Policy promises, political reality and questions BNP must address

Bangladesh has lived for years on big promises. Campaign season brings speeches, banners, and slogans. Those slogans feel urgent and comforting. But they rarely explain exactly how change will reach people’s lives. That is why BNP’s recent shift matters. For the first time in a long time, a major party has tried to make policy a central part of its campaign.

Long before the fall of Awami League regime, BNP published a 31-point outline. It then produced leaflets and trained organisers to explain the programme face-to-face. That is a useful start. It marks a change from pure rhetoric to something that looks more like planning. Yet a plan on paper is not a plan in practice.

We must now ask how those ideas will reach a classroom, a hospital ward, a rice field, or a kitchen. We must ask too whether the planners have thought enough about who will be excluded by simple technicalities, like a voter list or a digital login. These are not minor details. They will decide whether the next government delivers, or whether it hands out attractive cards that never function for the poorest families.

Look at the competition. Some parties offer stirring language but few details. Proposals that sound bold on a poster can become confusing in daily life. Ideas like shorter working hours for women or remuneration for housewives have emotional appeal. Yet they also raise immediate questions about feasibility and financing.

Other parties lean on slogans about a new political order (Notun Rajnoitik Bondobosto) or moral revival. These slogans ask voters to imagine a different country. That is a political strategy. It can be energising. But it does not tell teachers how to run a classroom, or farmers where to sell their crops, or a cancer patient how to get chemotherapy this month.

BNP’s difference is procedural. The party has organised training sessions, issued leaflets on health, education, agriculture, women’s welfare, and other topics, and promoted a 180-day economic action plan for the first months in office.

This is the kind of work that can make policy legible for ordinary people. It tells local organisers what to say at a meeting. It gives activists a short script to explain an idea to a shopkeeper or a tea stall worker. That matters. But having leaflets and giving training is only step one. The real test will be whether those ideas survive the messy realities of implementation.

BNP has offered several card concepts: Family Card, Farmer Card, Health Card, and others. Each card is meant to simplify access to services and benefits. Family Card, for example, is designed to empower the female head of household by giving her monthly financial or food support.

Farmer Card aims to record land and crop data, guarantee fair prices, allow easier loans, and deliver market and weather updates via phone. These are sensible directions. They respond to real problems: women who manage households, farmers trapped by middlemen, patients stuck behind long hospital queues.

Yet policy design is rarely simple. How will the Family Card handle internal migrants who work in cities but vote in villages? Will the Farmer Card include fish and livestock producers who have low literacy and little internet access? Who will administer the registries, and what grievance mechanisms will protect people when distribution fails? 

Experience matters here. Previous schemes like VGF cards and local rationing show how services can be diverted by local brokers and political figures. If a national programme simply creates another list to be controlled by local power holders, the cards will not help the poorest. They will become another layer of paperwork that benefits those who already have influence.

We must insist on answers to practical questions, such as how eligibility will be verified for people who lack national IDs or for households that move seasonally between village and city. BNP must explain not only what it wants to do but how it will stop local capture from turning a welfare card into a political instrument.

Policy discussions often feel abstract until they touch real life. Think of the woman who works as a domestic helper in Dhaka. She cooks, cleans, and cares for children in a middle-class home. She is hardworking. She sends money back to her family. She needs help with food and health care more than many.

Yet because her voter registration remains in her village, she often cannot access government-sponsored rationing services in the city. The delivery rules of many programmes tie benefits to residency or local voter lists. The result is exclusion that feels cruel and arbitrary.

If BNP’s Family Card is to be meaningful, it must address mobility and registration. It must create ways for urban migrants to claim benefits without losing the limited security they already have in their home communities. It must also ensure that frontline administrators cannot divert benefits to those connected to them. These are not technicalities. They are the difference between a life saved and a family left behind.

The scale of the problem is large and growing. Recent research by the Power and Participation Research Centre found that nearly 27.93 percent of people now live below the upper poverty line, up from 18.7 percent in 2022, while extreme poverty rose to 9.35 percent.

