Why hold talks with BNP, asks PM

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has wondered why the issue of holding a dialogue with BNP over the next national elections are being raised again and again. She said BNP would have to pay for its ‘political mistake’ of boycotting the January 5 parliamentary elections. In an interview with the BBC Bangla during her last week’s London visit, she said neither the presence nor the absence of the BNP and its ally Jamaat-e-Islami in the Parliament would affect anything. An audiotape of the interview was published on the BBC Bangla website on Thursday. When asked why there was no apparent initiative to sit for talks with the BNP over the next polls, Hasina said it was unclear to her as to why everyone was so bothered about the dialogue issue. ‘I took initiative for talks as the prime minister... I myself had made a telephone call and everyone knows the rest,’ she said. The BNP and its allies stayed away from the 10th parliamentary polls demanding supervision by a non-party neutral caretaker government, a provision scrapped through the 15th Constitutional Amendment. Hasina’s government stuck to its decision to supervise the polls citing Constitutional clause. The prime minister had called BNP chief Khaleda Zia to sit for talks before the elections but the latter turned down the offer citing her party’s pre-announced shutdown programme. ‘Who is to be held liable if a party makes a political mistake?’ Sheikh Hasina asked in the interview, according to bdnews24.com.