Why Bangladesh’s Politics, Polity and Policy Remain Unaligned

The July 2024 mass uprising was heralded as a foundational rupture in Bangladesh’s post-colonial trajectory, promising the dismantling of a hyper-centralised, repressive state apparatus. Yet, two years into this transition, the initial revolutionary euphoria has turned into widespread public disappointment and disillusionment. The high-minded architecture of transformation – exemplified by the 11 reform commissions established under Professor Muhammad Yunus’ interim administration – produced voluminous diagnostic texts, but the structural machinery of the state remains remarkably untouched. This paralysis stems from a profound, systemic misalignment among the three structural pillars of the state: politics, polity, and public policy. Since our ruling class operates devoid of an authentic democratic praxis, the euphoric energy of the streets has been neutralised by the gravitational pull of institutional inertia and the government’s nonchalance.

In post-uprising Bangladesh, the visual axis of power has shifted, yet the underlying political culture remains strongly intact. Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony explains how deeply entrenched habits of domination survive superficial systemic shocks; elite networks merely adapt to maintain control. Bangladesh’s political culture remains tethered to structural clientelism and competitive authoritarianism. In fact, political parties treat the state not as an instrument for the public good but as an engine for patronage distribution.

While the interim government’s reform commissions diagnosed the symptoms of misrule, their prescriptions failed to alter the transactional logic of power. Bangladesh has been trapped in a hybrid of a parochial and subject political culture, where citizens are either marginalised or reduced to transactional clients. To achieve a non-violent participatory political culture, structural reform must be driven by organic social movements. Instead, the current political class has simply inherited the instruments of the old regime, proving that an uprising can replace the political players without altering the architecture of governance.

This cultural rot directly cripples the polity – the institutional, constitutional, and structural framework through which state power is organised and legitimised. In a true democracy, the polity must possess a qualitative, deliberative character. In Bangladesh, however, there is a profound intellectual and conceptual deficit regarding what a transparent and accountable polity actually requires. Do our politicians understand the polity at all? Do the policymakers contemplate its qualitative nature? The empirical evidence points to a definitive negative. Even within the civil society and the educated intelligentsia, the understanding of the polity is frequently reduced to the mechanics of periodic elections (every five years), completely ignoring the institutional checks and balances necessary to sustain liberty.

Montesquieu’s theory of the separation of powers is fundamentally broken within the Bangladeshi state structure, where the executive branch routinely hollows out the legislative and judicial domains. If we critically look at the specific paralysis of the reform commissions formed more than two years back, we will see how the interim government’s initiatives failed.

The Judiciary Reform Commission recommended structural decoupling of the lower judiciary from executive oversight; yet judicial appointments and administrative controls remain deeply politicised, leaving the apex court vulnerable to the executive capture.

 The Police Reform Commission sought to dismantle the colonial legacy of the “1861 Police Act” to end the institutionalised use of law enforcement as a partisan militia, yet policing remains defined by regime survival, arbitrary detentions, and a lack of independent accountability mechanisms. However, the police force functions as a repressive state apparatus (RSA).

The Public Administration Reform Commission aimed at streamlining a bloated, colonial-era bureaucracy, but the civil service continues to function as an insular caste, resisting technocratic accountability and preserving its gate-keeping authority over state resources. Max Weber’s sociology of bureaucracy warns that an unreformable administrative caste will always prioritise its own institutional survival over democratic transformation. While our constitution explicitly declares in Article 7 that all powers in the Republic belong to the people, the state machinery operates as an extractive, unaccountable entity. The constitution is treated as a “secret and sacred” text – fetishised in rhetoric but concealed from public consciousness. Instead of being lived as a dynamic “social contract”, it is weaponised as a supreme legal shield to legitimise authoritarian impulses.

Because politics remain clientelist and the polity is unaccountable, the public policy formulation process is deeply distorted. According to Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, legitimate public policies must emerge from rational-critical debate and communicative action within an open, inclusive civic space. In Bangladesh, public policy remains an exercise in top-down bureaucratic dictation.

Members of the Parliament appear to tend to act more as localised development catalysts and patronage dispensers than focus on their constitutional roles as legislators. Parliamentary sessions seldom present rigorous, evidence-based debates on complex policy matters; statutory bills are routinely passed with minimal scrutiny. The citizens possess no collective agency in the policy formulation process. There is no institutionalised mechanism – such as public notices, legislative town halls, or transparent feedback loops – to communicate or debate policy issues with the public before they are enacted. Consequently, public policies suffer from severe elite capture, engineered by powerful business syndicates and political insiders, while systematically alienating the broader populace.

Reclaiming the Social Contract

To rescue the democratic experiment from this institutional morass, the constitutional order must be radically re-imagined. The constitution of Bangladesh is not the private property of the ruling elite; it is a foundational social contract. This contract must be aggressively and independently upheld by the Supreme Court. No individual or institution within the executive, the legislature, or the judiciary can remain above the law of the state. From the president and the prime minister to the lowest-ranking bureaucrat, every custodian of state power must be held strictly accountable to this foundational contract. Moreover, the predatory practice of altering the constitution to suit the shifting interests of the party in power must be permanently abolished. If the constitution is to protect the people’s sovereignty, its evolution must reflect public demands – not the survival instincts of an incumbent regime.

Civic education must be institutionalised at the primary education level. Future generations must grow up understanding how a state runs, how a democracy functions, and what their rights and duties are under the social contract. Only by cultivating an informed, active citizenry can we bridge the chasm between politics, polity, and public policy. This is how it would transform the raw energy of the youth-led uprising into a durable, functional democracy.
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The writer is an Associate Professor of English at Stamford University Bangladesh. He could be contacted at [email protected]