Reza Mahmud :
BNP takes peaceful movement as effective weapons at a time when the party men are facing hundreds of cases from past years of agitations.
“Our party is a democratic organisation. BNP leaders and activists are also respectful to the democratic and nonviolent norms. So it is simple that our programme will be peaceful,” Mirza Abbas, the Standing Committee Member of BNP told The New Nation.
Insiders said, the high-command of the party has taken ‘peaceful agitation’ as a better strategy for drawing bigger support from common masses.
Senior leaders of the party also said that they want to create trust among party men and supporters to face police peacefully in the street without fear.
“Apart from these, our high-command also wants to show the countrymen and the world, especially foreign diplomats that we are peaceful always, even after jailing our party chief in a false case,” they said.
Senior leaders said that there were several thousand cases against thousands of party leaders and activists including its jailed Chairperson Khaleda Zia.
There were more than 80 cases filed against the party Secretary General Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir.
In fact every leader who is capable to organise party men at field level has been sued by police throughout the country.
Most of the cases were filed after and before the one-sided national polls held on January 5 in 2014, they said.
Many of the party leaders were arrested and imprisoned in the past years. Some of them were on the run for years from their family to save themselves from police harassments.
In the given circumstances, BNP has taken such peaceful programme to free its leader Begum Khaleda Zia from jail.
“You see that hundred of our party leaders were sued centering the incident of February 8 when the verdict against the party chief was delivered,” said Syed Moazzem Hossain Alal, one of the Joint-Secretary General of the BNP.
“Everyone has seen that BNP men are not responsible for those incidents. Because those were occurred after the ruling party men attacked on us,” he said.
He also said, “Around 10 cases were filed against our party leaders, most of them are mentioned as ‘unknown’, that means they (police) want to hold our party men on their whims and show them arrest under those cases.”
Alal also mentioned the incident of January 30 in front of the high court mazar in which a prison van was vandalised by miscreants, when Khaleda Zia’s motorcade was passing the area.
He said police sued and arrested party Standing Committee Member Gayeshwar Chandra Roy and some important party leaders in the incidents.
Senior party leaders said that in this situation the grass root level activists always pass time in fear of arrests.
“In such circumstances, movement in peaceful manner proved highly fruitful. The leaders and activists get courage to take to the street in every programme,” said one of the senior leaders preferring anonymity.
He said the party high-command want to get rid of the allegation imposed upon the party men about the petrol bomb incidents and such other violence during 2014 election.
“Our Chairperson made it clear that those petrol bombs were thrown by the ruling party men to give us blame. We want to stay at a distance from such incidents from now during agitation programme.
“You see we staged some programme to free our leader Khaleda Zia from jail but all were nonviolent in nature,” he said.
