The National Citizen Party (NCP) was supposed to represent a break with Bangladesh’s old political habits. It was young and born from a student uprising in which women had played a prominent role.
Its leaders promised a different political culture, one less beholden to inherited loyalties and the familiar hierarchies of power. Yet the party that emerged from a movement in which young women helped challenge an entrenched political order is now struggling to retain some of its most recognisable female politicians.
First came Dr Tasnim Jara, who resigned in December 2025. A day later, Tasnuva Jabeen followed. Now Samanta Sharmin, a joint convener, has quit, accusing the party of sidelining women and abandoning the reformist aspirations of the July 2024 uprising.
Three departures do not establish that a political party is inhospitable to women. Parties lose members over ideology, ambition, strategy and personal disagreements. New parties, particularly those assembled around protest movements, are especially vulnerable to such fractures.
But the NCP's problem is not simply that three women have resigned. It is that three prominent female politicians, who joined a party promising to change the rules of politics, have left after questioning how those rules are being written.
Their objections have repeatedly converged on two issues: the party's relationship with Jamaat-e-Islami and the influence women exercise over its decisions.
The leadership rejects the suggestion that these departures reveal a structural problem. It says capable women remain active and that disagreement over an electoral alliance should not be mistaken for discrimination.
Yet the presence of women in a party is not necessarily evidence of their influence within it. The difference is worth examining, particularly when those leaving have questioned both the party's political direction and the processes through which it is determined.
The sequence began on December 27, 2025, when Tasnim Jara resigned as the NCP's senior joint member secretary and announced that she would contest Dhaka-9 independently.
Jara, a physician who had returned from Britain to enter Bangladeshi politics, had been among the party's prominent public faces. Her departure came as the NCP moved towards a seat-sharing arrangement with Jamaat ahead of February's parliamentary election.
Her objection was not simply to the identity of the prospective ally. It concerned the political identity the NCP was constructing. Jara had promised to pursue a new political culture and argued that contesting under the emerging alliance would compromise that commitment.
The following day, Tasnuva Jabeen resigned as joint convener and withdrew from the parliamentary contest. She had been preparing to contest Dhaka-17.
Tasnuva was particularly critical of how the alliance had been negotiated. She accused the leadership of putting electoral calculations ahead of political principles and complained about the decision-making process. She also promised to return campaign contributions to supporters.
At least 30 central NCP leaders had written to party convener Nahid Islam opposing the proposed Jamaat arrangement, arguing that it conflicted with the party's declared ideology and democratic commitments. The dissent included men as well as women.
The opposition was therefore not exclusively female. But the departure of two prominent women raised a separate question: whether the NCP could accommodate female politicians who challenged decisions made by its predominantly male leadership.
Samanta's resignation on November 5 brought that question back into public view, with a more explicit accusation about gender.
She said she had spent 11 months challenging the party's direction through discussions, written complaints and proposals. She opposed Jamaat as both an ideological and strategic partner, arguing that the alliance weakened the NCP's independent identity and its commitment to constitutional and political reform.
She also accused the party of failing to give women meaningful influence despite their prominent participation in the uprising. Her complaint was not that women had been excluded from the organisation altogether, but that their presence had failed to translate into authority over its political decisions.
Her criticism extended to the NCP's internal structure. On October 23, the party reorganised its central committee, moving her from senior joint convener to joint convener. She was also left out of its 16-member Political Council, which has only two women.
Samanta questioned the restructuring without a party council, arguing that the process undermined internal accountability. She said she had offered five alternative political strategies that would have allowed the party to build influence without joining Jamaat's alliance.
Two women in a 16-member political council amount to 12.5% representation. That alone cannot establish discrimination. But for a party claiming to embody a generational transformation, the imbalance is difficult to ignore.
Women helped lead the movement that gave the NCP its political legitimacy, yet they occupy only a small fraction of the seats in one of its highest decision-making bodies.
