Purveyors of Radical Islamism or Casualty of Cultural Nationalism: Situating Jamaat-e-Islami in Contemporary Bangladesh Politics

Methodology

This paper pursues a three-pronged strategy to address the issues in question: it harnesses content analysis and historical institutionalist analysis and uses information collected through qualitative interviews. It starts with a rigorous analysis of the available literature on each issue, including academic work, media analysis, and content promulgated by the BJI and other Islamist parties. It then delves into institutional analysis that focuses on the ways institutions fashion the modes of activities and the goals of political actors (Hall, 1986; North, 1990; Thelen and Steinmo, 1992), especially the BJI, and analyses the structure of power relations that underlie Islamist politics in Bangladesh.

Institutions significantly impact fashioning political interactions and, as such, impact political outcomes (Hall, 1986). Between rational choice institutionalism (Bates, 1989; Levi, 1988; North, 1990) and historical institutionalism (Hall, 1986; Ikenberry, 1988; Immergut, 1992; Katzenstein, 1978; Thelen and Steinmo, 1992), this paper takes a more historical institutional bent. The historical institutionalist argument stresses that institutional context does not just shape individual party strategies but also their goals (Thelen and Steinmo, 1992), and as Dunlavy argues, new actors can emerge to pursue new goals through existing institutions (Dunlavy, 1992).

Historical institutionalist analysis focuses on both formal organizations as well as informal rules and procedures that guide the behaviors of political actors (Thelen and Steinmo, 1992). Ikenberry breaks institutions down into three specific levels, from specific characteristics of government institutions to the more overarching structures of the state and the nation’s normative social order” (Ikenberry, 1988). Krasner presents an institutionalist model that proffers a slow cycle of change, with prolonged institutional stasis being punctuated by periods of abrupt change, which lead to new institutional arrangements followed by a new stasis (Krasner, 1984). He argues that institutional crises emanate from disruptions or changes in the external environment, seen in the country multiple times since its inception in 1971, not disconnected from global economic and political events. This paper also looks at the institutional structures and policies since the 1970s that propagated the rise of these parties. It identifies specific institutions, their role in the last decade, and how the BJI has molded itself over time in reaction to the policies of those institutions.

Further insights and information have been availed through more than a dozen interviews. The interviewees included two current and two former high-ranking members of the BJI, two of whom were former parliamentary candidates for the party. A senior member of the ruling party, BAL, was also interviewed to provide a counterview more in-line with the official government narrative and to shed further light on the nature of the government’s and state institutions’ relationships with the BJI. In addition, four young student activists from private universities were interviewed, two of whom were active members of the BAL student front, Bangladesh Chatra League (BCL). The other two did not identify themselves as activists of any political party. However, they were respondents in a survey whose responses showed strong favor or positive inclination toward Islamist Political Parties (IPP) and the BJI.

BJI operates in a quasi-religious sphere, and the views of the IPPs on their ideologies, projects, and activities are more than illuminating. Thus, detailed unstructured interviews were conducted with notable leaders of IPPs whose ideologies and provenance range from hard-right to center-right and from madrasa to shrine/pir-based, according to Riaz and Razi’s typology of IPPs (Riaz and Raji, 2011). Senior leaders from four prominent IPPs have been interviewed: the Muslim League, Islami Andolon Bangladesh, Khilafat Andolon, and the Nizam-e-Islami Party.

Institutional capture

While institutional change is incremental (Dunlavy, 1992; Thelen and Steinmo, 1992) and or in spurts (Krasner, 1984), both can come into play when authoritarian regimes tend toward the active co-optation of state institutions to enlarge the capacity of the regimes de facto power and its tenure (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2006; Schleutker, 2021). This is achieved through an active process of encroaching and taking over these institutions, in a process commonly identified as institutional capture. In regimes that tend toward authoritarianism, as perpetuated by BAL since the 2014 elections (Riaz, 2019), there is a strong tendency toward institutional capture of not just the parliamentary apparatus (Gandhi, 2008) but other state and nonstate institutions like the media as well (Tepe, 2022).

