Opinion The medium and the message of the Dhaka University poll
Through spectacles of triumph, the Jamaat delivers its own brand of political shock therapy, through which it can look bigger than it actually is
What Jamaat wants is to make the next national election a bipolar contest, in which it will refashion itself as the party of the youth and the New against the BNP of the Old. (Reuters, Aug 2024, Dhaka) 
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The recent Dhaka University Central Students’ Union (DUCSU) polls had seen a stunning victory for Jamaat-e-Islami’s male-only student wing, the Bangladeshi Islami Chhatra Shibir, in the first major student elections after the July Uprising. It, of course, raised eyebrows across South Asia. Shashi Tharoor, apparently under the spell of the shock, reckoned it was a sign of things to come, and speculated about a possible Jamaat government next-door; “not because these voters are zealots or Islamist fundamentalists, but because the JeI are not tainted by the corruption and misgovernance associated, rightly or wrongly, with the two mainstream parties”. In a viral Facebook response, Meghmallar Bosu, a losing left-wing candidate who garnered close to 5,000 votes in the DUCSU polls, chastised Tharoor for “inadvertently doing a PR campaign for Jamaat” and interpreted his own performance as a hopeful resistance against “rising Islamofascism”.
Both of them posit a relationship where none might exist: Campus elections don’t map very well to legislative elections, as observed by Shamsad Mortuza, a professor at Dhaka University, in a column in The Daily Star. As such, the DUCSU elections are largely inconsequential in Bangladeshi politics as much as the JNU elections in India. Jamaat, nevertheless, might use its campus politics-based shock therapies to generate an impression of its ascendancy across the country. The reaction of Tharoor and Bosu is exactly what it intends to provoke: The idea that their sites of dominance are actually representative of the entire society.
Forget that metropolitan university students — who tend to be from families that can afford higher education for their kids — are a biased sample of the national population, but they also tend to be fickle-minded. Opinion polls with representative samples repeatedly suggest that the Bangladesh Nationalist Party is set to clinch a majority in the parliamentary elections. But they also report widespread support for Jamaat-e-Islami, which is likely to be the second-largest party, with a significant following among younger voters. It has been clear for a while that the Jamaat can possibly overtake the BNP, especially if they can win over the average not-so-secular Muslim voter of the banned Awami League. There are enough reasons to believe that neither the BNP nor the NCP can win the scramble for the alienated Awami League voter. This is where the true contest lies in Bangladeshi politics.
Those who have been tracing such tendencies wouldn’t be surprised by the Shibir victory in Dhaka University, but it is still an interesting phenomenon. Why does the educated Gen Z — purported to be progressive, outspoken and iconoclastic — fall for Jamaat’s appeal?
Rumspringa, the Amish rite of adolescent freedom, is a ritualised pause from strictness — but its spirit of youthful “running around” is near-universal in modern societies. “If you’re not a socialist in your twenties, you lack a heart”, as the saying goes, “but if you’re still a socialist in your thirties, you lack a brain.” Marxism and Anarchism used to be the rumspringa for elite offspring, before they returned to mainstream politics, like the entire May ‘68 generation. Even JNU produced a long list of leftists who would later join non-communist parties. Adolescent rebellion nowadays often finds expression in campus “wokeism”, where privileged youth revolt against the failings of their elders, from colonialism to racism to corruption.
Campuses, not just in Bangladesh, have become special political zones where the free-floating rumspringa radicals can be recruited for various radical causes championed by formations like JeI. It is a mutually beneficial relationship. The radicals use the established political platforms for embedding and advancing their political projects, and the proprietors of political platforms use the radicals for rebranding themselves and thereby augmenting their political capital.
It is apparent that Jamaat-e-Islami concentrated its resources and energies in winning Dhaka University polls, also in elections in other campuses, by platforming the partyless rumspringa radicals. The JeI could now legitimately propagate that the BNP or the newbie National Citizen Party (NCP) has no monopoly over post-July Uprising politics and the rebellious youth in the country. The JeI’s politics often involves strategies of self-aggrandisement based on being attractive to student radicals: Projection of disproportionate influence, often detached from reality, amongst the masses in Bangladesh is a familiar tactic of Jamaat-e-Islami — one that Islamophobes eagerly amplify and liberals anxiously overreact to. Through spectacles of triumph like that at Dhaka University, Jamaat delivers its own brand of political shock therapy, through which it can look bigger than it actually is.
It is not a small thing to cut the purported leaders of the student-led uprising down to size in the very citadel of student activism in Dhaka, which can help to retrospectively redefine who championed and carried forward the July Uprising. Jamaat now lays claim to the subversive legacy of the July Uprising and the mantle of Bangladesh’s change-seeking youth, further pushing the NCP to the margins ahead of next year’s national election. The NCP’s inexperienced leadership is unlikely to emerge unscathed from the shock of Jamaat’s sudden usurpation of its “natural” youth constituency.
What Jamaat wants is to make the next national election a bipolar contest, in which it will refashion itself as the party of the youth and the New against the BNP of the Old. This is precisely how “partyless” formations like the NCP get subsumed into Jamaat’s cadre-based, ideologically driven platform. Thus, campus election victories, with their profound shock value, have emerged as the medium of rebranding Jamaat into a party that represents youthful change and aspirations. The underlying message is that a transformed Jamaat stands for the dream of the Naya Bangladesh articulated in the anti-Hasina protests.
This shock therapy works only if it jolts Bangladeshi society into believing in Jamaat’s immaculate rise. However, the shock could awaken the BNP, and others too, from the folly of taking Jamaat-e-Islami lightly.
Ramachandran is a research scholar at the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad. Mathew teaches politics and international relations at the School of Liberal Arts and Management Studies, P P Savani University, Surat. His research focuses on democratic forces in transitional polities
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