Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir Elected Bangladesh's President

DHAKA: Bangladesh's parliament Thursday elected longtime BNP secretary-general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir as the country's president, elevating to the highest constitutional office a veteran who entered politics in the late 1960s as a left-leaning student activist. Ahead of his election as president, the 78-year-old political leader was serving as the local government, rural development and cooperatives minister while also discharging his role as secretary general of the centre-right Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) under Prime Minister Tarique Rahman’s leadership. During his student life at Dhaka University, Alamgir joined the East Pakistan Students' Union, a left-leaning organisation, and eventually became president of its Dhaka University unit during the 1969 mass uprising against the then Pakistani military-backed government. The political upheaval of the late 1960s was followed by Bangladesh’s independence movement and the 1971 Liberation War. Back then, Alamgir functioned as an organiser for left-leaning freedom fighters, taking refuge in India, helping facilitate their mobilisation. BNP was founded seven years after the Bangladesh Liberation War. Before getting into mainstream politics, Alamgir held a government job. He became a teacher of economics after joining the civil service’s education cadre in 1972. Since then, he worked with the government in various capacities. Alamgir quit the government job in 1986 to start a career in politics. Two years later, he was elected chairman of the municipality in his hometown, Thakurgaon, located in northwestern Bangladesh, as an independent candidate. The son of Muslim League leader and former East Pakistan Provincial Assembly member Mirza Ruhul Amin, Alamgir joined the BNP in the early 1990s, during the mass movement against the autocratic regime of then-President Hussain Muhammad Ershad.