In this aspect, institutional capture has played a big part in both the role that the BJI has played in perpetrating political violence and the perception of that violence. Tepe (2022) refers to three specific forms of institutional capture (1) the direct kind, which is done through constitutional amendments and institutional reforms; (2) the indirect kind, which is achieved through defunding institutions and making partisan appointments; and (3) the insidious kind which is achieved through incremental policy changes. Since their start to an uninterrupted three terms in office, all three with a clear two-thirds parliamentary majority, which gave BAL free reign to make constitutional amendments, ³ direct capture has been clear and immediate. Almost as soon as the BAL was elected in 2009 with a two-thirds majority, they repealed the caretaker government system, which was in place for 15 years, through a constitutional amendment (Obaidullah, 2019), and upheld it through a judicial verdict (Sarkar, 2011).

The state bureaucracy in Bangladesh has a long history of political intrusion, primarily through politically influenced appointments and promotions, with one prominent retired bureaucrat and academic identifying this indirect capture as the most urgent obstacle to achieving an efficient bureaucratic cadre in the country (Khan, 2015). Indirect capture of law enforcement agencies (Greitens, 2016; Jackman and Maitrot, 2022) has also had a tremendous impact on the BAL’s ability to administer biased justice and the ability to frame one group versus another as the perpetrators of violence, a sentiment expressed rather clearly by the BJI leaders interviewed. Another critical aspect of the indirect capture of law enforcement agencies was that over the last decade, appointments have been biased toward BCL activists and other BAL adherents, and the police have been “prioritised, politicised, and directed against the opposition under cover of maintaining law and order” (Jackman and Maitrot, 2022: 1516).

One institution that was open to both indirect and insidious capture was the judiciary (Alam and Teicher, 2012), primarily through indirect capture in judicial appointments (Asano and Minato, 2019; Siddiq, 2018), a trend that had started as early as 1991 due, among other things, their influence any caretaker government formation (Alam and Teicher, 2012; Obaidullah, 2019). The effect of this has been instrumental in not just the ban of the BJI, as argued by BJI and other IPP leaders and adherents interviewed, but also the branding of any act of terrorism and harmful political activity as “Jamaat” or BJI activity (Hajjaj, 2021a; Murshid and Sanyal, 2013).

A critical nonstate institution, which has had a monumental impact on how the BJI is perceived and has led to substantial changes in the party’s strategy and goals, is the mass media. Over the last decade, the BAL regime handed out many television channels and national newspaper licenses, most of which were awarded to party loyalists (Ahmed, 2020). This, along with the legislative passing and implementation of multiple laws tantamount to gagging the media (Intizar and Majed, 2020), the regime has created a stranglehold of the mass media in general.

BJI in Bangladesh politics

JI’s founder, Abul A’la Maududi, deemed the JI necessary specifically to represent and integrate the global umma, yet to his chagrin, it was the non-Islamist All India Muslim League that took up the banner for the umma in early 20th-century India (Jalal, 1994). Nonetheless, the BJI has shared many commonalities over the last five decades with other IPPs. Sartori (2005) would call anti-system parties the BJI and most other IPPs, as they “would not change—if they could—the government but the very system of government” (p. 118).

The JI started as an organization for Muslim men who were among the educated elite (Bano, 2012: 88–89; Shehabuddin, 2008: 579), the types that Ullah (2014) calls “hierarchical Islamists” (p. 49). Moreover, the members were, and still are, selected through a lengthy probationary period during which they are inculcated with party ideology through study groups, prayers, welfare activities, and such (Bano, 2012). The party also imposes a variety of restrictions on the lifestyle of its members (Riaz and Raji, 2011).

The first government of Bangladesh, under Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman ⁴ (Mujib) had been apprehensive of religious nationalism, not only due to the direct affiliation of religio-ideological political parties like the BJI because they stood on the wrong side of the country’s liberation war but also due to this very anti-system ideology. Article 12 was instituted in the nation’s first constitution to forestall such parties’ activities and prohibited the functioning of political parties that argued for an Islamic state (Bano, 2014: 927; Huque and Akhter, 1987). This has been denounced as a move to create a new and artificial nationalist dogma, according to the two BJI leaders interviewed; in their perspective, this was a trick to bolster support for a newly irreligious BAL, which they equated with more leftist and ungodly ideologies. As one of the leaders articulated,

Sheikh shaheb created [Article 12] under pressure from those ungodly leftists. It was the leftists who attacked us even before 1971, not Sheikh shaheb. ⁵

Young IPP supporters interviewed for this research showed less inclination to view it as such, with one interviewee attempting to identify a personality clash between Mujib and Golam Azam as a fact; however, upon further probing, he relented that he did not have any credible source of information to corroborate his belief. One difference in opinion between young IPP supporters and veteran BJI and IPP leaders was related to the perception of Mujib, with the young supporters showing a higher degree of reverence than the veterans. On the other hand, student activists of the ruling BAL identified this banning of IPPs as a critical need to keep the newly formed Bangladesh from being reassimilated into Pakistan post-1971.

