Fault Lines in Bangladesh's Political Journey Towards Democracy
- 1 day ago
- 17 min read
By Nasif Khan | March 08, 2026
"The same forces which have brought about the forms of democratic government, general suffrage, executives and legislators chosen by majority vote, have also brought about conditions which halt the social and humane ideals that demand the utilization of government as the genuine instrumentality of an inclusive and fraternally associated public. ‘The new age of human relationships’ has no political agencies worthy of it. The democratic public is still largely inchoate and unorganized." - John Dewey in ‘the public and its problems, an essay in political inquiry’
Bangladesh’s democratic journey moves from popular mass mobilization to political reset to recurring phase of public disappointment. When street legitimacy doesn’t translate into democratic accountability and more egalitarian distribution of power, authority returns to those better organized to control it – political parties, coercive networks, and increasingly powerful non-state institutions. Bangladesh’s democratic journey is stuck in a systemic, perpetual struggle between competing political and non-political elites, with ordinary people lacking access to the center of power in local and national policymaking that affects their lives and livelihoods.
On February 12, 2026, Bangladesh held a national election for the first time since former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was ousted by a mass uprising in the summer of 2024, ending her 15 years of increasingly authoritarian rule. With around 59% voter burnout, the election was widely seen as the most credible in decades and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party-led alliance swept to victory to form a government. However, the expectation that the election will make Bangladesh more democratic -- or at least put it on a path toward a functioning democracy -- would be misleading.
One of the simplest ways Bangladesh’s current political story is viewed – an authoritarian incumbent falls, an interim arrangement follows, and the election is expected to reset the system toward a functioning democracy. However, Bangladesh’s deeper problem doesn’t necessarily only lie in electoral mechanics. It is, perhaps, the country’s long struggle to build a durable grassroots democratic culture and power that can shape national political discourse – the local practices, structures, and institutions through which citizens can consistently demand transparency and accountability from those who govern them.
Even the expectation that a free and fair national election will chart a path toward democracy is flawed, as representative democracy designed on the basis of electoral premises would likely to perform suboptimally – even under the best and most democratized circumstances. Elections often introduce systematic discriminatory effects on who has access to power – especially agenda-setting power that can influence local and national policymaking – and are not conducive to deliberation or its prerequisite virtues, such as open-mindedness over partisanship. Seeing democracy primarily through representative practices creates unrealistic expectations of what elections, on their own, can achieve, leading to delegitimization – and, in turn, creating openings for elite capture, populist uprising, and demagogic usurpation. When you look at the current socio-economic-political situation of Bangladesh, the manifestations of all these points are clear.
Leading up to the national election, the political culture and order could be defined by mob violence, street coercion, fear among minorities, and a reform agenda under the July National Charter (constitution reform) that tiptoed around building consensus among political (and non-political) elites at the center -- avoiding the hardest questions of structural power distribution and accountability needed for a functioning democracy and a more egalitarian society -- even as everyday security frayed at the edges. The manifestation of that was a few recent incidents that made headlines right before the election: the assassination of a student politician, Sharif Osman Hadi, the lynching and buring of a Hindu factory worker, Dipu Chandra Das, following a blasphemy accusation, and attacks on major national dailies – the Prothom Alo and the Daily Star – as well as a cultural institution – Chhayanaut. If anything, there were not merely isolated incidents, but went on to show the results of a political culture rooted in distrust over trust.
After the ouster of former Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, many Bangladeshis hoped the country might finally turn the page toward a democratic culture after 15 years of increasingly authoritarian rule. Instead, Bangladesh entered a familiar in-between moment for authoritarian to democratic political transition: the old authoritarian regime is gone, yet the institutions that could replace raw force with lawful democratic accountability remain weak. Politics has become a scramble among organized elite minorities, and ordinary people are left to navigate insecurity with limited means they have – especially in the context where the top 10% enjoys 41.4% of national income and hold 58.4% of national wealth, while the bottom 50% enjoys 17.1% of national income and holds just 4.7% of national wealth.
