Bangladesh Awami League has opened a ‘party office’ and has been operating for months from the office at a commercial complex in a busy suburb on the outskirts of Kolkata in the Indian state of West Bengal, reported BBC Bangla on Friday.
According to the report, the place has become the meeting ground for top-tier leaders of AL and its affiliated organisations, who fled after July uprising in August 2024.
The interim government of Bangladesh has kept the activities of Awami League suspended until the trial of the party and its leaders over atrocities during the July mass uprising which ousted the authoritarian AL regime on August 5, 2024.
There is no signboard, no picture of ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina or Bangladesh’s founding president Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, anywhere outside or inside the room, reported the media outlet.
‘Very consciously we did not put any signboards or pictures of Bangabandhu or the leader. We did not want the identity of this room to be revealed,’ said one AL leader.
‘A room was needed for regular meetings and gatherings and this was found. We call it the party office, but in reality it is a commercial office,’ the leader said to the media.
The BBC report assumed that Indian intelligence agencies knew about this office and without the approval of the top level of the Indian home ministry, the Awami League activities could not be carried out from this party office.
The Awami League has been run from India for about a year and the party’s leader, Sheikh Hasina, lives somewhere near Delhi, while the majority of its leaders live in the areas surrounding Kolkata, said the report.
On May 12, the interim government banned all activities of the Awami League and its affiliated, allied and like-minded organisations until the completion of the trials of the party and its leaders by the International Crimes Tribunal.
Awami League president and deposed prime minister Sheikh Hasina fled to India on August 5, 2024, in the face of the student-led mass uprising.
