Anything less than democracy not acceptable: Rehman Sobhan

FE Team | Published: January 27, 2018 22:49:24

FE Report
Noted economist Professor Rehman Sobhan said Saturday anything less than democracy will not be acceptable as people of Bangladesh bear a historic tradition of struggle against non-democratic forces.
"We all are part of a historic tradition of struggle, Bangladesh emerged from liberation struggle. Anything less than democracy would not be acceptable for the country at the end," he said.
He was chairing a Gyantaposh Abdur Razzaq distinguished lecture, organised by Gyantaposh Abdur Razzaq Foundation, at Muzaffar Ahmed Chowdhury auditorium of Dhaka University.
Abdur Razzaq was a national professor and intellectual lighthouse of post-1947 Bangladesh or East Pakistan. His political ideas influenced hundreds of youths to anti-Ayub government movements during the 1960s.
He was born in 1914 in the Paragram village of Nawabganj Upazila of Dhaka District and died in 1999 in Dhaka.
Prof Sobhan said that the political movement nowadays is confined to urban elite class. "Political movement without participation of all classes of people can't be a successful one."
Political scientist Professor Rounaq Jahan delivered the lecture on 'Political Parties: Movements, Elections and Democracy in Bangladesh', highlighting the country's political parties, movement, leadership and elections.
"Razzaq and many of us projected our expectations of a liberal democratic order in a post-liberation Bangladesh. What we could not anticipate was the short life span of the post-1971 democratic order," she said
She said Razzaq lived to see the return of electoral democracy in Bangladesh in 1991, but he did not live long enough to witness the tensions and contradictions which have continued to disturb the working of the country's democracy in the following decades.
Foundation director general Dr Ahrar Ahmed and Professor at the Department of Government and Politics of Jahangirnagar University Dr. Al Masud Hasanuzzaman also spoke at the event.
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