Staff Correspondent, CHT News
Saturday, 7 February 2026
The United Peoples Democratic Front (UPDF) has reacted
to the BNP’s election manifesto.
The party has described the BNP’s election manifesto,
published yesterday on 6 February, as a collection of flashy, misleading
slogans, stating that “it contains no commitment to fulfilling the basic
demands of the people of the Chittagong Hill Tracts.”
In a statement issued to the media today, Saturday, 7
February 2026, UPDF Vice President Nuton Kumar Chakma made these remarks.
Commenting that BNP’s concept of “Bangladeshi
nationalism” is, in reality, a covert promotion of a “Pakistani ideology,” and
merely an attempt to distinguish Bengali Muslims of East Bengal from Bengalis
of West Bengal by prioritizing religious identity, he said: “This manifesto
makes no provision for the fundamental issue of recognizing, respecting, and
ensuring the rights of non-Bengali nationalities. BNP has deliberately avoided
this issue.”
He further stated: “We are different as nations—such
as Bengali, Chakma, Marma, Tripura, Garo, Manipuri, Santal, and others.
However, as citizens, we are all Bangladeshi. The Bangladeshi identity denotes
our citizenship, not our nationality.”
Without acknowledging this truth and reality, he said,
it is impossible to ensure the political, economic, and cultural rights of
minority nationalities.
Describing the BNP’s promises regarding the Chittagong
Hill Tracts as hollow, the UPDF leader stated: “The absence of any commitment
to resolving the Chittagong Hill Tracts issue politically clearly indicates
that BNP has not changed its previous position. In the 1980s, they resettled
settlers in the hills and enforced repressive policies. BNP has failed to make
any clear commitment that it has moved away from that stance.”
He added that the manifesto’s promise to establish
“sustainable peace” is vague and merely an attempt to sidestep the core issues.
The statement further notes that the manifesto
contains no promises regarding the people’s fundamental demands, including
autonomy, land rights, demilitarization and democratization, human rights,
rehabilitation of settlers in the plains, constitutional recognition of
national identities, trial for genocide, or even justice for the recent
horrific communal attacks in Guimara, Rangamati, Khagrachari, and Dighinala.
Additionally, criticizing the manifesto’s promises to
establish an “Ethnic Development Directorate” and “exclusive tourism zones”
through private initiatives as mere flashy rhetoric, he said: “The root cause
of the Chittagong Hill Tracts problem is not economic underdevelopment. Rather,
development is being used here as a tool to oppress disenfranchised peoples. In
the past, innocent villagers were displaced and their land was forcibly
occupied in the name of so-called tourism. If exclusive tourism zones are
established in the future, the same events will be repeated on an even larger
scale.”
Therefore, he remarked, this deceptive manifesto will
not be acceptable to the people of the Chittagong Hill Tracts.
The UPDF leader called upon the voters in the three
hill districts to reject the BNP’s election manifesto and not to vote for
BNP-nominated candidates, and instead urged them to vote for independent
candidate Dharma Jyoti Chakma in Khagrachari and independent candidate Pahel
Chakma in Rangamati.
He stated that there is no alternative other than to
raise the demands and aspirations of the people of the Chittagong Hill Tracts
both inside and outside the National Parliament and to continue the struggle
for them.
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