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IN MORE than three decades in uniform, I have rarely heard a Jamaat leader speak a word against the military. Nor did scandals of money or women ever cling to them in the way they stained others. That restraint, that discipline, was their strength. And when Hasina’s fiefdom banned and brutalised them, it only polished their image, turned them into martyrs of state repression, drew sympathy from every corner.

But July has changed the air. Zealotry and impatience now stalk the streets like loose sparks after a storm. In my own circle of friends, men I had trusted with my life branded me ‘anti-nationalist,’ ‘anti-Islamist,’ ‘pro-Indian,’ simply because I questioned the historical role of Islamists in this country. Imagine that — an old comrade’s friendship corroded by ideological fervour.

And now, after DUCSU and JUCSU, I watch the social media tide. Praise pouring in, manufactured adoration, smear campaigns against every rival voice. It is the same suffocating tactic of Gano Jagoron Mancha all over again — the drowning of dissent in orchestrated chorus. Sadik Qyum dressed up like Imran H Choudhury, Jhuma lauded like Lucky Akhter. And those who dared July — Abid, Kader, Umama — now chased into the dark by a politics of slander. This, more than the ballots, alarms me.

Jamaat has always claimed to be the conscience of Muslim politics, the custodian of faith in the marketplace of betrayal. Maududi’s vision in 1941 was of discipline, ethics, community. But look closer, and another pattern emerges: agitation that toppled civilian governments, opportunism that courted generals and demands that cracked open the doors for martial law. Across Pakistan, across Bangladesh, the story is the same: democracy interrupted in the name of Islam.

Today, Bangladesh teeters again at that edge. The fall of Hasina’s 15-year rule promised a renaissance. Yunus’s interim government, the surge of youth power, the possibility of renewal. But the same vacuum that invited hope now draws in a darker force — the theo-democrats, those who march into elections not to strengthen democracy, but to strangle it from within.

The lifting of the ban has given Jamaat new breath. With its loyal 3–5 million voters and its disciplined student army, Shibir, it has resurfaced as a formidable machine. The DUCSU results are not just a campus surprise; they are a siren. Nine out of 12 posts in the hands of Shibir’s alliance — delivered with the cleverness of masks. A ‘hijab-free’ girl at the podium, a non-Muslim in the slate, inclusivity staged like theatre. And the people applauded. Because they are tired. Because they are hungry for honesty. Because every other force has betrayed them.

But let us not be fooled by cosmetics. Tunisia’s Ennahda rebranded, Turkey’s Islamists reshaped themselves into the AKP — Jamaat has studied these lessons well. It knows how to wear democracy as a veil, how to perform liberalism long enough to seize power. Beneath it remains the same: a doctrine that reduces democracy to heresy, that tolerates pluralism only as a recruitment tool, that smiles while it sharpens the knife.

And yes — the hunger for values is real. Our young women, who voted for Shibir’s panel, did not endorse its theology. They rejected the filth and violence of campus politics under Awami League and BNP. They cast a desperate vote for something cleaner, even if it meant embracing danger. It was not loyalty — it was escape.

But history teaches us that this is how theocracy enters: first term, hybrid, cautious, playing the game; second term, the mask falls away. Ask Iran. Ask Afghanistan. Ask Pakistan.

Bangladesh’s journey now turns on this choice. Will we see Jamaat evolve into a true ideological party of the people — unlikely, given its inner culture of superiority, of slander, of silencing women — or will we watch the theo-democratic trap spring shut?

The irony is almost unbearable. A party that once spat on democracy as ‘man-made’ now uses its vocabulary to demand proportional representation, to delay elections, to posture as guardian of the people’s will. What it seeks is not democracy, but its shell — an empty husk to be filled with Sharia.

This is why I write with unease. Because the future may not be fascism as we knew it, but something harder to fight: a democracy that votes itself into chains. A democracy where dissent is sacrilege, where opposition is blasphemy, where to resist is to be cast as enemy of God.

And once that door closes, it will not reopen easily.

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The first precedent: Lahore, 1953

IT BEGAN, as so many tragedies in South Asia do, with a mob and a slogan. Lahore, 1953. The demand was simple, brutal and sectarian: that Ahmadis be declared non-Muslims, that Sir Zafarullah Khan, the brilliant jurist and Pakistan’s first foreign minister, be stripped of office for his faith. Behind the demand stood Jamaat-e-Islami and its allied clerical networks.

