Bangladesh’s drift to the right before its historic election

“The movement toppled the government,” said Manisha Chakraborty, who is standing for parliament in a deprived rural constituency in southern Bangladesh. “But it did not help the people.”.On Thursday, 127 million Bangladeshis will head to the polls in what Muhammad Yunus’s interim government has billed as the country’s first free elections in 17 years. But, over the last week, I found that voters in Dhaka and around the country were apprehensive about what comes next. Amid an uncertain security situation, the right-wing Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami looks set to gain its strongest showing in history after forging an alliance with the former student revolutionaries of the National Citizen’s Party, or NCP..Now, 18 months after the fall of Hasina’s autocratic government, women, minorities and progressives fear that social freedoms – hard-won despite the years of Hasina’s autocracy - may now be rolled back. “It’s not just a disappointment,” said the progressive politician Tajnuva Jabeen, who resigned from the NCP in December. “It’s a betrayal.”.A few days ago, the Jamaat, which was banned under Hasina, presented a detailed manifesto to an assembled crowd of diplomats and journalists. Drafted by a committee of supporters in Bangladesh and abroad, it promised ambitious economic growth and foreign direct investment but was silent about economic inequality or workers’ rights. While pledging an “inclusive” cabinet, it also showed a paternalistic concern for women’s “safety”, for example through its proposal to reduce women’s working hours with full pay. “It’s about respect and dignity,” explained Mardia Mumtaz, a civil engineer and prominent member of the Jamaat’s women’s wing..Support Himal’s independent journalism on Bangladesh. Become a Patron today!.But outside the party, many Bangladeshis took a different view. “Jamaat is very good at pretending that women will be very safe, that they will ensure women’s rights,” said the student activist Samanta Sharmin. “Over the years we have come to know their position is antithetical to the equality of men and women – and it’s un-Islamic as well.” The Jamaat’s leader has repeatedly suggested that women are ineligible for leadership roles. Several female politicians I spoke to also reported that they had been attacked by social media bots associated with the Islami Chhatra Shibbir, the Jamaat’s youth wing..Bangladeshi progressives see this right-wing resurgence as a failure of both the interim government and the student coalition that toppled Hasina. “Our aim in the NCP was to be a third force,” said Jabeen. “But we noticed that NCP was drifting towards the old ways more and more day by day.” She felt that female members of the party were increasingly sidelined, as key decisions were taken by a handful of men who were “inclined towards the Jamaat.”.THE NCP HAS tried to sell itself as a new force, a corrective to the country’s dysfunctional political order, long dominated by a bitter rivalry between two centrist dynastic parties: Hasina’s Awami League on the one hand, and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party on the other, with Islamist groups acting as an influential, if small, third force. Last May, the interim government banned the Awami League, effectively excluding perhaps a fifth of the electorate who, polls suggest, still support it. That created “a political vacuum” and the possibility of “a new settlement”, Sharmin said, rooted in “the spirit of the uprising.”.The rebranding of Islamist politics in Bangladesh.For some supporters of the uprising – like Nusrat Tabassum, who was tortured in police custody in July 2024, or Tasnim Jara, who left a teaching job at Cambridge University to join the student revolutionaries in Dhaka – that spirit was a progressive one, rooted in respect for social as well as political freedoms. Last year, Jara, who distributes advice on women’s health to 12 million followers on YouTube, told me she believed the NCP would platform diverse voices and support women in the public sphere. “It breaks my heart to see this kind of online abuse happen to the women in the NCP,” she said. “It takes a toll on their mental health.”