Tea labourers’ organisations across the district observed the “Tea Labourers Day” in Moulvibazar Monday.
The event is held to commemorate the deaths of hundreds of tea garden workers in the hands of British colonial rulers in 1921 during a revolt.
According to tea labourer leaders, in the beginning of tea cultivation in the region, tea labourers were brought here from different areas of the subcontinent, such as Orissa, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh and had to work under inhuman conditions in the tea gardens.
On May 20, 1921, thousands of tea labourers left their work and gathered in the Chandpur River Port to go back to their homelands.
But the then British owners of the gardens, with the help of the then Assam law-enforcing agency, resisted the labourers and at one stage fired indiscriminately on them, resulting in hundreds of deaths.
Satya Narayan Naido, President of Bangladesh Cha-Sramik Federation, told this correspondent that different tea labour organisations had observed different programmes marking the day in remembrance of the killing and in demand of declaring May 20 “Tea Labourers Day”.