Nahid Islam, Convener of National Citizens Party (NCP) has said the so-called ‘PR Movement’ launched by Jamaat-e-Islami was nothing but a ‘calculated political deception’.

“Now, the people of Bangladesh clearly understand this deception. They have awakened to the truth and will no longer be deceived by false reformists or manipulative actors. Neither the Almighty nor the sovereign people of this land will ever again permit dishonest, opportunistic, and morally bankrupt forces to rule over them,” he wrote in a Facebook post on Sunday.

“It was deliberately designed to derail the Consensus Commission’s reform process and divert the national dialogue away from the real question, the restructuring of the state and constitution in light of the people’s uprising,” Nahid said.

The core reform demand for the establishment of an Upper House based on proportional representation (PR) of votes was conceived as a constitutional safeguard, he said.

“We sought to build a movement around such foundational reforms and to establish the legal framework of the July Charter through broad based national consensus. But Jamaat and its allies hijacked this agenda, reduced it to a technical PR issue and used it as a bargaining tool for their narrow partisan interests. Their motive was never reform; it was manipulation,” he wrote.

Jamaat-e-Islami was never engaged in the reform discourse, neither before nor after the July Uprising, Nahid added.

They offered no substantive proposals, no constitutional vision, and no commitment to a democratic republic, he said.

Their sudden endorsement of reform within the Consensus Commission was not an act of conviction but a tactical infiltration, a political sabotage disguised as reform, he said.