ANOTHER FALSE DAWN IN BANGLADESH
Ikhtisad Ahmed
It was never in doubt that an alliance led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) would triumph in the country’s general elections, which concluded on 13 February. As expected, with 212 of 300 seats, it secured a supermajority large enough to amend the constitution.
But anyone tempted to celebrate the start of a “democratic transition” should hold their tongue, because an alliance led by the hardline Jamaat-e-Islami came second with 77 seats – the Islamists’ best showing to date. Yes, Bangladesh finally has a democratically elected government, after more than a decade-and-a-half of authoritarian Awami League rule. But Bangladeshi society has become more conservative than ever before.
The Awami League was not even allowed to participate in the election. Last May, members of the Jamaat’s student wing and the National Citizen Party (NCP) – the latter born out of the student uprising that ousted the Awami League’s despotic leader Sheikh Hasina in August 2024 during the “Monsoon Revolution” – were part of a crowd that held a protest outside the residence of Muhammad Yunus, who was heading the interim government. They called loudly for a ban on the League and were led in prayer by a recently freed Al-Qaeda ideologue, Jasimuddin Rahmani. Yunus – who is mystifyingly praised in the international media as a responsible centrist – gave in and proscribed the League under the Anti-Terrorism Act.
This is in keeping with a broader rightward drift. If the League once sought to impose a monopoly on Bengali nationalism, the Islamists are now trying to do the same. The fact that the NCP fought the elections in alliance with the Jamaat suggests how completely the Islamists have hijacked the student uprising. Reflecting an increasingly pro-Pakistan and pro-Turkey orthodoxy, Urdu phrases like “azadi” (freedom), “inquilab” (revolution) and “insaf” (justice) have replaced their Bengali counterparts “shadhinota”, “biplob” and “shubichar” in the public sphere. This is despite the fact that our freedom struggle was predicated on defending Bengali culture from the hegemony of West Pakistan, beginning with the Language Movement of 1952.
More ominous is the rise in violence against religious minorities – conveniently dismissed as Indian disinformation by Yunus’s press team. Islamist mobs have destroyed Sufi shrines and Hindu temples, intimidated women and queer people, and have even gone after musicians and female sports teams. In these circumstances, the BNP – which long defined itself largely in opposition to the Awami League – has rebranded itself as the last defence against an Islamist state. (Never mind that it once governed in coalition with the Jamaat.)
The election was fought along this post-uprising faultline – and the best that can be said for the result is that it could have been worse. The below snapshots from the campaign trail suggest how the country is being culturally remade.
1.
3 February
In the town of Kishoreganj, three hours’ drive north-east of the capital, Dhaka, the air was thick with the promise of God. Thousands had gathered at the campaign rally to get a sight of Shafiqur Rahman, the ameer or chief of the Jamaat-e-Islami. In a reference to the party’s symbol, some brandished scales of justice made from bamboo sticks and shallow tubs strung together with nylon fishing lines. They sang songs extolling the virtues of the “daripalla” (scales): “There won’t be corruption and violence/ In our golden Bangladesh/ Only God’s blessings/ under the scales.”
Around 10 AM, Rahman drove up to the community field in an SUV. The bearded, pockmarked, 67-year-old physician was dressed in resplendent white and covered his head in a topi or cap. On stage, Rahman was not a firebrand cleric. With calm assurance, he delivered a sermon about anticorruption, about doing politics in a different way from the established parties. A former leftist activist, he knew how to keep the crowd’s attention with scripted and punctual rhetorical flourishes. After his speech, he departed by helicopter to his next campaign stop in the neighbouring Mymensingh division. More than one supporter in Kishoreganj proudly told me that they were accompanying the ameer on multiple campaign stops, as a kind of pilgrimage.
Rahman’s current popularity can make him seem like the return of an outcast prophet. Until recently, he was not just in the political wilderness, but debarred from public life altogether. His party, which sided with Pakistan during Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence, had been banned by Sheikh Hasina in 2024, under anti-terrorism laws. The League liked to present itself – much like the royals and military dictators in the middle east – as the last bulwark against religious fundamentalism. After Hasina was ousted, the ban was lifted and the Jamaat was given a new lease of life.
