Bangladesh students who deposed PM Hasina form party to fight elections Leave a comment
Dhaka, Bangladesh – Bangladeshi students who led last year’s mass protests to oust Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina have launched a political party before parliamentary elections expected to be held within the next year.
Addressing a rally on Manik Mia Avenue adjacent to the parliament building in the capital on Friday, leaders of the new National Citizens Party (NCP) insisted that they would pursue the politics of national unity over division, transparency and good governance over corruption, and an independent foreign policy to build a “second republic.”
Lima Akter, sister of Ismail Hossain Rabby — who was among those killed by security forces during the July uprising against Hasina — announced that 27-year-old Nahid Islam would be the new party’s convenor.
Islam – the 26-year-old poster boy of the July uprising, which toppled Hasina, and later the acting head of Bangladesh’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting – will lead the new party. Islam resigned on Tuesday from the interim government, headed by Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus, to assume the leadership of the new party, which will initially have a central committee of about 150 members.
Yunus, who has headed the interim government since Hasina’s exit in August, has said general elections will be held by December or in early 2026.
Shafiqul Islam, a third-year nursing student at Gazi Munibur Rahman Nursing College in the coastal district of Patuakhali who was at the launch event on Friday, said, “We had no freedom of expression under the previous regime. We don’t want violence in educational institutions in the name of politics. Corruption remains a major obstacle to our progress, and we want a permanent end to it. This new party is our hope.”
On Wednesday, former leaders of Students Against Discrimination (SAD), the student movement that toppled Hasina’s Awami League government, launched a new student organisation, Ganatantrik Chhatra Sangsad, or the Democratic Student Council (DSC), at a news conference that saw a brief scuffle between two SAD factions.
According to DSC leaders, the SAD was formed to organise the July movement with the participation of students affiliated with various political party student wings who have since returned to their respective organisations. Additionally, many of its leaders have now joined the new political party.
“We have formed this new organisation to uphold the spirit of the July movement among students,” DSC convener Abu Baker Mazumdar said at the launch of the group.
He emphasised that the organisation will remain independent and will not affiliate with any political party, including the NCP.
However, analysts view it as an allied organisation of the new party, sharing the same spirit as the July movement.
New chapter in Bangladesh’s politics
Political analysts said the youth-led NCP aims to upend Bangladesh’s political landscape, dominated for decades by two woman-led family dynasties. Hasina’s family is descended from the country’s founding leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who also was the founder of the Awami League party. Then there’s former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia’s family. Zia’s late husband, former military ruler Ziaur Rahman, founded the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).
Hasina, Rahman’s 76-year-old daughter, sought exile in neighbouring India when the student-led movement forced her from power. Her 15-year government was marked by major economic gains for the country – and by widespread allegations of corruption, rights violations and authoritarianism.
The BNP, which hopes to dominate the next parliamentary elections, is headed by an ailing Zia, 79, and her son, Tarique Rahman. Zia was flown last month to London, where her son lives in exile, for treatment of liver and heart complications.
Besides the two main political groups, Islamist organisations such as Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami (BJI), and left-leaning groups, such as the Communist Party of Bangladesh, have so far maintained their role as influential pressure groups in Bangladesh’s politics.
Leaders of the newly formed party contended that Bangladesh’s politics has long been defined by what they consider “divisive faultlines” – secularism vs Islamic law or people’s allegiances towards Pakistan or their own homeland during the 1971 liberation movement.
These divisions, they argued, have pushed issues of livelihoods, health and education to the margins. The Jamaat, which has often allied with the BNP politically, opposed Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan.
“In the Bangladesh of tomorrow, we do not want these divisions to persist. We want to secure equal rights for everyone, whether a university professor or a person from the lower strata of society, whether a daily wage labourer or a garment worker, without any discrimination,” Akhtar Hossen, who has been named one of the member secretaries of the new party, told Al Jazeera.
The party’s founders said they gathered opinions from nearly 200,000 people, both online and offline, on the kind of politics they should pursue and which issues needed urgent attention. They said the responses reveal a strong desire to root out corruption, reform education and ensure universal access to healthcare.
Speaking from the stage on Friday, Islam said: There will be no place for pro-India or pro-Pakistan politics in Bangladesh. We will rebuild the state with Bangladesh at the center, keeping the interests of its people first.”
Akhter, speaking to Al Jazeera, said that the new party would steer clear of ideological divisions.
“Our politics will be about good governance, ensuring equality and securing civic benefits for all,” he said.
