The Far Right Behind a Liberal Mask: Faisal Mahmud’s Intellectual Deception

​Writing an English response to a political analysis originally published in Bengali creates an opportunity to misrepresent the original argument. The assumption is that English-language readers will not go back and read the original Bengali text. In that gap, it becomes easy to twist an author’s words, attribute claims to him that he never made, and construct a strawman—only to demolish it by invoking Western political scientists and philosophers.

​Faisal Mahmud, Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa, does just that in his response to Manoj De’s November 3 essay in Prothom Alo, “Politics in a Right-Wing Trap: What Will the Left and Liberals Do?” At first glance, his November 4 piece, “The ‘liberals’ who mistook their monopoly for a voice,” reads like a principled argument grounded in pluralism and the rule of law. Read the two essays side by side, however, and the problem quickly becomes clear. Rather than engaging with Manoj’s central arguments, Faisal Mahmud either leaves them out or misrepresents them.

​A recurring tactic in far-right political discourse is to invoke the language of democracy, human rights, and free speech while defending coercive majoritarian politics. Whatever Faisal Mahmud’s personal political affiliation may be, his essay offers a clear example of how this tactic operates in Bangladesh.

​Putting Words in the Author’s Mouth

​A central claim in Faisal Mahmud’s essay rests on a misrepresentation of Manoj De’s argument. Under the subheading “The right did not appear in July 2024,” Faisal draws a distinction between a society becoming more conservative and conservatives becoming free to organise. In theory, that distinction is valid. In reality, three separate processes can unfold at the same time: previously suppressed supporters stepping into public view, the long-term spread of right-wing ideas across society, and organisational growth once political restrictions are lifted. Faisal’s error lies in highlighting the first process to brush aside the other two and in using this theoretical distinction against Manoj as though Manoj had claimed Bangladesh turned right-wing overnight after July 2024.

​What did Manoj De actually write? In a passage translated from Bengali, Manoj stated clearly: “During and after the mass uprising of 2024, a clear rise of the right wing can be seen in Bangladeshi society. This cannot be called an abrupt or sudden change. This qualitative shift has to be seen as the outcome of decades of quantitative change.”

Manoj himself pointed to the long-term drivers behind this shift: the opening up of labour markets in the Middle East in the 1970s and 1980s, the anti-Soviet mujahideen movement in Afghanistan, and more than two decades of the US-led “War on Terror” after 9/11. Yet Faisal proceeds to lecture Manoj on the politics of the “War on Terror,” portraying a writer who traced four decades of gradual change as someone startled solely by post-July visibility.

​Faisal offers an equally selective reading of Bengal’s history. Manoj opened his essay by describing Bangladeshi society as historically moderate and liberal, shaped more by Vaishnava, Baul, Nath, Yogi, and Sufi traditions than by rigid scriptural orthodoxy. Faisal objects that religious syncretism and cultural pluralism do not equate to modern liberal politics. On that narrow theoretical point, Faisal’s objection is not unreasonable; Manoj moves somewhat quickly from pre-modern syncretic traditions to modern political character.

​Even so, that limited theoretical caveat does not refute Manoj’s central argument. Manoj himself noted at the outset that modern political thought began to take shape here relatively recently, in the late nineteenth century under British rule. Nor did he depict a conflict-free past. Drawing on Abul Mansur Ahmad’s Amar Dekha Rajnitir Ponchash Bochor (Fifty Years of Politics as I Saw It), Manoj showed how Muslim jotedars, peasants, and tenants were made to sit on floor mats in the offices of Hindu landlords and their deputies, while caste and lower-caste Hindu tenants were allowed to sit on benches. Manoj clearly explained how this disparity in social status and treatment helped fuel the region’s praja (tenant) movement and early political consciousness. To ignore this account of the social inequalities behind the tenant movement and accuse Manoj of writing “one-sided history” is to disregard the evidence in the original text.

​The Electoral Arithmetic He Avoids

​Faisal argues that because competitive elections were destroyed under Sheikh Hasina, the actual level of public support for right-wing and Islamist parties could not be measured; now that restrictions have been lifted, existing supporters have surfaced, and Manoj has mistaken this for growth. Here, Faisal leaves out crucial parts of both Manoj’s essay and Bangladesh’s electoral history.

