Understanding the BNP’s Quiet Repositioning in Bangladesh’s Political Centre

By midday on the last day of 2025, the capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka, had reached a standstill of thousands converging for the funeral of Khaleda Zia, the former prime minister and enduring matriarch of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).

Her death at 80 marked a seismic political rupture, landing with the force of an earthquake just six weeks before a high-stakes general election – one set to follow a decade of authoritarian rule that collapsed only last year amid a mass uprising.

As a sea of mourners flooded the Dhaka streets, they gathered to honour Zia who for decades served as the primary counterweight to ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s dictatorial drift and was seen as an uncompromising, and often combative, champion of parliamentary democracy. 

In Bangladesh’s hyper-polarised political atmosphere, the death of such a leader is rarely just an end rather it is often the beginning – where legacy is litigated and the future is bartered in the language of the past. 

For Tarique Rahman, the lone living son of Khaleda Zia and the exiled heir now at the helm of BNP, the challenge is, in all good senses, no longer merely to lead a party but to redefine what that party has always been. 

Tarique’s return to Bangladesh after nearly 17 years in exile was greeted by vast crowds on last year’s Christmas day and infused with expectation that he could reclaim his party’s mantle as the guardian of democratic balance after the ousting of Hasina in 2024 and the ascent of an interim government under Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus. 

In recent months, observers have noted a carefully calibrated narrative injected into the country’s political bloodstream. What began as a whisper – accusations that the BNP was offering refuge to so-called “Awami-Baksalites,” remnants of the old political order of Hasina and her party Awami League – quickly hardened into something more corrosive.

It is the claim that the BNP under Tarique’s leadership has become a vessel of Indian hegemony. For many, it seems like a calculated pincer movement by elements of Bangladesh’s religion-based right, including Jamaat-e-Islami and its affiliates, seeking to strip the BNP of its nationalist credentials and recast it as a politically hollow force. 

Critics today, especially from among the Islamists and the newly formed unofficial “Nationalist Front” they champion, argue that the BNP has abandoned the true spirit of nationalism.

Yet this entire debate rests on the idea that the BNP lacks a substantive political identity of its own, and that it is merely defined by what it opposes – the Awami League – or by a supposed betrayal of nationalist purity.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Making sense of BNP’s politics 

To understand the BNP as it exists today is to understand a party born out of pragmatic engagement with Bangladesh’s volatile post-Independence politics. From the soldier-statesman Ziaur Rahman to the populist tenacity of Khaleda Zia and now the cautious modernisation under Tarique Rahman, the BNP’s core identity has never been a simplistic reaction. 

Its pillars are rooted in adaptive pragmatism and neoliberal economic modernization. The party has no rigid ideological dogma and tendency to make a staunch stance around enforcing any political doctrination. These qualities have essentially made the party a safeguard of democratic balance in an often fragile polity.

It is now widely recognised that Ziaur Rahman, the party’s founder, did not erect an orthodox ideological edifice. He built a platform of power, calibrated to accommodate Bangladesh’s competing social currents. 

Trained as a military commander, Zia viewed history as a series of tactical openings instead of seeing it through a doctrinal compass. His genius – or, to his critics, his cynicism – lay in the ability to simultaneously suppress and nurture competing political forces.

From left-leaning factions loyal to the National Awami Party to the religious right that would later become a potent political current, he mended relationships with all. 

He crushed radical proletarian movements while elevating the military to an unprecedented institutional role, reshaped party alliances to suit shifting terrain, and institutionalised a political elasticity that allowed the BNP to govern without being held hostage by extremes.

This flexibility was foundational. The BNP’s original political grammar was elastic and ruthlessly adaptive. Friends and enemies were never sorted by ideological purity. Rather they were assessed and glued together by utility within the arithmetic of power. 

This approach institutionalised what later analysts described as the party’s “ideological indifference” – which is a feature that enabled political survival in a landscape defined by coups, counter-coups, assassinations, and factional violence.

What many observers miss in the rush to dismiss the BNP as “anti-Awami” is that opposition to the Awami League has always been a rhetorical core of its politics. 

At its heart, the BNP has been the primary architect of Bangladesh’s largest phase of neoliberal economic policy. During Khaleda Zia’s first term in the 1990s, the party embraced the International Monetary Fund’s Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility with a zeal that even seasoned technocrats might envy.

Fiscal and monetary policies were reshaped along IMF lines, subsidies were curtailed, and social safety nets were pared back. Imports duties were slashed and state-owned industrial enterprises were shuttered. Also the value-added tax was rolled out nationally. 

These shifts transformed Bangladesh’s economic landscape, spurring GDP growth even as they widened economic inequality. These are all hallmarks of neoliberal reform. 

Even the celebrated “Female Secondary School Assistance Project”, hailed as a milestone in expanding girls’ education, was not an ideological invention of the BNP. Rather, it was an institutionalisation of a World Bank blueprint, politicalised by the party into a signature policy achievement that galvanised public support while aligning Bangladesh with global development norms.

Blending pragmatism with restraint 

This pragmatic embrace of market liberalisation did not negate Khaleda Zia’s contributions to democratic practice. Her leadership was instrumental in resisting military rule in the late 1980s and in consolidating parliamentary democracy in the early 1990s. 