What began as agitation metastasized into violence. Streets filled with fury, mosques turned into rallying points, and by the time the blood was washed from Lahore’s alleyways, the civilian government had collapsed in both will and authority. Prime minister Khawaja Nazimuddin — an eastern Bengali already eyed with suspicion by the Punjabi establishment — watched as order slipped from his hands.

For the first time in Pakistan’s short and turbulent history, martial law was declared in a city. General Azam Khan marched in not as a servant of the state but as its new arbiter. The precedent was set: the uniform would step into the political vacuum whenever clerical zeal met civilian weakness. Weeks later, Nazimuddin was dismissed by Governor-General Ghulam Muhammad. The constitutional fig leaf was that he had ‘failed to control the crisis.’ The truth was uglier: a Bengali civilian prime minister had been sacrificed, his dismissal marking the beginning of a military-bureaucratic axis that would dominate Pakistan.

Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, another Bengali, would meet a similar fate. His attempts to navigate Pakistan’s fractured polity ended with his ouster in 1957, his independence and Bengali roots once again threatening the entrenched West Pakistani establishment. It was not democracy that triumphed in these years, but the collusion of unelected powers — bureaucrats, generals and religious agitators — each reinforcing the other’s authority at the expense of elected civilians.

By 1958, the mask had slipped entirely. General Ayub Khan, who had cut his teeth managing crises stoked by clerical agitation, seized power in the first outright coup. And who lent him the moral gloss, the street-level justification? Jamaat-e-Islami. The same party that had denounced democracy as a ‘man-made heresy’ now lent its networks to Ayub’s dictatorship when it suited its survival.

This was the poison chalice Jamaat offered Pakistan: mobilisation in the name of God, instability in the name of purity, and then acquiescence to the boot when the army marched in. The Lahore riots of 1953 were not a side note in history. They were the original sin — the moment when Pakistan’s political compact was broken, when the idea of civilian supremacy was betrayed, and when Jamaat opened the gates through which the army would stride, never to leave.

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1971: the betrayal etched in blood

THE Liberation War was not only a battle for territory; it was a struggle for the right of a people to exist on their own terms. The Pakistan army met that cry for freedom with an assault so merciless it bled into the soil itself — villages burned, women brutalised, and the country’s intellectual vanguard methodically erased.

Into this darkness stepped auxiliaries drawn from Jamaat’s student and political networks — Al-Badr and Al-Shams. They were not the official party in council chambers, but men steeped in its discipline and ideology. Their role was chillingly precise: compile the names, identify the dissidents, point the way for soldiers who pulled the trigger. When Dhaka’s professors, writers and students vanished in December, the guns were Pakistani, but the guides were local. The collaboration stripped Jamaat of any moral standing in the republic that emerged. To the survivors, distinction between party and affiliate was irrelevant; betrayal bore only one name.

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The post-war survival game

THE surrender of Pakistan in December 1971 should have been the end of Jamaat. Its name had become synonymous with collaboration and atrocity. Yet, like a shadow that lingers after the body is gone, the party found ways to survive. Banned in the new republic, it slipped underground, its cadres burrowed into institutions, its rhetoric repackaged to feign political legitimacy.

Survival, not repentance, defined the years that followed. Its leaders did not seek forgiveness for the atrocities of 1971, nor did they make amends with the families of the dead. Instead, Jamaat waited — for weakness in the state, for cracks in the political order, for the inevitable return of authoritarian rule.

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The unholy bargain

THE generals, as they always do, came not to serve the people but to consume them. When Hussain Muhammad Ershad seized power in the 1980s, his martial regime was a testament to moral decay, a government born of political putrefaction. It was a regime without a soul, and it came searching for a moral façade, a spiritual anointing to sanctify its reign of terror.

And there, waiting in the shadows of its own past, was Jamaat-e-Islami. A party whose hands were still stained with the blood of 1971, a party that had chosen collaboration over compassion, the bayonet over the ballot. Its name was a byword for treachery, and yet, in this hollowed-out landscape, it saw an opportunity not for redemption, but for power.

Their unholy bargain was struck in plain sight. Jamaat, a group still reeling from its complicity in genocide, offered a cloak of religious piety to a usurper, a sacred endorsement for a secular sin. It was a Faustian deal, an exchange of legitimacy for a place at the table of power. In lending its support to Ershad’s military dictatorship, Jamaat did more than just survive; it helped entrench a system of oppression, hammering another nail into the coffin of Bangladesh’s fragile democracy. It could have chosen to stand with the people, to atone for its past by nurturing the nascent democratic spirit. Instead, it chose the familiar embrace of the powerful, placing expedience above all else.

