Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), one of the major political parties in Bangladesh, is in the habit of creating obstacles to the way of establishing democracy in the country by avoiding the election again and again.
Instead of participation in the election, the only democratic process, the party has been opting for the process of violence.
The BNP in cooperation with anti-liberation forces Jamaat-e-Islami burnt over 500 primary schools to ashes during the election in 2014. Besides, hundreds of polling and presiding officers also became victims of their anarchy.
The BNP is still going the wrong way which is leaving the people of the party into indecisions.
As a result, the leaders, activists and supporters of the party cannot understand what actually the party’s leadership wants.
As BNP is suffering from leadership crisis, internal feuds among the senior leaders and mistrusts to each other, its leaders and activists in the root-level or field-level, cannot understand the policy of the party. They are now facing difficulties to understand whether the party would take part in the next National Parliament elections.
The senior leaders of the BNP have been saying that they have no trust in the Election Commission and that is why the party did not take part in the recent dialogue held between the political parties and the EC.
But, the BNP submitted its accounts of income and expenditures to the EC in writing, which is totally in contrast to its stand.
Such type of contrasts have left even the party’s senior leaders into indecision.
In the name of so-called protest and movement, they created countrywide anarchy, killed hundreds of innocent people through petrol bomb and other types of terrorist acts in 2014. They set many buses on fire resulting into deaths of innocent people of the country.
Political analysts and experts say that if BNP does the same mistake like in 2014, the party would fall into severe disarray and the process of establishing democracy in Bangladesh would also face difficulty..
It is widely known that at present the BNP has no leader to command the party. The main leader of the party, former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, who is a convict by the court, is disabled due to various physical complications.
Instead of Khaleda Zia, her elder son Tariq Rahman, who is also on the run, has been given the charge of the BNP. But he could not come to Bangladesh being the suspect in the August 21 Grenade attack on the then opposition leader and present Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
Tariq Rahman is running the BNP staying in London over phone or video conference.
In the circumstances, the party has no leader to command the party. As a result, different leaders of the party are giving different opinions. Besides, party leaders have become divided into groups due to leadership crisis, mistrust to each other and various other aspects.