Even the recent general election of Bangladesh held on 30 December 2018 witnessed violent on large scale and resulted in the landslide victory for the Awami League led by Sheikh Hasina, who won 257 seats out of 300 in the Jatiya Sangsad. Kamal Hossain, the leader of Gano Forum party , rejected the results and charged vote rigging, violence and demanded fresh elections to be held under a neutral government. Considering the long violence and vote rigging records of the nation, once the time has come to evaluate nexus between parties and the terror groups in the country. Although Bangladeshi terrorists have largely been incompetent. While there have been more than 114 terrorist attacks that can be attributed to Islamists in Bangladesh since 2000, their victim yields are low: They generally only kill one person per attack. In nearby Pakistan, terrorists routinely kill dozens of persons per attack. Moreover, until 2017, suicide bombing was extremely uncommon in Bangladesh. Initial phase The very first government of Bangladesh under the political leadership of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (“Mujib”) and his party, the Awami League (AL), established secularism as a state principle. Over time, the resurgent importance of Bangladeshis’ personal identity as Muslim made it difficult for the government to maintain its commitment to secularism. While secularism allowed citizens to separate their identities as Bangladeshis (distinct from Bengalis in India) on the one hand and as Muslims on the other, it did not eliminate the importance of personal faith, and openly criticizing Islam was politically unpopular. The role of Islam deepened as Mujib sought to secure the support of other Muslim countries to rebuild the war-torn country and burnish his legitimacy; however, most Muslim states saw Bengali independence as a means to destroy Pakistan and divide the Muslim world. In 1973, Mujib mustered considerable efforts during a meeting of the Non-Alignment Movement in Algiers to obtain formal recognition and eventual support of several Arab countries. Wary of losing newfound aid from the Islamic bloc, Mujib abjured criticizing Islam aggressively and became more permissive of Islamist movements. Despite the efforts of some Bangladeshi politicians to firmly embed secularism in Bangladeshi society and systems of education, Bangladeshis increasingly equated secularism with dishonoring Islam and tantamount to dependence upon India. In coming years religious schools, the media, and the ubiquity of Islam in family and social life subsequently contributed to a growing consensus in support of Islam and away from secularism. As skepticism towards secularism grew “political parties and leaders competed with one another to be in tune with the society and its rulers, thus strengthening Islam as a factor in the power struggle in Bangladesh.” Mujib was assassinated during an August 1975 military coup. Khandakar Moshtaque Ahmen became president for less than three months before a counter-coup brought Major General Ziaur Rahman (usually called Ziaur) to power in late 1975. He remained in power until 1981. Phase of military rulers Bangladesh’s external ties to Arab Gulf states intensified under Ziaur’s tenure. To establish more productive ties with Muslim states and to woo Saudi Arabia, Ziaur made crucial constitutional changes. He inserted a clause into Article 25 of the 1972 constitution that formally stated Bangladesh’s solidarity with other Muslim countries. He also reversed the country’s secular orientation by changing the constitution in 1977 to remove the preamble’s reference to secularism in favor of the words “absolute trust and faith in the Almighty Allah.” In 1978, he founded the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) as an alternative to the AL and promoted Bangladeshi nationalism, which was “explicitly Islamic in character,” instead of the AL’s secular Bengali nationalism. Between 1976 and 1979, Ziaur also legalized religious political parties and allowed the Islamists who had worked with the Pakistani Army during the liberation war to participate in government again. BJeI was able to publicly rejoin Bangladeshi politics in 1979. By the time Ziaur was assassinated in 1981, reliance on Islam to build nationalism and bolster the government’s legitimacy was commonplace. General Hossain Mohammad Ershad (Ershad), Bangladesh’s second military dictator, who was in power from 1982 until 1990, continued consolidating Bangladesh’s ties with Muslim countries and extended Ziaur’s project of embedding Islam in Bangladesh’s governance. He made Islam Bangladesh’s state religion and he revivified BJeI as a legitimate political actor. Ershad even appointed two BJeI war criminals to cabinet positions. Democratic Stalwarts-AL and BNP In 1990 democracy returned with a BNP electoral victory. The chasm between the religious Bangladeshi nationalism propounded by the BNP and the secular Bengali nationalism espoused by the AL widened in subsequent years. Both parties boycotted parliament at different times to undermine the elected government of the competition and, when out of power, have used hartals (total strikes across the country which impose enormous economic costs and often turn violent) to destabilize the other in power. Since 1990, Bangladesh’s civil societies and political actors have struggled to define the role of Islam within the polity and the state, with proponents of secularism pitted against those who want to see greater formalization of Islam in state and society. Critically, with the country nearly split in its support for two parties, neither party can win an election without coalitions. This has made BJeI an important kingmaker that can extort political gains in exchange for its coalition support. Electoral politics have thus empowered the BJeI as both parties tried to align with it to augment their own political power. In addition, the shape and size of terror in Bangladesh have largely been determined by domestic political change and the changes that are taking place in the country. In over three decades, millions of its workers have returned from West Asia infected by the austere Sunni and Wahabi Islam they found practised there. About three million Bangladesh work there and a large proportion come back changed almost beyond recognition: They go as ordinary men but come back completely different. They bear different clothes, cut their beards differently, put their women in burqas and profess an intolerant Wahabi type of Islam that is completely alien to other countrymen. The percolation of this imported Islam into Bangladeshi society has turned the Jamaat-i-Islami into a potent political force. An allied cause of this is the failure of the State education system. This has sent more and more children to Madrassas which are founded by private donations, and by liberal inflows of funds from religious trusts in Saudi Arabia and other West-Asian countries. These changes have led to the emergence of an intolerant aggressive, messianic fringe of reformed Sunni Muslims, who are bent upon purifying Bangladesh on the lines of the Taliban in Afghanistan. However, for the present Bangladesh’s political parties and intelligentsia, in comparison to Awami League of Sheikh Hasina the reportcard of BNP headed by Begam Khaleda Zia is painful. Under the BNP Bangladesh has recognised the ubiquity of the madrassas and opted to recognise their degrees and to modernise their curricula. Recognising the growing strength of a terrorist organisation and realising that it is concentrated in the western border belt alongside India, the BNP was quick to form an alliance with it. And BNP’s alliance played a decisive role in its stunning and unexpected victory in 2001. At the time Awami League leader Sheikh Hasina had accused the government of ‘letting loose communal extremist forces’. It was also reported that some international extremists are using Bangladeshi passports and some are obtaining them with the assistance of sympathetic officials at various Bangladesh Embassies. The foundation and proliferation of terrorist and extremist groups in today’s Bangladesh has become a concern for the world in larger context. The writer is Professor and Head P.G. Dept. of Political Science BNMU, West Campus Bihar India