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Hostage to a flawed system

Anisur Rahman
The May-31 elections of the Bangladesh Chess Federation (BCF) has become a talking point in the country's sports arena since the organisers' panel swept to a landslide victory over the players' panel, winning all the posts.
The election caught so much attention that it was even discussed in a parliament session where State Minister for Youth And Sports Ahad Ali Sarker announced that it was a victory for the ruling Awami League's organisers over the BNP (Bangladesh Nationalist Party) organisers.
Whether or not the winners belong to the ruling party is a debatable issue, but there is no argument over the fact that those who have been elected are hardly associated with the game of chess.
This phenomenon is common not only in chess but also across most of the sports federations. The councillors, elected with the blessings of the District and Divisional Sports Associations (DSA), are only found active during elections of the national sports federations where they allegedly trade their votes for money, and soon after the elections, disappear from the scene.
That is what prompted the chess players to come under an umbrella in protest of the 'so-called-organisers' who are hardly known in the chess circuit, even though they proved
powerless against the DSA-backed panel.
The DSA organisers' (70 out of 117 councillors) panel was so strong that vice presidential candidate and the subcontinent's first grandmaster Niaz Murshed had to concede defeat against unknown vice presidential candidates. General secretary candidate FIDE master and banker Khandoker Kayesh Hasan too was defeated by unknown candidate Gazi Saiful Tareq, who reportedly came to the election only at therequestofa chess player from Bhola.
What gives councillors like Tareq, more specifically DSAs, so much power is the fact that DSAs generally send their loyal representatives to the respective federations, whether or not they are involved with that discipline, who vote for them in the elections.
And what gives the DSAs so much freedom is the lenient nature of the constitutions of sports federations which allows them to retain their councillorship by participating in two national meets in four years while giving no importance to whether they organise their district competitions or not.
There have been instances where players living in Dhaka collected consent letters from the respective DSAs to take part in the national chess championships of their own accord to ensure DSA’s councillorship in chess federation even though those DSAs do not hold any local competitions or take any initiatives to send players to the national championships. According to
the by-laws, the champions of districtlevel leagues are supposed to take part in the national chess championship, but the reality rarely reflects this law.
Of the 64 districts and seven divisions, chess is played in 18 to 20 districts regularly while the rest of the districts and divisions ensure their representation by participating in the national meets twice in four years, without organising any district league.
The National Sports Council (NSC), the regulatory body of the country's sports, also allegedly doesn’t always play a neutral role during the polls and reportedly do favours to the incumbent committee by picking NSC representatives in line with recommendations from the incumbent committee.
As per the constitution, top five chess players are to be chosen in the voters' list but this time surprisingly the top-rated player, GM Ziaur Rahman, was ignored and while a councillor from Brahmanbaria was included in the voters' list despite him not meeting the criterion of participating in two national meets in four years. Again, there is no existence of representatives of the Chess Arbitrators' Association in the constitution but one councillor was included in the recently concluded chess polls.
Taking the experience of the chess polls into consideration, the authorities concerned should find a way out on how to form acceptable executive committees at different federations with the participation of all stakeholders of respective disciplines.