Bangladesh repeatedly produced street legitimacy, but struggled to convert that into local democratic power. When that conversion failed – between national mobilization and local democratic institutionalization – power flowed back to the best-organized elites – those with coercion, money, political party machinery, and networks, both within the political apparatus and non-political ones (large businesses, influential NGOs and other institutions).
To understand why Bangladesh keeps returning to this cliff edge, history might offer us some clues. And, it helps to begin not in 1971 but earlier – in the political architecture and elite bargains Bangladesh inherited from Pakistan, and in the distinctive street mobilization style of politics that has substituted for grassroots democratic institution-building in the Bengal delta for generations, coupled with an aid-and-service delivery model that substituted for citizen-state democratic bargaining. The result is a polity where street power can shake the center, but rarely reorganizes social and political power structures in ways that deepen democracy and reshape national political and governance discourse.
Pakistan’s founding bargain and inheritance of a weak democratic foundation: A contradictory alliance between Punjabi Muslim elites and Bengali Muslim peasants
India’s partition and the Pakistan period did not leave Bangladesh with deeply democratic institutions or political culture – instead they entrenched a system in which elite competition and state control repeatedly overpowered citizen-facing agenda setting and accountability.
Pakistan was a uniquely difficult state-making experiment. It was founded on narrow religious nationalism, governed two wings separated by 1,500 kilometers, and, unlike India’s congress-led independence movement, it did not consolidate a robust, inclusive, programmatic national coalition capable of embedding democratic norms across society.
Pakistan’s shaky founding coalition fused aristocratic Punjabi Muslim landholders (in West Pakistan, now Pakistan) with Bengali Muslim peasants (in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh) – a marriage of convenience that helped create the nation but proved unstable for democratic development because of its contradictory material interests. West Pakistani political elites were never intended to be deeply accountable to mass popular forces in East Pakistan, nor to pursue a more egalitarian distribution of power. In East Pakistan, largely home to peasants, many aligned with Muslim nationalism less out of theology than out of economic hope – a ‘peasant utopia’ of land, egalitarianism, and justice. That hope soon collided with the reality of a state whose coercive and administrative core sat in West Pakistan and was dominated – politically and institutionally – by West Pakistani elites.
And, political and administrative marginalization gradually became structural – West Pakistani Punjabis dominated the army and the officer corps. Economic power was also concentrated in West Pakistan – in the late 1960s, Mahbub-ul-Haq, then Chief Economist of Pakistan’ Planning Commission, famously asserted that 22 families owned 87% of Pakistan’s financial assets in banking and insurance and 66% of industrial assets, and none of them were Bengali.
And the political mobilization capable of converting mass hopes into durable democratic accountability – and reshaping the national discourse – never fully formed in East Pakistan. Parties based in East Pakistan repeatedly found it easier to mobilize crowds – fiery mass rallies, protest marches, general strikes, manifestos – than to institutionalize citizen power in local and national governance in ways that could change the underlying power structure and make society more equal.
When electoral politics struggled to find its feet, Pakistan went for an approach that would have a lasting imprint for decades in the Bengal delta: the military coup. The first coup in 1958 entrenched a pattern in which coercive institutions could override democratic politics – effectively ending Pakistan’s early experiment with democracy.
Thus, Bangladesh did not fail to become democratic in a vacuum. It was shaped within a political system designed to keep popular forces at bay and elites in power – and it inherited a political culture that excelled at the drama of mobilization during crises more than the slow work of building democratic accountability.
Independence from Pakistan was followed by continued authoritarian practices – albeit in new forms – rather than democratic renewal
Bangladesh’s independence in 1971, after a brutal nine-month long war, should have been a democratic reset – or at least that was the expectation. Instead, the architecture of insulated power was largely localized.
