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Academics, researchers and activists on Saturday said that institutional and legal reforms in the post-uprising era would not sustain unless the political parties institutionalise participatory democracy with youth engagement.

They made the remarks while addressing the Bengal Delta Conference 2025 organised by a Dhaka-based think tank, Dacca Institute of Research and Analytics, at a hotel in the capital. 

The two-day conference themed ‘Bangladesh at crossroads: rethinking politics, economics, and geopolitical strategy’, began on Friday.

The last day of the conference featured seven panel discussions and five paper presentation sessions.

In a session titled New political dialogue: transformation in South Asia politics, panelists from Bangladesh said that the country’s political party culture was widely marred with elitism and oligarchy.  

Badiul Alam Majumder, a member of the National Consensus Commission, said, ‘Businesses have captured politics while politics dominates the commerce and nothing is working at all,’ adding that ‘the country may require another uprising to welcome a new political order.’

Mirza M Hassan, adviser at Brac University’s Centre for Governance and Development, recommended a rewritten constitution to empower citizens’ direct participation and the rights of ordinary people against entrenched elites.

Harindra B Dassanayake, researcher and policy analyst at Muragala Centre for Progressive Politics and Policy, Sri Lanka, said that South Asian democracies, including those in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, were like ‘broken machines’, where electoral systems failed to convert citizens’ aspirations into policy outcomes.

He called for leveraging technology to enhance participatory and deliberative democracy.

Mir Nadia Nivin, a governance and digital transformation specialist, said that Bangladesh’s political parties must reform to connect citizens as active stakeholders rather than passive beneficiaries.

Nepal’s former water resources minister Dipak Gyawali, Dhaka University’s social science faculty dean Professor Taiabur Rahman, Amar Bangladesh Party general secretary Asaduzzaman Fuaad, North South University’s political science and sociology professor Bulbul Siddiqi addressed the session anchored by the Dhaka Tribune editor Zafar Sobhan.

In another session titled Cross-border experience: uprising and the aftermath, the speakers said that politicians must not fail to translate people’s ‘rapture’ into meaningful changes after an uprising.

Sharing the Sri Lankan experience, Prabha Manuratne, an English language professor at Kelaniya University in Colombo, said that academicians were skeptical about the long-term impacts of the ‘horizontal’ leadership in the uprisings, both in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

She said that time would be needed to assess the impacts properly.

She hoped that the subalterns would get the ultimate benefits of the post-uprising politics.

Expressing his disappointment with the unsustainable constitutional reforms in Nepal in the last decades, Dipak Gyawali warned his Bangladeshi friends, saying, ‘Oligarchs, even in the post-uprising era, are stuck to old political systems.’

South Korea-based Kyun Hee University’s philosophy and cultural studies professor Alex Taek-Gwang Lee,  National University of Singapore’s Institute of South Asian Studies fellow Rajni Gamage, and Dhaka University’s development studies professor Asif Shahan also spoke.