Those figures mean one in four people face daily vulnerability and that many households fall into crisis at the slightest shock. We cannot pretend these are marginal numbers. They shape the baseline for any policy change.

Addressing this scale matters for costs. A simple arithmetic example helps. If 50 lakh families received a monthly transfer of Tk 2,000, the annual cost would be about Tk 12,000 crore. If the transfer were Tk 2,500, the price would rise to Tk 15,000 crore a year. That is a large sum. The national budget for fiscal year 2025–26 totals roughly Tk 7.90 lakh crore.

Any major new expenditure must be set against that reality. It is possible to reallocate, to increase revenue, or to cut elsewhere. But those choices must be explained. Citizens deserve to know which services would be postponed, which taxes might rise, or where savings would be found. Without that clarity, card promises sound like charity rather than a coherent policy programme.

Governments often launch attractive programmes that fail because they lack sequencing and pilot testing. Good policy design usually begins small. Pilot a district. Learn the problems of registration, delivery, and monitoring. Fix the loopholes. Then scale.

That learning cost is small compared with the price of nationwide failure. Yet political pressure often pushes parties to promise nationwide rollout on day one. The result is the opposite of prudence: programmes that are underfunded, badly monitored, and easy to capture.

We also have structural limits. Bangladesh’s economy runs heavily on informal labour. Tax revenue remains lower than potential. Debt servicing eats a growing share of government spending. In that setting, a pile of new cash transfers will force tough tradeoffs.

The party that asks citizens to choose it must tell them what it will prioritise and why. It must also explain how it will strengthen administrative capacity and reduce leakages. Otherwise, the next government will simply inherit the familiar pattern: energy devoted to headlines, not durable systems.

BNP deserves credit for starting a conversation about policy, and that matters in a political culture long dominated by slogans and personality clashes. Leaflets, training sessions, and the language of reform are not the destination, but they are a beginning.

They signal an attempt to move politics toward accountability, and that shift should be acknowledged. Still, credit cannot become a free pass. Voters are not persuaded by printed promises alone. They are asking for clarity, for timelines that make sense, for budgets that add up.

They want to know whether pilot projects will be tested before nationwide rollouts, whether public audits will be routine rather than exceptional, and whether there will be institutions strong enough to prevent local power brokers from capturing programmes meant for the poor. 

Leadership matters here in very ordinary, human ways. People remember leaders who walk streets, not just stages, and who answer uncomfortable questions without irritation. When Tarique Rahman returned and said, “I have a plan,” people listened, because that sentence carried weight after years of absence and anticipation. But that weight now demands explanation. This should not be seen as a political burden. It is an opportunity to demonstrate seriousness.

The next step is not louder slogans but deeper listening, showing in practical terms how a Family Card would work in a Dhaka neighbourhood and in a remote rice-growing village, how Farmer Cards would reach marginal fish farmers, and how health partnerships would ensure treatment without turning patients into customers at the mercy of private overcharging.

The real test will come when BNP places a costed and phased plan on the table, with clear pilots, transparent registries, and independent oversight. If it can do that, it will move decisively from the realm of political promise into the far more difficult, and far more meaningful, realm of governance.

This election season may reward the party that speaks most strongly to emotion. That has always been part of politics. But democracy also rewards the party that shows how to make good intentions practical. BNP has a chance to close the gap between promise and practice.

It has a chance to answer the basic questions the public now asks: what is the plan, how will it work, who will benefit first, and what happens when things go wrong? Answering those questions once in a public, detailed, and honest way will change the meaning of campaigning in Bangladesh. It will show voters that politics can be about implementation as well as rhetoric.

People want plans that feel real. They want leaders who will walk with them and show where the money will come from and how the systems will be protected from capture. That is a heavy demand. It is also a fair one. If BNP wants to lead, it should be ready to explain and to pilot, to listen and to adjust. That is what real political responsibility looks like.

*Mostafa Mushfiq is an undergraduate student of Anthropology at the University of Dhaka.