BNP Chairperson Khaleda Zia has asked her party’s senior leaders to visit their respective constituencies before and during Eid festival for carrying out anti-government campaign.
She also asked them also to stand beside grassroots leaders and activists facing suppression and harassment under a tyrannical rule unleashed by present government.
The BNP chief gave the direction at a meeting with them at her Gulshan office on Monday night. BNP standing committee member Nazrul Islam Khan briefed reporters after the meeting that began around 9:15pm and ended around 11:05pm. He said the meeting discussed various issues relating to the country’s latest political situation, party activities, party overhauling process, its next course of action, government’s repressive acts, corruption, law and order price hike and public sufferings.
It strongly condemned the government’s repressive acts, killing and making disappeared of the opposition men and filing of ‘false’ cases against them, Nazrul said. The meeting also urged the government to ‘restore democracy shunning repression and oppression on the opposition leaders and activists’.
It demanded the government release the arrested BNP leaders and activists and not to harass those are on the run facing political cases, he added.
The BNP leaders also voiced deep concern over the growing price hike of essentials and deterioration of law and order. They demanded the government take necessary steps so that the eid holidaymakers can safely and smoothly go to their homes and return.
The meeting criticised the government for importing rotten wheat from Barzail and its inaction in this regard. Nazrul said the meeting has decided to strengthen BNP’s organisational capacity through its overhaul. He said the party leaders will again sit after eid and will work out the party overhauling process and its next course of action. The BNP leaders said they will continue their movement for restoring democracy in the country.
This was the first formal meeting with Khaleda’s party senior leaders since she returned home on April 5 after nearly three months of her stay in her Gulshan office. Meanwhile, Khaleda Zia is trying to pull her Bangladesh Nationalist Party back on track. She is using the Islamic ritual of iftar as a platform to regain the confidence of the party members and sympathizers.
The iftar receptions during Ramadan provide an opportunity to bring the party activists and supporters to a social gathering. An iftar reception thus becomes more than just meeting a religious obligation. It contains a political hue too. The Ramadan has offered Khaleda the much-needed pause. Her party is holding iftar receptions, while her allies are doing the same where she is invited as the chief guest.
Khaleda is delivering speeches at the iftar congregation attacking the government on a number of issues. Iftar receptions have come as a relief to a party whose leaders and members are too afraid to take the streets as many of them face criminal cases such as arson attacks since the Jan. 5 elections. This way she has been able to put her message across the country thanks also to the media.
Attending an Iftar party on Monday , he Bangladesh Nationalist Party chairperson, Khaleda Zia, people were now looking to the ‘nationalist forces’ to rid them of the current situation.
She urged all nationalist forces to work together narrowing differences to build up a happy Bangladesh.
She made the remarks while briefly addressing an iftar party hosted by Bikalpadhara Bangladesh at a hotel at Gulshan in the city.
Khaleda said the Liberation War was fought for democracy, human rights, fundamental rights, job, health and education for all. But the country was yet to achieve the goals, she said.
Khaleda alleged that the incumbent ‘undemocratic’ and ‘unelected’ government was repressing women. In an oblique reference to a recent statement of Jatiya Party chairman HM Ershad, she said a leader of the self-declared opposition in parliament had branded women in parliament as ‘showpieces’.
‘The wife of that leader is leader of the opposition in parliament,’ Khaleda said adding that even the prime minister and the speaker, although elected without vote, were women. The BNP chairperson wondered how ‘that leader’ could dare to insult the mothers and sisters of the country where women constituted 50 per cent of the population.
Source: Weekly Holiday