This calculated charade held fast until it was no longer politically useful. When the rigged 1986 elections failed to deliver Jamaat the political spoils it craved — when Ershad’s regime spurned them and elevated the Awami League as the primary opposition — the grand bargain collapsed. Only then, when they had been discarded by the very power they had so eagerly served, did they turn to the streets they had once betrayed. Suddenly, they rediscovered the virtues of the ballot, joining the people’s row not out of a moral awakening, but out of a desperate, cynical need for survival.

By the time Ershad’s reign came to its inevitable, violent end in 1990, Jamaat’s legacy was sealed. Their story is not one of faith or of principle. It is a chronicle of profound betrayal — a long, brutal surrender of moral authority. They aligned themselves first with the killers of 1971, and then with the uniformed usurper of the 1980s. Each time, their actions revealed not conviction, but the cold, calculating ambition of a party willing to trade a nation’s soul for a moment of political power.

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The pattern repeats: agitation, weakening, intervention

WHETHER in Lahore in 1953 or Dhaka in the 1980s, Jamaat’s political method has followed a familiar, almost ritualistic cycle:

Agitation — mobilising the streets through theological, moral or ideological claims, a theatre of righteousness that masks raw ambition.

Destabilisation — exploiting already fragile civilian governments, exposing weaknesses, amplifying cracks, ensuring no political authority can stand without compromise.

Intervention — allowing, even inviting, military or bureaucratic actors to step in as arbiters, the ultimate guarantors of order in the chaos they themselves helped orchestrate.

But the story does not stop there. In the decades since, Jamaat has perfected the swing — the art of appearing flexible while keeping its core agenda intact. It has unsettled both BNP and Awami League governments, supporting the opposition when it suited survival, undermining political legitimacy while preserving its own. It lent moral and organisational support to the infamous 1/11 military-backed government, simultaneously using every platform to disparage politicians’ character and inflate its own credentials.

In Dhaka, it took shelter within the very organisations it once opposed. Chatra League’s corridors of influence became a cover, its victories rebranded as the triumph of Jamaat networks. July Revolution’s successes were claimed as their own, social media flooded with curated praise, while dissenters — especially BNP activists — were vilified and silenced. Its cadre quietly entered bureaucracies, universities and other positions of power, creating a lattice of influence invisible to the casual observer but suffocating to opponents. Even allies, like the National Citizens Party, were abandoned when expedience demanded it.

The pattern is unmistakable. Each cycle — agitate, destabilise, intervene — is now augmented by modern tools: propaganda, social media, the subtle insertion of loyalists in state and educational institutions. The result remains eerily consistent: democracy weakened, unelected power fortified, and a political landscape reshaped to favour those who operate in the shadows while masquerading as reformers.

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Proportional representation: the sweet sound of deceit

AH, ‘PROPORTIONAL Representation.’ The language of fairness is, of course, the most effective camouflage for a deeper game. This demand, whispered into the ears of a wounded nation in the midst of a fragile transition, is not a bid for democratic reform. It is a calculated, strategic act of delay. A lullaby meant to put the nation to sleep just long enough for the networks to consolidate, for the ties with generals to be nurtured, and for the universities to be turned into fertile ground for recruitment.

Every postponement, every administrative tangle, serves a purpose. It strengthens their hand, allowing them to reposition their pieces on the national chessboard. Proportional representation, then, is not about the grand idea of equal representation; it’s about holding a fragile system hostage until the conditions are perfectly tilted in their favour. It is a siege, a war of attrition waged with the bland-sounding language of electoral reform.

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A national rehearsal on campus

THE 2025 DUCSU elections were not a student contest. They were a national dress rehearsal, a stage where the future was being tested in miniature. The victory — nine out of twelve posts — was a performance of breathtaking audacity. They paraded a ‘hijab-free girl’ and a ‘non-Muslim,’ carefully placed flowers in a graveyard, a theatrical display of pluralism to paint over the same unyielding ideological core.

The internet, that great amplifier of lies, turned it into a spectacle. The old, worn-out rivals — the Awami League and the BNP — were publicly eviscerated and cast as villains, their every misstep magnified, while Jamaat positioned itself as the sole authentic voice of generational change. It was a clear strategy: capture the imagination of the youth, project legitimacy online, and then transfer that manufactured energy onto the national political stage.