Even though Bangladesh was quick to establish a democratic political framework through finalizing the constitution for a parliamentary democracy based governance within the first 12 months of independence with mixed success, its early years stumbled into coercion, corruption, and a syndicate-style political culture and economy. The country’s first general election in 1973, won by the Awami League under Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was marred by intimidation, coercion, vote rigging, and ballot theft – extending older traditions of electoral irregularity into the new country and leaving a lasting imprint on the political culture of Bangladesh.
In Bangladesh’s early years, ruling party (Awami League) loyalists exploited the state apparatus through patronage networks, licenses, smuggling, and politically connected thuggery. And, the breaking point was the 1974 famine – rice prices surged, the treasury was too empty to import, food aid was constrained by geopolitics, relief supplies were misappropriated/hoarded, administrative capacity was weak, and when the army arrested hoarders, it found that some were protected by Awami League connections – shielded by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman even when guilt was plain. A group of prominent intellectuals condemned the famine as man-made, attributing it to plunder and misrule and alleging the government was dominated by smugglers and profiteers.
This is exactly the kind of political economy that produces what Bangladeshis later called syndicates – networks that profit from scarcity, control distribution channels, and blur the line between political party, state and market. In that sense, corruption, rent-seeking syndicates, and politicized distribution has its roots right from the beginning of Bangladesh.
Amartya Sen’s classic work on famine helps explain why this matters for state legitimacy. He argued that the 1974 famine in Bangladesh was not simply a matter of food shortage, but of collapsing entitlements – people’s actual ability to access food through wages, assets, and public support – especially when the state fails to protect the vulnerable. He further argued that the decline in food availability offered little explanation for the Bangladesh 1974 famine – in fact, 1974 was the local peak year in terms of both total output and per capita output of rice since 1971 – and pointing instead to distributional and policy failures. The famine is estimated to have claimed as many as 1.5 million lives.
This episode provides a grim lesson: when democratic accountability is thin, crises become opportunities for extraction – and the costs are paid by those with the weakest voice and least access to power.
Afterwards, as political legitimacy deteriorated, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman turned toward an authoritarian route – emergency rule, suspension of rights, and a one-party presidential system. And when civil politics broke, Bangladesh followed Pakistan’s script – military takeover. From 1975-1990, two Pakistani trained strongmen dominated Bangladeshi politics, taking on the self-appointed role of arbiters of the state – often framed as the solution to corrupt civil/popular politics.
And, even when the mass movement, led by students and workers, that eventually toppled military dictator Hussain Muhmmad Ershad in 1990 – the two major political parties at that time, Awami League and Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), struggled to build a united alliance because suspicion between them ran deep. They converged only when they risked being outflanked and marginalized by their younger followers, which galvanized party leaders into a common platform aligned with the students’ and workers’ demands. Although Bangladesh transitioned to a parliamentary democratic system in the 90s, the political apparatus lacked a robust, cohesive, programmatic vision for the country – a feature that, in many ways, has its roots in Pakistan’s founding.
A foreign aid-backed, service-delivery-focused, market-oriented development model – driven in significant part by NGOs – contributed to weakened democratic accountability
Bangladesh’s social development would be unthinkable without the contribution of its NGO sector. The NGO sector made Bangladesh’s development story real: improvements in health, education, reductions in extreme poverty, and women’s participation have saved lives and expanded capability. But the social development model also reinforced Bangladesh’s democratic accountability deficit – perhaps, substituted service delivery for citizen-state bargaining.
Here too, perhaps, the roots reach back to Pakistan. In Pakistan, policymakers explicitly pursued ‘growth through inequality’ development strategy, described as functional inequality, privileging capital formation and top-down development over broad-based democratic accountability. And, during the cold war, foreign aid effectively whitewashed Pakistan’s failure to achieve democratic constitutional normalcy – as the aid was tied to security imperatives over political and economic well-being, thus providing stabilization for an authoritarian governance structure through military apparatus.
