The challenge of breaking away from past undemocratic practices

The dramatic downfall of Sheikh Hasina’s regime has given rise to high hopes, particularly amongst the youth who participated in the July movement, about a new beginning for Bangladesh. The youth leaders are now demanding rastra-sanskar (reforms of the state), so that in future another autocrat would not rule Bangladesh.

The interim government headed by Nobel Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus, installed in the wake of the mass uprising, has set up various commissions to work out reform proposals for different areas. Several political parties have also put forward proposals for reforms.

The reform proposals, now being debated, mostly focus on creating new structures and enacting new laws and rules. However, this preoccupation with changing structures and rules misses the significance of the role of political practices in defining the political system as it operates on the ground in Bangladesh. I would argue that the return of another autocratic ruler cannot be prevented by simply adding or changing structures, laws and the constitution. It is not the absence of laws and rules but the state’s failure to implement them and hold violators of laws and rules accountable for their misdeeds, which have led to the perpetuation of undemocratic political and governance practices. Our priority now is to challenge and dismantle these undemocratic practices. I briefly highlight below a few of these practices, which have been entrenched over successive regimes since the independence of Bangladesh.

Election engineering and forming king’s party

All regimes in Bangladesh, whether led by the military or political parties, have abused state institutions to perpetuate their regimes. Election engineering and party building through use of state institutions have been longstanding political practices which different regimes have pursued in Bangladesh. Military regimes (1975-1990) initiated the practices of election engineering, floating of “king’s parties” and fake opposition parties. Unfortunately, elected civilian leaders who came to power following military rule also pursued the same strategies.

Election engineering has now become a routine political practice. It is widely believed that the intelligence agencies, civil administration and the police have been systematically used by different regimes for engineering election results.

We all know that in the past 12 national parliamentary elections, an incumbent regime never lost an election when organised under its supervision, but always lost it when the election was organised by a non-party caretaker government (NCG). In four parliamentary elections—the fifth, seventh, eighth and ninth—organised by the NCG, the incumbent regime lost power. But Sheikh Hasina, who had originally led a movement against the incumbent BNP regime in 1994/95 for constitutionalising the NCG system, abolished the NCG system in 2011. This enabled the AL led alliance to retain power in three successive rigged elections in 2014, 2018 and 2024.

Following the model of the military dictators, she also fabricated an opposition in the parliament. In the 10th parliament, Jatiya Party (JP) was both in the government and in the opposition; in the 11th and 12th parliaments JP worked as a friendly opposition. These repeated fraudulent elections and engineered parliaments ultimately resulted in people’s loss of trust in our election system.

State-sponsored party building has been another longstanding undemocratic political practice. In 1975, one-party system BAKSAL was formed under regime sponsorship. The military rulers then started building their own parties using state agencies and patronage. Both the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and the JP were floated by military regimes. Again, this legacy of using state patronage to build and maintain support for political parties did not end with military rule. It was exacerbated during the subsequent years of electoral democracy. Under each regime, its supporters monopolised control over financial institutions and business contracts that funded party and election expenses. A vicious nexus of politicians, bureaucrats and business people emerged who used control over state resources to perpetuate specific regimes in power.

Erosion of institutions

Eroding the autonomy of institutions has been another entrenched undemocratic political practice. This led to malgovernance and corruption. Over the years, successive regimes used their own partisan interests in recruiting and promoting people in all institutions. The end result was the weakening of the institutions of democratic governance and the institutionalisation of the “winner takes all” culture. In the last 15 plus years, without exposure to any form of electoral accountability, the executive perpetuated the partisanship of the administration as well as the law enforcement agencies and eroded the independence of the judiciary. With increasing elite capture, where close to two-thirds of the members of parliament were businessmen, the legislature was disinclined to hold the executive accountable for its various misdeeds. This encouraged wilful bank default, weak enforcement of building codes and road safety rules, land grabbing, river erosion and a variety of other regulatory abuses.

Undemocratic party politics

Despite their original ideological differences, the policy preferences and support base of both the AL and the BNP became increasingly similar. Both indulged in undemocratic practices such as use of state patronage, clientelism, money, muscle power and violence as instruments of building and retaining political support. Both lacked internal party democracy. In both parties, decisions were taken by the top party leader, who was a dynastic successor and was given authority by the party to select party office bearers in different strata as well as candidates for elections.

Political violence

The divisive politics, the practice of “othering” the opponent, the absence of inner party democracy—all these led to the routine use of violence to win political competitions or business deals. Generally, student and youth organisations were used by political parties to carry out political violence. Some of this violence took place between political parties, but more violence occurred between groups and factions within the same party. According to data from Ain O Shalish Kendra, between 2002 to 2023, inter-party violence resulted in 266 deaths, whereas intra-party violence caused 447 deaths. Interestingly, the incidences of intra-party violence were always higher within ruling parties compared to opposition parties which implies that the former had greater availability of patronage resources over which contestations were taking place.

All powerful executive

From the beginning, Bangladesh has been ruled by an all-powerful executive where all key decisions have been taken de facto by the prime minister when we had a parliamentary form of government or the president when we had a presidential form of government. The practice of the same individual holding the position of the head of the executive and legislative branches of the government as well as the head of ruling political party has led to the rise of a single supreme regime leader who became unaccountable and controlled all state institutions.

The challenge ahead

The challenge before both the government and the people of Bangladesh now is the need to dismantle the above-mentioned undemocratic political and governance practices so that we can move towards a regime of accountability in both politics and governance. We can build democratic institutions only when we practice democratic norms and rules. Our plan of returning to a system of free, fair and inclusive elections must ensure an electoral process which minimises the influence of money and muscle power so that people of modest means can freely participate in the political process.

Meaningful, more inclusive elections will also require restoration of full freedom to the media, unfettered right of public assembly and a genuinely independent judiciary. Such institutions of good governance as an independent election commission, a credible anti-corruption commission, a strong public services commission and other empowered regulatory agencies should be appointed through a non-partisan process and their integrity should be protected through an uncompromised judicial system.

To achieve such goals, all political parties need to come to an understanding that they will give up the practice of the “winner takes all” culture that had made Bangladesh’s politics confrontational and exclusionary, marginalised the loser, and has made political discourse intolerant, leaving little space for public reasoning.

Democracy means more than just free elections. Bangladesh needs to address again the challenge of democratising the democratic process to ensure that the representative institutions are no longer exposed to elite capture and are rescued from the influence of money and muscle power. Parliament needs to regain its rightful place as the source of constructive debate to address the problems of the country rather than serve as an arena for confrontational politics. Citizens’ trust in the rule of law needs to be established so that they can believe that one law for all prevails without partisan application of law enforcement.

The prospects for meeting such challenges depend to a large extent on the commitment of the diverse political forces now competing to gain state power for building a sustainable democratic political order in the country.

This is a brief version of a keynote address delivered at the 1st International Conference on Politics, Society, and Development (ICPSD 2025) at the Shahjalal University of Science and Technology from January 31 to February 01, 2025.

Rounaq Jahan is a political scientist, author and distinguished fellow at the Centre for Policy Dialogue.

Views expressed in this article are the author’s own.