On February 28, Bangladesh saw the birth of a new political party named the National Citizen Party (NCP). The party initially formed a 151-member national convening committee—later expanded to a 217-member committee—with Nahid Islam as the convenor. It has to be mentioned that Nahid Islam recently resigned from the post of advisor for Information and Broadcasting in the Muhammad Yunus-led interim government.
Party led by the anti-Hasina student protestors
The new party is formed by the students of the Students Against Discrimination (SAD) and Jatiyo Nagorik Committee (JNC). It has to be mentioned that it was the SAD that led the July uprisings last year against the then Sheikh Hasina-led government. The movement, now referred to as the “monsoon revolution” in the country, ended the 15-year rule of the Awami League (AL) and ousted Sheikh Hasina, who had to flee the country on August 5 and since then has been living as a refugee in a hidden place in India.
After the change of power through street protests and the formation of the interim government led by Nobel laureate Yunus, the Jatiyo Nagorik Committee (JNC) was formed by the SAD as a platform to facilitate the reconstruction of the country’s political system.
Is NCP really a new party or the King’s party?
Since the 1990s, Bangladesh has been dominated by the two parties—five-time prime minister Hasina’s Awami League (AL) and Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) of Khaleda Zia, who also has held the post of PM twice. No other party has been able to emerge in the last few decades as the dominant party challenging the AL-BNP binary, which, however, was turned into a single-party system by Hasina in the last decade.
Now after August 5, 2024, there is a political vacuum in the country. There have been signs of hardline Islamists led by Jamaat-e-Islami trying to come into power in the country by taking advantage of the current situation. NCP—posing as a centrist tent with people from the left as well as Islamists—is formed to fill that vacuum, as in politics a vacuum doesn’t last long.
Content retrieved from: https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/bangladeshs-national-citizen-party-old-wine-in-new-bottle-13870246.html.