After independence, Bangladesh became a laboratory for development programs – but with a very weak early administrative and state capacity. This administrative vacuum meant that someone had to deliver basic public service while the new nation was being built – and into that gap entered NGOs. Donors increasingly used NGOs as delivery channels because the state had limited capacity to absorb aid flows and deliver quality development services at scale. Aid commitments rose sharply, and the system, in effect, allowed (new) elites to emerge, stabilize, and sustain themselves relying more on transnational partners than on citizen bargaining.
Over time, however, Bangladesh’s development service delivery shortcut had an unintended consequence, which unfolded gradually, – weakening democratic accountability. Foreign aid fueled a proliferation of NGOs, some came to resemble to run like a parallel government. Institutions such as BRAC, Grameen, and others grew into national actors – often extraordinarily effective at delivering ‘public’ services – evolving from donor-funded organizations to large enterprises, operating across national programs and private markets. Yet the democratic accountability bargain that ties representation, taxation, and citizen oversight through elected representatives to state performance remained thin. When citizens receive core public services through organizations that are not politically accountable to them, the pressure that forces public officials and elected representatives to answer downward can weaken – or never develop in the first place.
In this context, well-established and influential NGOs became part of an elite settlement – powerful, protected, internationally legitimated, and only indirectly accountable, if at all, to the people they serve. Bangladesh does not lack grassroots democratic practices – village mediation traditions, informal deliberation, and NGO-facilitated groups exist – but these often do not generate enforceable leverage over elected representatives or public administrative officials or national political discourse. The ladder from local voice to national bargaining remains weak – and service-delivery-focused NGO systems unintentionally stabilized that weakness.
In a polity where citizen oversight is thin through democratic means, persistent inequality is easier to sustain. Even though Bangladesh made real gains in health, education, women’s participation, and resilience, the distribution of wealth and income has remained stubborn. According to the World Inequality Database, in 2024, Bangladesh top 10% hold roughly 58.4% of wealth while the bottom 50% hold about 4.7%, and the top 10% receive about 41.4% of national income while the bottom 50% received about 19.1% – these proportions have shifted only modestly over decades.
Bangladesh’s present moment – reform at the center among elites, coercion in the street, and persistent politics of violence
Bangladesh is again at a pivotal point. The interim government under Muhammad Yunus arrived amid public hope – but it appeared to govern as a coalition manager, trying to appease powerful groups rather than doing the hard work of building citizen-facing accountability and enabling democratic pressure from below. Public hopes often were being reduced to perception and pulse surveys and data points, while the bargaining that matters happens among elites in Dhaka – and never reaches farmers, laborers, tea workers, or the informal workforce, which accounts for roughly 85% of national employment.
The interim government’s decision to ban Awami League activities under an anti-terrorism legal framework may not be the wisest move if the goal is to break the cycle of political violence and chart a path toward a functioning democracy. This containment tactic might keep Awami League – as an antidemocratic force – out of power, but it won’t necessarily weaken them or in time it might even strengthen them. A broad ban on mass parties like Awami League might lead them to go underground, and resort to use violence as a political method to find its feet in Bangladesh politics. In fact, Awami League supporters have threatened unrest after being excluded from the vote. A narrower accountability approach – targeting individuals credibly accused of ordering or carrying out killings – could reduce the risk of collective retaliation while keeping accountability and justice focused. Democracy at its heart is about competition, so short-circuiting it for too long can be self-defeating.
Meanwhile, post August 5, 2024, politics reorganized through alliances at the top – and the elite-bargain dynamic was visible in new coalitions. The student-led National Citizen Party (NCP) – born from the protest movement – has struggled to translate its street legitimacy into grassroots legitimacy and has formed an electoral alliance with Jamaat-e-Islami, a party with a long and polarizing history. In parallel, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) – now the largest political party in the absence of Awami League – has moved to form another alliance ahead of the national election in February 12, 2026 – effectively turning the contest into a competition between two major blocs.
On the ground, coercion was often getting enforced by party-linked (directly or indirectly) musclemen and clientelist brokers, making politics feel like intimidation rather than representation. When violence becomes a political method, it is not enough to simply schedule an election. If this coercive layer is left intact, the street power can slide into street punishment – even legitimate reform agendas become fragile.
