Jamaat, NCP trade barbs over PR system ahead of Bangladesh polls
Dhaka, Oct 20 (IANS/WISHAVWARTA) In another escalating political conflict ahead of next year’s election in Bangladesh, the radical Islamist Party Jamaat-e-Islami and National Citizens Party (NCP) are engaged in a war of words over the former’s demand for a proportional representation (PR) system, local media reported.
Addressing a joint press conference in Dhaka, Jamaat and seven other Islamist parties announced a three-day programme as part of the fourth phase of their simultaneous movement to press home their five-point demand, including a referendum on the July charter in November and holding the upcoming national elections under a PR system.
Following the announcement, NCP Convener Nahid Islam took to his social media platform, stating that the demand for ‘Proportional Representation (PR) Movement’ launched by Jamaat “was nothing but a calculated political deception.”
“It was deliberately designed to derail the Consensus Commission’s reform process and divert the national dialogue away from the real question,” he stated.
Nahid stated that the core reform demand for the establishment of an Upper House in the country’s Parliament based on the PR system was conceived as a constitutional safeguard.
He accused Jamaat and its allies of hijacking this agenda, reducing it to a technical PR issue and using it as a bargaining tool to serve their narrow partisan interests, adding that their motive was never reform, but manipulation.
“Jamaat e Islami never engaged in the reform discourse, neither before nor after the July Uprising. They offered no substantive proposals, no constitutional vision, and no commitment to a democratic republic. Their sudden endorsement of reform within the Consensus Commission was not an act of conviction but a tactical infiltration, a political sabotage disguised as reformism,” wrote the NCP leader.
Hours after Nahid’s remarks, Ahsanul Mahboob Zubair, assistant secretary general of Jamaat, in a post on his social media platform, described the NCP leader’s statement as “unclear” and “misleading”.
“We couldn’t understand what he (Nahid) wanted to say. The nation does not expect such immature statements from him,” the Jamaat leader stated.
Bangladesh continues to face growing uncertainty and political turmoil ahead of next year’s election.
The parties that earlier collaborated with Chief Advisor to the interim government Muhammad Yunus to overthrow the democratically elected government of the Awami League, led by Sheikh Hasina, are now at loggerheads over reform proposals.
