A senior BNP leader has said filing cases would not be able to stop their anti-government agitation.
‘Cases filed with ill motives won’t succeed to thwart the demonstration. The protest will continue until our demands are met,’ the BNP standing committee member, Moudud Ahmed, told a discussion at the National Press Club in the capital on Saturday.
He said, ‘The government thought the movement will stop if cases are filed and the leaders are detained. That’s why they filed those cases against our leaders after staging those pre-planned bomb blasts and arson attacks.’
‘The court premises has also been blocked so that the leaders cannot go there [to secure bail],’ Moudud added.
The opposition BNP and its allies, who were demonstrating in demand of reinstatement of the caretaker government since its annulment, had enforced five days of countrywide daylong shutdowns in the last two weeks protesting at the alleged ‘abduction’ of party leader M Ilias Ali and demanding his immediate ‘release’. Ilias, also a former MP, went missing along with his driver Ansar Ali past midnight on April 17 from the capital’s Mohakhali area.
During the shutdowns, there were incidents of violence. The police filed two cases on April 29 accusing several senior BNP
leaders over bomb explosions at the secretariat and torching of vehicles in front of the Prime Minister’s Office during the opposition-enforced countrywide lockdown.
Former law minister Moudud also criticised the businessmen who asked for a law banning of general strikes. ‘
According to a Supreme Court verdict, which is also considered as a law, general strike is a democratic right of the people. That’s
why hartal will be there as long as the constitution is there.’
In wake of five full days of shutdowns, the leaders of Bangladesh’s apex business body FBCCI on Thursday had demanded enactment of a law to ban hartal or shutdowns terming it a ‘destructive programme’ affecting the country’s economic development and political stability.