Samantha Sharmin resigns from the NCP, citing differences over the alliance with Jamaat in a Facebook post

Samantha Sharmin, a leader of the National Citizen Party (NCP), has resigned from the party. She announced the resignation in a Facebook post on Thursday (5 November), writing that she had resigned from the National Citizen Party a short while earlier.

Sharmin wrote that about a year ago she took a separate position on the NCP's alliance formation. She had said at the time that Jamaat-e-Islami was not fit to be an ally in either ideological or strategic terms, and that the NCP would have to pay a heavy price for allying with them.

She wrote that over the past 11 months, whenever she had the opportunity, she submitted written complaints and proposals at various levels of the party and took part in debate and discussion, analysing the NCP's past activities and future course according to her political understanding. Trying to protect the party from a wrong path, if it went that way, was her political duty, she wrote.

To carry out that duty she chose ideological struggle inside the NCP, she wrote. In her words, there was no other democratic way to bring the party back from a wrong path than to challenge its adopted policies in a reasoned way in recognised forums.

Sharmin wrote that she was now declaring an end to this struggle of nearly a year, because she no longer believes the NCP can be sincere to its founding values.

On the timing of her resignation, she wrote that she could have waited for a more suitable moment, when her resignation would be easier to assess as a reaction to a party decision or activity, but she considers such waiting meaningless.

She wrote that the NCP may take various political roles, and may even decide to leave the alliance with Jamaat, but she does not believe it can create its own identity, thought and programme beyond the old political style. In her words, a political party of the old system will never help bring a new system for the state, but will stand as an obstacle.

She wrote that the time has now come to let everyone in the party and well-wishers outside the party structure know about the differences she has had with the party and the discussions that took place.

On reform, she wrote that the NCP's politics, as a party of the aspirations of the country's common people, was reform. To ensure the existing power structure could not block the path to a democratic state system, reform was needed in at least three areas: constitutional reform, legal reform, and reform of politics and political parties.

She wrote that Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami does not consider any of those three to be part of its own politics and state project, and does not truly hold the politics of reform. The organisation's philosophical basis and proposed state project are not a democratic state project, she wrote.

In her words, whatever Jamaat is seen to say about reform is said out of the need to appropriate the aspirations of '24. The core of democratic reform springs from liberal democratic social values, while Jamaat is opposed to the democratic state system, she wrote.

She further wrote that when the NCP treated Jamaat as a friend on the path of reform, ordinary people who are naturally liberal and democratic were forced to turn away from the politics of reform. Because the NCP's own political line was not clear, the party is disappearing into Jamaat and having to play a reactive and supportive role for Jamaat on various issues, she wrote.

On the 2026 election, she wrote that it had every possibility of being held as a political election, as happened in 1946, 1954, 1970 and even 1990. But the old political parties wanted to remove the election from the political character of the uprising, she wrote.

She wrote that the NCP had the opportunity to ally with those who wanted to confront the old system politically, or to move towards a political election even alone. But by taking part in the election as a tail of a big political party, without giving importance to the lesson of history, the NCP exhausted its own politics and the possibility of a new post-uprising politics, she believes.

Sharmin wrote that she had told the party leadership of five methods by which more political influence could be created than the current result, without joining an electoral strategy such as the 11-party unity, but the party did not take that path. By giving priority to electoral victory over political victory, the NCP has also lost the credibility to object to election results through a system without reform, she wrote.

On Shaheed Osman Hadi, she wrote that Hadi campaigned completely alone in a complex and risky seat in Dhaka against a strong rival, with a new type of election campaign and the aspiration of getting at least five hundred votes. Yet his death was used as the reason for allying with a big party, which she wrote was completely unreasonable and motivated.