Narrow defeats of Jamaat Leaders fuel conspiracy claims. What do the numbers say?

“Why did Dr. Shafiq accept election engineering? In Pirojpur-2, Delwar Hossain Sayeedi’s son was defeated by only 70 votes. In Khulna, Mia Golam Porwar was defeated by only 2,000 votes. The number of seats where Jamaat lost by less than 5,000 votes is 53. Basically, Jamaat was defeated through manipulation in these 53 seats. Jamaat actually would have won 135 seats. But the deep state wants to reduce the number to 70–80. (translated from Bangla)”.

The statement was made by a Facebook user and shared by 58 others. From the morning of February 13, the day after the vote, such narratives were seen spreading on Facebook.

In another post, another user wrote: “In 57 seats, the vote margin between Jamaat candidates and BNP candidates was only 70 to 2, 3, 4, 5 thousand — you can understand how competitive the election was by looking at these seats!” (translated from Bangla).

Dismislab collected at least a dozen such posts and comments circulating on different social media platforms. The core message of these posts is that, without manipulation or conspiracy, Jamaat alliance candidates would have won many more seats.

To verify these claims, Dismislab collected the votes received by winners and their main competitors from the seat-based results published by Prothom Alo and calculated the margins between them.

According to the analysis, a total of 22 seats were decided by margins of less than 5,000 votes, not 53. In these seats, the margins ranged from 385 votes to 4,702 votes. Altogether, the number of seats with margins below 5,000 does not exceed 22.

A coalition-based breakdown of these 22 seats shows that Jamaat and its allies won 11 seats. BNP and its allies won 9. One seat was won by an independent candidate and one by Islami Andolon Bangladesh. That means roughly half of the seats decided by less than 5,000 votes were won by Jamaat-supported candidates.

Within this list, Jamaat alliance candidates directly lost 9 seats. Among them were Md. Abdul Ahad of the NCP, Omar Faruq of the Liberal Democratic Party, Maulana Mamunul Haque of Bangladesh Khelafat Majlis, and six candidates from Jamaat-e-Islami, including the party’s Secretary General Mia Golam Porwar.

Among the five closest races, Madaripur-1 was decided by 385 votes and Sirajganj-4 by 594 votes. Both seats were won by Jamaat or allied candidates. On the other hand, Cox’s Bazar-4, Chattogram-14 and Brahmanbaria-5 were decided by margins of 929, 1026 and 1061 votes respectively, and were won by BNP-supported candidates. This shows that narrow margins applied to both alliances.

A coalition-based analysis of defeat margins shows that in the seats where Jamaat and its allies were defeated, the total combined margin was 26,907 votes, resulting in an average defeat margin of about 2,990 votes. In contrast, in the seats where BNP and its allies were defeated, the total combined margin was 30,820 votes, resulting in an average defeat margin of about 2,568 votes. This means that among the narrow-margin seats, the average defeat margin for Jamaat alliance candidates was higher than that of BNP alliance candidates.

When the results of all 297 seats are arranged from smallest to largest vote margin, the 50 closest races range from 385 votes to 9,581 votes. Among these 50 seats, Jamaat and its allies won 24, BNP and its allies won 22, three were won by independent candidates and one by another party. No single alliance had exclusive dominance in the 50 most competitive seats.

The claims also specifically mentioned Khulna-5. According to the published results, the margin between the winner and the main competitor in that seat was 2,608 votes. Although the figure is below 5,000, it does not match the number mentioned in the claim.

Several also claimed that in Pirojpur-2, Delwar Hossain Sayeedi’s son was defeated by only 70 votes. Instead, the margin was 8,288 votes. According to the results, the winner Ahmad Sohel Manjur received 105,185 votes and Shammim Sayeedi received 96,897 votes.

The post mentioned at the beginning of this report was found circulating across various social media platforms. On multiple Instagram posts  (1, 2, 3) , the caption “Why did Dr. Shafiq accept election engineering?” was used.

The narrative was not limited to standalone posts. Supporters of the party also used the same text in comments under different posts. For example, under a Facebook post by a page named “Jobians” (a short name used by the student of Jagannath University), one user posted the “Why did Dr. Shafiq accept election engineering?” text as a comment.

Similarly, under a Facebook post by the media outlet Amar Desh about Jamaat chief Shafiqur Rahman visiting the party office, a user posted the same comment.

A verified page named “Tanvir Sir” also posted that if the Pir of Charmonai had contested in alliance with Jamaat, combining votes under the hand-fan symbol could have resulted in 40–50 additional seats. That post repeated the claims that Pirojpur-2 was decided by 70 votes, Khulna by around 2,000 votes, and that Jamaat lost about 53 seats by less than 5,000 votes — none of which are supported by the data.

Nearly identical claims were also seen in a post by a well-known parody profile named journalist Moniruzzaman. In his post, using an image from when Jamaat’s Amir became ill on stage, he wrote: “68 seats + 50 seats with less than 5,000 margin means Jamaat would control 200+ upazilas…” (translated from Bangla).

Note: For this report, only the constituency-based results published by Prothom Alo have been used.