Rashed Khan, the prime minister’s political assistant, has called Nasiruddin Patwary, a leader of the National Citizen Party (NCP), a “ganja addict”. He made the remark on Saturday afternoon in a long post on his verified Facebook account about the political ideals of Osman Hadi, the Dhaka-8 election and the positions various parties have taken around him.
In the post Rashed Khan claims that although various political parties were at odds with Osman Hadi in his lifetime, attempts are being made since his death to present him as their own ideological leader. He questions the role of Jamaat-e-Islami and the NCP in this.
He writes that the NCP had announced a rickshaw puller, Sujan, as its candidate against Osman Hadi in Dhaka-8. He also says that Zubayer, personal secretary to the Jamaat ameer and president of the BUET unit of the Chhatra Shibir, had told Hadi not to contest the seat, saying Sadik Kayem would stand there as Jamaat’s candidate.
Rashed Khan claims Osman Hadi replied that he would contest Dhaka-8 even if he got only 500 votes, and says Hadi’s brother, Omar Hadi, had posted about this on Facebook. He also asks whether Zubayer is now in the country.
Criticising the two parties’ positions, he writes that in his lifetime Osman Hadi had raised allegations of corruption against the NCP, of destroying the unity of July and of trying to monopolise July, and claims he had also described Jamaat as “clandestine”.
Turning to Patwary, he writes: “We all have respect for the martyr Osman Hadi. But when the NCP’s ganja-addict leader Nasiruddin Patwary says Hadi’s struggle was stronger than Ziaur Rahman’s, there is nothing left to say: Jamaat and the NCP have gone into business to make Osman Hadi controversial. Patwary made such a remark as part of a dirty plan to get BNP leaders and activists to make disparaging statements about Osman Hadi.”
He calls on leaders and activists of the BNP and its affiliates not to be drawn into such disputes, writing that Osman Hadi struggled with the anti-hegemony politics of President Ziaur Rahman as his ideal, and that no attempt to set him against the BNP will succeed.
He also gives his view on the burial of Osman Hadi beside the grave of the national poet, Kazi Nazrul Islam. He writes that some statements by Inqilab Mancha leaders may have raised questions in some minds about the burial, but that it is not right to dispute the burial of a man who was murdered.
At the end of the post he says he spoke by phone that morning to Osman Hadi’s elder brother, who told him that no statement should be made that gives opponents a chance to stir controversy over a dead man. “I agree with him,” he writes. “We will hold our brother Osman Hadi in our hearts for life, God willing. We must also stay alert and speak out about those who want to use him as a political weapon.”
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report