Academics like Islam and Islam (2018) have shown that state-sponsored Islamic revivalism started with Mujib, who was less a secularist and more a political realist who had survived three different national denominations. However, he did not reinstitute Islamist parties. This was reversed in 1978, and then in 1988, Islam was designated constitutionally as the state religion (Riaz, 2017: 16), with direct capture of the legislature by two consecutive eras of military incursion into politics. After the removal of Article 12 in 1978, the Islamic Democratic League was formed by the Nizam-e-Islam and BJI to participate in the 1979 elections, but they formally split in later 1979, and the BJI was formally revived (Riaz, 2017: 82). While from 2001, the Nizam-e-Islami and the BJI have been partners in the BNP-led coalition, they have been at odds both on political principles and on sharing key parliamentary constituencies, with the Nizam-e-Islami leader interviewed casting the most negative light on the BJI, among all other IPPs.

Traditional Western typologies and categorizations of political parties often fail to capture crucial elements of parties like the BJI. Ideas rooted in South Asian political culture are better equipped to comprehend their true nature. Riaz and Raji (2011) offer a five-category taxonomy of Islamic political parties in which they place BJI as the sole occupant of the pragmatist/opportunist category, which they define as: “want to establish Islamic social order in society through the state, belief in ‘Islamic revolution,’ participate in elections; support-base is wide-ranging” (p. 48). Most of the Islamic political parties in Bangladesh are what Sinno and Khanani (2009) would call “centralized and networked” (p. 40) parties, the sort that could very easily be described as less inclined toward elections and prone to co-optation under the right circumstances (Hamzawy et al., 2007). This easy co-optation thesis was also harped on by the two BJI leaders interviewed regarding all other IPPs, including those in their BNP-led 20-party coalition. Leaders of other IPPs interviewed identified the BJI as inclined to other kinds of co-optation, with some averring foreign or more insidious forms of co-optation, which is more in line with BAL claims (Hajjaj, 2021b).

The BJI and the BAL have had a long history of contestations, even if they have also worked together in multiple movements over the decades. As far back as 1969, before the liberation war, prominent leaders of the BCL and Chattra Union (Marxist student coalition) were calling JI anti-Pakistan and demanding a ban on their activities (Correspondent, 1969). This is why following the BJI’s success in the 1991 general election when the BAL presidential candidate formally sought their support in his bid for office, it took some of the lusters off the BAL’s prior invectives against the BJI for their role in Bangladesh’s liberation war (Islam, 2021: 9; Riaz and Raji, 2011: 50). The BJI’s support has also been extensively used by military dictators Zia and Ershad (Hakim, 1998).

The formal ideology of the BJI is to establish iqamat-e-Deen, or the way of Islamic light, and the party outlines a five-point program to accomplish this task, with the end goal being to establish political and socioeconomic life along Islamic lines and eventually create an Islamic state (Islam, 2021: 11–13). However, their idea of the ideal Islamic state seems contrapuntal to those of other IPPs, with IAB showing maximum theological vituperative among the interviews conducted for this paper. It is their status as an anti-system party that sparks the argument that it is beyond them to be able to act within the boundaries of liberal democracy (Kumar, 2009). They are the only IPP with a significant vote bank and presence in parliament or government, as illustrated in Figures 1 and 2.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Votes received by Islamist parties in the 2008 and 2018 general elections.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Votes received and parliamentary seats won by top 4 parties between 1991 and 2008.

While the JI is multinational, spanning Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, only the BJI has received any significant electoral success. Something local BJI leaders and activists seem distinctly conscious of. Even under Maududi’s leadership, the JI fared miserably in every election in which it participated, from the 1950s to the ill-fated election of 1970 (Qasmi, 2017: 140). In Bangladesh, the BJI electoral base had been on a downward slide dropping from a substantial 12.13% in 1991 to about a third at 4.28% in 2001 and holding steady at around 4.5% in 2008 (Riaz, 2017: 87–88), before its electoral ban in 2013, which, coming just months before a new election was to be held, could not but have been a boon for the BAL (Dominguez and Mazumdaru, 2013; Kumar, 2013).

