Dhaka:
Ousted Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina's Awami League should not be allowed to contest elections, a key adviser to the interim government of Muhammad Yunus said on Saturday.
“The elections will be contested only among pro-Engladesh groups,” said Mahfuz Alam, a top leader of the anti-discrimination movement, which led the mass uprising that toppled Hasina's Awami League regime and pushed her to take the country to 5 August to flight year.
Addressing a street rally in the central Chandpur district, Alam said only former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia's Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), Jamaat-E-Islam and other groups of “pro-Bangladesh” groups would continue their politics in the country. He added that any of these will “establish future governance through a fair electoral process.”
“But the rehabilitation of the Awami League will not be allowed in this country,” said Alam, a de facto minister without portfolio in the government of chief adviser Yunus.
Mahfuz Alam stated that no election would take place until “minimal reforms” were implemented and institutions, allegedly destroyed by the “fascist Hasina government”, were restructured.
Initially appointed by Yunus as a special assistant in his government, Alam later served as an advisor in his interim cabinet. At a function on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly last year, Yunus introduced Alam as the “mastermind” behind the “carefully” designed student-led movement that toppled the previous regime.
The Awami League has been virtually out of the open political landscape since August 5, 2024, with most of its leaders and Hasina's cabinet members in jail and other criminal charges or on the run at home and abroad.
Earlier, the BNP said it was against banning any political party, which visibly weighed its support for the existence of the Archrival Awami League in the political sphere. It demanded elections in the soonest possible time after minimal reforms, calling it a continued process.
BNP Secretary General Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir recently said that the interim government's reform agenda could last 10 years and that an unelected government should no longer continue.
Amid speculation about the formation of a youth-led new political party by the student leaders, BNP said the interim government would lose credibility if the government's numbers put a party in power.
Meanwhile, local government and youth and sports advisor Asif Mahmud Sajeeb Bhuiyan, another leader of the anti-discrimination movement, said in a Facebook post on Saturday: “There will be efforts or debates on who is more advanced in the welfare of people”.
Information Affairs Advisor Nahid Islam, another student leader said that if the government advisors would be required to resign from their positions to form the party and contest the future elections.
Last month, Yunus said the country's next general election could take place in late 2025 or the first half of 2026. However, he had said the timing of the election would largely depend on the political consensus and the extent of reforms required for it.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Our staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)