaat’s Ameer Shafiqur Rahman accepted the results, alleging that “deep state” manipulation reduced the party’s projected 135 seats to 70-80.
Citing an analysis by Dismislab based on seat-wise results published by Bangladesh’s leading newspaper, Prothom Alo, it reveals these figures to be inaccurate, with data showing that only 22 seats across the country were decided by margins of fewer than 5,000 votes, not the claimed 53 seats.
The analysis suggests that narrow victory margins applied to both major alliances rather than favouring any one side.
“Jamaat or allied candidates won the country’s two closest races: Madaripur-1 (385-vote margin) and Sirajganj-4 (594-vote margin). Conversely, BNP-supported candidates secured narrow victories in Cox’s Bazar-4, Chattogram-14, and Brahmanbaria-5, with margins of 929, 1,026, and 1,061 votes respectively. Further examination of the 50 closest races, where margins ranged from 385 to 9,581 votes, showed that Jamaat and its allies won 24 seats, while the BNP and its allies won 22,” the report detailed.
Despite the absence of supporting evidence, the report said, these claims were widely amplified across social media platforms through individual posts and coordinated campaigns.
“Identical text questioning why the Ameer accepted ‘election engineering’ appeared under reports by the media outlet Amar Desh and on the ‘Jobians’ Facebook page, a forum for Jagannath University students. One user even claimed that in 57 seats, the margin between Jamaat and BNP candidates was only 70 to 5,000 votes,” it mentioned.
“A verified page named “Tanvir Sir” falsely claimed that a coalition with the Pir of Charmonai using the ‘hand-fan’ symbol could have secured an additional 40–50 seats. Additionally, a well-known parody profile named ‘journalist Moniruzzaman’ used an image of the Jamaat Ameer becoming ill on stage to suggest that the party, with its alleged margins, would have controlled more than 200 upazilas,” it noted.
The report highlighted that following a review of at least a dozen such posts and comments, Dismislab concluded that the “narratives were designed to suggest Jamaat would have won significantly more seats without a ‘deep state’ conspiracy”.
–IANS
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