In early 2025, a young mother of two toddlers approached us through the National Citizen Party (NCP) diaspora network. She arrived with approximately 32 men. She was the only woman in the group. She was also its leader.
She was crying. Her husband had been detained in the United Arab Emirates for participating in demonstrations during Bangladesh's July uprising. She was desperate to bring him home. The woman travelled repeatedly from Boalkhali, Cox's Bazar, to Dhaka, knocking on doors, seeking assistance and refusing to give up. I doubt she could count how many journeys she made.
We stood beside her and her team. Eventually, her husband returned. But the significance of her story extends beyond a wife's determination to rescue her husband. That young mother subsequently became a local NCP leader. She found her political voice, asserted her independence and established herself in a community far removed from Dhaka's political establishment.
Today, she is considering contesting a local chairman election against established political figures. Is her political agency any less significant than that of Tasnim Jara, Samantha Sharmin or Tasnuva Jabin? Who decides which woman's political journey matters? In many ways, I find her story more compelling than those of the NCP's nationally recognised women leaders.
Yet her struggle, resistance and emergence as a political leader have attracted little attention.
Why?
What makes one woman politically visible while another remains invisible? Who decides whose struggles deserve recognition, whose leadership commands attention and whose story enters the national political narrative?
These questions expose a longstanding paradox in Bangladesh's politics. Women participate, but rarely control decisions. They gain visibility without necessarily securing representation. Parties celebrate symbolic inclusion while substantive empowerment remains elusive.
And political agency is too often confused with media recognition. Add class to this equation, and the contradiction becomes sharper.
Bangladesh's most visible female leaders frequently come from relatively privileged urban backgrounds. From development organisations to academia, women's rights groups to labour advocacy, public leadership is often shaped by women with educational, institutional and social advantages.
Yet the picture changes when we look beyond these established spaces.
Political parties often have a broader grassroots presence of women than universities, development organisations or institutionalised women's rights networks. These women organise communities, mobilise voters, endure political repression and sustain party structures through difficult periods.
But they rarely receive the recognition afforded to their urban counterparts. Their political work is indispensable. Their public visibility is negligible. This raises a more fundamental question: Who gets to define women's political participation, and who decides which forms of leadership deserve recognition?
The difference between visibility and representation matters because the two are not interchangeable. A woman with a substantial media following may possess little organisational influence. Another, virtually unknown outside her constituency, may command considerable local authority.
Yet our political conversation often treats the former as the measure of women's empowerment while overlooking the latter. The more consequential question is where women stand within the decision-making structures of Bangladesh's political parties.
And how does the NCP, a relatively new organisation, compare with its established rivals? Available figures from central party committees offer a useful, if imperfect, comparison. The figures reveal two realities.
First, women's representation remains limited across much of Bangladesh's party system. The NCP's 9.7% is particularly low, but the problem extends well beyond one party.
Second, the public scrutiny applied to this problem appears uneven. Are we satisfied with women's representation in any of these organisations? And does the media apply the same standards to every party? Or has the NCP, precisely because it is new and its internal disputes attract attention, become a disproportionate focus of this particular debate?
These are not arguments against scrutinising the NCP. They are arguments for scrutinising everyone. The question becomes more pressing when we examine the selection of women for reserved parliamentary seats. The BNP faced criticism over allegations that grassroots women, many of whom had sustained the party through years of political repression, were overlooked.
Critics argued that comparatively privileged candidates, including women from influential political families and established urban networks, received preference. The controversy exposed the intersection of class, political inheritance and access to institutional power. But did these exclusions receive the same sustained media attention as the departures of prominent women from the NCP?
Were the sacrifices of grassroots BNP women examined with comparable intensity? A serious discussion about representation must scrutinise those who hold state power as rigorously as those who aspire to it. Otherwise, political entertainment risks replacing the examination of power.
The departure of several talented women from the NCP is deeply regrettable. Their decisions deserve reflection. But these developments must also be understood within the institutional and cultural difficulties of building a democratic political organisation.
A central disagreement concerned the NCP's decision to form an electoral alliance with Jamaat-e-Islami. The proposal was discussed across multiple party forums before being put through a written consent process. According to the figures presented within the party, 30 executive members formally opposed the alliance, while 120 supported it, including several women.
The division was real. So was the decision-making process. This raises a difficult question: What does internal party democracy require? Democracy cannot mean that every individual preference must prevail. It requires debate, disagreement, negotiation and, ultimately, collective decisions.
Political organisations must accommodate competing views. Their members must also recognise that participation in a democratic process does not guarantee their preferred outcome. A leader's political convictions may be sincere and strongly held. But those convictions must coexist with the collective judgment of an organisation.
That requires compromise, patience and political maturity. It also requires intellectual humility: the recognition that one's own position, however persuasive, may not command majority support. Yet majority rule alone is not sufficient to establish a democratic culture. The process must also protect dissent, ensure meaningful participation and allow minorities to challenge decisions without intimidation or exclusion.
The NCP must therefore answer two questions.
Was the alliance decision reached through a fair and inclusive process? And were those who opposed it given genuine opportunities to influence the outcome? Equally, those who rejected the alliance must confront a question of their own: Can collective politics survive if every major disagreement becomes grounds for departure?
Political differences are inevitable. The test of an institution is how it manages them.
There is a fundamental difference between building a political identity and building a political institution. The former can be achieved through visibility, public recognition, individual charisma and a compelling personal narrative. The latter requires something considerably harder.
It demands the ability to work with people who disagree, reconcile competing interests, accept collective decisions and sustain organisational relationships beyond individual ambitions. Personal political prominence is not the same as institutional leadership.
Nor does a strong public image necessarily translate into the ability to build a democratic organisation. This distinction becomes especially important for a party born from a mass uprising.
The NCP emerged from a movement that brought together people with different ideological commitments, social backgrounds and political aspirations.
Transforming that diversity into a functioning political institution was always going to be difficult. A party cannot simply reproduce the emotional unity of a protest movement. It must develop rules, structures, accountability and a political culture capable of surviving disagreement.
That means making room for competing ideas without allowing every dispute to become an existential crisis.
It also means recognising that grassroots organisers, including women whose names rarely appear in national headlines, are no less important than the party's most recognisable personalities. The young mother from Boalkhali illustrates precisely this distinction.
She did not begin with a national platform, a prominent professional identity or a carefully cultivated public image. She began with a personal struggle, organised others around a common cause and eventually translated that experience into political leadership.
Her journey deserves recognition, not because it diminishes the contributions of more visible women, but because it broadens our understanding of political agency. Bangladesh's debate over women in politics will remain incomplete as long as it measures empowerment primarily through media visibility and individual prominence.
The real test is whether women, across class and geography, can participate in decisions, influence institutions and exercise political power.
Now, for the NCP, that challenge is inseparable from the task of building a democratic party.
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Dilshana Parul is a leader of NCP