The Awami League will mark the 42nd anniversary of the homecoming of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Tuesday with discussion meetings and prayers and the distribution of charities.
On this day in 1981, Hasina returned home from a six-year exile in New Delhi, India to take over as the president of the Awami League and launch a 21-year pro-democracy movement against military regimes to bring the party back to power by winning the national election in 1996.
Hasina and her younger sister Sheikh Rehana were abroad on August 15, 1975, when their father Bangladesh President Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated with most of his family members at his Dhanmondi-32 residence in Dhaka.
The two daughters had since then been forced to live in exile until Hasina was elected president of the Awami League in her absence and returned home on this historic day amid a welcome by millions of cheering supporters.
After landing at Dhaka’s Kurmitola airport on the rain-swept afternoon of May 17 Hasina addressed a huge rally at Manik Miah Avenue where she vowed to dedicate her life to the restoration of democracy and fulfilling Bangabndhu’s unfinished task of building Bangladesh into a “Sonar Bangla”, a land of prosperity.
To mark the day Awami League’s front and associated bodies will organize discussions and other programs highlighting the significance of her return and how she changed the political and development landscape of Bangladesh as the prime minister of Bangladesh.
A discussion meeting of the Bangladesh Awami League will be held at Bangabandhu International Conference Center in the capital on Tuesday with the party’s General Secretary Obaidul Quader in the chair.
Bangladesh Awami Jubo League will organize another discussion program where Awami League Presidium Member Mofazzal Hossain Chowdhury Maya will attend as the chief guest.
Jubo League chairman Sheikh Fazle Shams Parash will preside over the program while its General Secretary Moinul Hasan Khan Nikhil will conduct it.
The organization will also distribute clothes, wheelchairs and white canes to the physically challenged people during the program.
Special prayers will be held at mosques and other places of worship across the country seeking blessings for the prime minister.
The Hindu community will arrange a prayer program at the Dhakeswari temple in the capital at 10am, the Buddhist community at the International Buddhist monastery temple at Merul Badda at 9:30am and the Christian community at the YMC church at Senpara Parbat in Mirpur-10 at 6pm.