But it was her economic policy choices, rooted in neoliberal prescriptions, that defined the BNP’s governance philosophy more than any narrow claim of nationalist rectitude.

Under Khaleda’s watch, the BNP also redefined Bangladesh’s political centre of gravity by co-opting erstwhile fringe elements as strategic partners. The party’s decades-long alliance with Jamaat-e-Islami, a force once sidelined for its anti-liberation stance, was probably never a sign of doctrinaire alignment. 

It was a tactical accommodation that expanded the BNP’s electoral base in a polarised landscape. When Jamaat-e-Islami won 18 parliamentary seats in 1991 with 12.13% of the vote, it was considered as a dramatic political comeback for a political entity that had been politically marginalised after independence.

Khaleda Zia’s decision to elevate Jamaat’s leaders to influential ministerial positions, even as its vote share declined in subsequent elections in 2001, demonstrated the BNP’s willingness to build coalitions in practical politics.

Such alliances however gave space to ultra-right religious elements whose influence became increasingly visible in university campuses and politics. Islami Chhatra Shibir, Jamaat’s student wing, turned campuses into centres of political force, exhibiting muscle that sometimes erupted into acts of intimidation and violence. 

Groups such as Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh, initially supported and patronised by individuals aligned with the BNP, later morphed into Jamaatul Mujahideen Bangladesh – a group that carried out coordinated bombings across 63 districts and many other “questionable” activities. 

These episodes underscored the dangers of tactical accommodations that were insufficiently contained by democratic institutions.

Yet the BNP’s recent shift away from such alliances reflects a growing recognition of the contemporary political landscape. With Jamaat and its allies pushing an aggressive religious nationalist narrative – often unfettered by policy coherence or governance plans – the BNP under Tarique Rahman has begun to reposition itself toward the centre. 

Rejecting the idea that its politics are defined by hostility, the party is now seeking to reclaim the mantle of liberal democracy – an approach once, probably faulty, associated with the Awami League. 

This strategic pivot aims to appeal to urban middle-class voters, a large part of women voters, youth activists, and secular constituencies who are wary of both religious populism and the authoritarian tendencies that marked the Awami League’s 15-year rule prior to 2024.

This centrist pivot is born of political necessity. In electoral arithmetic, the BNP has little to gain by trying to out-right the Islamists on the religious right. Religious populism, while rhetorically powerful, does not offer substantive development policy or a coherent governance framework that resonates with Bangladesh’s increasingly heterogeneous electorate. 

Instead, Tarique Rahman is betting on the “liberal” votes who are invested in economic opportunity and social inclusion. His speeches since returning to Bangladesh have invoked inclusive language and development-oriented visions, echoing global democratic leaders rather than parochial nationalists.

This shift has invited fresh criticism from a large section of BNP’s traditional voter base. The religion-based right insists that any move away from strident anti-India rhetoric amounts to servility and labels the BNP as compromised or even “Indian agent.” 

The India equation

Yet ironically, the BNP’s historical relationship with India was never simplistic. 

While anti-India sentiment provided a rallying cry in earlier phases of Bangladeshi politics, particularly around the upheavals of 1975, Ziaur Rahman’s actual policy was one of guarded cooperation. 

He worked with India where interests converged – shutting down insurgent camps, co-operating on regional stability, and initiating what would become SAARC as a multilateral counterbalance to hegemonic pressures. These were all strategic choices.

Likewise, Tarique Rahman’s current approach – eschewing performative hostility in favour of calibrated diplomacy – is a realistic acknowledgment that Bangladesh’s leverage with its gigantic neighbour lies in strategic engagement.

The perception that the BNP lacks internal ideology and exists only as an anti-Awami bloc is thus fundamentally flawed. The party’s politics are deeply rooted in neoliberalism, adaptive pragmatism, inclusivity and a commitment to democratic stability, even if that commitment has sometimes been unevenly realised in practice. 

It is this flexible but substantive political identity that has allowed the BNP to survive coups, counter-coups, military interventions, and political repression that have marked Bangladesh’s post-independence history.

Nowhere is this tested more sharply than in the current moment. With Khaleda Zia’s death, Tarique Rahman faces a leadership transition that demands a rearticulation of the party’s core mission. 

His decision to appear as a grieving son in front of the largest crowd in Bangladesh’s history rather than to immediately harness the emotive power of personality cult politics suggests a desire to institutionalise the BNP rather than perpetuate its historical dependency on charismatic figures. This is probably a high-stakes gamble. 

But considering the current reality of Bangladesh, to win, Tarique Rahman needs to transform the BNP into a party that articulates clear policy platforms – continuing economic liberalisation while developing credible social safety nets that respond to material concerns of ordinary Bangladeshis. 

Only such a platform can realistically counter the populist, often hollow appeals of the religious right. Especially in the long run.

The coming election will test whether this new, centred BNP can withstand the pitched battle over who owns Khaleda Zia’s true legacy and whether the party can clearly differentiate itself from both the radical right and the authoritarian past of its principal rival, the Awami League. 

If Tarique Rahman succeeds, he will have done more than win an election; he will have completed the transition of the BNP from a personality-driven faction into a mature political institution grounded in policy coherence and democratic stewardship.

Faisal Mahmud is the Minister (Press) of Bangladesh High Commission in New Delhi.

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