The young leader of the protest-born National Citizen Party has teamed up with Jamaat-e-Islami to contest this week’s parliamentary elections, with mixed reactions. Nahid Islam was just 26 when he stepped up to a microphone at Dhaka’s Shaheed Minar, a national monument, on August 3, 2024, and uttered a single rallying cry: “Hasina must go.” Student-led demonstrations had begun weeks earlier over a government job quota system that reserved a large share of coveted civil-service posts for special groups, including descendants of 1971 liberation war veterans, leaving too few merit-based opportunities for everyone else. When then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government moved to crush the protesters with lethal force, the backlash only swelled – turning a youth-led revolt into a nationwide...