Hill Voice, 17 September 2023, Dhaka: Adv. Rana Dasgupta, General Secretary of Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Oikya Parishad said, as the parliamentary elections draw nearer, concerns about the security of the country’s religious and ethnic minorities are growing. Because, now a days, communal violences have been a common phenomenon in pre and post period of elections. However, none of the election pledges of the government including the formulation of a special law for the protection of minorities have been fulfilled so far. It should be remembered that in at least one hundred constituencies of the country, the minority voters have the power to determine the election results. Considering this fact, the calculation of what you will give and what will not must be cleared before the election. Otherwise, it will not be possible for us to take part in the elections.
Adv. Dasgupta said this while addressing as chief guest in an extended meeting of Dhaka Metropolitan North Unit of Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Oikya Parishad in Dhaka.
The extended meeting was held in Tejgaon Polytechnic Institute auditorium chaired by Atul Chandra Mandal, acting President of Metropolitan North Unit of Oikya Parishad on September 16, 2023, yesterday. Hriday Gupta, acting General Secretary of the Metropolitan North unit conducted the meeting where Central Joint General Secretary of Oikya Parishad Adv. Shyamal Kumar Roy, Principal Harichand Mondal Suman, Adv. Kishore Ranjan Mondal, Rabindranath Basu, Joint Organizing Secretary Bappaditya Basu, leaders of Metropolitan North unit Parimal Kuri, Prabhash Mandal, Abinash Somajpati, Sudhir Biswas spoke among others.
In the meeting, Rana Dasgupta added that we are not the agents of India nor Awami League or any other political powers. We are the agents of Bangladesh. The religious minorities of this country played a significant role in the emergence of Bangladesh by sacrificing their lives, blood and suffering losses mostly, bearing the spirit “Equality, human dignity and social justice” of the Mujibnagar government’s declaration of independence. But it is matter of depressing that we are seeing even after passing half of the century of the independence, the three goals -equality, human dignity and social justice- for the reason we sacrificed in the liberation war of independence have apparently been disappeared from the country. The state has turned into discriminating and communal. The constitution of ’72 has been lost. Today, the spirit of liberation war and the legacy of Bangabandhu has been overthrown from the state. We have been made minority by introducing state religion in this state, today. There is an ongoing political blueprint to de-Hindu Bangladesh. If the minority population are wiped out from this country, Bangladesh will turn into Afghanistan.
The leaders of Tejgaon, Tejgaon industrial Area, Badda, Rampura, Hatirjheel, Mirpur, Pallabi, Kafrul, Darus Salam, Shah Ali, Rupnagar, Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, Uttara East, Uttara West, Cantonment, Airport, Bhatara, Khilkhet, Mohammadpur, Adabar, Gulshan, Banani, Turag, Uttarkhan, Dakshinkhan, Bhashantek thana committee spoke in the extended meeting.
In the meeting, the leaders called to success the 48-hour mass hunger strike and mass sit-in at the central Shaheed Minar to be held on September 22-23 and the mass grand rally in Suhrawardy Udyan on October 6.
The programs were circulated in a press release signed by Mihir Ranjan Howladar, office secretary of Oikya Parishad.
