National Citizen Party’s (NCP) convener said the so-called movement for Proportional Representation (PR) by Jamaat-e-Islami was nothing but a calculated political deception.
In a Facebook post today, Nahid Islam said the PR movement was deliberately designed to derail the Consensus Commission’s reform process and divert the national dialogue away from the real question, the restructuring of the state and constitution in light of the people’s uprising.
“The core reform demand for the establishment of an Upper House based on proportional representation of votes was conceived as a constitutional safeguard. We sought to build a movement around such foundational reforms and to establish the legal framework of the July Charter through broad based national consensus. But Jamaat and its allies hijacked this agenda, reduced it to a technical PR issue and used it as a bargaining tool for their narrow partisan interests. Their motive was never reform; it was manipulation,” Nahid Islam wrote.
The NCP leader also alleged that Jamaat-e-Islami never engaged in the reform discourse, neither before nor after the July uprising.
“They offered no substantive proposals, no constitutional vision, and no commitment to a democratic republic. Their sudden endorsement of reform within the Consensus Commission was not an act of conviction but a tactical infiltration, a political sabotage disguised as reformism," Nahid added.
Nahid also said the people of Bangladesh clearly understand this deception by Jamaat.
“They have awakened to the truth and will no longer be deceived by false reformists or manipulative actors. Neither the Almighty nor the sovereign people of this land will ever again permit dishonest, opportunistic, and morally bankrupt forces to rule over them.”