Familiar patterns return as discussions emerge about possible elections. There are claims of moral high ground, stalled consensus and demands for concessions.
Political impasse is nothing new to Bangladeshis. Yet this moment does not resemble a routine deadlock. It signals a deeper poverty of political imagination and hollowing out of public purpose. At its core is a question that remains unasked: what are political parties actually for?
The constitution of Bangladesh was a promise not only of sovereignty, but of justice. It committed the state to equality, non-discrimination, dignity, secular governance, and democratic participation.
Parties in Bangladesh have long positioned themselves as the guardians of nationalism, often along dividing lines of Bengali versus Bangladeshi and secularism versus Islamism. These labels have generally served as tools of control than inclusion, flattening diversity and excluding indigenous, religious and linguistic minorities and women.
This narrowing of identity has gone hand in hand with a narrowing of purpose. Political parties stopped functioning as vehicles of public service and transformed into engines of self-preservation. Whether it is older parties like Awami League, BNP, Jamaat, Hefazat or CPB claiming to represent the poor, or newer entrants like NCP adopting the language of civic renewal, the pattern is consistent: public legitimacy is invoked but private interests drive the machine.
At every level, political parties in Bangladesh function as clientelist economic systems. They capture institutions, distribute patronage, and rely on tightly managed networks of loyalty. Local governance, where democracy should be closest to the people, has been suffocated. Our short democratic history tells us that elected representatives are often brokers, not advocates. The system rewards loyalty not leadership.
Internally, most parties are profoundly undemocratic. Leadership is entrenched or inherited, dissent is punished. Party workers are mobilised for rallies, arrests, and blockades, but have no voice in policy and decision-making. This absence mirrors the broader erosion of democratic culture. Parties have become hollow.
Parliament reflects this exclusion. Many MPs are not deeply rooted in the communities they represent. They did not grow up in these areas, do not live among their constituents, and often have only symbolic ties to their constituencies. Frequently, the sons, daughters, or relatives of former ministers or party elites are parachuted as part of dynastic entitlement.
Across every level of politics, from local unit leaders to national nominees, access to power is shaped by family legacy, patronage and parochialism: the unwritten rule that certain territories belong to certain families or factions.
Campaigns are expensive and nominations are transactional, driven by wealth, connections, and loyalty. Elections are a season of loudspeakers, banners, and pre-paid processions. For ordinary citizens, aspiring to become a politician is impossible without embracing the same culture of nepotism and rent-seeking. Even recent voices speaking revolutionary language have quickly fallen into similar patterns.
When political parties abdicate their responsibilities, others step in. Civil society imagines itself as democracy’s primary guardian. Bureaucrats and judges overreach in their roles. The military positions itself as a stabilising force. This is political dysfunction. When parties refuse to be democratic institutions, they create a vacuum; and vacuums are rarely filled with accountability.
Meanwhile, people’s needs remain neglected. Relief is distributed with party flags. Photos are taken. Votes are expected in return for much publicised charity. Majority of the largely rural and poor voters are not in need of charity. They are victims of an unequal and rigged system, one that rewards privilege. Few political actors engage with structural reform that can address inequality because it would threaten the system they benefit from.
No one wants to touch land reform, decentralisation, or how police are recruited. Reform stops where power begins. Structural reform is no election gimmick. To be clear, it cannot precede elections, nor is it substantively achievable during a transitional phase. Serious reform needs a government that takes the Constitution seriously, not just in rhetoric but in budgets, institutional design, and policy direction.
The current political struggle is not a battle between competing social visions but over control of the same political machinery. State institutions have become politicised. Law enforcement and courts have been weaponised to protect the powerful and punish dissent. Even civil society movements are silenced or absorbed into elite consensus. Protests are televised, co-opted, and then forgotten. NGO roundtables echo with promise but rarely shift power.
In this landscape, the constitution itself is now framed as a liability, as if the problem lies in the text, not in the hands that have consistently betrayed it. The constitution of Bangladesh was a promise not only of sovereignty, but of justice. It committed the state to equality, non-discrimination, dignity, secular governance, and democratic participation. It offered an inclusive vision of nationhood, one that recognised the dignity of all communities, not just the majority.
This betrayal has produced material harm. Enforced disappearances, partisan prosecutions, unchecked police violence, and institutional impunity form a structural pattern. No singular party, regime, and actors are exempt from this pattern, which is precisely why a reckoning is needed to confront the political system as a whole.
If political parties remain accountable only to themselves and elections are tools of capture, it is not merely a failure of governance but a generational betrayal. Young people who came of age after 1991 were promised a functioning democracy. What they received instead is elite consensus without public voice, and revolutionary rhetoric without change.
So again, what are political parties for? To whom are they accountable? What does it mean to serve, not rule? What would the constitution’s Bangladesh look like, the one we were promised? And if the parties will not serve the people, then who will?
* Dr. Cynthia Farid is a lawyer of the Supreme Court, researcher and teacher