New student-led party joins hands with offshoot of Jamaat ahead of Bangla polls

Dhaka, Dec 7 (PTI) The recently launched student-led party NCP on Sunday joined an offshoot of Jamaat-e-Islami and another pressure group to form an alliance called 'Gonotantrik Sangskar Jote' ahead of the February election in Bangladesh.

The National Citizen Party (NCP), formed in February this year with encouragement from Interim government Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus, is a political outfit of Students Against Discrimination (SAD) that led last year’s violent street movement leading to the ouster of prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League government on August 5, 2024.

The NCP formed the alliance with Amar Bangladesh (AB) party, the offshoot of right wing Jamaat-e-Islami, and the Rashtra Songskar Andolon.

“Our alliance will be called the 'Gonotantrik Sangskar Jote'," NCP convenor Nahid Islam told a press conference, adding it was an outcome of “more than two years of long-term efforts.” Islam said the upcoming polls would not merely be an ordinary election, rather “it will be for political transformation and economic liberation” and that the alliance is “committed to build a new Bangladesh.” Three student leaders, including Islam, were part of the advisory council that Yunus had formed soon after he took charge as the chief adviser on August 8, 2024, three days after Hasina was deposed. However, Islam quit his post to organise NCP’s formation.

The AB party, formed in 2020, broke away from the parent Jamaat-e-Islami citing ideological grounds.

Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh’s largest Islamic party, formed a coalition of eight Islamist parties recently in its efforts to build a greater unity among the like-minded political outfits eyeing the February polls.

Yunus' government had disbanded Hasina's Awami League, leaving the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), led by currently critically ill former prime minister Khaleda Zia, as the frontrunner in the country’s political arena.

Zia's BNP, however, is being steered virtually by her self-exiled elder son and party’s acting chairman Tarique Rahman from London, where he is staying since 2008.

With the two major political parties facing wilderness, the analysts said, the changed political landscape created scope for emergence of Jamaat and far right groups in Bangladesh. PTI AR NPK NPK