POREG VIEW: Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) has been boycotting Parliament ever since the present government of Sheikh Hasina came to power in 2008 with a whopping two-thirds majority. Yet, its leaders, chief, Khaleda Zia including have been demanding a mid-term poll claiming that opinion polls have expressed no-confidence in the Awami League led ruling Grand Alliance (GA).
The call for mid-term poll was given earlier this week by the BNP’s secretary general Khandaker Delwar Hossain. It was repeated by Khaleda herself on the eve of Jail Killing Day – a day (Nov 3) that saw the brutal assassination of the first Prime Minister Tajuddin Ahmad, Syed Nazrul Islam, AHM Kamruzzaman and Captain Mansur Ali in the Dhaka Central Jail in 1975.
BNP and its founder Zia Ur Rahman had helped the killers enter the jail; after the assassination, they rewarded them by sending them abroad and giving them diplomatic assignments.
Though the jail killing case was committed to trail, it was sent to cold storage by the BNP-Jamaat coalition government in 2001. Now a retail is planned in the case along with the War Crimes case, making the BNP see read herrings every where since it is coinciding with two other developments – one every passing day is taking the BNP functionaries closer to the Day of Judgment in several graft cases, two arrested militants are on a song these days disclosing how Khaleda Zia and her Islamist allies had turned the country into an Islamist hub and almost managed to over run the secular ethos of the country with Talibanisation.
This is the reason why Khaleda’s criticism that the government was not holding election to the Dhaka city corporation as it feared a repeat of its debacle in the Chittagong city corporation polls sounds a laboured effort.
Mid term blues are normal in any democracy to the ruling party as the Congressional elections in the US have shown.
BNP leadership must subject themselves to a democratic test before clamouring for fresh elections. And it is to utilize the forum of Parliament as lawmakers. Otherwise, they stand exposing their feet of clay.
