“How Bangladesh elections look like a fixed match for Jamaat and foreign interests”, First Post, February 03, 2026
“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……”
Read full article at firstpost.com
