Bangladesh’s Hindu woman activist Priya Saha will be sued for sedition for ‘defaming’ her country.
Bangladesh roads minister and ruling Awami League general secretary Obaidul Quader said Priya Saha’s remarks about oppression of minorities in Bangladesh was “totally false and malicious”.
“Priya Saha’s allegation was absolutely false. No one will agree with her,” Quader said while talking to reporters at the Awami League president’s Dhanmondi political office in Dhaka on Saturday.
“A sedition case will be filed against her. The process is underway,” he said.
Priya Saha, a Bangladeshi national, participated in the Second Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom held at the US Department of State in Washington, DC from July 16-18.
Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen also attended the meeting.
Two Rohingya refugees and two other minority activists attended the meeting attended by President Donald Trump.
Delegates from 106 countries, including about 40 foreign ministers, took part in the meeting at the invitation of Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state.
A video clip, that later went viral on social media, showed Priya, one of the organizing secretaries of Bangladesh Hindu-Bouddha-Christian Oikya Parishad, pleading to Trump to save 18 million people of minority groups in Bangladesh from persecution.
She alleged that 37 million Hindus, Buddhists and Christians had disappeared from the country, persecuted at the hands of fundamentalist Muslims groups, who enjoyed political support.
Saha said her own land has been seized by Muslim fundamentalists.
Earlier on Saturday, a press release issued by the Foreign Ministry termed Priya’s allegations as “blatant lies” and said there was an ulterior motive behind Priya’s “absolutely false and concocted stories”, and they were targeted to malign Bangladesh.
It said that Bangladesh is a beacon of religious freedom and communal harmony, where people of all faiths have been living in peace for ages.
From Quader to Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal to junior foreign minister Shahriar Alam, the official reaction against Saha’s remarks have been fierce.
Her organisation Bangladesh Hindu-Bouddha-Christian Oikya Parishad has distnaced itself from Saha’s remarks, saying in a statement they were her ‘personal views and not that of the organisation’.