How Bangladesh elections look like a fixed match for Islamists and foreign interests

As Bangladesh awaits its farce of an election, where the leading party, the Awami League, has been banned from participating, there are hopes that Tarique Rahman, the son of recently deceased former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, will come to power and reverse the brutal chaos that is everyday news in the nation. Under the premiership of Sheikh Hasina, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) provided a sharp contrast to the Awami League’s relatively secular politics by allying sharply with the Jamaat-e-Islami’s Islamist policies. Rahman’s latest visit, after the death of his mother, has seen the Jamaat’s chief, Shafiqur Rahman, make
pointed suggestions that the BNP chief was not to be trusted with being as aligned with the JEI at this time.

When the Hasina government collapsed in 2024 in a coup that saw the self-exiled Mohammed Yunus being flown in to take control, many analysts in the Indian subcontinent claimed that there was strategic misjudgment in aligning so strongly with the politics of a single party and that there was not enough outreach to the more irrelevant BNP. This, however, can be argued to be untrue. It has been unlike India to take such a strong stand to support any political party in a neighbouring state as to be unable to conduct business.

As the same analysts now decry, India provides aid to Afghanistan regardless of who is in power and has sought to prevent further chaos in the region by engaging in good faith even with the Taliban when the United States’ unceremonious exit left the Afghans to their fate and Indians at a massive disadvantage with regards to national security. It is much more likely that Indian ties with BNP would not be difficult to build should Tarique Rahman, or Tarique Zia, as he is sometimes known, come to power.

As recent
CIA leaks show, the American government has been working behind the scenes to help the Jamaat come to power. With the Awami League banned and the BNP-JeI alliance in the doldrums and clear American support for the JeI, no matter the face of the nation, the Jamaat holds the key to power in Bangladesh. Despite Tarique’s open embrace of the Pakistani legacy of his father, Ziaur Rahman, to connect with an absolutely radicalised population that has gone on a rampage killing Hindus and lynching Awami League politicians, it is unlikely that any attempts to stabilise an economy in free fall through diplomacy with neighbouring India will yield results.

Socially, while elite Bangladeshis are not in support of complete Sharia that bans women from participating in public and political life and imposes the abaya on all, their complacency around the Jamaat and their belief that whoever allies with them will still retain the upper hand is almost reminiscent of the leftist support of the Islamic regime in Iran in the 1970s, with the same results being likely.

The Jamaat chief posted last week that his party would not field women as leaders due to ‘biological differences that made women incapable of leadership. This in a nation where recent prime ministers have only been women over the last three decades. The post on social media platform X, formerly Twitter, was quickly taken down. Rumours are that the American Embassy wished to preserve the semblance of normalcy for as long as it was possible to do so. With a long history of aiding Islamists, all the way from Kosovo to closer home in Pakistan and even India, it does not seem unlikely.

In all this time, Rahman faces the uphill task of campaigning in a country which has no other clear face for the position of prime minister. He is hindered only by the power play behind the scenes. While it looks likely that State Department and Democrat pick Mohammed Yunus will have a role to play in the shadows, likely applying the writ of his masters as president, he is unlikely to be elected. There are some who hope that the election of Tarique Rahman as PM will help stabilise the nation as it grapples in the throes of violent jihad and absolute economic chaos. Culminating in the destruction of even their most successful industry, that of textiles, in the aftermath of the India-EU deal that empowers India further in the sector, the country is likely to take decades to stabilise its manufacturing.

While the majority population of the nation were Islamic radicals protected by an elite who preached secularism from foreign universities, the Sheikh Hasina administration had kept the most hardline advocates out of administrative power, allowing for industry to flourish during her reign. Maintaining a balance with good relations with both India and China is hardly likely to be an easy task, but it allowed the Asian nation to gain hope of growth after witnessing decades of violence and extreme human rights abuse.

However, this is unlikely to be the path that Rahman will be allowed to follow. Already, direct flights between Bangladesh and Pakistan have resumed, 14 years after they were suspended. Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) has been extremely active after the presumed coup that led to Hasina’s fall in 2024. With a network expansion that allows it to monitor and affect activities in India’s northeast with Bangladeshi assistance, Bangladeshi politics is likely to be determined by the Jamaat’s closeness to its ideological masters in Pakistan.

Notably, it was the Jamaat that acted against Bangladesh’s independence movement in 1971 during Pakistan’s genocide of its Bengali population that forced Tarique Rahman’s father to declare independence. As East Pakistan reemerges, the February 12 elections in the nation will be witnessed with keen interest by its neighbours. If Tarique Rahman even wished to change the direction of his nation, he simply lacks the power to do so.

On the other hand, Shafiqur Rahman’s interests are well-known, but he may face electoral challenges, and it has typically been his alliance with the BNP that has allowed his party to wield power. Regardless of the results of an election where one out of two major parties has been banned and a third, extreme one, has been raised to extreme power, chaos shall reign until the balance is reset. India, meanwhile, works to further fortify its eastern borders with its erstwhile friend and watches with interest.

(The author is a columnist at several Indian publications, and hosts a podcast on geopolitics and culture. She writes about international relations, public policy and history, and posts on X on her handle @sagorika_s. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)