Nearly 2,500 apply to contest Bangladesh election

By Anis Ahmed

DHAKA (Reuters) - Nearly 2,500 candidates have submitted nominations to contest parliamentary elections in Bangladesh on December 29, poll officials said Monday.

The election for the 300-seat parliament will cap nearly two years of emergency rule which followed widespread political violence in the impoverished south Asian country.

Most of the nominations came from the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), led by former prime ministers Sheikh Hasina and Begum Khaleda Zia, respectively.

The exact number of contestants will not be known until applications have been scrutinized, officials told reporters, a day after the deadline for submitting nominations expired.

Many political stalwarts, mostly from the BNP, were barred from filing nominations because of convictions for corruption.

They were arrested in a crackdown on corruption by the army-backed interim government and tried by special courts operating under emergency rules.

This has partly fulfilled a promise by the interim authority, which took over in January 2007 at a time of political turmoil and canceled an election due that month, to clean politics of corrupt practices.

But analysts and officials say that effort stumbled around the middle of this year when Hasina and Khaleda, both held in separate prisons for nearly a year for alleged corruption while in power, were released. Hasina was freed on medical parole and Khaleda on bail.

Scores of detained politicians from their parties have since come out on bail -- except those who were convicted and sentenced -- and are taking part in the polls.

"The anti-corruption drive has failed to stop many bad people from entering the election (and) threatens to give democracy another bad run in the country," newspaper editor and political analyst Shyamal Dutt told a television talk show late Sunday.

Hasina and Khaleda rotated as prime ministers for 15 years until October 2006, when Khaleda's second five-year term ended.

The interim authority headed by former central bank governor Fakhruddin Ahmed has vowed to make the December 29 polls free, fair and credible.

(Editing by Dean Yates)