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মর্নিং নিউজ | ২৭ নভেম্বর, ১৯৭০ |
MUJIBUR RAHMAN WARNS AGAINST BID TO FRUSTRATE
ELECTIONS
Remarks made at a Press Conference at Dacca on November 26, 1970.
The Awami League Chief Sheikh Mujibur Rahman told a Press Conference in Dacca yesterday that “if the polls are frustrated, the people of Bangladesh will owe it to the millions who have died to make the supreme sacrifice of another million lives, if need be, so that we can live as a free people and so that Bangladesh can be the master of its own destiny”.
To a query by a foreign correspondent as to whether this could be, interpreted as a call for “independence”, Sheikh Mujib said, “No, Not yet”.
Asked if by referring to the sacrifice of another one million Bengalees he meant to put up physical resistance, the Awami League chief said, “That I do not say now. My party is a constitutional organisation. We will start a constitutional movement. If they follow unconstitutional ways, people will follow their own course”.
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was giving his impression of the tour of the cyclone ravaged areas in the coastal belt at the Press Conference which was attended by foreign journalists.
He strongly opposed the postponement of the general elections as a whole because of the disaster. Elections he however said, could be postponed in the eight constituencies ravaged by the catastrophe for a few weeks.
Reply to a question as to what he would do if elections were postponed, the Awami League chief said he would consult his party men to decide the future course of action. “Nothing, however, will go unchallenged”, he added.
When his attention was drawn to the statements of some political leaders who had demanded postponement of the elections because of the catastrophe, he asked. “Who are these leaders”? He said that by asking for postponement of the elections, which he described as a referendum on his Six-Point Programme, these political leaders were only trying to perpetuate the Martial Law regime.
“They want the Martial Law to protect their leadership. The same leaders had raised a hue and cry for postponement of the elections after the last flood. But what did they do to alleviate the sufferings of the flood-stricken people”, he asked.
