HARTAL<br>Tuesday, Wednesday
Threat on for Thursday; Shibir to enforce 60-hour shutdown in Rajshahi, Chapainawabganj from today
The BNP-led 18-party opposition alliance yesterday announced that it would enforce a 36-hour countrywide hartal from tomorrow morning protesting a Dhaka court denying seven BNP leaders bails.
The alliance came up with the announcement immediately after the court ordered bails to three BNP lawmakers but denied bails to seven other leaders, including BNP acting secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir.
The opposition alliance would also enforce hartal on Thursday if the government obstructed its hartals and kept harassing opposition leaders, Hamadullah Al Mehedi, secretary general of Bangladesh Labour Party, a component of the alliance, told The Daily Star yesterday.
The hartal call has again worried the business communities. In April alone, the opposition parties enforced six days' countrywide hartals. This excludes hartals in districts.
A day of shutdown causes a loss of Tk 1,600 crore to the country's businesses as per a recent statement of Dhaka Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
"The shutdowns are damaging our economy," Kazi Akram Uddin Ahmed, president of Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry, told The Daily Star.
"Considering the gravity of losses, we are organising the congress of businessmen in Dhaka on April 26 to listen to their opinion and we are planning to meet the political leaders to mediate a solution to the stalemate."
Moreover, Higher Secondary Certificate examinees would suffer as the authorities like the previous occasions would defer their exams scheduled for tomorrow and the day after tomorrow due to hartals.
In defence of the hartal, BNP's Khandaker Mosharraf Hossain claimed that the government had forced the opposition parties to go for hartal by oppressing them and denying all their demands, including restoration of a non-partisan election time government system.
"More than two hundred top party leaders across the country landed in jail. We will organise tougher agitations to free the leaders," Mosharraf, a member of national standing committee of BNP, said at a press briefing from where the hartal call was made.
The alliance would also observe protest rallies on April 27 in all district headquarters, he said.
Meanwhile, Islami Chhatra Shibir, pro-Jamaat-e-Islami student body, yesterday said it would enforce a 60-hour non-stop hartal in Rajshahi and Chapainawabganj from this morning to protest the recent arrest of its president.
It said the ongoing HSC examination would remain outside the purview of the hartal.
The Sylhet city unit of BNP, on the other hand, yesterday announced that it would enforce a dawn-to-dusk hartal in the city on April 30 to protest BNP leader Ilias Ali's disappearance a year ago.
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