What the Jamaat student wing victory in Dhaka University elections says about Bangladesh politics

In September, nearly 400 young men from Islami Chhatra Shibir, the Jamaat-e-Islami’s students’ front, gathered at Dhaka University’s historic Nawab Ali Chowdhury Senate Building to celebrate after defeating the Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s student wing in the Dhaka University Central Students’ Union elections.

Soon the wood and glass-panelled auditorium rang out with the thunderous chorus: hijab, hijab, hijab. This continued for a good 30 seconds before the students settled back into their chairs with big smiles.

The Shibir’s nominees clean-swept the Dhaka University Central Students’ Union elections, a feat not achieved since Bangladesh’s 1971 liberation war when – along with their parent party, the Jamaat – they were branded as razakars, or collaborators of the occupying Pakistani army.

Bangladesh’s liberation war had led to the killing of hundreds of thousands of men and women, many as a result of the Pakistani military’s excesses which involved rape and other atrocities in which local collaborators played a significant role. The Jamaat, an Islamist party, had opposed the liberation war, a taint which it still carries unapologetically.

But the events surrounding the chanting of hijab, hijab were slightly different. This was more in response to the victory of a hijab- and niqab-wearing electoral candidate and not a demand for compulsory headscarf use by all female students of the university.

The Shibir’s maiden...

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