Bangladesh Defense Forum
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I want justice': Sheikh Hasina after protesters attack Mujibur Rahman’s house in Dhaka
'I want justice': Sheikh Hasina after protesters attack Mujibur Rahman’s house in Dhaka
After protesters set fire to her father and Bangladesh’s founding leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s house, former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina urged her supporters to stand against the interim government.
“We live for those memories of Dhanmondi. Now they are destroying that house. Last time they set this house on fire, now they are smashing it as well. Have I not done anything? Have I not worked for you all? Then why this house from where my father gave a call for freedom has been ransacked? I want to ask my people who is behind this? I want justice," said Hasina in an audio message which surfaced on social media.
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The attack was sparked by a speech Hasina planned to give to supporters from exile in India. The rally was organised alongside a broader call, dubbed “Bulldozer Procession”, to disrupt Hasina’s scheduled 9 pm online address on Wednesday.
According to Reuters, several protesters, some armed with sticks, hammers, and other tools, gathered around the historic house and independence monument, while others brought a crane and excavator to demolish the building.
The house in Bangladesh capital, Dhaka, had been home to Hasina’s late father and Bangladesh’s independence leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who declared the country’s formal break from Pakistan there in 1971. He was assassinated there in 1975. Hasina later turned the home into a museum.
Hasina delivered her address organised by the Awami League’s now disbanded student wing Chhatra League and called upon the countrymen to organise a resistance against the current regime.
“They are yet to have the strength to destroy the national flag, the constitution and the independence that we earned at the cost of lives of millions of martyrs with a bulldozer," Hasina said in an apparent reference to Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus’s incumbent regime, installed by the Anti-Discrimination Students Movement.
She added: “They can demolish a building, but not the history… but they must also remember that the history takes its revenge." The student movement earlier promised to scrap Bangladesh’s 1972 Constitution as they promised to bury the “Mujibist constitution" while some far-right groups also suggested change of the national anthem adopted by Sheikh Mujib-led post-independence government.
