Riot police unleash dye-laced water cannon on demonstrating Communist Party of Bangladesh (CPB) activists in Dhaka yesterday.

AFP/Dhaka

Bangladesh police fired tear gas and water cannon at protesters yesterday as a nationwide strike over a hike in fuel prices brought large parts of the country to a halt.

A coalition of leftwing parties, including the Communist Party of Bangladesh, called the strike to protest a recent increase in diesel, kerosene and gasoline prices, saying it was due to pressure from the International Monetary Fund.

Most schools, shops and private businesses were closed in the capital, the normally congested Dhaka streets were largely empty and motorways were deserted, affecting deliveries from the ports.

Police fired tear gas at scores of activists near the Communist party headquarters in Dhaka after they tried to barricade a key road and smash vehicles, local police chief Golam Sarwar said.

“They became violent and also burnt tyres on the road,” he said.

Sarwar said that no one had been reported injured.

The online edition of the Daily Star, however, said several people were hurt and that police had used pepper spray to disperse the activists.

Police also sprayed coloured water from a cannon on protesters at a road crossing, according to an eyewitness.

The strike was the eighth to hit the impoverished and politically volatile country in the last six weeks.

The country’s main opposition parties also held a strike on January 4 to protest the latest fuel price hike. They also enforced series of strikes last month demanding polls under a neutral technocrat-led caretaker administration.

Bangladesh on January 3 raised fuel prices by up to 11%, saying that the spike was needed to cut the country’s growing energy subsidy bill.

The government said the hike would save more than $300mn.

Leftwing parties said the increase was one of the strings attached by the IMF to secure a tranche of the $1bn soft loan that it agreed to provide Bangladesh in April last year.

On Tuesday, BNP led opposition alliance formed human chains in capital Dhaka and elsewhere in the country to express no-confidence in Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s coalition government as its key demand for reinstating a non-party caretaker government to oversee general election remained unheeded.

Thousands of activists and supporters of former prime minister Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh’s Nationalist Party (BNP) and its 17 allies, many with red headband, joined their hands and stood on one side of many major Dhaka streets for an hour.

Police and party sources said the anti-government demonstrations were peaceful in Dhaka and elsewhere in the country.

“People through the human walls demonstrated their no- confidence in the government,” Tariqul Islam, spokesman of BNP, said.

He said the government, which pushed the country to the brink of collapse through “looting, corruption and misrule”, should immediately meet the opposition demand for restoration of the non- party caretaker
government system.

He said the alliance was trying to save people from the misrule of the government and set them free from anarchic situation now prevailing in the country where there is now “besieged democracy”.

The opposition protesters carried banners and placards demanding withdrawal of “false” cases filed against Zia’s elder son Tarique Rahman, also BNP’s senior vice-chairman, who has been in London since he was released on parole in 2008.

They also demanded release of the party’s acting secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir whose bail petition was rejected by a magistrate court on December 11.

BNP and its allies had called a series of strikes earlier to protest against the annulment of the caretaker government system.

Zia has threatened to enforce a non-stop strike if Hasina’s government does not respond to her alliance’s demand for restoration of the caretaker system.