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The digital echo chamber

AND now, the information war has its own minstrels, its own digital jesters. The Pinaki-Elias-Kanak trio — a new cadre of YouTubers who don’t just report the news, they sculpt it. Pinaki frames history to fit a political agenda; Elias packages raw emotion into consumable commentary; and Kanak weaves ideological threads into the fabric of everyday anxieties. Together, they have built a hall of mirrors, an echo chamber where every whisper becomes a roar, every lie a truth repeated until it becomes a common memory.

Their role is not commentary; it is mobilisation. They turn every fissure within the opposition into a moral justification for their own approach, transforming political victories into moral spectacles and opponents into monsters. It’s a digital war designed to soften the ground, to make the quiet hollowing out of institutions feel less like a betrayal and more like an inevitable outcome.

This is not an isolated plot; it’s a choreography of quiet, systemic decay. The aim is not to dismantle democracy outright but to manage it — to delay elections, embed loyalists and ensure the system operates within boundaries favourable to those who pull the strings. The result is a political order that wears the mask of pluralism while concentrating all real influence in the hands of unelected guardians and ideologically committed networks.

So, we are left with a stark question. Will these new instruments of change — proportional representation and student politics — broaden democracy, or will they serve as the tools of its slow, insidious suffocation?

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Theo-democracy and the ethical reckoning

ACROSS the shifting landscapes of the Global South, a quiet but profound tension unfolds — one that demands more than political analysis; it demands ethical reflection, spiritual vigilance and the courage to interrogate power. Movements that once spoke in rigid ideological tongues are now softening their rhetoric, staging gestures of inclusivity, and promising reform. Bangladesh is no exception. Yet the question persists: is this transformation genuine, or merely strategic?

The hunger for values is undeniable. Decades of secular governance have delivered corruption, hollow promises, and a mimicry of material progress without moral substance. In this vacuum, movements that speak of discipline, honesty and service — when enacted, not just proclaimed — resonate deeply with the disillusioned. It is not theology alone that calls; it is the craving for trust, dignity and meaningful engagement.

Yet the theo-democratic dilemma is inescapable. When faith-based movements engage democratic processes while holding fast to the belief that divine authority ultimately supersedes human law, democracy becomes instrumental rather than principled. Participation is tolerated only as a means to an end. This is not a tactical flaw; it is a theological one. Can a movement that treats democracy as provisional ever truly honour pluralism, freedom of conscience, or individual rights?

Proportional representation, in this context, is instructive. For Jamaat-Shibir, PR is not merely a reform measure; it is a calculated route to maintain influence, to secure footholds in power, and to bypass the arduous work of earning consent from the majority. The veneer of inclusion — a hijab-free candidate, outreach to broader publics — is tactical brilliance, but it cannot cleanse the inner culture of an organisation that still regards critics as deviants, opponents as heretics. True reform demands introspection, accountability and an embrace of institutional limits. Without this, faith remains a cloak for ambition rather than a guide for justice.

The stakes are moral as much as political. Delaying elections, manipulating narratives, or relying on bureaucratic influence is not just strategy — it is a transgression against the people a party claims to serve. Ethical religious life requires negotiation, reason and compassionate engagement with human complexity. When strategy overtakes principle, piety becomes a weapon, and democracy a façade.

Bangladesh now stands at a threshold. The long shadow stretching from Lahore in 1953 to Dhaka in 2025 is a reminder: history does not merely repeat; it whispers warnings. Will the light of constitutionalism and collective responsibility finally prevail, allowing faith and ethics to guide political action? Or will the cycle of delay, disruption and the instrumentalization of democracy persist, turning piety into a tool for control rather than a compass for justice?

The measure of a society — and of those who seek to lead it — lies not in the purity of their ideals, but in their willingness to be accountable, to face critique, and to submit power to the higher standards of conscience and law. This is the true challenge of theo-democracy: not merely to win elections, but to harmonise faith with freedom, conviction with compassion, and ideology with the demands of justice.

History whispers to those who listen: power borrowed from faith is fragile, and democracy, though imperfect, is sacred. To the citizens, let vigilance be your prayer, and accountability your compass; to those who claim to lead in the name of God, let conscience temper ambition, and justice shape every decision. The measure of any movement is not in slogans or victories, but in the courage to serve rather than dominate, to embrace pluralism as truth and not tactic, and to submit even sacred ideals to the scrutiny of law, reason and human dignity. Shadows of delay, manipulation and the instrumentalization of belief may fall long, but courage, reflection and ethical rigor can shorten them — and in that light, the soul of a nation is revealed, and the promise of freedom endures.

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Abdul Monaiem Kudrot Ullah, a retired captain of the Bangladesh navy, is an informed voice on institutional reform, geo-strategy, strategic governance and supply chain management.