Who runs Bangladesh's sports? Not the people who paid for July

For seventeen years, BNP activists learned the geography of the lower courts better than their own neighbourhoods. Six days a week, year after year, they stood in corridors waiting for fake cases to be called, adjourned, and called again. That was the price of opposing Sheikh Hasina. Many paid it with their careers; some paid with their lives.

Seven months into a BNP government, it is fair to ask what those people got in return. And in at least one corner of public life — sports administration — the answer is unsettling.

The “independent" who runs our youth football

Look at the Bangladesh Football Federation. Nasser Shahrear Zahedee was elected to parliament from Jhenaidah-2 as an "independent" on 7 January 2024 — the election the world recognised as a stage-managed exercise, in which Awami League's own "dummy" candidates were the only permitted opposition.

Nine months after that parliament was dissolved in disgrace, he was elected BFF vice-president, and today he chairs the development committee that oversees every national age-group team. He won the highest number of votes among the six vice-presidential candidates.

Fluent in the language of the new Bangladesh

He is not alone. Tipu Sultan, an incumbent from the Kazi Salahuddin era, was returned to the executive committee in the same 2024 election. And Fahad Karim, president and CEO of K-Sports — a firm that grew fat on sports rights during the Awami years — sits as a full vice-president.

At his election he thanked, among others, "the current regime," and declared himself proud to be part of the first election in "the new Bangladesh."

The men who prospered under the old Bangladesh have proven remarkably fluent in the language of the new one.

The caretaker who calls herself the owner

Then there is the Bangladesh Mahila Krira Sangstha. In July, the National Sports Council reconstituted the ad hoc committees of 27 sports organisations and named Barrister Sarwat Siraj Shukla president of the new 29-member BMKS ad hoc committee, with instructions to hold elections within 90 days.

Read that again: an ad hoc committee, with a 90-day mandate to hand over to an elected body. Yet in every press release, every summit delegation, every prize-giving photograph, the words "ad hoc" quietly disappear and she is simply "President." The caretaker has started introducing herself as the owner of the house.

None of this happened under Hasina

None of these four appointments happened under Hasina. Every one of them happened after 5 August 2024 — three under the interim government, one under the BNP's own National Sports Council. That is the real indictment. Nobody forced the new order to hand its sports institutions to the survivors of the old one. It chose to, or it failed to notice.

The myth of the “apolitical" organiser

The usual defence is that these people are "professionals," "organisers," "apolitical." That word — apolitical — did not exist in Bangladesh between 2009 and 2024. Nobody held a federation seat, a broadcasting contract, or a parliamentary "independent" ticket without the regime's consent. To have thrived in those years was to have been acceptable to the regime. That may not be a crime. But it is a fact, and it is a disqualifying fact for anyone now asking to be trusted as a steward of the public's institutions.

Where are the BNP's own?

Meanwhile, where are the BNP's own? The party has thousands of organisers who ran district leagues, coached school teams, and managed club finances in the years when doing so as a BNP man meant losing your grants and gaining a case file. Are we seriously to believe none of them is qualified to sit on a football executive committee? Or is the truth that the new government, like every government before it, finds it easier to inherit a machine than to rebuild one?

The 2002 lesson: How to act without a FIFA ban

Here the government should be careful about how it acts, not whether it acts. The BFF is a FIFA member, and FIFA does not permit governments to sack elected football officials. Bangladesh learned this the hard way in 2002, when a BNP minister replaced the elected committee with an ad hoc one and FIFA suspended the country within weeks.

The lesson is not that nothing can be done. It is that the tools are different: the councillors who vote, the audit that reviews the federation's commercial contracts, the parliamentary committee that asks how sports rights were awarded between 2009 and 2024, and the disclosure that lets the public judge for itself.

The BMKS is simpler. The government constituted that committee; the government wrote the 90-day clock into its mandate. It should enforce its own deadline and let an election, not a notification, decide who leads women's sport.

What July was not fought for

The July revolution was not fought so that the same faces could run the same institutions under a different flag. The people who stood in court corridors for seventeen years did not ask for reward. They are entitled, at least, not to see their tormentors' friends running the nation's games.

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