TARIQUE Rahman, the acting president of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, returned home on December 25, from 17 years of exile in London, which was enforced in September 2008 by the then military-backed unelected regime. Before forcing him and his family to board a London-bound flight, the regime of the day, which had reportedly physically tortured him in custody, also forced him to give an ‘undertaking’ to the effect that he would ‘never’ be involved in politics. Now, after more than a decade and half, Tarique returned to Dhaka to a roaring reception by more than a million people organised by his party. Earlier, the military-backed regime brought the BNP’s political rival Awami League to power through controversial national elections in 2009. The League government of Sheikh Hasina put his mother and chairperson of the Nationalist Party, Khaleda Zia, into jail until the League regime’s ouster from power in the face of a massive mass uprising in August 2024. During Khaleda’s imprisonment, the BNP leadership made Tarique Rahman the acting chairperson of the party, while Tarique, who was implicated in more than 80 cases by the League’s autocratic government, considered the political environment uncongenial for his return to his homeland.
However, on his return to Bangladesh after more than 16 months of Hasina’s ouster and fleeing the country, Tarique in a brief speech called for the unity of the country’s democratic forces to ensure peace, discipline, safety and security of the people ‘at any cost’ and said that he ‘has a plan for this country to get the people’s aspirations met’ in the time to come. He, however, did not disclose his plan yet.
Meanwhile, given the democratic spirit that the millions of people displayed and rendered sacrifices for during the last historic mass uprising that ousted the League’s autocratic government, this is not impossible for a democratically oriented popular leader to effectively work towards the materialisation of the people’s dream, which, in our views, include the establishment of genuine democratic values in society and the state by ensuring equal rights for the citizens irrespective of their political, religious, ethnic and gender identities; the removal of social and economic disparities by actively pursuing egalitarian policies and building as well as strengthening institutions to safeguard the social, political, economic and cultural justice of the people in general.
While we would wait for his ‘plan’ to get revealed and comment on it accordingly, for now, we would say that in order to serve the people the way he has already hinted at, Tarique Rahman has to face many challenges — the most immediate being getting free and fair general elections held — in the days to come, which we would gradually share with our readers in this column. However, the first couple of challenges that he would require to take up is to make sincere efforts to democratise his party from the top to the bottom both politically and organisationally and keep himself away from his party’s sycophants who are visibly active to build a cult around him. The idea of democratising society and the state without a democratic party is simply absurd while the creation of political cult in a party only points to its political bankruptcy. Bangladesh needs a genuinely democratic political party led by a democratically oriented collective leadership.
