It is unfortunate that apart from The Daily Star, few other newspapers have covered this story in a serious manner. The former PM has used this issue in a way that suggests she would welcome even a famine to discredit the government. What more can one say of Shekih Hasina and her party? It is not the first time that she has attempted to discredit the BNP Government on false premises; she has made this a bad habit. She seems to care little for the truth or what it does to our image as a nation. It was only over a couple of years ago when, as the Prime Minister, she was boasting about the success of her agricultural policy that made Bangladesh self-sufficient in food. Now how come that she saw a famine in Bangladesh so soon after declaring Bangladesh self-sufficient in food production? Was her claim of self-sufficiency unsustainable and a propaganda stunt? Did she forget this deliberately so she could raise the horror of a famine knowing its impact on the public from experience of the famine during her father's time, when the government dismissed it as mischief of anti-national elements, a denial that led the people to turn against it? In her desire to hasten the downfall of the BNP, she was overlooking a few other facts well-known to everybody; that today we have a good food reserve; that the distribution system is efficient and that there are now just too many NGOs working in the rural areas to let anyone die of starvation in the country.

The fact that Bangladesh did not see the famine which Sheikh Hasina had said there was proves to us that she was using a temporary shortage of food (which in the northern districts is a very temporary phase called monga) to create hatred against the BNP government. In other words, Sheikh Hasina was playing politics with human misery and that too on fabricated premises.