Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina yesterday urged all to stay alert so that the country was not plunged into the dark era of post-1975. 

She was addressing a discussion in the city's Krishibid Institution, Bangladesh in the afternoon. 

The Awami League organised the programme marking Amar Ekushey and the International Mother Language Day. 

Hasina, also the AL president, said there was a section of people in Bangladesh whose hearts lied in Pakistan. “We have to save the people of Bangladesh from them.... This is my request to people.” 

She regretted that a political party made some war criminals ministers and handed them the national flag. 

“The nation will never forgive those culprits.... The people of the country will have to remain alert to those who honoured the culprits and to those who raped our mothers and sisters, got involved in genocide, arson attacks and looting.... The nation must not forgive those culprits.”

She said the use of the mother tongue has to be ensured at all levels of life.

About writing court verdicts, the PM said judgments in the lower court are written in Bangla whereas the higher courts still use English.

“We hope the verdicts in higher courts will be written in Bangla in future. As this has been a matter of long practise, it is not possible to change it overnight,” she told the programme.

She said due to the delivery of verdicts in English, people were facing serious problems and they had to depend on their lawyers to understand those.

Hasina sharply criticised the recent trend of speaking Bangla in an English accent. “I don't know why some people started using this type of pronunciation. This is very unfortunate.”

The premier, however, said she was not against learning other languages.  She put emphasis on learning a second language to get jobs at home and abroad and earn money online.

“But we have to practise our language for which we had shed our blood. This is our mother tongue. We have to practice this language. We have to learn this from our families.”

The AL president called upon the party leaders and workers to uphold the ideology with which the country was liberated and devote themselves to building Bangladesh as a hunger- and poverty-free Sonar Bangla as dreamt by Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. 

Highlighting the history of the Language Movement, Hasina said the pride of Amar Ekushey now resounds in the hearts of the people of 193 countries. 

She paid tributes to Bangabandhu and recalled his role in establishing Bangla as the country's state language. 

She also remembered the AL's contributions to all movements -- from the Language Movement to the Liberation War.

AL presidium members Matia Chowdhury, Sheikh Fazlul Karim Selim, Abdur Razzaque and Abdul Matin Khasru, Prof Emeritus Rafiqul Islam and former Bangla Academy director general Syed Anwar Hossain took part in the discussion, conducted by AL Publicity and Publication Secretary Hasan Mahmud. 

Earlier, a one-minute silence was observed as a mark of respect to the memory of Language Movement martyrs who laid down their lives on February 21 in 1952 for establishing Bangla as the state language.