We can no longer afford to ignore the very concerted effort on the part of the powerful students' lobby that is able to exert a great degree of control over the interim government, to deliberately delay the election that is supposed to be its number one priority. This week, we saw two of the prominent student leaders, who have now formed their own political party, try in different ways to put back the possible date of the election.

First, Sarjis Alam, the chief organiser (Northern Region) of the National Citizen Party (NCP), said no one in the country should even mention elections until the deposed leader of the Awami League regime that ruled the country for 15 years, Sheikh Hasina, is brought to justice. "There will be no election in Bangladesh until the murderer Hasina is seen on the gallows," Sarjis said.

Tying justice delivery to some external event (like elections) is to compromise the quest for justice from the start. As it is, the disgraced former prime minister is not in the country, having fled to India. The chances of seeing her actually walk the gallows are slim to non-existent. The extradition treaty that the two countries signed isn't strong enough to force either to forfeit anyone they don't really want to.

When the same tribunal was trying war crimes and crimes against humanity from 1971, the average length of each trial was 2-and-a-half years. The law and parliamentary affairs adviser to the interim government, Asif Nazrul, has said they will bring this average length down to a year for the cases emanating from the July-August massacres of 2024, earning a swift rebuke from the tribunal's current chairman.

Two days after Sarjis, Nahid Islam, who is the foremost leader of the NCP, and till recently was an important part of the interim government (he left to take the reins of the new party), asserted that the administration that he was a part of has been unable to fully ensure public safety, and holding a general election this year would be difficult. Truth be told, that is not all that radical a statement. While we may have grown used to late December/early January elections, this time we may have to wait till the end of the first quarter. The Chief Adviser, in a BBC interview this week, mentioned March 2026. In order to still catch that slight wintry feeling, as well as beat the monsoon, while remaining within an acceptable timeframe, we propose February could be even better. It would also satisfy General Waker-uz-Zaman's earliest public assessment as well - where the timeframe was given as 18 months. The closer we stick to that, the better.

The students' obvious desire to prolong the wait, is obviously to allow themselves time to get better-organised. Different quarters, previously marginalised, are hoping to populate the students' ship as it sails to shore. And they are feeding outsized ambition in them to emerge as winners. Yet the best outcome for the country, from its present political landscape, would be for the election to yield a 'national' government of the 'anti-Fascist' coalition, i.e. all the parties that took part in the July Uprising, and for the student-led party, the NCP, to be a part of it. We need a period of less competitive, more conciliatory politics.