Besides its political activism, the BJI also conducts significant welfare work (Bano, 2012; Shehabuddin, 2008). In Bangladesh, the party’s members “prefer to act as board members of independent Islamic institutions involved in welfare work” (Bano, 2012: 87). Bano argues that the BJI does not engage in welfare work for direct conversion to votes but rather to “establish the commitment of the party to the implementation of religious precepts” (Bano, 2012: 87–88). Nonetheless, it is primarily this arena of their activity that most interviewees for this paper believe has led to the intense loyalty of the BJI activists compared to all its competitors. BJI is also the only party with intra-party devolution of power and a lack of nepotism at the top, while the BAL, BNP, and the Jatiya Party all relinquish extraordinary powers in the hands of the party Chairperson (Riaz, 2016: 160).

Upon the BAL government’s return to power in 2009, one of the foremost issues on their political agenda, the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) to prosecute the perpetrators of crimes against humanity in 1971, was restarted, and the BJI became its biggest casualty, with many among its top tier of leadership being implicated (Fair and Patel, 2020; Hossain, 2015; Islam, 2021; Islam and Islam, 2018). In its almost decade-long run, the ICT has delivered more than 30 verdicts against perpetrators of crimes against humanity and collaborators of the Pakistani junta. However, there also has been much controversy over the manner and conduct of these trials (Chopra, 2015; Gidley and Turner, 2018; Mollah, 2020; Zeitlyn, 2017). Most IPP leaders condemned these trials as a treacherous act perpetrated by the BAL government. It was also mainly in response to these tribunals that a new set of secular-versus-Islamist movements were spawned with created new divisive narratives (Riaz, 2017: 120–133) and saw the rise of the Hefazat-e-Islam ⁶ (Raqib, 2020). Views on the rise of Hefazat seem more divergent among BJI leaders and activists, but the common string in most IPP leaders interviewed was their opinion on the culpability of the government and their views on the May 2013 incident, which those interviewed registered as a tragedy, even if the government and Human Rights Watch declared to the contrary (Correspondent, 2013).

While the BJI never departed from electoral politics following the rescinding of their registration, their electoral fervor has suffered in local and general elections since 2014. The party publicly shares electoral data up to the 2014 round of local elections (Release, 2014). In 2015, the BAL government amended the law to allow party symbols in local government elections (Alamgir, 2021), thus further debilitating the BJI’s electoral position.

In 2019, former Assistant Secretary General of BJI Barrister Abdur Razzak, former president of the BJI’s student wing, ICS, Mojibur Rahman Monju (Wadud, 2020), with many prominent and celebrated leaders of the BJI, broke away from the party, to form the AB party (Antara, 2020). Adherents of the BJI interviewed believe that the AB party maintains close ties with state organizations. Since their start, the party’s activities have been relatively robust, especially for the offshoot of a much-maligned political organization. Their programs have seen regular and enthusiastic participation by many of the stalwarts of the BNP and its 20-party alliance (Correspondent, 2021). The AB party’s top brass seems to maintain cordial relations with the BAL as well because the BAL leader interviewed declared quite confidently:

I do not think there are any bad elements in that party. They have successfully jettisoned the Razakars and Pakistani agents and have created a party of the right chetona. ⁷

However, somewhat surprisingly, neither BJI leaders nor other IPP leaders interviewed were derogative of the AB party when inquired, even if some maintained that it had ties with state organizations.

BJI and links to political Islam and terrorist activities

One of the original commentators on political Islam connected it with the early-20th-century development of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and the JI in India, both of which emerged as a means of protecting traditional Islam from the clutches of Western colonial powers (Roy, 1994: 35). As it is viewed today, political Islam is nonmonolithic (Ayoob and Lussier, 2004) yet embodies numerous global elements (Cesari, 2018; Roy, 1994).

Most Islamic states exist today because of the nature of colonialism and are fixed by the “globalization of politics” (Roy, 1994: 18), with all nature of international relations based on this agreed-upon state of affairs (Billig, 1995; Smith, 1991), accorded by the original colonial powers. This difference in power relations between the West and the rest is an integral part of the story of political Islam (Cesari, 2018).