To many, this is one sign of the ‘betrayal’ of the Monsoon Revolution. It’s true that, like other ‘Gen Z’ revolutionaries in Sri Lanka and Nepal, the students in Dhaka and around the country never managed to articulate a coherent political position beyond opposing the authoritarian party in power. Still, when they stood up to Hasina, their movement was progressive in spirit. They fought for democratic renewal, secularism and justice for minorities, with participation – and even leadership – from female students. So it was a shock when the party leadership decided to throw in its lot with the Jamaat last December. “It’s not just a disappointment,” said Taznuva Jabeen, one of 13 high-profile leaders who quit the party at the time. “It’s a betrayal.”
The depth of that betrayal was evident at the Kishoreganj rally, where women had to squint at the stage from more than 100 metres away. The Jamaat had simply forgotten to set up a closer ‘segregated’ area for them. This is in keeping with the party’s programme. Though women have been central to its election campaign, going door to door in coordinated canvassing groups, it did not select a single female parliamentary candidate among 300 seats. (This is also true of around 30 other parties.) “Allah has made everyone with a distinct nature,” Rahman has said. “A man cannot bear a child or breastfeed. There are physical limitations that cannot be denied. When a mother gives birth, how will she carry out these responsibilities?”
A Jamaat-e-Islami supporter at a rally in Dhaka, February 2026 / Photograph by Jibon Ahmed
If you were following the elections on social media, you could have been forgiven for expecting that the Jamaat-led alliance was on course to form a new government. The Islamists – their intellectuals, influencers, surrogates and bots – built a robust online campaign around an anticorruption message. They relentlessly attacked BNP veterans Mirza Abbas and Amir Khasru as corrupt – “just like the Awami League”. Their famed ideological discipline was momentarily broken when an X post from the ameer’s verified account likened professional women to prostitutes. This was widely shared and defended by the party network, before a backlash brought a risible explanation: apparently the accounts of the Jamaat’s senior leadership had been hacked en masse for an hour.
2.
4 February
The city of Faridpur, three hours’ drive west of Dhaka, sits on the banks of the Padma River, and is a centre of the hilsa fishing industry. It has a 30,000-capacity cricket stadium named after one of Hasina’s brothers, but the BNP held its rally in the less grand setting of an Eidgah, an open field where people congregate for Eid prayers. The BNP is the only established party fielding female candidates, albeit in wretchedly low numbers: less than 4%. Still, the contrast with the Jamaat is pointed, especially in this constituency, where Shama Obaed Islam – the daughter of a former BNP secretary general – is the frontrunner. In the Eidgah, women mingled freely with men as they waited for the party leaders to arrive.
The BNP now presents itself as a defender of secularism. In fact it bears a great deal of responsibility for the rise of political Islam in Bangladesh. In 2001, under Khaleda Zia, widow of the assassinated party founder Ziaur Rahman, the BNP led the Four Party Alliance, which toppled the Awami League and brought the Jamaat into parliament in significant numbers for the first time. Over the next five years, she and her son, Tarique Rahman, personally oversaw the formation of the notorious Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) – black uniforms, black headscarves and wraparound sunglasses – which went on a spree of torture, enforced disappearance and extrajudicial killing in the name of tackling crime. Under their watch, an imported Salafist Islam also took root in the country, accompanied by a first spate of organised jihadi violence. Corruption worsened as Khaleda and Tarique skimmed a percentage off the top of government tenders through a network of trusted advisers.
In 2006, Khaleda was ousted in a coup d’etat and the military installed a caretaker government. With the constitution temporarily suspended, Tarique was taken into military custody and tortured. Two years later, the army allowed him to move to London for medical treatment, on the condition that he vow never to participate in national politics again. He remained in exile for 17 years. In 2018, as the BNP creaked and threatened to splinter under the League’s repression, Tarique assumed the party’s de facto leadership. This time he tried to steer the BNP away from the Islamist orthodoxy favoured by his mother, and towards what might be kindly described as centrist nationalism. By the time he returned to Bangladesh on Christmas Day in 2025, he had reinvented himself as a liberal democrat with “a plan”.
