For the second consecutive day, the Bangla Blockade grips the capital, with thousands of students and jobseekers bringing traffic to a standstill at key intersections across Dhaka.
Beyond Dhaka, protesters hold the streets with equal resolve
Even on a holiday, the quota reform protests show no sign of slowing. Students across Bangladesh take to the streets, block roads, form human chains, and voice their rejection of the reinstated quota system in government jobs.
Defying the rain, they sat on the streets, waving banners and shouting slogans
The student movement against the reinstatement of the quota system in public service recruitment escalated on July 3, 2024, as demonstrations expanded beyond university campuses to major highways and key city intersections, mounting pressure on the government.
Defying rain, warnings, exhaustion, anti-quota protests gained momentum
Though protests had already begun in response to a High Court verdict reinstating quotas in government jobs, it was on July 1, 2024, that the movement for reforms to the quota system truly took shape.
On March 31, 1971, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi moved a resolution in parliament strongly criticising the military action in Bangladesh.
East Pakistan Governor Lt Gen Tikka Khan today admitted that a railway bridge in Cumilla had been blown up by the Mukti Fouj recently.
Foreigners in Dhaka were warned this week to avoid Chinese restaurants, which apparently became the latest targets for Bangladeshi guerillas.
KM Shehabuddin, diplomatic representative of Bangladesh, described Pakistan President Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan’s threat of declaring war against India as a “desperate and heinous attempt to hide his shame and hoodwink the world opinion by implicating India”.
Pakistan President Yahya Khan in an interview published in The Financial Times today said Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman would be put on trial “very soon”.
All the members of the Bangladesh mission interviewed by the Swiss representative Dr Bonard in Calcutta today refused to be repatriated to Pakistan and reaffirmed their allegiance to the Bangladesh government.
A three-member Canadian parliamentary delegation that visited Pakistan was told by Pakistani officials in Islamabad that Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was at present in a jail in West Pakistan.
Reg Prentice, a member of the British parliamentary delegation which had visited both Pakistan and India to study the present crisis, wrote an account of his tour today in the New Statesman:
The Prime Minister of Bangladesh Tajuddin Ahmed declared today that “military victory is the only solution to the situation in Bangladesh”, reported The People, a pro-AL English-language weekly.
The New York Times in an editorial published today urges the US administration to promptly divert military supplies already en route to Pakistan.
The New York Times today published excerpts from a report by a mission of the World Bank that visited East Pakistan in June, 1971 and from a report on a survey of the western area of Bangladesh by Hendrik van der Heijden, an economist and member of the mission.
