Jamaat-e-Islami’s stunning leap from 18 seats to 68 in a single election is more than an electoral upset. It is a structural warning that Bangladesh’s secular compact is under the most serious pressure it has faced since independence.
Bangladesh has always been a country that prays hard and votes pragmatically. For most of its fifty-five-year history, the ballot box has been a contest between two comparatively secular dynasties, not a referendum on faith. That understanding has now been shaken to its foundations.
On 12 February 2026, the 13th general election delivered a result that no political analyst had fully anticipated in its scale. Jamaat-e-Islami, the country’s most organized Islamist party, won 68 seats, a record that shatters its previous best of 18. Its 11-party Islamist alliance collectively secured 77 of the 300 parliamentary seats. In terms of vote share, Jamaat crossed 32 percent nationally, compared to a ceiling that had never breached 12 percent in the party’s history since 1941. Bangladesh has, in one election, produced its first Islamist opposition bloc.
The BNP-led alliance won 212 seats and will form the government. The Awami League, banned after the July 2024 uprising that ousted Sheikh Hasina, was absent from the field entirely. That absence created a vacuum which Jamaat filled with extraordinary efficiency. But to call this merely an opportunistic gain would be to miss the deeper and more dangerous story.
A DECADE OF GROUNDWORK, ONE YEAR OF REVOLUTION
Jamaat did not win 68 seats in one night. It won them over years of quiet, patient institution-building. While the Awami League ruled with an iron fist and BNP oscillated between street agitation and internal crisis, Jamaat was doing something more methodical: it was capturing the educational ecosystem.
Bangladesh has millions of madrasa students. Over the past decade, a significant number of madrasa graduates have gained admission to public universities. Following the fall of Sheikh Hasina’s government in August 2024, Jamaat-e-Islami’s student wing, Islami Chhatra Shibir, took control of several public university campuses. Islami Chhatra Shibir swept student union elections at five prestigious universities in the months that followed, although critics have questioned whether those elections were conducted freely or whether the post-uprising atmosphere gave Shibir an undue advantage. Either way, its expanded presence on university campuses is now an established fact.
Jamaat also did something historically unthinkable. It brought in figures associated with the 1971 Liberation War, including Oli Ahmed and Major Akhtaruzzaman, into its electoral coalition, seeking to blunt the charge that the party collaborated with Pakistani forces during the genocide. Whether that charge is truly blunted or merely papered over is another matter, but the political optics were crafted with unusual sophistication for a party long accused of living in the past.
WHY THE NATION MUST NOT MISTAKE THIS FOR NORMALCY
Let us be direct. The rise of political Islam in Bangladesh is not simply a rotation of power. It is a structural transformation of the country’s political identity, and it carries serious risks that deserve honest examination rather than diplomatic circumspection.
Jamaat-e-Islami fielded not a single woman candidate in this election. Its Ameer, Shafiqur Rahman, has publicly stated that no woman can head the party. For a country where women’s participation in the workforce and political life has been one of the few genuine success stories of the development decades, a country that has had women prime ministers on and off for thirty years, this is not a minor ideological quirk. It is a declared intention about the kind of society Jamaat envisions.
Between August 2024 and the election, at least 97 attacks on Sufi Mazars (shrines) were recorded across the country. The dargahs, khanqahs, and mazars that are central to the spiritual life of tens of millions of Bangladeshis were targeted with a frequency that should have prompted alarm. The Muhammad Yunus-led interim government’s response was widely seen as inadequate. Jamaat, whose doctrinal tradition is deeply hostile to shrine culture and saint veneration, cannot be absolved of the political atmosphere that made such attacks possible.
Outside parliament, the Islamists are also powerful. The combined weight of Islamist forces inside and outside the legislature constitutes a pressure network that no government in Dhaka can simply ignore.
Hefazat e Islam, which does not contest elections but commands an enormous street level following among madrasa students and conservative clergy, has grown more assertive. Islami Andolan Bangladesh, which won one seat, represents yet another strand of organized religious conservatism. The combined weight of these forces, inside and outside the legislature, constitutes an Islamist pressure network that no government in Dhaka can simply ignore.
THE FRACTURES WITHIN
It would be a mistake, however, to treat political Islam in Bangladesh as a monolith. The 32 percent vote share that Jamaat secured is striking, but it also tells us something important. The Islamist vote bank is fragmented. Jamaat, Islami Andolan, and Hefazat e Islam do not sing from the same hymn sheet. Theological disputes, organisational rivalries, and questions of leadership succession divide them in ways that occasionally erupt into open hostility.
Moreover, Bangladesh’s rural heartland remains deeply rooted in Baul traditions, syncretic folk Islam, and Sufi devotion. The village woman who touches the grave of a pir with her prayer is not going to be easily converted to Jamaat’s Saudi inflected reformism. Liberal urban voters, worried about the trajectory of the country, largely held their noses and voted BNP as the less threatening alternative. These structural limits on Jamaat’s expansion are real.
But structural limits are not permanent guarantees. The limits on Jamaat’s growth in 2026 can erode if the BNP government fails to deliver on economic promises, if corruption returns at scale, or if a new political crisis creates another opening for the Islamist bloc to present itself as the clean alternative.
THE TEST THAT LIES AHEAD
Jamaat’s Ameer has spoken of doing “positive politics” in opposition. That is a phrase worth holding against the record. An opposition that uses its 77 seats to scrutinize the BNP government, hold it accountable on economic mismanagement, judicial appointments, and anti-corruption measures, that is a legitimate democratic function, and Bangladesh’s parliament needs robust opposition voices.
But if the Islamist bloc uses its institutional foothold to push for blasphemy laws, to restrict women’s rights, to deepen pressure on minorities already living in fear, or to tolerate the extra-parliamentary activities of groups like Hefazat, then the 77-seat tally in 2026 will look, in retrospect, like the beginning of a very long and painful journey for this republic.
Bangladesh was born out of a liberation war fought partly against the forces of religious nationalism. The country’s founding documents spoke of secularism as a foundational principle. That principle has been amended, diluted, and debated over fifty years. It now faces its most serious electoral challenge yet.
The danger ahead for Bangladesh is not that Jamaat will immediately turn the country into a theocracy. The danger is slower and more insidious: a steady normalization of religious conservatism in law, in public space, in education, and in political discourse, until the Bangladesh of Sheikh Mujib’s vision is unrecognizable, not through revolution, but through incremental erosion.
Bangladesh has a long and rich culture of secular movement. It is a country that was born from a historical language movement, a struggle that placed mother tongue and cultural identity above religious solidarity. Bangladesh is not Iran, not Pakistan, not Afghanistan. It is a nation with its own distinct democratic and pluralist inheritance, and that inheritance is worth defending.
History has a habit of moving faster than observers expect. Bangladesh should not wait until the damage is irreversible to ask the hard questions. The 13th election is a warning. The question is whether the country is willing to read it as such.
Parvez Hashem, Lawyer and Human Rights Defender.
