Prime Minister’s International Affairs Advisor Gowher Rizvi has said the government will not make any decision under overseas pressure but hoped the general elections will be contested by all parties.
His comment came on Wednesday after US Secretary of State John Kerry wrote to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and opposition chief Khaleda Zia urging them to hold immediate dialogue for the sake of free, fair and credible parliamentary elections.
Replying to a question on the sidelines of a seminar in Dhaka, Rizvi said Bangladesh as an independent country would not make any decision under pressure from other countries.
He said if any such decision was taken, people might not agree with the government.
Kerry’s letters came on Sunday barely two weeks after United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged the top two leaders to find a way out of the impasse over the elections.
The two major parties are at loggerheads over the nature of the administration that will oversee the balloting after the ruling Awami League scrapped the caretaker government provision through the 15th constitutional amendment.
Even Chinese envoy Li Jun joined them in their rare move last month saying he was trying to encourage face-to-face talks between the two rival parties as he believed stability was needed for a developing country like Bangladesh to develop.
The Awami League says the election-time administration would comprise elected representatives of all parties with Hasina at the helm while BNP is demanding non-partisan caretaker administration that had supervised previous polls since the late 1990s.
Hasina told UN chief Ban during Aug 23 phone call that she planned to hold the polls in keeping with the Constitution, under government supervision.
But she hinted that the opposition would be welcome to offer a proposal for discussion in Parliament.
Khaleda has said she was ready for a dialogue to overcome the crisis but made it clear the opposition would not go to polls if that was supervised by the Awami League-led government.-bdnews24.com