And, as the killing of Hadi, the lynching of a minority worker, and the vandalism of major national dailies and a cultural institution, show that, the cost of this type of political culture are no longer abstract.
In Box: a map showing how power becomes entrenched among elites in Bangladesh: This is a suggestive visualization of the above – not a verdict: Bangladesh swings/dances between periodic mass mobilization and everyday elite control, with a persistent gap between mass mobilization and grassroots democratic institutionalization.
Group | How actors reproduce themselves | Where power sits | Likely effects | Typical example |
A – political and bureaucratic elite | Closed party/bureaucratic, patronage appointments | Coercion and patronage networks, control over rules, budgets, contracts, appointments etc. | Low democratic accountability, repression/impunity risks, managed/selective people participation | National party high command, senior bureaucracy in government agencies, security apparatus, rent/syndicate networks |
B – episodic mass movement/uprising | Through movement legitimacy, temporary/episodic coalitions | Mass numbers and moral legitimacy, but institutions remain weak, status-quo power temporarily contested | Volatile openings, likely backlash, change often not institutionalized with the mass | Student/youth uprisings, crisis coalitions, labor movements/protests, national protest waves |
C – local accountability platforms/practices | Membership organizations, participatory local politics etc. | Civic associations/institutions, local government institutions, citizen facing agenda setting and accountability structures at the local level | Accountability deepens, democratic culture grows – rule-bound culture strengthens | Locally rooted unions/co-ops/village groups, participatory local bodies, grassroots rights groups, NGO-facilitated groups when they enable citizen-state bargain |
D – service-delivery intermediaries (emerging/new elite) | Professional/managerial selection, donor/market mechanism, board governance | Resources + platforms + expertise, international legitimacy | Better development services possible, but democratic accountability remains thin as they are not directly accountable to the people they serve | NGOs as public service delivery system, donor implementation partners, social enterprise organizations |
Bangladesh repeatedly surges into group B (mass mobilization capable of toppling a regime), and then slides toward group A (elite consolidation and coercive/patronage dominance) because the missing bridge is group C: durable grassroots organization, empowered local democratic institutions, and citizen-facing accountability practices/structures – collectively which can influence national political and governance discourse. A further complication is that major NGOs often sit in group D – improving welfare and capacity, but (when structured as upward-donor-board-accountable service systems) potentially reducing the political pressure that would force government institutions (both public officials and elected representatives) to become accountable to citizens, it can unintentionally stabilize a low-democratic-accountability system instead to strengthening it.
Path ahead for a democratic transition
There are no easy answers or straightforward blueprint. Confronting the systemic nature of unequal power distribution in Bangladesh – deeply embedded in the country's social and political fabric – is essential for policymakers across both the political and non-political apparatus. If Bangladesh truly wants a democratic transition, it will require changes in how power remains concentrated within – and reproduced by – certain groups.
Bangladesh's current political crisis gets further complicated by an economy that remains heavily dependent on the garment sector (over 80% of export earnings), leaving the country exposed to global shocks. Amid mounting macroeconomic pressure, the country is facing growing stress in the financial sector – especially in banking – along with high inflation. Bangladesh has also struggled to diversify its export base and has seen limited ‘product discoveries’ relative to neighboring countries like Pakistan and India.
On the other hand, Bangladesh is producing more graduates than the economy can absorb in decent jobs – while around 85% employment comes from the informal sector. Youth unemployment has continued to rise. Bangladesh is also projected to face roughly a 3C and 4.5C rise in temperature by 2060 and 2100, respectively – implying more heatwaves, water scarcity, and land loss from sea level rise. Meanwhile, as global development aid is projected to shrink, and concessional finance is expected to decline, pressure will grow to rely more on domestic resources – prominent Bangladeshi economists were already arguing for a gradual shift toward self-reliance as early as the late 1980s.
