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AL unveils draft election manifesto

DHAKA: Bangladesh's Awami League, led by Sheikh Hasina, has pledged to curb Indian influence if voted into power in coming general elections.

Hasina said on Thursday night in unveiling her party's draft manifesto that the Awami League would adhere strictly to principles of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) and would not renew a 25-year friendship treaty with India which expires in March next year.

She said the former ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) led by Begum Khaleda Zia had turned Bangladesh into the biggest market for Indian goods, mostly smuggled through a virtually open border.

She criticised Khaleda for branding the Awami League as pro-Indian, saying the party believed in peaceful co-existence on the basis of equality, which she said would be a cornerstone in the League's foreign policy.

She rejected BNP accusations that the treaty with India, signed in 1972 by Hasina's father and Bangladesh's independence leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was a deal of slavery.

SAARC came into being in 1985 following an idea conceived by Khaleda's husband, President Ziaur Rahman, who was assassinated in a 1981 abotive army mutiny.

SAARC's members are Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. All SAARC countries are members of SAPTA (South Asian Presferential Trade Arrangement), formed in 1995 with aims to boost trade among SAARC nations.

The main features of the Awami draft manifesto promise a stronger defence force, restoration of law and order, an intensified anti-corruption drive, farm subsidies, rapid industrialisation, privatisation, free press, women's development, stronger local government and alleviation of poverty.

Khaleda resigned on March 30 following a two-year opposition campaign of strikes led by Hasina and was replaced by a non-party caretaker ruler, former chief justice Habibur Rahman.

Rahman's appointment coincided with dissolution of the parliament elected last February 15. Opposition parties boycotted the elections and demanded fresh polls under neutral authority.

The schedules for new elections, which must be held before end of June, have not been announced, but major parties including the League and BNP, the main contenders for power, have already started campaigning.

The country's third biggest Jatiya Party has focussed its campaign on the demand for release of its leader, jailed ex-president general Hossain Mohammad Ershad.

Jamaat-e-Islami, the fourth biggest party, is wooing Bangladeshis by saying that it would introduce "rule of Allah" if voted to power.-Reuter