.Instead, over the last year, the NCP has chosen to dwell on the past, demanding a form of “justice” for the Hasina years that sounds a lot like retribution. Party leaders have called for the death penalty for Hasina’s officials and insisted on eradicating the traces of “fascism” through purges and arrests..When I met the NCP’s leader Nahid Islam, days after the party was established last February, I found him sincerely traumatised by the dictatorship but uninterested in progressive causes. “Bangladesh is a traditional society, with a majority of Muslims,” he said. “So you have to be careful of those sentiments. We want to take into account all religious groups, but Muslim sentiment is an important thing in our politics.” Those words prefigured the NCP’s alliance with the Jamaat, whose stated positions are almost identical, if more detailed..The party’s rightward drift was sealed on 25 December, when six of the NCP’s female leaders met Nahid to discuss election strategy. “I didn’t know they had already sealed the deal by that time with Jamaat [to share] 36 seats,” recalled Jabeen, who resigned immediately along with Jara. Her ex-colleague Sharmin has not resigned but believes the alliance will ruin “the integrity of the party” because “there has been a lot of infiltration from the Jamaat.” In practice, the NCP has all but ceased to exist as an independent force. Wherever I met NCP candidates in Dhaka, they were trailed by Jamaat activists, who have filled their rallies and their campaign coffers..Some also blame the interim government for rising intolerance. Mob violence has erupted sporadically around the country since Hasina’s fall. In most instances, the perpetrators were loosely organised groups with right-wing Islamist leanings. Their targets ranged from Hindu temples and Sufi shrines to journalists, musicians and even a girls’ football team. Sometimes the mobs purported to be targeting supporters of either the fallen regime or of India, which supported Hasina to the hilt. In other instances, the attacks appeared to be motivated by religious or ideological hatred..Chakraborty, herself a Hindu, estimates that in her home district of Barishal, 85 to 90 percent of attacks on Hindus had an underlying political motive. In some cases, she suggested, victims were accused of having taken advantage of Awami League protection to prey on their neighbours, while 10 to 15 percent of incidents were “purely communal”..Bangladesh’s women have lost before the country has even voted.TO DATE, the interim government has not acknowledged the scale of communal violence in Bangladesh, preferring instead to point to underlying political motives or a well-documented Indian misinformation campaign. It has also failed to get a grip over law and order. Rather than act against perpetrators, local administrations have tended to fold in the face of these threats, cancelling concerts and public meetings in the name of safety. “The local policemen are very shaky – they say, ‘Who will take care of our security if we act against the mob?’” said Chakraborty, who concluded that “mob violence only happens if the government wants it to happen.”.One Dhaka-based journalist I spoke to echoed that suspicion, wondering why it took four hours for the authorities to send the army to disperse a mob that had set fire to Bangladesh’s largest English-language newspaper, the Daily Star, on 17 December. The government has also failed to make proactive use of the judiciary, army or specialised security forces like the heavily armed, US-trained Rapid Action Battalion, known as RAB. This has rendered the mobs’ targets vulnerable to an unspecified, seemingly random threat. As the academic Meghna Guhathakurta – whose father was killed as a Hindu during Bangladesh’s 1971 Liberation War – told me last year, the impact of communal violence extends far beyond its direct victims: “It sends the message that no one can help you.” .Despite a surge in support for the Jamaat, the BNP remains the front-runner to take power in this week’s elections. In recent months, it has sought to move beyond its historic association with cronyism and corruption, recasting itself in the language of secular liberalism – even as it has called to remove the now-toxic word “secularism” from the constitution, replacing it with the more nebulous “pluralism”..The senior BNP leader Amir Khosro Chowdhury told me his party had “a long history of empowering women”, pointing to the expansion of Bangladesh’s ready-made garment industry under the last BNP government from 2001 to 2006. However, his party has only nominated 10 women among its 331 parliamentary candidates. Chowdhury blamed “10 years of repression and persecution” for a lack of “good people joining politics.” Many in Dhaka, however, are sceptical of the BNP’s commitment to the ideals it claims to espouse..Moreover, the Jamaat’s surge in popularity is at least partly due to dissatisfaction with the BNP. “The BNP’s mafia-style politics and extortion have exhausted people across the country,” said the Jamaat-backed NCP leader Hasnat Abdullah at a recent public meeting. Chowdhury told me that the BNP has taken a firm stance against extortion, expelling more than 7000 party members, but I have heard voters – including women – express support for Jamaat precisely because they don’t trust the BNP..IN SEPTEMBER 2024, I wrote in Himal that the Jamaat had