Fund raising
Saif Tinku, On e-mail
Reports in newspapers on June 5, 2007 said that both the big political parties collect money for their parties in various unlawful ways. This money is mainly spent for election. On December 07, 2006 Bangladesh Economic Society's General Secretary Dr. Abul Barakat revealed that Tk 20 thousand crore would be spent in the January 22, 2007 general election in Bangladesh. In this regard I have a small analysis of a relevant report published in newspapers on October 16, 2006. The news said, "More than 3,500 Iowa Democrats paid $100 each to attend the fund-raising banquet that kicked off with Clinton 's speech. About 50 people paid $10,000 per couple to attend a private reception with Clinton beforehand." It was the situation in a single state of the US on the fund raising inauguration day. We are now a Nobel Prize winning nation. Can't we compare political fund raising in the US with that of Bangladesh? I think, yes, because Dr. Yunus' micro-credit model has been successfully used in the US for the last two decades (and later in many other countries). Even before the partition of the sub-continent, the then major political party of the soil, Muslim League, raised its funds substantially by taking 'two anaas' from its tens of thousands of workers in 1946, prior to the election (Abul Hashim, My Life and Pre-Partition Politics of Undivided Bengal, Page 52, Bengali version). After the liberation of Bangladesh, all ruling parties have complained that opposition parties have been responsible for huge losses of properties in the country. These losses must be quantified for each regime. The same thing has to be done for quantifying how much public money has unlawfully gone into the pockets of ruling party leaders, including ministers and MPs.
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