Hasnat blames BNP’s ‘anti-reform’ politics for growing ‘disorder'

National Citizen Party (NCP) lawmaker Hasnat Abdullah has blamed what he called the BNP’s “anti-reform” politics for Bangladesh’s growing instability and disorder./

The young leader accused Prime Minister Tarique Rahman of preserving the state machinery inherited from the ousted Awami League government.

In a Facebook post on Sunday, Hasnat used the metaphor of an “unroadworthy vehicle” to argue that the BNP had chosen to operate the existing system rather than overhaul it after the July uprising.

“By opposing reforms, Prime Minister Tarique Rahman sought to become a good driver of the unroadworthy vehicle left behind by Hasina,” he wrote.

Hasnat alleged that influential BNP leaders, including Salahuddin Ahmed, encouraged Tarique to take control of what he described as a broken system.

“No matter how skilled the driver, an unroadworthy vehicle is eventually bound to end up in a ditch,” he wrote.

‘July was not merely about changing who holds power’

Hasnat linked his criticism to Saturday night’s vandalism of content creator Salman Muqtadir’s BrownFish Studio in Dhaka’s ECB Chattar area.

He said young Bangladeshis of Salman’s generation had joined the July uprising not simply to replace one political party with another, but in pursuit of a fundamentally reformed state.

“The generation pioneered by young people such as Salman Muqtadir did not take to the streets in July merely to see power change hands,” Hasnath wrote.

He said reconstruction and institutional reform were central aspirations of the uprising.

Hasnat accused the BNP of obstructing what he described as essential reforms involving the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances, the Human Rights Commission, the Anti-Corruption Commission and proposals for an independent police commission.

Instead, he alleged, the party had fought to preserve the “decrepit, rotten, stale and failed state system” inherited from the previous government.

Hasnat said the result was a state increasingly gripped by drugs, extortion, tender manipulation, dynastic politics, mafia networks and impunity.

The BNP has previously defended its positions on the reform process and disputed criticism that it opposes institutional reforms.

‘Broken expectations of a generation’

Hasnat sharpened his criticism of the government by alleging that political connections and family influence were replacing accountability.

He described Tarique’s system as one “in which ministers’ sons can turn themselves into powerful contractors” and where mega-projects could create “mega-thieves without accountability.”

He also alleged that state institutions were being captured by incompetent party loyalists.

“Tarique Rahman’s anti-reform state system is one in which a minister with an eighth-grade education can nominate a national professor; where a hospital can be brutally demolished and seized; and where businesses built on citizens’ dreams and years of hard work can be vandalised,” he wrote.

Hasnat further accused ministers and lawmakers of treating party activists as the only people to whom they were accountable.

“To Tarique Rahman’s ministers and MPs, ‘the people’ appear to mean only party leaders and activists,” he wrote.

He said the BNP’s approach represented a betrayal of the political moment created by the July uprising and of the younger generation’s expectations for institutional change.

“By taking an anti-reform position, Tarique Rahman and the BNP have betrayed the promise of the moment and broken the expectations of the younger generation,” Hasnat wrote.

“This broken system and resistance to reform will bring Tarique Rahman repeated crises at every turn.”

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