Bangladesh lifts ban on Jamaat-e-Islami

DHAKA: Bangladesh’s new authorities on Wednesday lifted a ban on the country’s largest Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, imposed in the final days of the rule of now ousted ruler Sheikh Hasina.

“The government… has cancelled the previous order of August 1, 2024, that banned Bangladesh’s Jamaat e Islami”, the order read. “It will come into effect immediately.”

Jamaat-e-Islami, which has millions of supporters, was banned from contesting polls in 2013 after high court judges ruled its charter violated the secular constitution of the Muslim-majority nation of 170 million people.

Jamaat was also barred from participating in elections in 2014, 2018 and again in January this year, when 76-year-old Hasina won her fifth term in widely discredited polls without a credible opposition.

Hasina’s government then banned the party outright under an anti-terrorism act on August 1, just four days before she was ousted from power after weeks of student-led protests, fleeing to India by helicopter.

The government order said it had lifted the ban, including on the party’s student wing Islami Chhatra Shibir, because there was “no specific evidence of involvement with terrorism and violence”.

Jamaat is one of the country’s main political parties, along with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party.

It is unclear what strength Hasina’s once all-powerful party, the Awami League, still holds.