August 2025 - BRAC Institute of Governance and Development

The aftermath of the July 2024 uprising has sparked unprecedented civic and political debates in Bangladesh. But is the country ready to move from slogans to systemic transformation?

The spontaneous, youth-led uprising in Bangladesh in July 2024 was a rupture, caused by the eruption of long-suppressed frustrations with a system that has increasingly failed to deliver political accountability, rule of law, or meaningful representation. In the weeks that followed, three terms came to dominate the national political lexicon: justice, reform, and election.

But these words, evoked in political rhetoric, must now be interrogated for their substance. What does justice look like in a country where the legal system is widely seen as politicised? Can reform be meaningful in a context marked by weakened institutions and an institutional culture that discourages transparency and accountability? Can elections, long treated as ends rather than means, be reclaimed as instruments of genuine democratic renewal?

The road Bangladesh chooses now will determine whether it emerges from this moment of crisis with a more inclusive political compact or slides further into a more sophisticated form of managed democracy. It creates a system where elections are held, and institutions exist in form. But real power remains concentrated, dissent is controlled, and democratic procedures are manipulated to preserve the status quo.

Justice Beyond Retribution

Too often, justice in Bangladesh has been narrowly defined in retributive terms: prosecuting a few perpetrators, conducting public trials, or removing scapegoats. But as victims and their families have argued, symbolic punishment means little if the underlying structures that enable abuse remain intact.

The opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) has called for the establishment of an independent commission to investigate the abuses committed by the previous government. However, critics raise doubts about whether its current reformist rhetoric reflects genuine change or political opportunism. Meanwhile, the National Citizen Party (NCP) has articulated a deeper vision of justice—dismantling the networks of patronage and impunity that link the police, bureaucracy, and political leadership.

What Bangladesh needs now is structural justice, an independent judiciary free from political influence, and safeguards for civil liberties. Yet, only very few steps have been taken. Some mid-level officials have been transferred, but institutional accountability remains elusive.

The Pitfalls of Superficial Reform

Reform has become a buzzword in Bangladeshi politics since the uprising, but little has translated into meaningful institutional change. On paper, the agenda seems promising. In practice, its credibility is undermined by two major gaps: a lack of internal party democracy and vague implementation mechanisms.

Most political parties in Bangladesh are tightly centralised organisations, driven by dynastic or personality-based leadership and patron-client networks. Intra-party elections are rare, and dissent is often punished.

Moreover, many reform proposals focus on institutional architecture and amending constitutional clauses like Article 70, which prevents Members of Parliament from voting against their party, thereby limiting legislative independence or creating new oversight bodies. These measures may offer symbolic reassurance but risk becoming hollow fixes if not backed by enforcement mechanisms and a political culture that values accountability.

Reform should start with political will, extend into institutional restructuring, and be sustained by civic vigilance. Half-measures, as history has shown, only reinforce the status quo.

Election: A Necessary but Insufficient Condition

Bangladesh’s next general election, tentatively slated for early 2026, is being viewed by many international observers as a litmus test for democratic recovery. But treating the election as the sole measure of democratic progress is misguided.

The ruling Awami League had consistently resisted opposition demands for a non-partisan caretaker government to oversee the polls. Voter suppression, intimidation, and partisan manipulation are longstanding issues that remain unaddressed. As a result, public trust in electoral integrity has eroded, particularly among rural and peri-urban populations. While most citizens still want to vote, many no longer believe that elections will produce real change.

For elections to be truly meaningful, they must be embedded within a broader ecosystem of democratic accountability. That means guaranteeing press freedom, protecting opposition voices, and curbing executive overreach. It also means recognizing the often-overlooked importance of local elections where communities can hold leaders accountable on immediate, tangible issues.

A revitalised democratic process must empower citizens at all levels, not just at the national ballot box. At the heart of this crisis lies a deeper issue, such as the absence of both a culture and mechanisms of accountability. Without channels for citizens to scrutinize power and demand responsiveness between elections, democratic processes risk becoming hollow rituals. Representative citizen forums, deliberative spaces where communities can engage directly with local and national authorities, could serve as one crucial way to rebuild trust and embed accountability into political life.

Rebuilding Trust and Imagination

The core of Bangladesh’s current political crisis is not just institutional dysfunction, but a deficit of trust. Rebuilding that trust will require both symbolic acts, such as citizen assemblies, constitutional amendments, or new commissions, and material changes in how power is structured and exercised.

Organisations that can bridge political divides and mobilise civic oversight may be the key to moving beyond the confrontation that has defined Bangladesh’s political landscape for decades.

Ultimately, the language of justice, reform, and elections captures a rare window of possibility. But to turn this moment into a true democratic opening, Bangladesh must go beyond slogans. It must ask hard questions: can justice be pursued without vengeance, and reform without regression?

