Desk Report:
Former information advisor to the interim government and convener of the National Citizens Party (NCP) Nahid Islam has made serious allegations against several members of the advisory council. In a recent interview with a private television channel, he claimed that many of the advisors have made liaisons with various political parties and are now thinking about their ‘safe exit’.
This explosive comment has led to widespread discussion and criticism on social media Facebook. Videos and photocards of his speech have been posted from various Facebook pages and accounts. Netizens are showing various reactions for and against.
In the interview, Nahid Islam directly accused the advisory council of fraud and said, ‘We must have made a mistake in trusting many of the leaders of political parties and those who became advisors. We should have strengthened the student leadership, and gone into government together.’ He added, ‘We have been betrayed in the trust we had placed in civil society or political parties.’
He claimed, ‘Many advisors have either betrayed themselves or betrayed the mass uprising. When the time comes, we will also reveal their names.’
He believes that the reason for this deviation is that the advisors did not trust the power of the mass uprising. He said, ‘Many of the advisors have formed liaisons with various political parties. They are thinking about their safe exit. We are suffering a lot from this and will continue to suffer. But if they believed that their employers were the power of the mass uprising, the ordinary people who took to the streets and gave their lives, then this deviation of the advisors would not have happened.
Nahid Islam, one of the coordinators of the anti-discrimination student movement during the July mass uprising, joined the Ministry of Information as an advisor after the uprising. He resigned last February and took over as the convener of the NCP. However, two other representatives of the student movement, Mahfuz Alam and Asif Mahmud Sajeeb Bhuiyan, are still advisors.
In response to a question about whether the decision of the student leaders to take the position of advisor was wrong, Nahid Islam said that none of them wanted to take the position of advisor to the government. Their main demand was to form a national government.
He argued that if the political parties had agreed and formed a civilian government, this responsibility would not have fallen on the shoulders of the students. ‘If the power of the coup had not been in the government, then this government would not have lasted even three months,’ he commented. He said, ‘The attempt to overthrow this government and carry out a counter-revolution was ongoing for the first six months. There is still some left. We had to take this responsibility due to the need of the time.’
The former advisor further regretted that such regrets would not have arisen if a national government had been formed instead of a government with representatives of civil society. He reminded, ‘On August 5, it was the political leaders who prostrated in the cantonment, not the students.’
Regarding the allegations of the leaders of the anti-discrimination student movement who were called coordinators after the mass uprising and who owned huge amounts of money, Nahid Islam said, ‘Such allegations or such false trials have always been made against us. Information has been disseminated about how students of other political parties came to the anti-discrimination student movement and extorted money. That issue should be highlighted in the name of anti-discrimination. We think we are not getting that media support.
Nahid’s clear answer is, who owns how much money, everything should be investigated.
He said, “We should investigate in our name, in our case, how much property we own, how much money we own, and how many crores of taka the other leaders and activists of the political party that we have now have earned in the last one year – extortion, looting, how they have installed their own people in various places in the administration, universities, no one knows. After this mass uprising in Bangladesh, corruption was stopped for the first few months, how this cycle of corruption got entrenched in the government again, you should investigate this, see who is involved in it.”
When asked whether the leaders of the anti-discrimination student movement will disappear when the elected government comes or whether the leaders will choose the safe exit path, Nahid Islam said, “We took to the streets thinking that this fight will be very long and very challenging. “But the National Citizen Party was not formed with this election in mind. The National Citizen Party was formed with the dream and goal of changing the political landscape of Bangladesh. In the past year, students have been used in various ways.”
