Nation does not expect such immature remarks from Nahid Islam: Jamaat-e-Islami

Jamaat-e-Islami has protested against the Facebook post of National Citizen Party (NCP) Convener Nahid Islam, calling his comments vague and misleading. In a statement issued Sunday night, Jamaat’s Assistant Secretary General and Chief of the Central Publicity and Media Department, Ahsanul Mahboob (Zubair), made the protest.

In the statement, Jamaat leader Ahsanul said, “In a Facebook status, National Citizen Party Convener Nahid Islam criticised one of the key demands of Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami — the proportional representation (PR) system — in a way that is both vague and misleading. His remarks describing Jamaat-e-Islami’s PR movement as deceitful and a political ploy are entirely false and regrettable. It is not clear to us what he intended to convey through such comments. The nation does not expect such immature statements from him.”

The Jamaat leader further stated, “Jamaat-e-Islami has made its firm position clear to the public, both in the discussions of the Consensus Commission and through movements on the streets, in demanding legal recognition of the July National Charter. Therefore, Nahid Islam’s statement has no logical basis.”

Ahsanul Mahboob urged Nahid Islam to refrain from making such misleading remarks.

Earlier, in a Facebook post, Nahid Islam said that Jamaat-e-Islami’s so-called “movement for proportional representation (PR)” was nothing but a well-planned political deception. He said that the PR campaign was intentionally brought forward to divert the reform process of the Consensus Commission and the national dialogue away from the real issue of reconstructing the constitution and the state in light of the people’s uprising.

Referring to the establishment of an upper house based on proportional representation as one of the fundamental demands for constitutional reform, Nahid Islam wrote, “We wanted to build a movement to legally structure the July Charter based on such fundamental reforms and a broader national unity. But Jamaat and its allies have hijacked it, reducing it to a mere technical issue of PR, and have used it as a bargaining tool to advance their narrow partisan interests.”