Akhter said the new party was inspired by similar parties abroad: the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in India, cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) in Pakistan, and Turkiye’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party). Akhter said the conditions that fostered the creation of these political movements were also present in Bangladesh.
The AAP was born out of a popular anticorruption movement in 2012 and ruled over India’s national capital territory of Delhi for more than a decade until it was defeated by the Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) this month. The AAP still governs the northern Indian state of Punjab.
Khan’s PTI broke the stranglehold of Pakistan’s two main family-based parties – the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) and the Pakistan People’s Party – to win the 2018 elections. It lost power in 2022 after Khan, then prime minister, was removed in a vote of no-confidence. He is now in jail over a slew of cases that he insists are politically motivated. Despite these setbacks, the party remains the most popular political force in Pakistan, as evidenced in last year’s national elections, in which the PTI’s candidates – who were forced to contest as independents after the party lost its symbol – won the single-largest chunk of seats in parliament.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party has been ruling for nearly 25 years although it is now seeing signs of significant challenges to its power.
Akhter said seeking inspiration from these movements “doesn’t mean we will replicate those parties”.
“Bangladesh has its own unique context, and we aim to set a distinct example,” he said.
An uphill road ahead
But analysts said the new party will face a series of challenges and overcoming internal rifts, presenting a unified front and presenting itself as distinct from existing political entities will be its main immediate struggles.
Shortly after joining the interim government, student leaders announced the formation of a National Citizens Committee (NCC), a platform aimed at uniting people from diverse political backgrounds as the country rebuilds itself after Hasina.
The idea was to offer a new political compact to the people of Bangladesh. However, since talks of floating a new political party began last month, disputes have emerged within the NCC as most factions agree on Islam as their leader but clash over other key positions.
On Wednesday, Ali Ahsan Zonaed and Rafe Salman Rifat – two former leaders of Bangladesh Islami Chhatrashibir, the student wing of the Jamaat, who were also part of SAD – announced on Facebook that they will not join the new party.
They and other student leaders from the Jamaat’s student body have alleged that they are being kept out of key positions in the new party because of their political affiliations. Zonaed said in his post that he wished the new party well. However, Ariful Islam, joint secretary of the new party, told Al Jazeera, that suggestions of a split were overblown and Jamaat-linked student leaders might be included in leadership positions later.
These tensions, which have played out in the open, are reflective of the challenges the new party will face, said political analyst Zahed Ur Rahman, who believes the new student-led force has already taken some missteps.
He pointed to how some student leaders, unlike Islam, remain in the interim government. It is unclear whether or when they might join the new party. “By joining the interim government, they share its successes and failures,” Rahman told Al Jazeera.
Rahman said the party has included figures from across the ideological spectrum, from leftists to conservatives, leading to fears of “internal ideological friction”. He added that it could prevent the party from becoming a “cohesive force”.
Rezaul Karim Rony, an analyst and editor of Joban magazine, however, argued that leadership struggles within a political party are natural and Islam remaining the movement’s central figure might help ease internal divisions.
Still, Rony cautioned that forming a party alone was not enough.“They must realise that broad-based support during the uprising [against Hasina] will not automatically transform into political support,” he said, stressing the need for a “vision connecting people that resonates beyond rhetoric”.
And how have Bangladesh’s existing political parties reacted to the arrival of a new rival?
In September, when the student leaders first announced their plans to form their own party, BNP deputy leader Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir questioned the interim government’s neutrality and warned that people would reject a “state-sponsored king’s party”.
The Jamaat echoed those sentiments at the time. Jamaat leader Shafiqur Rahman said: “Those who are currently part of the interim government as nonpartisan figures will no longer remain neutral if they enter politics or form a party.”
However, both the BNP and Jamaat have softened their stances since Islam resigned from the government this week. “We welcome the new party. Since the individual set to lead the new party has resigned from the government, we currently have no objections,” Alamgir told Al Jazeera.
Jamaat Secretary-General Mia Golam Parwar also welcomed the formation of the new party but with a note of caution.
“We have a bitter history of rulers forming state-sponsored political parties and imposing authoritarianism on the people. But we want to believe that this new political party will introduce a democratic, safe and inclusive approach to Bangladesh’s politics, benefitting the people,” he said.
For now, the new party has a narrow window of opportunity, analysts said.
“The July uprising has sparked a desire among Bangladeshi people for new politics. If the new party can meet this demand, it has the potential to become a dominant political force in Bangladesh,” Rony said. “Otherwise, it does not.”
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+ 6676539901 (international)Source (Al jazeera News)
