Dhaka: Home Adviser Lieutenant General (Retd) Md Jahangir Alam Chowdhury today announced that the government plans to deploy nearly nine lakh members of law enforcement agencies and support services to ensure a free, fair, peaceful, and impartial 13th national parliament election and referendum-2026, scheduled for February 12.
According to Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha, the deployment will be executed in two phases, with all security operations coordinated under the authority of the returning officers. This announcement was made during a press briefing after the 20th meeting of the Law and Order Advisory Council Committee at the Home Ministry in Bangladesh Secretariat.
The deployment will consist of 100,000 members of the Bangladesh Army, 5,000 from the Bangladesh Navy, 3,730 from the Bangladesh Air Force, 149,443 from the Bangladesh Police, 576,314 from Bangladesh Ansar and VDP, 37,453 from Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB), 3,585 from Bangladesh Coast Guard, 7,700 from Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), and 13,390 from Fire Service and Civil Defence. The second phase of deployment will be vote-centric, with personnel remaining on duty from February 8 to 14.
A Law and Order Coordination Cell will be formed, including the police, armed forces, BGB, Coast Guard, and RAB, to ensure coordination. A special team linked to the 999 emergency services will operate round-the-clock to manage election-related complaints, relaying them to the Home Ministry and local coordination cells.
To bolster security, 25,000 body-worn cameras will be deployed at key polling stations, and CCTV cameras will be installed in all 42,761 polling stations nationwide. The government has classified polling centers into 8,780 most important, 16,548 important, and 17,433 general stations based on security sensitivity.
For the first time in a national election, 418 drones from various law enforcement agencies will be used for surveillance, along with dog squads and area-based operations to recover illegal weapons and arrest suspected miscreants. The newly introduced ‘Election Security App-2026’, developed by the National Telecommunication Monitoring Center (NTMC), will facilitate real-time monitoring and rapid response to law and order issues.
The Home Adviser emphasized that law enforcement agencies have been instructed to take immediate legal action against any attempts to disrupt or influence the election, ensuring a secure voting environment across the country.