By Shahrian Ahmed Joy
Dhaka, December 30 – From a political analysis perspective, the current crisis of Bangladesh’s National Citizen Party (NCP) is a textbook example of how revolutionary legitimacy can be squandered through strategic miscalculation.
The core mistake was the decision by movement leaders to enter government immediately after the fall of authoritarian rule. Comparative history—most notably South Korea’s April Revolution—shows that student-led movements preserve moral authority by remaining outside power, acting instead as a sustained pressure group for democratic reform.
The NCP leaders did the opposite. By becoming state “advisers,” they crossed from moral challengers into establishment insiders, losing public sympathy and becoming directly accountable for governance failures they did not structurally control.
This reflects what political science terms the “Insurgency to Governance Paradox”: revolutionary energy dissipates when activists move too quickly from the streets to bureaucratic offices. And once inside the system, NCP leaders were blamed for inflation, law-and-order breakdowns, and administrative paralysis—issues that inevitably erode popular support.
Detached from grassroots reality and stripped of their moral high ground, the NCP leadership then sought political survival through an alliance with Jamaat-e-Islami. For the youth and urban middle class who supported NCP as a symbol of modern, non-ideological politics, this alliance represented a fundamental betrayal. It was widely perceived as ideological compromise for power, not principle—effectively the final blow to NCP’s credibility.
In short, NCP’s downfall was not accidental. It stemmed from abandoning the role of principled watchdog too early, misunderstanding the nature of transitional power, and prioritizing short-term political positioning over long-term legitimacy. The greatest casualty of this failure is not just a party—but Bangladesh’s chance for a cleaner democratic reset.
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