No more politics of vengeance
Unb, Dhaka
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina yesterday urged her party men to forget personal interests and devote themselves to the service of the common people who overwhelmingly voted Awami League to power.
“This is not the time for reckoning what we have got and what we haven’t…The main consideration is what we could give to the people,” she told a discussion marking Bangabandhu’s Homecoming Day at Bangladesh-China Friendship Conference centre.
Hasina said people have given the Awami League a big responsibility through the December 29 elections. “We must fulfil their hopes and aspirations,” she said.
“We’ve got the opportunity to serve the people getting over innumerable hurdles,” she said with firm optimism that if all could work sincerely, the Awami League government will succeed in implementing the pledges made to the people.
Hasina, whose AL-led grand alliance won almost a three-fourths majority in the crucial polls that put an end to a two-year emergency rule, reassured that a balanced development throughout the country would be ensured disregarding who voted for Awami League and who didn’t.
She reminded that a group always belongs to government party by changing their colours. She urged all, including her party men, to remain alert about such turncoats.
Hasina said her government’s priority tasks are to provide rice for the people at reduced price, ensure fair price for the farmers’ produce and remove the curse of unemployment from the country.
Denouncing past practices, she made it clear that Awami League does not believe in politics of vengeance and grabbing.
The Awami League chief observed that people were in “total darkness” during the last seven years’ rule by the BNP-Jamaat alliance and the caretaker government.
“Even a six-year-old girl was raped during post-election violence in 2001,” she said in criticism of her political archrivals.
She said Awami League was not allowed to win the 2001 polls due to “vote rigging” by the rival camp.
“Now we have got an opportunity to serve the nation. We must make a good use of this opportunity,” Sheikh Hasina said.
The prime minister recalled that Bangabandhu’s dream was to alleviate poverty and class distinction between the rich and the poor from the soil of this country and build a non-communal Bangladesh.
“But how unfortunate we are! The father of the nation was killed. If power-hungry people like Khandaker Mustaq had not been in the party, my father might not be assassinated,” she said with an emotion-choked voice.
She said now time has come to build Bangladesh a non-communal and democratic state with the spirit of ideology of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as the country has to be modern and developed by 2021, the golden jubilee of the country’s independence.
Awami League presidium members Syeda Sajeda Chowdhury, Amir Hossain Amu, Tofail Ahmed, Abdur Razzak, Suranjit Sengupta and Matia Chowdhury, also the agriculture minister, among others, addressed the discussion meeting.
Courtesy: thedailystar.net