thrived on its reputation for moral discipline in Bangladesh’s corrupt politics. “If the interim government under Yunus is able to implement effective reforms,” I suggested, “support for the Jamaat and other Islamist parties may well diminish in the future.” In fact, over the last 18 months, the opposite has happened. As the interim government has largely failed to reform the state and ensure justice, the Jamaat has leveraged its ability to provide services at the grassroots: education, healthcare and security. Its reputation for probity remains intact, undiminished by its ambiguous stance on the Islamisation of Bangladeshi society..Meanwhile, a proliferation of parties more hardline than the Jamaat have enlarged the space for Islamist politics and conservative attitudes. In Barishal, Chakraborty – “Doctor Manisha” to voters in one of the poorest districts in the country, many of whom she has treated for free for years – is standing against Mufti Faizul Karim, an hereditary pir and the leader of the hardline Islami Andalon Bangladesh. He has refused to speak to her, or even be in the same room as her, simply because she is a woman. In Chittagong, one of Bangladesh’s more conservative cities, the leader of Hefazat-e-Islam was so incensed by the Jamaat’s comparative moderateness that he declared it antithetical to Islam..Even if the BNP wins power this week, the Jamaat is likely to remain a formidable opposition force. That strength will be reinforced by reforms introduced by the interim government. Designed to weaken the prime minister’s office and prevent a return to Hasina-style autocracy, these changes have also handed the second-largest party control of key parliamentary committees. In practice, that could give a Jamaat-led opposition influence over the political agenda out of proportion to its eventual seat share. Not only will this shift the centre of Bangladeshi politics further to the right, but the BNP will have to accommodate that shift if it is to govern effectively. Furthermore, with a strong Jamaat contingent in parliament, buttressed by an amorphous and unruly, but vocal, Islamist coalition online and on the streets, social attitudes will likewise shift rightwards as well..Still, a handful of women politicians are staying in the game, refusing to be silenced by their peers or foes. “I put so much work into this,” said Sharmin. “Why should I leave?” It’s taken a toll – several women reported taking psychological treatment over the pitch of online abuse they have faced. But, as Jabeen put it, “the women who are still active in politics right now have developed a thick skin.” That may not be reflected in Thursday’s polls, but it will certainly shape the future of Bangladeshi politics..This week, I saw Jara in action as she campaigned as an independent candidate in a working-class neighbourhood east of Dhaka. In a political culture often rooted in loud projections of strength, Jara chose instead to walk the streets, making quiet conversation with voters. They spoke of unemployment, drug addiction and the everyday want that mars their lives. Pointing to a sea of plastic rubbish along the dried banks of the Manda River, a middle-aged woman said to her, “we used to take a launch from one side to the other.” Up the road, a tea-shop owner reported that the area had no reliable connection to gas supplies, forcing people to use dangerous, polluting wood fires instead..Jara had hundreds of these conversations every day. “They’re not interested in the big national topics of conversation – no one brings up the referendum [on constitutional reform] or the Awami League,” she said. “They bring up things they think are local issues, but which are in fact national issues.” She has staked her campaign on tangible improvements to voters’ lives..Chakraborty agrees. Working as a doctor, she found that “it was not possible to treat patients because the system was broken,” she recalled. “So I decided to fix the system.”.In another part of the country, the photographer and rights activist Taslima Akhter has taken the same approach. In 2013, the over-crowded Rana Plaza garment factory complex collapsed outside Dhaka, killing more than 1100 people. Quick on the scene, Akhter photographed a couple – suffocated in the rubble – locked in each other’s lifeless arms in ‘A Final Embrace’. It was the defining moment of her career, and she has spent much of the last decade campaigning to get the Bangladesh government to regulate the factory owners on whom the country’s economic growth depends..Now standing for parliament for a small leftist party, she holds against the ideological current, reminding the BNP and Jamaat alike of the real, unavoidable struggles of more than 170 million Bangladeshis. As Jabeen put it, “We will not stop this dream for a new Bangladesh.” “No way!”