Since the 1970s, the contributions of migrant workers have aided immensely in creating the robust remittance economy of Bangladesh; the Middle East is the most popular destination for these migrant workers, with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia being one of the most prominent employment destinations. It is from Saudi Arabia that millions of Bangladeshi workers are imbued with highly conservative Islamic doctrines of Wahhabism, and upon their return, those ideologies are propagated in their native land (Hagerty, 2007: 108). This and other trends follow what Hashmi calls the “Arabization of Bangladesh” (Hashmi, 2015).

This Arabization of Bangladesh, the increasing image of violent global political Islam (Ayoob and Lussier, 2004), and the international links of the BJI, not just to its wings in South Asia but also with the Muslim Brotherhood, and the putative links with organizations fostered by the Afghan mujahedeen from the ‘80s war against the Soviets and its aftermath, have all contributed to the maligned image of the BJI as perpetrators of religious extremism. It was during the years of the Afghan-Soviet war that the mujahedeen found eager and willing recruits from among the ranks of the BJI, especially its student wing, the ICS. Some of these ICS youth leaders joined in what can best be called a global proxy war, then returned to Bangladesh in the 1990s and the early 21st century and created violent terrorist organizations like the Jaamatul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) (Riaz and Raji, 2011: 58), the Harkat-ul Jihad-al-Islami Bangladesh (HuJI-B) (Ahsan and Banavar, 2011: 73), and others.

Given the prominent role played by the Pakistan military in this Afghan-Soviet or global-proxy-war (Fair, 2014: 2; Rashid, 2001), it is also not surprising that these new terrorist outfits maintained some links with the Pakistan military, and especially the ISI. ⁸ Pakistan directly assisted US policy in this proxy war and being among the “good Muslims” aided tremendously in the movement and training of these mujahedeen forces that were volunteering from Bangladesh (Ahsan and Banavar, 2011: 78–79). This not only tied many of these leaders to links with the Pakistan military, specifically the ISI (Barfield, 2010; Rashid, 2001; Riaz and Fair, 2011: 1), but also put them on a different path altogether.

As argued by the BJI leaders interviewed, the youth that joined the ranks of the mujahedeen in perpetrating jihad traversed a distinct and severe path, and that very rugged unsettling path ensured that they no longer remained the ordinary folks who had initially joined the war as merely adventurous or ideologically enthused youths (Bhutta, 2002; Khan, 2002; Khattak, 2002); they were made not-ordinary by their very extraordinary experiences.

Leaders or members of some of these radical militant extremists were once associated with the BJI, which is indubitably true, and as such, claims of tacit or tenuous links between BJI leadership and some of these radical units certainly seem tenable, as some have claimed (Kumar, 2009; Islam, 2021). It is also true that the leadership of these radical militant units like the HuJI-B or the JMB are the same people that the US foreign policy labeled “good Muslims” in the 1980s as they became instrumental in the proxy war against the USSR but became “bad Muslims” after the collapse of Soviet Russia (Ayoob and Lussier, 2004: 40).

These veterans of a brutal asymmetric war might have had old links with the BJI, but they were ideologically changed and did completely different things. As one BJI leader intimated,

We were much younger, I did not go, but the few who did [go] were never again the same people. . . . It was a call for jihad. We were being asked to fight for the liberation of our brothers. Do you call people going to Ukraine today to fight against Russia terrorists? Furthermore, why don’t they question the Bangladeshi government at the time? Could they have gone without the government’s consent?

As argued by the BJI leader, these new militants were veteran war soldiers (Bourke, 2000: 50), not the ICS student leaders who had left their country to fight for Islam. It is also essential to understand that the more militant or violent ICS leaders did self-select themselves to volunteer as mujahedeen in the first place (Raine, 2014: 42).

