Jamaat Joins Call to Stand Against Agreements With India

Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh is planning a mass protest movement against the Awami League’s signed agreements with India.  Claiming that the agreements are bound to diminish Bangladeshi sovereignty, the leader of Jamaat, Maulana Matiur Rahman Nizami claimed that he would persuade Islamic leaders, students and intellectuals that their claims to Bangladesh as citizens would best be met by Jamaat’s platform.   This claim would seem to might have seemed less dishonest were it not also pegged to reinstating the fifth amendment and fighting education reform in Bangladesh.

Even though Maulana Nizami has promised that the grass-roots movement would be coordinated by all 4 members of the BNP led rightist coalition, his own claim to the necessity of standing against the government signed agreements requires an even broader anti-incumbent than the leading BNP party might allow.  For instance, Jamaat is against the education reform promised by the government, principally because the Awami League enacted education reform would also reform–and would likely reduce– government expenditure on madrasas and madrasa education.  Striking out against necessary education reform on the grounds that madrasa education might be badly served strikes me as being an entirely ideological move.  It does not take into consideration that madrasas educate a small fraction of the total number of students enrolled in primary and secondary education in Bangladesh.  What’s more the move doesn’t carry the slightest note of populism; it’s all ideological demagoguery, any time all the time, for these folks.

The claim of populism, of course, belongs to the 4 party coalition.  And in that pretext for one-up manship, the Daily Star reports, Nizami argued India has the upper hand in the deal,

“We are left with no choice but to move against the government.”   Indeed, he claimed, as did Khaleda Zia before him that behind the signed agreements, there stands a secret security deal.  And how did he come to know about a deal that is supposedly a secret?  He claimed that he came to know of the deal from reading about it in a newspaper.  Although, this “secret deal has been sealed between the two governments and, therefore, it is not possible for others to know about it.” 

And just so that we know, Nizami is worried about Bangladesh.  After all, now that an agreement has been signed between the two governments, wouldn’t India use the Chittagong port for militaristic purposes against China if war were to break out between these two regional powers? 

Nizami’s claim beggars the imagination to the possible depths of idiocy that can be plumbed by one who claims to hold the public’s interest in high regard.