Watching Jamaat-e-Islami Become the Official Opposition

I wrote a piece a couple of years ago about why the BNP-Jamaat alliance has always struck me as more than ordinary coalition politics, given Jamaat's documented opposition to independence in 1971. I didn't expect to be writing a follow-up quite like this one. In February's election, the Jamaat-led alliance won roughly 77 seats, nearly four times its previous best parliamentary showing from 1991, making it the largest opposition bloc in the new parliament.

Sit with that for a second. This is a party whose registration was cancelled back in 2013, that spent over a decade barred from electoral politics, and whose senior leadership was tried and executed by the International Crimes Tribunal for atrocities committed during the liberation war. Its comeback, powered partly by an alliance with the youth-led National Citizen Party that emerged from the 2024 uprising, is being described by more than one analyst as a genuine resurrection.

I want to be fair to the counterargument here, because I've seen it made by serious people, not just Jamaat sympathizers: that bringing Jamaat into mainstream electoral politics through legal channels, rather than leaving it banned and pushed underground, could actually reduce the appeal of extremism by giving Islamist politics a legitimate outlet. I understand the logic. I'm just not convinced a party with this specific history deserves the benefit of the doubt that logic requires.

What worries me isn't that Jamaat exists, it's how quickly a party with this specific history reorganized itself into the second most powerful bloc in the country's parliament, largely because the party that spent decades most explicitly opposing it, mine, was removed from the ballot entirely. I don't think that's a coincidence worth glossing over.