Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Thursday said the 2001 national election had a result of a huge conspiracy against her party and she was a witness to it.
“I was the direct witness to that incident (reaching an understanding) as BNP gave undertaking to sell gas if they could go to power,” she said.
The Prime Minister came up with the revelation while addressing the grand conference of
Diploma Krishibid Institution, Bangladesh at the auditorium of Krishibid Institution, Bangladesh in the city.
During the caretaker regime, just before the 2001 national election, Hasina recalled, she along with her then party general secretary Zillur Rahman and BNP chief Khaleda Zia and BNP’s secretary general Mannan Bhuiyan attend a luncheon at the house of then caretaker government head Latifur Rahman.
Hasina said former US President Jimmy Carter attended the luncheon meeting where the issue of selling gas by a US company to India came up for discussions.
“I then said I had told the US President (Bill Clinton) what I was to say during his visit to Dhaka and my visit to the US. So, there’ll be no change in my policy,” Hasina added.
At one point of the discussion, the Prime Minister said, she along with Zillur Rahman came out of that meeting, but BNP chief Khaleda Zia and Mannan Bhuiyan were still there at the meeting and gave undertaking to sell gas to another country.
“If you look back at the results of the 2001 national election, you could find that AL got the higher popular votes, but it couldn’t win the majority seats in parliament. There was no doubt that it was a huge conspiracy against our party,” she added.
Hasina said she had told then US President Bill Clinton following his request to sell gas to India that she was not aware of the real gas reserve in Bangladesh and the country’s gas resource belongs to its people.
“I told Bill Clinton that if there was any additional reserve of at least 50 years’ gas after fulfilling the country’s demand, only then we can sell the additional one, or else not, and it was quite natural for a President to be unhappy hearing this,” Hasina said in her flashback.
Describing diploma Krishibids as front-ranking soldiers in agricultural production, Hasina said they are doing hard works by remaining beside farmers in the field while the government introduced modern technology-based digital agriculture system to ensure food security.
The Prime Minister also urged all, including the diploma agriculturalists, to build the country with the united efforts of all. “We must develop our country… we’ve earned our independence through blood. So, we don’t want to live as a nation of beggars.
We want to live as a dignified nation and we can earn that dignity when we’ll be self-reliant in all fields.”
The Prime Minister said those who grabbed power after the assassination of Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman with most of his family members in 1975 did not take any step for the development of agriculture and farmers, rather they stalled agricultural production undermining the farmers.
Hasina said farmers today need not to run after fertilizers as agriculture input cards have been given to some 2,08,13,477 farmers to easily get such materials while bank accounts for some 1,01,19,548 farmers have been opened for only Tk 10 per account.
Assuming office, the Prime Minister said her government has provided Tk 41,000 crore as subsidy to the farmers from 2009 to June 2013 aimed at reducing production cost.
Hasina mentioned that her government has attached importance to innovate seeds of varieties of crops befitting to adverse and changing climatic condition adding that a total of 145 types of different new varieties of crops have so far been invented.
She said a project has been undertaken to mechanise cultivation system of the country through its modernisation to increase production, reduce production cost as well as to meet the demand of the farm workers with an estimated cost of Tk 163.41 crore.
Earlier, the Prime Minister inaugurated the grand conference through hoisting the national flag and releasing white pigeons at the Krishibid Institution’s auditorium premises.
Agriculture Minister Begum Matia Chowdhury and AL Organising Secretary AFM Bahauddin Nasim spoke on the occasion as special guests.
