It was the morning of February 13, a day after Bangladesh’s parliamentary election delivered a landslide victory to the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). The lock on the closed Chaklahat union office of the Awami League in the northern district of Panchagarh was removed. The office had remained locked for 18 months after the fall of the Awami League Government and the subsequent ban on the party’s activities.
Its reopening took place in the presence of the Panchagarh Sadar upazila BNP President, who stood beside local Awami League leaders and activists. The BNP leader, a former union parishad chairman, said he was unaware that the office had remained locked and claimed he would have opened it earlier had he known.