​First, Manoj himself wrote that even the 2026 election cannot provide an accurate count of right-wing votes. Because the Awami League remained barred from political activity and could not contest the election, its supporters who did vote divided their votes between the BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami, depending on the constituency. Faisal omits Manoj’s explicit caveat altogether.

​Second, Faisal avoids comparing the 2026 results with the competitive elections of 1991 and 1996. In the 1990s, Bangladesh did not face the Hasina era’s state-directed enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and electoral authoritarianism, and Jamaat-e-Islami operated openly. According to Election Commission figures on valid votes cast (cited by Manoj), in 1991 Jamaat won 12.13 percent of the vote and 18 seats after reaching seat-sharing arrangements with the BNP in several constituencies. Contesting on its own in the 1996 election, Jamaat secured 8.61 percent of the vote and 3 seats. In the 2026 election, where voter turnout was 59.44 percent, Jamaat won 31.76 percent of the vote and 68 seats while contesting independently.

​Manoj also showed that roughly 40 percent of votes cast (specifically 40.38 percent) went to the broader right-wing camp—comprising Jamaat’s 31.76 percent alongside its alliance partner the National Citizen Party or NCP (3.07 percent), Islami Andolan Bangladesh (2.70 percent), Bangladesh Khelafat Majlis (2.09 percent), and Khelafat Majlis (0.76 percent).


Whether a non-religious party like the NCP should be placed squarely in the “right-wing” category solely because of an electoral alliance is open to debate. Even excluding the NCP, however, religion-based parties alone surpassed 37 percent of valid votes cast. Given shifts in party alignments, voter turnout, and how former Awami League supporters voted, electoral numbers alone cannot establish precisely how much of this vote reflects ideological change and how much reflects immediate political circumstance. Yet the leap from 8.61 percent in 1996 to 31.76 percent in 2026 cannot be explained away simply as old supporters stepping out into the open—and Faisal makes no effort to examine the social and political causes behind so large a shift.

​Invoking Hasina and Modi to Discredit the Forces of the Uprising

​To bolster his case, Faisal brings in the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the state of exception, flaws in the 1971 war crimes trials, and a lengthy account of the strategic partnership between Narendra Modi and Sheikh Hasina from 2014 to 2024. State repression under Hasina is undeniable. Raising questions about international standards and due process in the 1971 war crimes trials is legitimate. But such questions do not erase the historical responsibility of those accused of grave crimes. Likewise, the existence of genuine terrorist threats, including the 2016 Holey Artisan attack, never justified treating entire opposition groups or religious communities as security threats. Manoj De himself wrote that blocking peaceful transfers of power, corruption, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial killings under Hasina strengthened right-wing politics, and he noted that sections of the left compromised their own standing by backing the Awami League as the “lesser evil.”

​What Faisal ignores entirely is the other side of the Hasina government’s two-faced approach. If Hasina’s rule was purely a “secular-liberal monopoly” bent on suppressing Islamists, how does one account for its simultaneous state patronage and political inclusion of sections of the Islamist camp? As Manoj pointed out, after the polarisation around Shahbagh and Shapla Chattar in 2013, the Hasina government struck political compromises with parts of the Islamist movement to stay in power through rigged elections—cultivating ties with Hefazat-e-Islam, altering school textbooks to meet demands from religious groups, recognising Qawmi madrasa degrees for political gain, and using compliant Islamist parties to manufacture electoral legitimacy. This reality makes Faisal’s simplistic equation difficult to sustain.

​More importantly, criticising past state repression or Modi-Hasina diplomacy and opposing present-day rights violations are not mutually exclusive. Faisal uses the former to downplay the latter. His most cynical move is to portray those now speaking out against far-right activism and mob violence as privileged gatekeepers of the Hasina era.

​That portrayal distorts the history of the 2024 mass uprising itself. Take the Drohojatra (March of Rebellion) on August 2, 2024, one of the uprising’s pivotal turning points. People from across classes, professions, and political persuasions joined that march, yet contemporary news reports and photographs clearly document the active presence of progressive, leftist, liberal, and cultural activists among its organisers and on its front lines.


