Jayanta Roy Chowdhury | Bangladesh Sees Big Islamist Shift A Year After Revolt

What began in 2024 as a spontaneous uprising against corruption, youth unemployment and dynastic rule has now, paradoxically, opened the door for Islamic hardliners to assert dominance over the country’s polity and society.

The interim government led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus has struggled -- or, critics argue, declined -- to stem this “dark tide” while its reign has disintegrated into sheer chaos.

The markers came early. Statues of Bangladesh’s founder Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and of those who fought in the liberation war of 1971 were broken down, while museums celebrating the victory over Pakistan were simply burned down.

Later, Sheikh Mujib’s house at 32 Dhanmondi, representative of the emotions of a new-born Bengali nation, was torn down by a mob assisted by bulldozers sent by the state public works department. Minority villages -- where Hindus, Christians and tribal Buddhists, who make up about 10-11 per cent of the nation’s population, live -- were attacked and burned down, with the security forces playing second fiddle.

Hundreds of journalists, intellectuals and academics, including well-known figures who are ideologically opposed to Islamist fundamentalism such as Shahriar Kabir, writer and human rights activist, economist Abul Barkat, journalists Mozammel Babu, Shyamal Dutta, Farzana Rupa and Shakil Ahmed, have been thrown into jail.

As have thousands of leaders and workers of the Awami League, Leftist parties and unions, and minority community leaders. Academics, journalists and civil servants from the minority community and those suspected of being pro-Awami League leanings have been forced to resign, often after public beatings.

Women in modern (or Western) attire, or who smoke in public, have had to grapple with public shaming.

Jamaat’s return -- and its enforcers: Behind this attempt to transform Bangladesh is the controversial re-emergence of the Jamaat-e-Islami, the fundamentalist party whose cadre acted as a paramilitary for the Pakistan Army in its nine-month long orgy of mass killings, rape and loot, in the run-up to Bangladesh’s liberation on December 16, 1971.

Once barred from elections for its role in one of the world’s worst genocides, Jamaat has used the post-Hasina vacuum to aggressively reassert itself -- backed, observers say, by a street force of hoodlums.

Joining hands with the Jamaat this time are a clutch of Islamist organisations and parties, including Hefazat-i-Islam, an outfit which ironically had been helped by Sheikh Hasina at one stage as a counter to the Jamaat.

The political vacuum has also thrown up the National Consolidation Party (NCP), widely seen by analysts as both a “king’s party” owing allegiance to Mr Yunus, which also acts as a “B team” to the Jamaat.

More than just ideological allies, the NCP is accused of functioning as storm-troopers of the Islamist movement. Mobs led by Jamaat and NCP leaders have attacked houses, specific people, often with assistance from the security forces. Lists drawn up by them, and circulated by the police, of suspected Awami supporters and liberals means tens of thousands have had to go into hiding to save their lives.

More recently the party began a reign of terror in Gopalganj district, after it led a “March on Gopalganj”, threatening to desecrate the tomb of Sheikh Mujib, which was disrupted by locals, accused of being Awami League supporters.

The Bangladesh Navy blockaded the rivers around Gopalganj in south-central Bangladesh, while the army, NCP storm-troopers and Jamaat functionaries went on a house-to-house cordon-and-search operation which saw more than 4,000 people arrested and 300 people going missing.

Calculated campaign of intimidation: The rise in hooliganism and street violence is not random. It appears designed to create a climate of sustained insecurity -- one that could justify postponements of the national elections, originally due in late 2025. Behind the scenes, the Jamaat and its allies are suspected of using the extra time to infiltrate and take over the apparatus of the State.

Already, reports suggest Islamist sympathisers are gaining influence in key bodies: the Bangladesh Border Guard (BBG), the civil police, the “Ansars” (a paramilitary force), and even in segments of the Army. The appointment of Nasimul Gani, with a well-known Islamist past, as home secretary has reinforced concerns that the security establishment is shifting decisively toward religious conservatism.

Constitutional and cultural re-engineering: At the same time, sweeping constitutional revisions are under review. The most contentious proposal would replace “secularism” as a foundational value with a framework rooted in Islamic principles. Jamaat and its affiliates have been pressuring the reform commission to enshrine “absolute trust and faith in Almighty Allah” into the national charter -- an explicit rejection of pluralism and religious neutrality.

Besides attacks on religious minorities, burning down factories owned by Ahmadis and other Islamic sects not favoured by mainstream orthodox Islam have surged in recent months. Sufi shrines and festivals -- once vibrant symbols of Bangladesh’s syncretic culture -- have come under fire from Islamist groups.

Rallies demanding the imposition of the Sharia, or Islamic legal order, stricter blasphemy laws, and censorship of “un-Islamic” culture have grown in frequency and scale -- some drawing crowds in the hundreds of thousands. The media landscape, too, is changing. Independent voices have been silenced or co-opted; several outlets report covert pressure to avoid “anti-Islamic” reporting.

Within universities and youth organisations, Islamist groups have gained ground -- filling the leadership vacuum left by the disorganised liberal forces.

Nation on edge: Traditional centrist players like the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and the remains of the Awami League, both of which in straw polls still come out as the two most popular parties, are unable to mount a coherent response.

Faced with an aggressive Islamist bloc and a rising security apparatus aligned with religious conservatism, Opposition parties are increasingly being marginalised. There are whispers of further purges in the bureaucracy, military and judiciary. Awami League leaders kept in various jails are being shifted to Dhaka Central Jail, and many fear that a repeat of a notorious slaughter of the Awami leadership in November 1975, months after Mujib’s killing, may well be re-enacted.

The dawn that some saw in the August 2024 student putsch now appears a false shimmer of light engulfed by what looks like the growing darkness of a long, bitter “Kristallnacht”.

The writer is a senior journalist and Bangladesh watcher