And, Bangladesh will have to confront these challenges, and many more, with a public administration system that ranks 93 out of 120 countries in the Oxford index of public administration – perhaps reflecting the result of gradual politicization of the public administration core.
If Bangladesh political and non-political apparatus doesn’t change course towards a more equal distribution of power, the consequences could be dire – especially for those with least access to policymaking tables.
Six thematic areas that policymakers – and those who can directly influence national decision-making – could treat as starting points for building a democratic accountability-rooted system:
Ensure the right to vote: the right to and be able to vote, without fear and intimidation, is a core element of any functioning democracy. And, a political candidate can only be truly democratically elected if all citizens are able to vote – without fear, intimidation, external incentives – and if the voting is easy and accessible to cast, so that it is convenient and low-cost for people to participate. The government, political parties, and the election commission should keep this in mind for all subsequent elections in Bangladesh.
Target accountability without triggering mass-party retaliation: if the aim is deterrence and rule of law, focus on credible legal accountability for individuals accused of ordering violence and systemic unlawful human right violations – rather than broad bans that risk driving factions underground or encouraging more violence.
Strengthen accountability from the bottom, provide people access to policymaking: To some extent, Bangladesh’s core democratic deficit is local. Citizen oversight should be institutionalized – through public hearings, enforceable grievance channels, and local institutions that can compel answers from officials – beyond the episodic heroics of protest. As much as this needs to happen within government, it is also necessary within the political parties – building and promoting a culture of politics ‘where politicians live for politics over lives of politics’ is critical for transition toward a functioning democracy.
Confront coercion as a political method: Goon/Muscleman networks are not a cultural phenomena, they are an institutional choice. Raising the cost of political violence through democratic accountability requires enforcement, political agreements to demobilize violent cadres, and local protection for collective action – so citizens can organize without intimidation.
Rebalance NGOs from service substitution to power-building: Bangladesh needed NGOs when state capacity was weakest. Bangladesh’s state now has far more administrative reach than it did in the 1970s/80s. NGOs should complement – not replace – public service delivery, and invest more deliberately in organizing citizens into durable bargaining units that can hold public officials and elected representatives accountable. NGOs can play their most valuable political role by enabling durable bargaining units – workers, farmers, urban poor, laborers, etc. – and by strengthening local accountability mechanisms that hold both politicians and administrators answerable through clear structures, processes, and procedures.
Reorganize and professionalize public administration, albeit gradually: Regardless of the political apparatus or constitutional design or who governs, Bangladesh will continue to need a capable public administration to navigate this uncertain period. A capable public administrative system – protected from politicization – can enforce rules, improve delivery, and constrain elected officials through transparent, lawful procedures.
Bangladesh does not lack civic courage. It lacks a reliable bridge from uprising to organized public institutions that can rebalance the structural power – from street legitimacy to grassroots-based democratic accountability. Thus, Bangladesh reproduced the same cycle – elections without accountability, development without active citizenship, and periodic uprising without democratic renewal.
For the past decade or so, Bangladesh was often promoted as a ‘basket case to development miracle’ narrative. But the fractures in the country’s political-economic governance are now wide open. If the policymakers – and citizens of Bangladesh – don't get serious about addressing them, the development miracle will run its course – and the bill will land on the people with least access to power.
Author
Nasif Khan is a public policy practitioner in the fields of international development and politics. He holds an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), where he was an Edward S. Mason Fellow in Public Policy and Management and Social Innovation and Change Initiative Scholar. Prior to attending HKS, he spent over a decade working in international development and political advisory roles, and most recently served as Chief of Staff and Head of Strategic Partnerships at BRAC, the world’s largest Global South-led INGO – a nonprofit and social enterprise hybrid.
© 2025 The Council on International Law, Order, and Security (CILOS) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission from CILOS.
To cite this article, use the following reference: Khan, Nasif. (March, 2026). Fault Lines in Bangladesh's Political Journey Towards Democracy. Council on International Law, Order, and Security (CILOS).
The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official positions CILOS, their staff, or board members.