The ‘politics’ that shapes politics

Political realignment is hardly unusual in Bangladesh. The current Amir of Jamaat-e-Islami once belonged to JASAD. Barrister Shahriar Kabir reportedly came from a left-wing background before joining Jamaat. BNP leader Major Akhtaruzzaman has also moved to Jamaat. 

Similar examples can be found across almost every major political party. I have never regarded changing political affiliation as inherently objectionable. In politics, people evolve and parties themselves change.

Yet not all political shifts are the same. Some are primarily driven by proximity to power. Others reflect a genuine change in political belief. That distinction matters. Someone who changes parties because their understanding of politics has fundamentally changed is making a different kind of decision from someone who simply seeks to remain close to whichever center of power happens to exist.

Bangladesh has seen both types throughout its history.

A useful way to think about this distinction is to look at Dhaka University. The university draws students from two broad educational streams. One comes through the Bangla-medium system, largely via the HSC curriculum. 

The other comes through the Arabic-medium system, generally via the Alim curriculum. Although these students eventually enter the same university, they arrive with different intellectual foundations.

The Bangla-medium curriculum is rooted in Bengali literary traditions while also introducing students to Western liberal ideas, individualism, secular political thought, and modern social theory. 

The Arabic-medium curriculum offers a different framework. Rather than treating Western liberalism as the default intellectual tradition, it presents Islamic scholarship and religious life as an alternative source of moral and political understanding. 

These educational systems rarely attack each other directly, but they cultivate different assumptions about society and the public sphere.

These differences naturally find political expression. The Bangla-medium tradition has long supplied activists and leaders for BNP, as well as various left-leaning and liberal organizations. The Arabic-medium tradition has supplied many of the country's Islamic political parties.

The thing that interests me, however, is not simply that these traditions exist. It is how they interact.

Divergent roads 

Students occasionally move in both directions. Some who grow up within Arabic-medium education later embrace left-liberal politics. Others travel the opposite path. But recent electoral outcomes at Dhaka University suggest that the movement has not been symmetrical. 

Candidates associated with the Islamic student movement have attracted support beyond the proportion of Arabic-medium students enrolled at the university. If Arabic-medium students account for roughly one-third of the student body while an Islamic candidate receives well over half the vote, then a substantial number of Bangla-medium students must also be supporting that candidate.

This deserves attention. It suggests that one intellectual tradition has become more effective than the other at persuading people outside its original constituency. The point is not whether one agrees with that outcome. The point is that it exists and therefore deserves sociological explanation rather than dismissal.

This observation also raises broader questions about how political ideas spread.

In recent years, the concept of the Overton Window has become increasingly popular in political commentary. Named after Joseph Overton, it describes the range of political ideas considered socially acceptable at any given historical moment. 

Politicians generally succeed by operating within that range, while ideas outside it are often regarded as too radical for mainstream electoral politics.

The concept has recently been applied to Bangladesh. According to one common interpretation, the political changes following Sheikh Hasina's departure in August 2024 shifted Bangladesh's Overton Window sharply to the right. The implication is that ideas once regarded as marginal have suddenly entered the mainstream.

I find this explanation incomplete.

To argue that the acceptable range of political ideas has suddenly moved, one must first assume that public opinion itself has undergone an equally dramatic transformation. But political history often tells a more complicated story.

For much of the past decade, Bangladesh's electoral system functioned under extraordinary conditions. The elections of 2014, 2018, and 2024 remain subjects of intense political disagreement. Whatever one's interpretation of those events, the practical result was that electoral competition became increasingly constrained. 

Political authority upon state institutions and  administrative structures as much as it has rested upon voters.

Under such circumstances, public discourse can easily become detached from the preferences of the electorate as a whole. A relatively narrow political and intellectual elite may come to define what counts as acceptable public opinion. Journalists, academics, civil society organizations, and political commentators often begin speaking primarily to one another rather than to society at large.

If that happens, perceptions of the Overton Window become distorted. Because something might appear to be the consensus of society but it may actually reflect the consensus of a comparatively limited segment of society.

Hidden interpretations

When political competition later expands, the apparent shift in public opinion may not represent a dramatic ideological transformation at all. Instead, it may simply reflect the fact that a much larger portion of the electorate is finally being heard. 

The ideas themselves may have existed for many years…the thing that possibly changes is their visibility rather than their existence.

For this reason, I am not convinced that Bangladesh suddenly became more conservative after August 2024. A different explanation seems equally plausible. The electorate became more fully represented in political conversation, exposing opinions that had previously received less public attention.

This brings me to another distinction that I believe is increasingly important: the difference between politicians and activists.

The boundary is not absolute. Thinkers from Antonio Gramsci to Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida have shown how deeply politics permeates every aspect of social life. Yet for practical purposes, a distinction remains useful.

Politicians operate within the existing Overton Window. Their task is to assemble electoral coalitions, compromise, and adapt to changing public opinion. Flexibility is therefore not necessarily a moral failing. It is often an essential feature of democratic politics.

Activists and think tanks play a different role. Their purpose is to reshape the boundaries of acceptable debate itself. They introduce ideas that initially appear too radical or too unfamiliar for mainstream politics. Over time, some of those ideas may move into the political center. When that happens, politicians adjust accordingly.

Seen from this perspective, ideological consistency matters more for activists than for politicians. Politicians must remain responsive to voters. Activists may choose to remain committed to principles regardless of electoral popularity.

This framework also helps explain contemporary political developments in Bangladesh. New political parties naturally seek to operate within the existing political landscape because they must compete for votes. 

At the same time, many prominent intellectuals and organizers associated with recent political movements appear more interested in developing long-term ideological alternatives than in immediate electoral success. That does not necessarily make them unsuccessful. It simply means they are performing a different political function.

I also believe Bangladesh's colonial inheritance continues to shape these debates in ways we do not sufficiently acknowledge.

Modern political institutions across South Asia emerged within colonial structures. Political leadership often developed through educational systems designed during colonial rule. Those systems produced elites who frequently understood their own societies through intellectual frameworks imported from elsewhere.

Many of those frameworks remain influential today. They continue to shape how political legitimacy, democracy, religion, and modernity are discussed. As a result, disagreements over political ideology are often also disagreements over culture and national identity.

This is why the interaction between Bangla-medium and Arabic-medium educational traditions deserves closer study. Their competition reflects competing understandings of knowledge and the direction in which Bangladesh should develop.

Whether one agrees with either tradition is ultimately beside the point. What matters is understanding why one has recently demonstrated greater success in attracting supporters beyond its traditional base. Explaining that phenomenon requires more than partisan assumptions. 

It requires careful attention to education, political institutions, historical memory, and the changing relationship between elites and the broader electorate.

Only by examining those deeper forces can we understand why certain political ideas resonate across social boundaries while others fail to do so. That, more than the fortunes of any single party or election, is the question that deserves sustained attention.

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S M Rezaul Karim is a writer, thinker and political pundit who is also known as Rock Monu