Some have argued that the BJI’s position on domestic political issues is shaped by the global dimensions of political Islam (Riaz, 2017: 102). However, the more likely fact seems to be that the BJI has very little room for maneuver, having failed to reinvent themselves outside the realms of their BNP-tied electoral dynamics, as proffered by both former BJI leaders and some other IPP leaders in their interviews. They have become inured to change. Another vital aspect of BJI’s ability or lack thereof to perpetuate militant Islamism in Bangladesh is that the BJI has not traditionally, nor does it now, spoken for Islam in the country. In most Muslim nations, there are deep disagreements on who shall speak for Islam (Hefner, 2005: 6). The BJI might stand as the most prominent Islamist political party; however, the role of speaking for Islam has for almost a century been held by the Deoband ulema (Hajjaj, 2021b; Roy, 1994), even if some have argued otherwise (Kumar, 2009: 543). Nor does the BJI have any substantial influence on the religious landscape through Imams and religious institutions like mosques because the control of most mosque committees today lies in the hands of local political patrons (Mostofa, 2018), who over the last decade have overwhelmingly been BAL adherents.

Muslim/BD nationalism and the BJI

Since at least 1978, Bangladesh’s political forces have struggled to establish two variants of nationalist dogma. The first, espoused by the BAL, is a linguistic-cultural identity (Hajjaj, 2022; Hossain and Khan, 2006) and has been touted as the ontological basis of the state of Bangladesh (Hossain and Siddiquee, 2004). This nationalist narrative, popularly known as Bengali nationalism, was preponderated post-1971 by the BAL government (Hajjaj, 2021b). Many viewed it as a secular, linguistic, and pro-Indian ideology (Ahmed, 2021; Hajjaj, 2021b; Hossain, 2015; Kabir, 1987). This identity was manifest in the country’s first constitution, invoked in 1972, and included socialism and secularism, which were, arguably, discordant with the ethos of Bangladesh’s liberation war (Murshid, 1995; Riaz, 2016).

In opposition to this linguistic-cultural identity of Bengali nationalism, the military government of Ziaur Rahman spawned its narrative of a religious identity under the canopy of Bangladeshi nationalism and promulgated it through his party, the BNP (Hajjaj, 2022; Khan, 1985). To counter the BAL narrative and bolster Bangladeshi nationalism, Article 12 of the 1972 constitution was repealed, and IPPs were granted political access. The BJI, by dint of being an IPP, naturally falls under the sway of the latter religious identity, but much more importantly, ever since its coalition with the BNP, the BAL has viewed the BJI as an intransigent threat.

It is also important to note that secularism has not taken hold in Bangladesh or countries like Bangladesh as it did in the West. Unlike in the West, in secularizing Islamic countries, many areas of life remain regulated by religious norms and regulations (Dabashi, 2015; French, 1998; Kupfer, 2007; Mignolo, 2015; Wilson, 2010; Yilmaz, 2007: 488; Zaman, 2016).

The BJI’s status as supporters of the Pakistan military junta during 1971 and more recently as a bastion of Bangladeshi nationalism, especially as the only Islamist political party with any significant ground strength (Jahan, 2015; Riaz and Fair, 2011), makes it an obvious threat to the BAL. As such, it should not be surprising that the BAL party machine would expend every effort to malign and debilitate the BJI support base. The argument that the BJI has suffered and its activist base vitiated is apparent from the assertion of the BJI leader:

Every government instrument used to hurt the opposition has been used more on our activists than even that of the [coalition leader] BNP. Why would that happen if the BAL did not consider us the more powerful opposition? Nevertheless, after more than twelve years of depredation, even the BNP is unmindful of us. The twenty-party coalition exists in name only.

This sentiment was shared by some other IPP leaders as well, and the BJI’s feeling of neglect by the BNP even led to an impromptu declaration by BJI chief, Shafiqur Rahman, in August 2022 that they no longer saw themselves as part of the same coalition (Antara, 2022), even if that declaration was later retracted.

It is not just a one-sided decline of the BJI base, but several other developments have emerged. Dunlavy argued that new actors could emerge to pursue new goals through existing institutions (Dunlavy, 1992), and such has been the case with other IPPs, filling the vacuum left by the BJI. The Islami Adolon has been one of the primary beneficiaries of BJI’s absence, or rather the absence of their symbol, from all polls, as evident in Figure 1. It has been argued that the government has pursued an active policy to shift the balance of power between these parties and empower the Islami Andolon to the detriment of the BJI (Bhattacharjee, 2020; Lorch, 2019; Rahman, 2019). The rise of the Hefazat-e-Islam in 2013 was also a related phenomenon (Rahman, 2019; Raqib, 2020). The rise of the Islami Andolon, as also argued by BJI leaders, has been due to the active usage of the religio-cultural institution of waz mahfils, ⁹ which provided unimpeded access to the masses for the Islami Andolon (Rahman, 2019; Riaz, 2017; Riaz and Naser, 2011). The Hefazat movement, on the other hand, came about through their control of the Qawmi madrasas, the stronghold of the traditional ulama in Bangladesh.

