DHAKA, March 10: Lawmakers of the main opposition party in the Bangladeshi parliament have decided to quit en masse in protest against a move by the ruling coalition to bring down the portrait of the country’s founder hanging in offices, schools and diplomatic missions abroad, an opposition spokesman said on Friday.
The decision to tender resignations by the 60 odd deputies of the opposition Awami League was taken at an emergency meeting of senior party leaders in Dhaka late on Thursday, Awami League Secretary General Zillur Rahman said.
The move to give up the parliamentary seats coincided with the approval by a parliamentary standing (house) committee of a private member’s bill seeking to remove portraits of the country’s founder President Sheikh Mujib ur Rahman now hanging on the walls of government offices and other state owned installations.
Mujib was declared the Father of the Nation but his special constitutional position was withdrawn by a group of rebel army officers who had overthrown his government and killed him and most of his close family members in 1975.
Since then Mujib’s status has been challenged by successive military rulers, extreme rightists and radical Islamists bitterly opposed to his secularist policies.
Awami League chief Sheikh Hasina who is Mujib’s daughter and political heir restored his honour during her five-year term from 1996 as prime minister by passing a law in parliament that made it mandatory to hang his portrait on the walls of government offices and other public places.
Tabling the bill in parliament Shamsul Alam Pramanik, a lawmaker from the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which dominates Prime Minister Khaleda Zia’s coalition government, said Mujib was a disputed figure as many did not approve of his special status.
“There should not be any legal compulsion to display Mujib’s picture anywhere,” Pramanik said.
Hasina, who presided over the party meeting, also announced hunger strikes, street demonstrations and a countrywide shutdown next week to stop the government from allegedly downgrading Mujib.
The protests were called also to highlight reported failure of the authorities to curb terrorism, attacks on Hindu and Christian minorities in the Moslem country and repression on opposition activists.
Hasina’s centre-left secular government was ousted from power by the coalition of BNP and its Islamist allies getting a two-third majority in the 300-seat parliament in the October 1 general election the results of which had not been accepted by the opposition.
The Awami League lawmakers have also been boycotting the parliament’s first two sessions in protest.
EX-MINISTER ARRESTED: A Bangladeshi politician who was a junior minister in the former government of Sheikh Hasina Wajed was arrested on Saturday as he was entering the country, police said.
Former state minister for planning Mohiuddin Khan Alamgir was on his way home from the United States, one of his relatives who requested anonymity said.
He had fled Bangladesh soon after a general election in October when Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League government lost power to a coalition government led by the rival Bangladesh National Party.—dpa / AFP