The future of Bangladesh hinges on whether this is treated as a crossroads or a conclusion. A crossroads implies deliberation and open possibilities. A conclusion suggests inevitability and closure. If Bangladesh chooses the former, it may finally have an inclusive and accountable democratic order. If it settles for the latter, it risks sliding into a performative democracy voting in elections without choice, reforms without any biting power, and justice without truth.

Illustration credit of cover image: John Digesare

Established in 1972 to aid in the nation-building efforts of a country emerging from the ruins of its liberation war, BRAC began its journey in Bangladesh with a focus on rehabilitation before shifting to a more long-term, sustainable community development approach. The organization’s leadership soon realized that, within the existing deeply patriarchal structure, working with the community as a whole was unlikely to address women’s needs or harness their potential as agents of change. Consequently, BRAC started to focus on women as a distinct subgroup, which eventually became one of its key constituencies.

After half a century, the organization still considers women empowerment and gender equality as central to its work. However, BRAC’s overarching strategies for women empowerment have shifted significantly over the years—from an emphasis on collective empowerment and social transformation to an approach built on women’s individual agency.

In the 1970s, BRAC’s approach was rooted in the Freirean concept of “conscientization”— the idea that oppressed groups must become critically aware of their social reality in order to transform it. Women were one such group, whom the organization saw as a “key instrument for change,” stressing their roles not only in improving their family’s positions but also in challenging oppressive social norms. BRAC ensured women’s inclusion in Village Organizations (VOs)—the primary vehicle of BRAC’s community empowerment and service delivery—and actively involved them in shaping program agendas. Crucially, BRAC, through these collective structures, created awareness and motivated the women to claim their rights by pressuring local authorities.

The 1974 famine further solidified the criticality of women in BRAC’s development agenda. As droves of men left famine-stricken villages in search of work, women were left to fend not just for themselves but also for their children and the elderly. The famine laid bare the extreme vulnerability of rural poor women, while simultaneously demonstrating their unmatched resilience and resourcefulness. Women’s collective empowerment was well-aligned with these organizational thinkings.

However, starting from the 1980s, BRAC increasingly started to prioritize women’s individual over collective empowerment, paralleling a broader organizational move from social transformation to service delivery, primarily through its Microcredit program. While BRAC still targeted women, it was primarily as service recipients, rather than as a collective force for social transformation. Women’s perceived creditworthiness and better compliance with program requirements significantly contributed to program’s success.

The authors argue that this de-emphasis on women’s collective empowerment was a result of the structural changes in the development sector itself. The rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s motivated donors to advocate for rolling back state interventions and promote NGO-led service delivery. Consequently, NGOs like BRAC started receiving significant donor funding for service delivery. The influence of neoliberalism also brought a push for efficiency, anti-poverty economic agenda, and a focus on individual agency. Moreover, a growing donor “fascination with numbers” meant that collective empowerment programs were further deprioritized because their impacts were hard to quantify using standard development indicators.

In line with donor priorities, BRAC was incentivized to develop efficient, service-focused programs that could be scaled up rapidly. Thus, using structures like VOs as a means of direct service delivery made more rational sense than using them as a force for fundamental social change, which was neither easily scalable nor measurable.

To successfully run efficient, scalable poverty alleviation programs, BRAC also often had to navigate and negotiate within the existing gender power structures. Directly challenging these structures would have been disruptive to achieving program goals. For example, staff often sought permission from the husband before giving out a loan to a woman.

To be fair, BRAC never completely abandoned its collective empowerment agenda. In the 1990s, the organization established village-based women’s forums, called the Polli Samaj, to develop women’s leadership so they could effectively advocate for social justice. However, instead of challenging the existing power structure, the Polli Samaj approach was to work in collaboration with the rural elites to remain apolitical. The effectiveness of Polli Samaj is debatable, and sometimes, the authors argue, it even reinforced the power structure. Over time, this program lost ground due to further shifts in donor funding away from collective approaches and doubling down on efficiency.

A more recent attempt at collective empowerment is BRAC’s Urban Development Program (UDP), which aims to integrate community organizations, mobilization, and women’s empowerment. The authors observe that even here, women are often instrumentalized, used, for example, to get easier household access. They also indicate that tensions arise between men and women over leadership positions, and in these cases, BRAC often makes pragmatic compromises with patriarchal norms.

Overall, NGO-led initiatives on collective empowerment of women, including those of BRAC, have gradually declined over time. While this has allowed BRAC to efficiently deliver essential services to millions of poor, including women, it raises questions about the extent to which the economic prosperity gained through its interventions has contributed to addressing repressive power structures, which is often the hope. With BRAC’s declining dependence on donor funding, the authors urge the organization to reevaluate the trade-off between programmatic efficiency and long-term social transformation.

Access the journal article here.

Month: August 2025

Justice, Reform, and Elections: Can Bangladesh Escape the Trap of Managed Democracy?

Scaling Up & Stepping Back: The Shifting Ground of Women Empowerment at BRAC