Bangladesh's Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus on Thursday sought support from political parties to take the nation forward through "unity" as he invited them to discuss a draft of the proclamation of the July uprising that toppled prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s regime.

Hasina, 77, has been living in India since August 5, when she fled Bangladesh following a massive student-led protest that toppled her Awami League's 16-year regime.

“When we work alone and see no one is beside us, we feel weak a bit. And when you all sit together, we get courage,” Yunus told the meeting attended by representatives of several political parties here.

Yunus, the Chief Adviser or de facto prime minister, said his government wants to take the nation forward through “unity”.

"We were born amid unity and the unity is our strength," he added.

Former prime minister Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) sent one representative to the meeting, attended by rightwing Jamaat-e-Islam and several relatively smaller left-leaning parties.

Several leaders of the Anti-Discrimination Students Movement, which led the July-August uprising, and their main ally, the National Citizens Committee, which intends to emerge as a new political party with a new name, were present.

Communist Party of Bangladesh (CPB), the main left-leaning party, and the CPB-led Left Alliance decided not to join the meeting, saying “they can't join the meeting at such short notice”.

Hasina's Awami League and its allies were not invited to the meeting.

The interim government drafted the July Uprising proclamation after a series of dramatic episodes as the Anti-Discrimination Students Movement were set to declare the charter last month.

They vowed to bury the “Mujibist 1972 Constitution” and “make irrelevant” Hasina’s Awami League, sparking political tensions. At the time, the Yunus-led government distanced itself from the proclamation, calling it a “private initiative”.

But in a surprise announcement, Yunus’ Press Secretary Shafiqul Alam later said the government has decided to prepare a “proclamation of July uprising” incorporating views of all participating students, political parties and stakeholders, including the Anti-Discrimination Student Movement.

At Thursday’s meeting, Yunus said that the interim government called for the dialogue after students who led the uprising informed him that there would be a proclamation and insisted on him being part of it.

"I tried to understand what proclamation they were going to make. I told them that it would not happen," he said, adding that he advised the students to make the proclamation involving all stakeholders of the July revolution. Stating that the meeting aimed to finalise the July Proclamation in unison, Yunus said if it could not be made unitedly, they do not need to announce it. Several participants told the media that many of them questioned the necessity of the proclamation.

BNP standing committee member Salahuddin Ahmed expressed his concern to the government about the potential division within the anti-fascist unity regarding the proclamation.

A key leader of the Anti-Discrimination Students Movement and member of Yunus’s interim cabinet, Mahfuj Alam, said on Wednesday that the government formulated a draft of the July Proclamation.

Law adviser Asif Nazrul also said the July proclamation would be finalized after intensive discussions with all stakeholders of the uprising, including political parties.

He said the leaders who joined the meeting “advised us to take the time required for reaching a consensus, but the process should not waste time".

According to mass circulation Prothom Alo and Daily Star newspapers, the three-page draft contained a background on the people’s decades-old struggle for independence since the 1947 partition of the Indian sub-continent with mention of the “blood-stained 1971 Liberation War”.

It described the backdrop of the July-August student-people mass upsurge that toppled the Awami League regime.

“We (also) express our desire to amend or if required, scrap the 1972 Constitution which nourishes Fascism and autocracy,” the draft was quoted as saying by the Bangla newspapers.