Bangladesh interim government lifts ban on Jamaat-e-Islami

Bangladesh’s new interim government on Wednesday lifted a ban on the country’s largest Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, its student wing Islami Chhatra Shibir and “all associated organisations”.

The ban was imposed in the final days of the rule of now-ousted ruler Sheikh Hasina.

“The government… has cancelled the previous order of August 1, 2024, that banned Bangladesh’s Jamaat e Islami”, the order read. “It will come into effect immediately.”

Jamaat-e-Islami, which has millions of supporters, was banned from contesting polls in 2013 after high court judges ruled its charter violated the secular constitution of the Muslim-majority nation of 170 million people.

Jamaat was also barred from participating in elections in 2014, 2018 and again in January this year, when 76-year-old Hasina won her fifth term in widely discredited polls without a credible opposition.

Hasina’s government then banned the party outright under an anti-terrorism act on August 1, just four days before she was ousted from power after weeks of student-led protests, fleeing to India by helicopter.

The government order said it had lifted the ban, including on the party’s student wing Islami Chhatra Shibir, because there was “no specific evidence of involvement with terrorism and violence”.

Jamaat is one of the country’s main political parties, along with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party.

It is unclear what strength Hasina’s once all-powerful party, the Awami League, still holds.

The lifting of the ban would enable the organisation to participate in the political process of Bangladesh and also participate in the political dialogue for holding the next general election in the country.

The ban against JeI Bangladesh, Shibir and their sister organisations was one of the last actions by the Sheikh Hasina government that fell on 5 August with the flight of Ms Hasina to India.

Ever since, Jamaat-e-Islami has been conducting its activities openly operating from their office in old Dhaka’s Moghbazar neighbourhood.

Earlier in the day, Dr. Rahman met the journalists, and senior editors based in Dhaka and struck a conciliatory tone about the interim government.

“During the years under East Pakistan, our Bangladesh was part of Pakistan, we were discriminated against. We remember the freedom fighters of 1971 who helped us attain freedom. I pay my respects to them,” said the Emir.

The JeI Bangladesh, which was originally an offshoot of the Jamaat-e-Islami established on August 26, 1941, in Lahore, favoured an undivided Pakistan and even campaigned for it after the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War.

In East Pakistan, as Bangladesh was known then, Ghulam Azam spearheaded the Islamic movement. Its leader Ghulam Azam was declared a war criminal and died while serving his prison term.

“Politics will determine the course of our country. We all have tried from our respective positions to address the aspirations of the people.

But I want to say respectfully that so far we did not succeed in addressing those challenges,” said the Dr Rahman urging the media to view the JeI Bangladesh from an “impartial point of view”.

Dr Rahman acknowledged that Bangladesh is multi-religious country saying, “Bangladesh is made of Muslims, Hindu brothers and sisters, Buddhists and Christians and other smaller religious groups. I want to say clearly that we all constitute Bangladesh”.