Bangladesh to hold elections one year after uprising toppled government

ABC NEWS (Australia)

One year ago, student protestors led an uprising in Bangladesh to overthrow the country's dictator.  Now, the first free and fair elections in almost two decades are about to be held. On tonight's episode of Foreign Correspondent, the ABC meets one of the key players in Dhaka.

Transcript

00:00NCP, NCP, NCP. Good, good, good. Like it, like, like.

00:13The NCP is the National Citizen Party.

00:16Last year's student protest leaders formed the party to capitalise on the uprising

00:21and stop the old way of politics taking hold again.

00:26In this car is the convener of the party, Nahid Islam.

00:31And as you can see, he's just being treated like a total rock star.

00:41On the other side of the car, we have Tasnim Jara,

00:44who's also one of the key members of the National Citizen Party.

00:48Hi, Tasnim!

00:57If you ever wondered if the spirit of last year's protests had died off,

01:03I think this makes it pretty clear that it hasn't.

01:06No, no, no, no!

01:08TASNAN JARA!

01:1230-year-old Tasnim Jara is already a famous face in Bangladesh.

01:17a famous face in Bangladesh. While working as a doctor at Cambridge in the UK, she started

01:22posting health videos online and now has 12 million social media followers.

01:30After watching the protests from afar, Tasna made a massive call and moved back home.

01:36So I got a call from the student leaders who led the movement and they were trying to form

01:45a political pressure group which would hold political parties to account. So we're trying

01:49to connect everybody who are committed to this journey of making Bangladesh 2.0, Second

01:57Republic or whatever you might want to call it, where the state is accountable to its citizens

02:03and upholds everybody's rights and does not kill or maim its citizens with impurity.

02:11We felt that we needed to form a political party to have a seat at the table and speak

02:18about the reforms that we felt that people really wanted.

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