Adaptation and change

Unlike all other Islamist parties in Bangladesh, barring the Islami Andolan in the last decade, the BJI, till the revocation of its registration, consistently molded itself in line with its needs to effectively partake in electoral competition (Riaz and Raji, 2011). Since 2014, however, the party has seemingly been unable to adapt to changing political circumstances, and thus might be argued that it has lost significant strength in shaping its destiny.

BJI was born as a modernist reaction to mid-20th-century colonialism. Its devices of social engagement and its rhetoric has made advances since then, if only moderately (Islam, 2015; Nasr, 1994).

As the BAL has attempted to move into political Islam (Hajjaj, 2021b; Islam, 2018; Tribune Report, 2018), so has BJI tried to incorporate itself with the ethos of Bengali nationalism by paying homage to many of its most venerated icons. After the brief military interregnum of 2006–2008, which seized power from the BNP-BJI coalition, the party also amended its constitution, in line with the needs of the time, to officially recognize the liberation war of 1971 (Momen, 2009). Their Ameers have incorporated the practice of addressing Mujib as the “architect of independent Bangladesh” before their speeches (Ahmad, 2016; Rahman, 2021). They have also consistently eulogized Language Movement heroes (Ahmad, 2016; Release, 2020). However, they are firm on offering no apology for alleged war crimes in 1971, with their denial of any such by the party (Antara, 2019), even though in 2019, one of their top leaders, Barrister Abdur Razzaq, resigned his position quoting the party’s failure to apologize for their role in 1971 (Molla and Hasan, 2019). He has since been seen as an active policymaker of the breakaway AB party (Zahid, 2020).

Conclusion

This paper has shown the nature of BJI’s political activity and sheds light on some of the more vociferous accusations against it, which have led to the electoral ban on the party. There is little doubt that the BJI is an anti-system party (Sartori, 2005: 118). However, that does not make it stand out from any of the other IPPs in Bangladesh. Their proclivity for electoral politics and the practice of exploiting social relations through welfare activities, unlike other Islamist parties, has been their strength since the beginning of the 90s. However, post-2013, their electoral ban, the stagnation of BNP’s electoral politics, and demographic and socioeconomic changes have all led to a seemingly steady decline of the party.

Religiosity is on the rise among the urban educated class in the country, and the assumption has always been that the rural masses have always been deeply religious. It has also been an increasing trend to follow more conservative interpretations of Islam throughout the urban educated classes and the preacher classes, the ulama. Under these circumstances, the BJI, while pinioned and stigmatized, still commands more adherence than any other IPP thus far.

Regarding the rise of the AB party, given the warm accord a supposed breakaway faction of the BJI has received from its coalition partners, it is difficult to disqualify any lingering strong connection between the AB and the BJI, even if the high-ranking BAL leader interviewed, believed otherwise.

As Lipset (2011: 56) points out, the rise in levels of education and economic improvements means that the citizenry is no longer uniquely concerned with purely economic issues and is more concerned with secondary issues such as health, education, culture, and so on, which is why he suggests the European Left-leaning parties are losing their support base; in a similar vein, it can be argued that it is the more economically empowered urban educated class who are likely to be the new adherents of IPPs (Huq, 2014; Huq and Rashid, 2008; Kabir et al., 2014). While most of these people are not BJI adherents, the appalling state of most of the other IPPs creates a new set of opportunities for the AB or any other form of a new BJI.

The BJI is indeed down, and legally, if temporarily, out. However, in its 80-year history, the JI has experienced numerous highs and lows, and with the global developments of political Islam and the confusing twists and turns of Bangladesh politics, it is tough to ascribe a definitive future to the BJI. After all, there always remains the specter of the return of the BJI as soon as the BAL is out of power. However, the current BJI seems progressively outdated and inured to change. If they fail to evolve, they might be consigned to playing no more than a marginal role in future Bangladesh politics, as its counterparts in India and Pakistan.