DHAKA: More than 20,000 activists marched in the Bangladeshi capital on Saturday, defying driving rains, on the fifth day of protests to press for electoral reforms before January polls.

Chanting slogans such as ‘no reforms, no polls’, and ‘accept reforms before it is too late’, the protestors representing a 14-party opposition alliance began the march from Babu Bazar, in the old part of Dhaka.

More than 20,000 joined the march as it proceeded peacefully despite downpours.

The parties, led by the Awami League, started six days of marches across the country on Tuesday to force electoral reforms they say are necessary for free and fair national polls scheduled for January.

Thousands of police and elite Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) units were deployed along the route after intelligence agencies warned of ‘subversive acts’ by extremists.

“More than 3,000 police and RAB officers were on guard at all the key points along the route to prevent any violence or any subversive acts,” a police official said.

A series of nationwide bomb blasts linked to a radical Islamic group has plagued Bangladesh since August last year. The blasts killed 28 people, including four suicide bombers.

In the last two years, major political violence has also rocked the country, killing a former finance minister and a popular opposition member of parliament.

Sheikh Hasina, former prime minister and leader of the Awami League, narrowly escaped a grenade attack at an Aug 2004 rally in the capital which killed 20 people.

The Awami League and its 13 allies have held frequent protests in the past two months to demand that the country’s chief election commissioner and his two deputies, whom they accuse of being partisan, resign before the elections.

The opposition has also demanded that the caretaker government, appointed three months before general elections under a constitutional provision, be selected with the consent of all parties.

The current four-party government is expected to hand over power to a caretaker administration in October.—AFP