Bangladesh’s Supreme Court decision in June 2025 to restore Jamaat-e-Islami’s registration was hailed as a victory for pluralism, but in practice, it risks opening the gates for organised, institutionally enabled persecution of minorities under the cover of electoral democracy.
Judicial Reversal in Dhaka
On 1 June 2025, the Appellate Division of Bangladesh’s Supreme Court ordered the Election Commission to reinstate Jamaat-e-Islami’s party registration, overturning a decade-old bar that had kept the organisation formally out of electoral politics. This came days after the same court had acquitted senior Jamaat leader ATM Azharul Islam on May 27, 2025, overturning a 2014 death sentence for crimes against humanity during the 1971 Liberation War — signalling a wider judicial re-evaluation of the war crimes process.
The legal shift followed the ouster of Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League government in August 2024 through a student-led uprising, after which a Muhammad Yunus-led interim administration promised fresh elections and a “reset” of the political order. The interim government had already lifted the administrative ban on Jamaat in August 2024, arguing that there was insufficient evidence to link the party directly to terrorism and violence and framing the previous proscription as politically motivated. Together, these moves re-cast Jamaat not as a collaborator-turned-pariah but as a legitimate stakeholder in the post-Hasina transition.
From Ban to Ballot
The irony is stark: in 2013 the High Court had declared Jamaat’s registration illegal because its charter contradicted Bangladesh’s secular constitution and that it had opposed independence in 1971, leading the Election Commission to cancel its registration formally in December 2018. The party and its student wing Islami Chhatra Shibir had long been criticised for links to extremist networks and for their role in wartime atrocities, which had justified their marginalisation in the eyes of many Bangladeshis.
The consequences were visible in the February 12, 2026 elections, where Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh emerged as the second largest party in the Jatiya Sangsad, winning 68 of 297 declared seats with 31.76 per cent of the vote — according to Election Commission data — while its alliance partners within the Jamaat-led 11-party bloc added nine more seats, bringing the alliance total to 77. This was a dramatic leap from its earlier peak of 18 seats and 12.13 per cent vote share in 1991, firmly establishing it as a national-level force rather than a peripheral Islamist adjunct. Its resurgence was underpinned by organisational discipline, effective mobilisation in conservative constituencies, and a carefully crafted narrative blending welfare politics with religious identity.
Street Revolt and Islamist Leverage
The structural danger lies in how Jamaat and allied Islamist groups leveraged the 2024–25 internal revolt against Hasina to expand their street power. While the initial protests were student-driven and focused on police brutality and economic distress, groups such as Jamaat-e-Islami, Islami Chhatra Shibir and Hefazat-e-Islam quickly joined, adding organisational muscle and ideological sharpness to the agitation. Analyses of the transition period suggest that these actors “hijacked” parts of the movement, continuing violent campaigns even after Hasina fled and the interim government took over, thereby normalising Islamist vigilantism in the streets. Partial data compiled by security watchers show hundreds of injuries in 2025–26 from clashes involving Jamaat, its student wing and rival party cadres, underscoring how electoral re-entry has gone hand in hand with street-level confrontation.
Minorities in the Crosshairs
The most alarming trend for India and the wider region is the pattern of attacks on religious minorities — particularly Hindus — as well as on individuals perceived to be aligned with the former regime or with secular politics. Reports from the 18 months between Hasina’s fall and the 2026 polls describe targeted violence by Jamaat, Islami Chhatra Shibir and other Islamist outfits against minority communities, ideological rivals and activists, often in localities where state authority was thin or complicit. Civil society submissions to international bodies had already warned that religious freedom in Bangladesh was deteriorating, with minorities facing intimidation, land grabs and mob attacks long before Jamaat’s formal return. The party’s new electoral strength risks giving a veneer of democratic legitimacy to networks that have repeatedly used mass mobilisation and religious rhetoric to police social behaviour and intimidate vulnerable groups.
Institutions as Enablers
What makes the present moment particularly fraught is that the institutional guardrails meant to protect a plural republic are themselves now central to Jamaat’s rehabilitation. The Supreme Court framed its decision as a step towards a “democratic, inclusive and multiparty system”, and Jamaat’s lawyers echoed this, arguing that they were simply reclaiming their rightful place in electoral politics. The Election Commission, acting on the court’s direction, promptly reinstated the party’s legal status — and subsequently its traditional electoral symbol — signalling administrative endorsement of its comeback.
Simultaneously, Jamaat’s student wing re-entered campuses with striking results: in September 2025, Islami Chhatra Shibir-backed candidates swept the central university union elections at Dhaka University, winning 23 of 28 DUCSU posts, including vice president and general secretary — the first time the organisation had won DUCSU since 1971. They repeated the feat at Jahangirnagar University days later. Opposition student groups rejected the Dhaka results as rigged and alleged university administration favouritism toward Shibir, and the legitimacy of the results remains contested. Nevertheless, Dhaka University — once viewed as a bastion of secular and inclusive politics — has become a new arena of Islamist ideological contention, with Jamaat-aligned students now holding formal union leadership. When courts, commissions and universities converge, however unintentionally, to normalise a party with a history of wartime collaboration, sectarian violence and anti-secular agitation, they risk turning from neutral arbiters into inadvertent enablers of majoritarian intimidation.
Conclusion
Procedural democracy, on its own, does not inoculate a polity against the rise of extremist forces; it can, in fact, provide them the very institutions they need to entrench themselves. Once parties with sectarian agendas secure court endorsements, election symbols, student unions and parliamentary blocs, they gain both the confidence and the cover to pursue cultural policing and targeted persecution while claiming the mantle of democratic legitimacy.
The lifting of the ban on Jamaat-e-Islami is therefore not merely a Bangladeshi domestic event; it is a cautionary tale of how internal revolt, if not anchored in a robust secular and minority-protective framework, can end by empowering those most hostile to pluralism. The real test for Dhaka now is whether its institutions can still draw a hard line between inclusion and indulgence — between bringing an Islamist party into the legal fold and allowing it to weaponise that legality against those it has historically demonised.
