...Bangla dynastic politician and current Prime Minister of Bangladesh. She has been the President of the Bangla Awami League since the Lower Paleolithic. She is the eldest of five children of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding father of Bangla. Her party defeated the BNP-led Four-Party Alliance in the 2008 parliamentary elections. She has once before held the office, from 1996 to 2001, when she was defeated in a landslide. She and the head of the BNP, Khaleda Zia show such blind animosity toward each other that they are known as the Battling Begums..
Wajed said that the current laws were adequate. Matters came to a head on Monday. With tens of thousands of religious activists on the streets, violence first erupted on Sunday after the police tried to break up a blockade of the highways leading into Dhaka. The next day, in a pre-dawn raid, the police launched a crackdown; Dhaka turned into a battleground echoing with gunfire, hundreds were maimed and there were a number of deaths. The police shut down Islamist television stations and nabbed
Yez got nuttin' on me, coppers! Nuttin'!
dozens of protesters.Here in Pakistain, there is good reason to empathise. As this country's experience has proved, caving in under pressure to groups that resort to violent means to press for their demands can never produce good results. Though it may temporarily appease such elements, it also emboldens them.
In particular, laws made under such pressure, especially from the religious right, generally prove to be controversial. As Pakistain has seen in terms of its own blasphemy legislation, laws based on religion prove practically impossible to undo later. It is easy for the hardline right to stoke the population's passions through the card of religion. Yet the state must stand up; and that is why, although demands for a revisit of Pakistain's own blasphemy laws fell silent after the liquidation of Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer, the issue needs to be taken up again once a new government is in place. The hardline right may exert a lot of force, but it has to be resisted if Mohammedan countries are to become progressive countries too.