Senior BNP leader Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir has urged everyone to take to the streets to oust the government, claiming it has lost its legitimacy.
The BNP acting Secretary General’s call comes a day after he threatened to cripple Bangladesh the moment the schedule for the 10th parliamentary election would be announced without constituting a non-party government to oversee the polls.
“We are not happy. The country is drowning in darkness. Opposition leaders and activists are being repressed and arrested. There will be no democracy and independence in the country if this continues,” he said while addressing a discussion at a hotel in Dhaka on Saturday.
“There is no alternative to overthrowing the incumbent government. Everyone including the youths must rise for this.”
Fakhrul said, “Let us take an oath today – that we will have an election under a non-party government by ousting this government.”
He reiterated the Opposition would not contest the national election under the Sheikh Hasina-led ‘all-party’ interim government.
The Election Commission is just a puppet of the government, he said. “It had promised to create equal opportunity for all contestants in the polls, but it did not.”
Responding to the Prime Minister’s claim that the President has approved the interim cabinet to oversee the polls, Fakhrul said, “After the meeting between the two, neither the Prime Minister nor the President’s Press Secretary disclosed anything on what was discussed. But the Prime Minister later told Parliament that she got an approval from the President to lead the polls-time government.”
After her meeting with President Abdul Hamid on Nov 17, Sheikh Hasina on Wednesday briefed the MPs in Parliament about Hamid agreeing on the interim administration as she outlined the process on the formation of an ‘all-party’ government.
Fakhrul on Saturday said, “We don’t know whether there are such examples in any democratic country in the world.”
“The actual process should have been like this: the Prime Minister and her Cabinet members should have first submitted their resignations to the President. Then the President would ask the Prime Minister to head the polls-time administration. But our Prime Minister did not do that.”
He said the present government was ‘illegitimate’. “Their staying in power is not legal anymore. They [the government] amended the Constitution and they are not even following it.”
The BNP spokesperson was speaking at a discussion organised by MBA Association of Bangladesh to mark the unveiling of the book ‘The Political Thought of Tarique Rahman’.
Seventeen contributors, mostly fellow party colleagues and two foreigners, contributed write-ups for the book on the BNP Senior Vice-Chairman.
Source: Bd news24