Professor Emajuddin Ahmed, a former vice chancellor of Dhaka University and today an adviser to the BNP, has asked the leaders and workers of the BNP to be on alert as a call can come to them anytime to launch a movement, obviously against the government.
That is understandable, especially if that call comes within the parameters of democratic behavior. If any political party feels that democracy is at risk in Bangladesh, it is free to undertake a program of restoring it.
The learned academic, whose association with the BNP goes back years, in the course of his remarks also let it be known that the Awami League had destroyed democracy, in his words, thrice. One of those moments, one assumes, could be a reference to the fourth amendment to the constitution in early 1975.
As for the other two, one is quite at a loss to comprehend the professor's hint. Be that as it may, there is surely no denying that the country is today in a difficult situation and the reasons why that is so are well known. The manner in which the ruling party has been handling issues of late has left a whole lot to be desired.
But it is on the question of how the Awami League has destroyed democracy, as Prof. Emajuddin has stated, that one needs to go into a discussion. More precisely, however, when the issue is one of democracy and its future, it is the role played by the BNP in national history since its inception which calls for severe scrutiny before any inquiry into the doings of the Awami League can be made.
The BNP and its founder, the nation's first military dictator Ziaur Rahman, cannot escape their responsibility for all the malignant acts which systematically undermined the nation in the twenty one years between Bangabandhu's assassination in 1975 and the return to power by the Awami League in 1996.
When Prof. Emajuddin Ahmed and his friends berate the Awami League on the democracy question, it would be well to remember the grave damage to the national body politic which the BNP and its leadership caused in their days in power. General Zia blatantly violated the core national principles by removing two of them, secularism and socialism, from the constitution by a stroke of the pen.
The BNP remains guilty of incorporating the notorious fifth amendment into the constitution at the session of Parliament in 1979. The party has not only played truant with national history but has also gone all-out to undermine the political giants who envisaged and led the movement for independence.
One of the more shameful episodes which the BNP has not regretted or apologized for was its unwillingness to prosecute the assassins of the Father of the Nation and the four national leaders.These are the truths which men like Prof. Emajuddin Ahmed and those vocal about democracy must not forget. We have not.
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