The National Citizens’ Party (NCP) of Bangladesh, which grabbed headlines in 2024 as part of the worldwide “Gen Z” youth movement against corrupt dynasties, is facing a revolt from many of its members after announcing a political alliance with the Islamic supremacist Jamaat-e-Islami party.
The first rumblings of the Gen Z movement – so named because its leaders tended to be students born around the turn of the millennium – were heard in Sri Lanka in 2022, when socialist President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his parasitic family were ousted by massive protests against corruption and authoritarian rule. His successor Ranil Wickremesinghe was not much of an improvement, so another protest wave bounced him out of office in 2024.
Each subsequent protest movement in the Gen Z wave saluted the previous successful demonstrators as inspirations, and they borrowed slogans and organizing tactics from each other. Eventually they embraced a common symbol — a skull-and-crossbones pirate flag with a straw hat, borrowed from the popular Japanese manga and animated series “One Piece.”
A common thread between the protests was that Internet-savvy young people were tired of being misgoverned and looted by corrupt parties and dynasties that seemed to hold power forever, no matter how badly they failed their people.
In Bangladesh, a youth-driven protest movement drove 76-year-old Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina from office in August 2024 after 15 years in power. The protests turned violent, and so was the response from government forces. The United Nations human rights office estimated that up to 1,400 people were killed over the span of three weeks in the summer of 2024.
Like other Gen Z targets, Hasina was part of a political dynasty, as she was the daughter of the first leader of independent Bangladesh. The young protesters expressed frustration that loyalty to her family name and political legend kept her in office long past her sell-by date.
The specific issue that triggered the Bangladesh protests was a quote system for government jobs that was designed to reward the “freedom fighters” who fought for independence from Pakistan in the 1970s. The quota system was still showing the children and grandchildren of the “freedom fighters” with privileges, decades after the revolution, and protesters accused Hasina of further rigging the decrepit system to reward her political allies.
In February 2025, the leaders of the victorious student movement decided to form a permanent political party and compete in the next elections, which are currently scheduled for February 2026. The youth group called itself Students Against Discrimination during the anti-Hasina protests, but it christened its new party “Jatiya Nagorik,” or the National Citizens’ Party (NCP).
“We will keep Bangladesh and the interest of its citizens in mind and join hands to build a new nation,” vowed the inaugural leader of the party, former student activist Nahid Islam.
On Sunday, Nahid Islam announced that NPC was forming an alliance with Jamaat-e-Islami (the “Islamic Society”), a hardline Islamist group with ties to terrorist organizations and the Muslim Brotherhood.
“The dictatorship we overthrew is attempting to sabotage the election. Therefore, for the sake of greater unity, we have reached an electoral understanding with Jamaat,” he said.
Jamaat-e-Islami (often known as simply “Jamaat”) actually began in India in the 1940s, with the goal of converting India into an Islamic caliphate. The vast number of Hindus living in India had little interest in this goal, so Jamaat relocated to Pakistan, tried and failed to build a hardline Islamic caliphate there, and went along for the ride when East Pakistan fought a brutal war of liberation to become Bangladesh in 1971.
Jamaat was strongly opposed to the formation of Bangladesh, because it wanted all of Pakistan (and eventually India) to be united as a single Islamic kingdom. Jamaat committed mass atrocities during the war of 1971, including a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Bengali independence activists that has been described as genocidal. The leader of Jamaat, Islamic scholar Ghulam Azam, was convicted of crimes against humanity in Bangladesh in 2013 and sentenced to 90 years in prison. He died in jail in October 2014.
Many people in Bangladesh today – particularly members of the Awami League, Sheikh Hasina’s now-outlawed political party – consider Jamaat leaders to be war criminals, and believe the Islamist party will mount another genocidal campaign if it regains power. Some outside observers share these concerns, fearing the possibility of mob violence against Hindus and Muslims from minority groups. A Hindu man was lynched and burned by an angry mob of Bangladeshi Muslims last week.
Jamaat staged a political comeback after Sheikh Hasina was ousted, reinventing itself as a more moderate, reform-minded “anti-fascist” party – and peddling a revised history of the 1971 Liberation War that whitewashes Jamaat’s atrocities. In July, the Supreme Court of Bangladesh reversed a decade-old ban on Jamaat-e-Islami and allowed it to run candidates in the next election.
Several high-ranking members of NCP quit the party immediately after Islam announced the alliance with Jamaat, including Tasnim Jara, a young physician and social media influencer who set aside her career in the United Kingdom to move back to Bangladesh and become a senior NCP leader.
Jara not only quit NCP over the Islamist alliance, but said she would run against NCP’s candidate as an independent from her district in the capital city of Dhaka.
“My dream was to go to parliament from the platform of a political party and serve the people of my area and the country. However, due to practical circumstances, I have decided not to participate in the election as a candidate of any specific party or alliance,” she said in a Facebook post.
Disillusioned NCP supporters began following Jara and other leaders to the exits over the weekend, lamenting the party’s loss of moral authority by allying with Jamaat.
“The NCP presented itself as a youth-driven alternative to traditional power structures. That identity is now under serious strain. Youth-based movements do not collapse only because they lose elections. They collapse when they lose clarity and internal unity,” researcher H.M. Nazmul Alam told Reuters on Monday.
“If you go with Jamaat, it will help Jamaat, not you. It will give them a liberal cover, and in return, you will become a force for the right. Your centrist idea and ideology – already poorly defined – will simply vanish,” warned political analyst Asif Shahan.
On the other hand, polls show NCP running in third with 6% support to Jamaat’s 26 percent, and the two combined might be able to beat the leading Bangladesh National Party (BNP), which sits at 30 percent. The Awami League was the largest party in Bangladesh before it was banned following Hasina’s ouster.