History is unforgiving. Political parties that fail to transition from movement logic to state logic rarely get a second chance to come back to power.
Political parties do not suddenly become capable governors on election night. Electoral victory confers constitutional authority, but it does not automatically generate governing capacity. That capacity is cultivated over years-sometimes decades-through organisational design, leadership grooming, policy experimentation, and gradual immersion in the practices of rule. Parties learn governance long before assuming state power: by running municipalities, serving in local government bodies, shadowing ministries as opposition, building policy expertise, and expanding internal leadership structures that mirror the state they seek to govern.
How a party structures its central committee, therefore, is not merely an internal organisational choice. It is a predictive indicator of governing readiness. Central committees are not symbolic bodies; they function as proto-cabinets, talent reservoirs, conflict-management mechanisms, and strategic brains. Their size, composition, and internal differentiation reveal how a party understands power itself-whether as moral authority, organisational control, or administrative command.
In Bangladesh, this question has acquired renewed urgency as Jamaat-e-Islami-an ideologically disciplined party with a compact 53-member central committee-stands in sharp contrast to the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and the Awami League (AL), both of which operate with jumbo-sized central and executive committees numbering several hundred members. Even these experienced ruling parties have at times been discredited for bloated cabinets and overextended ministries. Yet the comparison is not merely numerical. It reflects competing theories of political organisation: discipline versus depth, coherence versus capacity, and moral authority versus administrative reach.
Parties as Proto-Governments: In parliamentary systems, political parties are not only electoral machines; they are proto-governing institutions (Panebianco, 1988). Long before ministers take oath, parties are expected to generate policy ideas, train leaders, manage elite competition, and maintain channels with bureaucracy, business, and civil society. Central committees act as strategic command centres-filtering policy, arbitrating disputes, and recruiting future ministers, parliamentary committee chairs, and political overseers of state institutions.
BNP and AL evolved as mass parties in a patronage-based political economy. Their oversized committees-often criticised as unwieldy or inefficient-serve a clear political purpose. They absorb factions, reward loyalty, manage regional elites, and maintain balance among competing power centres. In effect, these large committees function as informal shadow governments, distributing political attention across sectors such as education, labour, energy, health, and foreign affairs. While messy, such breadth provides organisational depth.
Jamaat-e-Islami, by contrast, resembles a classic cadre-based ideological party. It prioritises moral vetting, discipline, obedience, and centralised decision-making. Leadership is earned through ideological commitment and organisational service rather than factional bargaining. This model has produced remarkable internal cohesion and resilience under repression. However, the very features that strengthen Jamaat as a movement raise questions about its preparedness to govern a complex modern state.
The Rewards of Compact Leadership: A small central committee offers three undeniable advantages.
First, ideological coherence. Jamaat avoids the message dilution and public contradiction that plague large, heterogeneous parties. Policy positions remain aligned with ideological commitments and leadership intent, enhancing credibility among supporters.
Second, decision-making efficiency. Compact leadership reduces transaction costs, allowing swift responses during repression, political crises, or opposition mobilisation (Duverger, 1954). Small committees facilitate secrecy, discipline, and coordinated action-traits essential for survival outside state power. Duverger's law also helps explain why tightly organised parties often outperform fragmented rivals in mobilisation, even if they struggle electorally in plural systems.
Third, resistance to internal capture. Smaller leadership bodies limit rent-seeking, opportunistic entry, and patronage inflation-problems endemic to South Asian mass parties. Moral screening and long probation periods help Jamaat contain corruption and maintain internal accountability.
These strengths explain why compact leadership models often perform well in oppositional politics, social movements, and periods of political exclusion.
Where Compactness Becomes a Liability: Governance, however, is not movement politics. The modern Bangladeshi state consists of more than 50 ministries and divisions, hundreds of statutory bodies, autonomous agencies, regulatory commissions, and a deeply entrenched bureaucracy inherited from colonial rule. Governing such a state requires not only moral clarity but also administrative breadth, sectoral expertise, and continuous political oversight.
A 53-member central committee faces structural limits in at least three areas.
First is ministerial overstretch. A small leadership pool must rotate across ministries, parliament, party management, and crisis response. This dilutes expertise and weakens sustained oversight. Effective governance requires ministers who can focus deeply on sectoral reform, not leaders juggling multiple political roles simultaneously.
Second is the absence of shadow governance. BNP and AL's oversized committees function informally as shadow ministers, sectoral spokespersons, and policy interlocutors with bureaucrats. Even in opposition, they maintain networks within ministries, professional associations, and interest groups. Jamaat lacks the numerical depth to mirror the state before entering office, weakening policy preparation, legislative scrutiny, and negotiation capacity.
Third is vulnerability to bureaucratic capture. In postcolonial states like Bangladesh, bureaucracies often outlast and outmanoeuvre political leadership (Migdal, 2001). Where political oversight is thin and leaders lack technocratic familiarity, civil servants dominate agenda-setting. Without a broad bench of politically trained sectoral experts, even ideologically committed governments risk becoming administratively hollow.
Lessons from Abroad: Expansion Without Dilution: Comparative experience suggests that Islamist parties which successfully transitioned into governance did not abandon ideology; they expanded institutionally.
Turkey's AK Party invested heavily in policy councils, municipal governance, and technocratic advisory wings long before consolidating national power (Yavuz, 2009). Tunisia's Ennahda pluralised leadership, separated party and government roles, and accepted functional differentiation between religious advocacy and statecraft (Marks, 2015). Malaysia's PAS institutionalised professional and occupational wings to engage state machinery and policy debates.
Failure to expand proved costly elsewhere. The Taliban (1996-2001) governed Afghanistan through a narrow clerical-military shura, never evolving into a state-capable organisation. Algeria's Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) won elections without administrative readiness, triggering elite panic and military intervention. Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood retained movement-era centralisation after winning power in 2012, allowing the "deep state" to outflank an inexperienced presidency (Brown, 2013).
These were not ideological failures alone. They were organisational failures-attempts to govern modern states with leadership models designed for resistance rather than rule.
What This Means for Jamaat, NCP, AB Party: The lesson for Jamaat-e-Islami, NCP or AB Party is not to abandon compactness, but to scale it institutionally. Expansion does not require factional chaos. It can be rules-based, vetted, and functionally differentiated. Governance demands policy councils, shadow ministries, technocratic inclusion, and distributed leadership. The shura must evolve from moral consultation into policy arbitration. Dawah and statecraft must be institutionally separated to avoid overburdening ideological leadership with administrative tasks.
Electoral victory delivers office, not power. Power flows from organisational depth, elite co-optation, and administrative penetration. Without these, even the most disciplined party risks governing in name while the state governs in practice.
Jamaat-e-Islami's compact central committee offers clarity, discipline, and integrity-valuable strengths in opposition politics. But in a bureaucratically complex state like Bangladesh, compactness without institutional expansion risks becoming a governance bottleneck.
The real test ahead is not ideological purity, but organisational readiness for government.
The writer is a senior journalist, the daily Observer