Over the past two years since the uprising, a large proportion of those anti-Hasina dissenting and progressive voices have been targeted by coordinated hate speech and mob intimidation both online and offline. Lumping these anti-authoritarian voices together with beneficiaries of the old regime only serves to strengthen far-right politics.

​Whitewashing Mob Violence as ‘Democratic Debate’

​Manoj De laid out a detailed account of both the interim government’s tenure and the first eight months of the current BNP administration. Repeated assaults on Bauls and attacks on Sufi shrines, disruptions of concerts and cultural events, vandalism and arson at media outlets and cultural offices, harassment of women and minorities, and the formation of mobs over allegations of religious insult to pressure the police into making arrests have continued unabated. For electoral reasons, the interim government largely limited itself to issuing statements, while the current BNP government stays silent unless an incident sparks major outrage on social media—disillusioning non-traditional voters who backed the BNP hoping to safeguard civil liberties.

​In response, Faisal briefly condemns assaults on Bauls and attacks on shrines, but puts his main emphasis on distinguishing among an Islamist party, a conservative voter, and a violent religious vigilante, arguing that Islamists also have the right to organise peacefully. On principle, he is completely right. Any peaceful Islamist party or religiously conservative citizen has the full democratic right to engage in politics and express their views, and ordinary conservative voters cannot be held responsible for mob violence.

​Nowhere in his essay, however, did Manoj call ordinary conservative voters attackers. He questioned the role of groups instigating mob violence, as well as the inaction of two successive governments that remained silent for electoral gain. Recognising Islamists’ right to peaceful politics does not mean accepting mob violence, persecution of minorities, or attacks on cultural life in the name of religion or politics. Yet Faisal says not a word about the current government’s inaction. Instead, he describes this volatile post-July environment as a “newly crowded public square” that makes the old gatekeepers uneasy. Wrapping mob violence in the language of conservative free expression effectively legitimises political coercion.

​Equally weak is Faisal’s claim that media coverage of these attacks, alongside the publication of Manoj De’s column in Prothom Alo, proves liberal voices have not been sidelined. Press reports on attacks are not the same thing as effective protection of citizens’ political and cultural rights. Critical columns can appear in newspapers even while dissenters face organised attacks that the state fails to stop—just as defenders of the Hasina government once pointed to television talk shows and newspaper columns to claim free speech was thriving. Manoj was not talking about whether articles get printed in newspapers; he was pointing to the absence of rights-based politics on the streets and in parliament, where the left’s vote share has fallen to 0.36 percent.

​Faisal’s Contradiction on Equal Citizenship

​Quoting Professor Asif Mohammad Shahan, Manoj De noted that Bangladesh’s political discourse has shifted rightward into a contest over who can appeal most to right-wing constituencies, making it urgent to bring politics back toward the centre or slightly to the left. Objecting to this, Faisal writes that it barely matters whether the national conversation sits on the right, the left, or the centre; what matters is whether everyone respects constitutional limits, individual liberty, and equal citizenship.

​True, labels of “left” or “right” alone do not determine a party’s democratic character. Still, Faisal’s argument either fails to grasp how political ideology affects equal citizenship in practice, or seeks to evade it. Majoritarian and far-right politics narrow citizens’ rights along lines of religion, gender, and belief. In a society where Bauls cannot perform safely, women face restrictions on their freedom of movement, and minorities and dissenters live under the threat of mob violence, while major parties compete to appease hardliners, the constitutional guarantees of equal citizenship and individual liberty are directly threatened. It is fundamentally contradictory to defend civil rights while dismissing the political polarisation that directly undermines them.

​In Bangladesh today, there is a growing tendency to invoke the crimes of Sheikh Hasina’s 15-year authoritarian rule to silence criticism of mob rule, shrinking cultural freedom, and majoritarian coercion. By framing opposition to far-right coercion as an attempt to preserve the political monopoly of the Hasina era, Faisal Mahmud’s essay reinforces that trend. Just as secular authoritarianism cannot be the answer to religious authoritarianism, the bogeyman of past autocracy cannot be used to pass off present-day political coercion as democratic pluralism. Faisal Mahmud’s essay is itself a clear example of the “right-wing trap” in Bangladesh’s politics that Manoj De described.

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​Writer: Editor, Dhaka Papers
[email protected]