Keeping alive dynastic politics, he brought along his 30-year-old daughter, Zaima, a British-trained lawyer, who accompanied him to meetings with dignitaries and diplomats. As if to underscore the party’s break with conservativism, she was thrust forward at well-choreographed events to speak about culture, education, healthcare and the rights of women and minorities. Despite her absolute lack of political experience, she quickly became a darling of the media, both at home and abroad.
Around 3pm, Tarique stepped on to the stage after flying in by helicopter. The tightly packed, unruly crowd of his supporters, shouting and jostling for position, fell silent and still. In his signature outfit of khaki trousers and light blue shirt with rolled-up sleeves, he delivered something like a TED Talk about his central policy: a social security card, issued in the name of the female head of a family, granting a monthly allowance for essential household items. At various points, Tarique invited members of the audience up on stage to speak about their own experiences. It is odd to see this Western-style performance of humility and professionalism in the context of Bangladeshi politics, where demagoguery is more common. But the audience was clearly won over. They rushed forward, hoping to get a handshake or a hug, when he signed off with the party slogan: “Bangladesh Zindabad”. His background in state terror and corruption had been forgiven, or perhaps just forgotten.
3.
24 January
On Saturday, two days after the legally mandated start date for election campaigning, Tarique and Shafiqur and their respective political armies were off holding rallies in other towns, and Dhaka felt a few thousand people lighter. Taking advantage of this relative lull, an informal coalition of non-unionised migrant labourers and garment workers convened that morning at a warehouse on the city’s northern outskirts. A few dozen people arrived wearing medical masks to hide their identities, and only took them off indoors. They were there to discuss whether or not they should join the Network for People’s Action (NPA).
The NPA, a new political platform, had been launched the previous weekend at the Shaheed Minar, a monument to the martyrs of the Language Movement of 1952 near the University of Dhaka campus. It was formed by stalwarts of the 2024 uprising, some of whom had left the NCP in disillusionment, and who wanted to build a grassroots movement that could one day become an electoral party. Many of the workers at today’s meeting had also participated in the uprising, and some had been present at the NPA launch. After brief deliberations, they unanimously but cautiously decided to join the NPA. None of the mainstream parties stood for their interests.
Later that afternoon, I drove south along Airport Road – the only highway in the city, serving as the spine of Dhaka – to a community centre festooned with election campaign banners. At a closed-door meeting for 50 people, over singara, piyaju and milk tea, a 15-strong collective of queer and feminist activists presented the findings of the surveys they had conducted among their communities. They found mass frustration about the Jamaat and the NCP’s political exclusion of women and the LGBTQ+ community, as well as alarm over the unchecked rise in online and offline bigotry under the interim government. There was a hopeful mention of the NPA.
In the evening, I went to a dimly lit speakeasy for a secret concert by a supergroup made up of some of the leading lights of the local rock scene. In recent months, they had had gigs repeatedly cancelled across the country owing to a lack of security in the face of Islamist threats. Tonight, the front rows were occupied by other musicians, there to support their peers. The gig was delayed by a milad (prayer gathering) elsewhere in the same building. Three bearded men came downstairs during the soundcheck, but left without a fuss, carrying a few cans of the local Hunter beer, brewed in military-owned distilleries and printed with a blatant knock-off of the Foster’s logo.
All three of these invitation-only gatherings were infused with culture: poetry at the first, the words and songs of the Hindu writer Rabindranath Tagore and the Sufi mystic Lalon at the second, homegrown rock at the third. They all expressed defiance in the face of fear. These political orphans had been abandoned by the interim Yunus government and targeted by the ascendent Islamist nationalism. But they were still determined to claim a space for themselves in the country’s future.
Ikhtisad Ahmed is a former human rights lawyer, a writer and the managing editor of Netra News.