There is also a difference between the three resignations. Jara and Tasnuva primarily challenged the alliance and its political consequences. Samanta made a broader allegation about women's exclusion from leadership.
Treating their complaints as identical would obscure the evidence. Ignoring their common concerns would be equally misleading. All three questioned the direction of a party they had joined to help build, and all three eventually concluded that their political ambitions were better pursued outside it.
Inside the NCP, the interpretation is quite different.
Senior Joint Member Secretary Sarjis Alam told Daily Waadaa that departures were inevitable in a developing party.
“Many of our women members were with us, some are no longer, and others have newly joined. This is a journey. Some will come and some will go. But we do not wish for anyone to leave us,” he said.
Sarjis argued that the Jamaat alliance was an electoral arrangement, not a permanent ideological commitment. The NCP had contested the parliamentary election in an alliance but was preparing to contest local elections independently.
He pointed to the BNP's long association with Jamaat as evidence that political partnerships need not define a party indefinitely.
“Someone leaving because the party allies with a group they dislike cannot be called commitment to the party,” he said.
His argument explains why the leadership considers the resignations political disagreements rather than evidence of discrimination. But it leaves unanswered whether women who opposed the alliance had meaningful opportunities to influence the decision before it was made.
NCP Joint Convener Monira Sharmin was equally dismissive of suggestions that the party had a gender problem.
“There is no problem among the party's women members,” she told Waadaa, adding that Samanta had been inactive for some time.
Monira said Jara and Tasnuva had opposed the Jamaat alliance from the beginning and that their resignations reflected this disagreement rather than discrimination against women.
“A new party is a journey. The NCP will move forward through breaking and rebuilding,” she said.
She also questioned whether politicians should leave because they failed to secure what they wanted or disagreed with party decisions. Some departures, she suggested, might be intended to please particular groups.
Political Council member Sarwar Tushar offered a firmer response.
“We are not at all concerned about who came and who went,” he told Waadaa, insisting that stronger and more capable women remained active in the organisation.
NCP leader Sadia Farzana Dina made a similar argument on Facebook. Women with large social-media followings, she wrote, were not the only legitimate representatives of women in politics.
She also warned against using the party to build personal profiles while obstructing collective decisions.
The NCP is hardly the first political movement to discover that challenging an established order is easier than constructing a democratic organisation. Nor is it the first young party to face questions about whether women who helped build its political appeal can secure comparable influence over its leadership.
Nepal offers a direct comparison.
The Rastriya Swatantra Party, another relatively young political organisation that challenged established parties, has faced sustained pressure over women's access to leadership.
At its June 2026 convention, women members demanded stronger representation in senior positions. Dr Toshima Karki questioned why women were so frequently confined to deputy or joint roles.
The party subsequently introduced stronger inclusion provisions. Women secured nearly half its elected central committee seats, although senior female leaders acknowledged that representation at the highest levels remained inadequate.
The comparison matters because it illustrates a problem that political movements do not necessarily overcome through youth or reformist credentials. Women can be prominent in mobilisation, campaigning and public communication while remaining underrepresented in the bodies that determine political strategy.
For the NCP in Bangladesh, the alliance with the largest Islamist party Jamaat obviously added another layer of complication.
Jamaat's conservative religious politics, its historical opposition to Bangladesh's independence and questions surrounding its approach to women's rights make the partnership contentious among sections of the NCP's original constituency.
For female politicians who joined the NCP expecting an alternative to Bangladesh's established political formations, the alliance also raised questions about the party's ideological independence and its willingness to accommodate competing views on women's political participation.
“An alliance with a conservative party does not, by itself, establish that the NCP discriminates against women. Nor does opposition to Jamaat represent the views of all women,” an NCP leader who requested anonymity told Waadaa.
The leader, however, acknowledged that Jara, Samanta and Tasnuva had distinct public profiles and constituencies, and that “losing them weakens the party's claim to represent the full diversity of the post-uprising generation.”
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