The nature of identity formation is complex. The production of identity in South Asia, with its colonial past, has been largely dependent on the region’s colonial history. In this article we chart the process of political identity formation in Bangladesh. We identify the various historical causes that led to the creation of each of the two types of identity prevalent today. These two divisive identities based on language and religion, one pitted against the other, each became the central platform of each of the two major political parties, the Awami League (AL) and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). This disquisition shows clear patterns of political distress that resulted in the bifurcation of these two divisive political identities that ossified by the late 20th century due chiefly to the actions of the colonial government of the Raj.

Identity formation is a complex process and has been discussed by post-structuralist discourse theorist Ernesto Laclau. This paper focuses on Laclau's proposed ideas on the means of identity production and populism and studies the popular independence movement for Bangladesh under that rubric. It locates charismatic leadership as a necessary condition for populism and identifies Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as the charisma\ t suturing the various chains of equivalence that rose to become the populist movement that resulted in the nation's struggle for independence in 1971. This paper also looks at the transformational leadership of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and acknowledges it as a necessary condition for the patterns of identity creation in East Bengal in the late 1960s.

In November 2020, the government of Bangladesh announced plans to erect a 25-foot-tall sculpture of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in the national memorial located in the country's capital, Dhaka. This announcement caused a massive uproar among the religious ulema and quickly turned into a quasi-mass scale movement, sparking a torrent of political and religious rhetoric from both sides. This article argues that behind the religious rhetoric, the true cause underlying this fracas was purely political in nature, and tied to the clash of two contrasting nationalist dogmas. The country's Islamic political parties and the Qawmi madrasas leaders face a clear and perceived threat from the nationalist narratives expounded by the ruling political party, the Bangladesh Awami League, and this movement was a retaliatory attempt and will not be the last.

A variety of Islamic political parties proliferate the South and South-East Asian nations, most of which advocate a sharia-based form of government. This paper articulates the political participation of Islamic parties in Bangladesh and attempts to delineate the nature of their participation in more recent times. While Islamic political parties in Bangladesh fall between a range of political ideologies, their activities, especially their nature of participation in the 2018 general elections, were far removed from those stated ideologies and fell more in-line with exploitative rent-seeking models of politics.

Between 1979 and 2013, the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami was the largest Islamist political party in the country and the only one that ever played a prominent role in government. In 2013, the party had its registration revoked, effectively banning it from running in elections, and has since been stigmatized as a terrorist, or at the very least a terror-sympathizing, organization. This paper looks at the nature of the party and the roles it has played historically in Bangladesh politics. It also investigates the party’s alleged links with religious extremism and terrorist activities in the country, and the roles the party has played in perpetuating religious nationalism.