This week, Bangladesh’s interim government led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus lifted a ban on Jamaat-e-Islami, a ban that had been imposed by former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s administration due to the party’s alleged involvement in terrorism. However, this move hardly benefits the group, which wanders around in Bangladesh’s political minefield with a lot of baggage.
The story goes back further than recent events.
For one and a half decades, Sheikh Hasina, with support from India, ran a brutal and dictatorial regime. Her departure from power was short but bloody, with a mass uprsing lasting 20 days and resulting in 542 deaths.
For years, India’s South Block turned a blind eye to Hasina’s fascist, kleptocratic governance. India’s unabashed support for Hasina was driven by its own security concerns. The Northeastern states, which are connected to the rest of the country through the 12-mile narrow Siliguri Corridor, have long been wracked by insurgencies. Anti-India insurgent groups have taken shelter in Bangladesh since the early 1980s, and Hasina’s regime cooperated by extraditing these leaders to India and preventing them from using Bangladeshi territory.
India has also been worried about Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh’s largest Islamist political party. Some of its leaders opposed Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan and fought against the Mukti Bahini by joining paramilitary groups formed by Pakistani forces in 1971. During the Bangladesh Liberation War, these paramilitary groups fought against the Indian Armed Forces, making Jamaat and a few now-defunct Bangladeshi political parties unique in their opposition to India’s military.
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Jamaat-e-Islami’s hubris
Jamaat-e-Islami was banned in post-independence Bangladesh in 1972. Three years later, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who had led Bangladesh to independence, banned his own party, the Awami League, and made the country a self-styled one-party socialist state. Mujib and most of his immediate family members were killed in a military coup that year. When political space reopened in 1976, Jamaat-e-Islami, along with other religious parties, formed the Islamic Democratic League (IDL), which won six seats in the 1979 parliamentary elections. That year, the ban on religion-based political parties was lifted, and Jamaat left the IDL to recommence its political activities as if the past eight years had never occurred.
This kind of hubris is characteristic of the party and its leaders. Since becoming politically active in independent Bangladesh, Jamaat-e-Islami has never addressed its role in 1971—why many of its members, despite being an Islamist party, aligned with the Pakistan Army in its campaign of genocide against the population of East Pakistan, most of whom were Muslims, or how a religion-based party can justify the rape of thousands of women documented in independent media.
While Jamaat-e-Islami remained in denial, popular discontent against its political influence grew. This was first evident in the 1980s television drama Bohubrihi, where a character teaches a parrot to say “Tui Razakar” (“You are a Razakar”).’ Razakar, originally meaning volunteer in Urdu, became a term of abuse in Bengali due to its association with the paramilitary forces that helped the Pakistani Army during Bangladesh’s war of liberation.
In 2001, two Jamaat-e-Islami leaders served as ministers in Khaleda Zia’s final term in office and managed their ministries effectively. However, when Sheikh Hasina assumed office in 2009, in an electoral landslide, the issue of prosecuting those responsible for war crimes in 1971 resurfaced in public discourse. This was sparked by a Jamaat-e-Islami leader’s claim that there were no war criminals in the country.
The Hasina regime ran the war crimes trial the way it ran the country—it was marred by the abduction of a key witness and questionable judges in charge of the trial. The prosecution was so inefficient that the Human Rights Watch condemned the trial as flawed and the Chief Justice calling the evidence insufficient. Despite this, Hasina made major Jamaat-e-Islami leaders walk the gallows, but the party neither destroyed nor grew stronger as a result.
The term “Razakar”, like a leitmotif, continues to haunt Bangladesh’s politics. In July, Hasina used the R word to describe students protesting against a discriminatory quota system in government jobs, which snowballed into a mass uprising leading to her ouster.
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A chance to change
The current revolution, described by Muhammad Yunus as the country’s second independence, has been spearheaded by the millennials and Gen Zs. Anti-India sentiment understandably runs high among them, partly due to India’s past support for Hasina. Many Bangladeshis find it difficult to separate India from the Awami League. This sentiment has led to incidents such as the torching of the Indira Gandhi Cultural Centre in Dhaka and protests outside the Indian visa centre, which required military intervention.
However, anti-India sentiment alone isn’t enough to rally support for Jamaat-e-Islami. The party’s past cannot be just thrown away by simply adopting anti-India rhetoric. Jamaat-e-Islami evidently wants to leverage the new political space created by the revolution. It is trying to woo the Deobandi ulemas, who have historically been wary of Jamaat. Last month, Qawmi scholars in Dhaka endorsed an Islamic state under Jamaat’s leadership.
It’s quite evident that Jamaat-e-Islami is trying to punch above its weight, which is causing friction with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), now the most popular party in the country. The BNP is pressing the Yunus-led government for a roadmap to the next election, which is not in Jamaat’s interest, given its current disarray after years of oppression by the Awami League.
In this context, India must rethink its approach to Bangladesh and consider its future beyond the Awami League. Propping up a military dictator is a bad idea and would be counterproductive, as the youth of Bangladesh are highly politicised and seek democratic representation. This sentiment will not go away in a decade or two as boys and girls as young as fifteen participated and died in the protests. For years, Jamaat-e-Islami has been Awami League’s ultimate boogeyman, which can occasionally be brought in to frighten India. Now, India has to confront reality and deal with an angry neighbour with which it shares the world’s fifth-longest land border.
Jamaat-e-Islami should change its name and form a new political party that includes its younger leaders from the recent revolution. This new entity should be inclusive, offering leadership roles to women, religious, and ethnic minorities. The current euphoria surrounding the party resembles the brief period of optimism following Sheikh Mujib’s fall. However, the party’s past quickly came back to haunt it. Instead of playing the role of a toxic partner, Jamaat-e-Islami must give ordinary Bangladeshis the closure they deserve. Unless the issues of 1971 are addressed honourably, Jamaat-e-Islami will remain what it has always been in Bangladesh’s politics—a political outsider.
Ahmede Hussain is a Bangladeshi writer and journalist. He is the editor of The New Anthem: The Subcontinent in Its Own Words (Tranquebar Press; Delhi). He has just finished writing his first novel. He tweets @ahmedehussain. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)
Mere name change is not sufficient. Jamat should be banned. Religious parties should be anathema to any democratic revolution. Giving the reins of Bangladesh to Jamat-BNP is like making General Dyer the Mayor of Amritsar. The next few months will be crucial for the history of Bangladesh. Despite history teaching us otherwise, many Indians are cautiously optimistic about a democratic neighborhood. Jamat doesn’t belong in that.