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BANGLADESH stands at a peculiar crossroads. Revolutions often end with the fall of a regime, leaving the victors to improvise their next steps. Rarely does the euphoria of an uprising give birth to a document that tries to discipline power itself. The July Charter is precisely that rare attempt — a bold, contested, and fragile blueprint meant to channel the anger of the streets into the architecture of governance. It is not just another declaration to be filed away in political archives; it is a test of whether this country can finally bind rulers and opposition alike to rules stronger than slogans and promises sturdier than power games.

The July Charter matters because it is the first serious attempt since independence to convert an uprising’s moral energy into a rules-based political settlement. Charters are not panaceas; they are lodestars. At their best, they take a country standing at the edge of rupture and sketch a lawful pathway back to consent, accountability, and predictability. Bangladesh has been here before in spirit — think of the Six-Point demands or the Proclamation of Independence — but rarely has a post-revolution moment been channelled into an explicit, negotiated blueprint with signatures from antagonists who do not trust one another and barely agree on first principles. That is precisely why this document is consequential: it aspires to do something our politics have almost never done — bind winners and losers, old parties and new movements, into a time-bound reform contract that outlives the next news cycle.

For all the cynicism suffusing public debate, the process has moved further than many expected. The National Consensus Commission has circulated a consolidated draft — reportedly containing 84 agreed items and an accompanying implementation commitment — to more than 30 parties, with written feedback first due on August 20 and, after requests from several parties, accepted through August 22. That timeline matters not because deadlines are magical, but because momentum is. The longer a revolutionary promise sits in committee, the more it curdles into suspicion. The commission’s insistence on capturing what is already agreed and then locking it with signatures is therefore strategically sound. It is also politically realistic: unanimity on everything is a recipe for stalemate, not reform.

The Charter matters because it tries to deal with structural defects that no single election can fix. Article 70’s near-total ban on MPs voting against party lines has for decades hollowed out parliament, reducing legislators to delegates of party chairs rather than trustees of constituents. Reforming this ‘anti-defection’ regime — even modestly — would begin to rebalance incentives inside the House. So would de-politicising constitutional appointments through a credible appointments council and setting transparent criteria for constituency delimitation so that gerrymandering is not an incumbent’s quiet prerogative. These are the prosaic mechanics of democracy that decide whether governments can be questioned between elections, not just replaced at them. None of this is glamorous, but all of it is nation-building.

Yet precisely at the moment when the country needed the broadest imagination, the scope of reforms was narrowed to only a slice of the state’s dysfunction. The NCC, charged with distilling six months of consultation, produced a draft that obsessed over elections, parliament, and judicial interpretation, but left untouched the deeper layers of governance that define the everyday lives of citizens.

Health. Women’s affairs. Media. Local government. Labour.

These were once part of the government’s initial reform agenda, but in the end they were quietly pushed off the table. Their omission is not a technical oversight; it is a political statement. To debate Article 70 and proportional representation but ignore health system collapse is to tell the citizen that their survival is secondary to elite bargaining. To fight over whether the Charter is ‘supra-constitutional’ while leaving women’s safety or labour rights unaddressed is to repeat the very arrogance that provoked the uprising. The July Charter, if it remains narrow, risks becoming exactly what critics fear: a document about politicians, not about people.

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Health, the broken backbone

IF DEMOCRACY is to mean anything, it must guarantee the right to life with dignity. Bangladesh’s health sector, however, is a chronicle of abandonment. Hospitals overflow, rural clinics are skeletal, and every public health crisis — from dengue to Covid — reveals how little has been invested in building resilient health systems. A reform charter that ignores this is not merely incomplete; it is blind.

The NCC should have debated: how can health spending be raised above the anaemic 2.5 per cent of GDP? Should there be constitutional guarantees on public health obligations? How do we stem the exodus of doctors and nurses abroad? Instead, silence. The danger is obvious: a state that cannot protect its people from disease is a state without legitimacy, however beautifully it designs electoral systems.

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Women’s affairs, half the nation, still marginal

BANGLADESH loves to showcase women leaders at the top of politics, but at the bottom of society, women remain marginalised in both law and practice. Domestic violence remains rampant. Political parties offer token candidatures, rarely ceding safe constituencies to women. Economic reforms still rely on women as the cheap labour behind garment exports, without giving them security or dignity at work.

The July Charter could have demanded quotas in party nominations, or gender-sensitive budgeting in state planning, or independent commissions on violence against women. None of these emerged. Women’s questions were discussed as ‘social issues’, not as foundational democratic rights. The revolution in the streets was gender-inclusive; the reform document is not. That disconnect could prove fatal for its credibility.

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Media freedom at the margins

IF TRUTH is silenced, democracy suffocates. The fall of the Awami League regime was catalysed in part by years of media repression — draconian laws, harassment of journalists, and censorship by intimidation. Yet the Charter avoids media reform, as if freedom of expression were a luxury to be debated later.

A truly people-centred Charter would have confronted the digital security laws that criminalised dissent. It would have proposed guarantees for public service broadcasting or measures to insulate editors from political capture. Instead, by leaving media untouched, the draft effectively preserves the old arsenal of repression for whoever comes next. That may suit parties today, but it ensures that tomorrow’s citizens will once again face the same silence.

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Local government, the unfinished devolution

EVERY decade, Bangladesh promises decentralisation. Every decade, the promise is betrayed. City corporations and union parishads are still strangled by central control. Budgets are handed out as favours, not as rights. The Charter, obsessed with the parliament, has nothing to say about the third tier of governance where ordinary lives are most affected.

Yet decentralisation is not charity; it is democracy’s foundation. A village health clinic, a school, a road — these are not delivered from Dhaka; they are delivered locally. If the Charter cannot guarantee elected local governments real power and finance, then the promise of reform is hollow. To imagine constitutional democracy without empowered local bodies is to imagine a house without foundations.

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Labour, the forgotten majority

BANGLADESH’S labour force is the engine of its economy. Migrant workers send remittances that keep the currency afloat. Garment workers sustain exports. Informal workers keep cities running. And yet, labour has no seat at the reform table.

The Charter does not mention trade union rights, workplace safety, or the protection of migrants abroad. This silence is not neutral — it reproduces a politics that treats workers as instruments of growth, not as citizens with rights. The Rana Plaza tragedy should have been enough to make labour reform non-negotiable. That it is absent from the Charter shows how deeply elite pacts are divorced from the lives of the majority.

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The risk of an elite charter

WHAT emerges, then, is a paradox. The July Charter is both historic and insufficient. It dares to imagine reforms in the core of the Constitution, but it refuses to imagine reforms in the core of people’s daily lives. If signed in its current shape, it may stabilise elite competition but will not heal the social fractures that fuelled the uprising. Health crises will continue to kill silently. Women will continue to struggle in fear. Journalists will continue to work in shadows. Local governments will remain beggars before the centre. Labour will remain voiceless.

That is why the excluded sectors matter. They are not auxiliary issues; they are the lifeblood of a just republic. A charter that claims to be national cannot afford to treat them as afterthoughts.

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The legal and political stalemate

THE immediate dispute is not over every policy detail but over the instrument of implementation. On one side, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and several allies argue that the elected parliament should implement the Charter and that no pre-election legal scaffolding is necessary. On the other hand, Jamaat-e-Islami, the National Citizens’ Party and several groups aligned with the student leadership insist on giving the Charter an explicit legal footing before the polls, warning that a purely political compact will be honoured in the breach once offices are occupied.

This is not an abstract quarrel. The consolidated draft is said to contain provocative devices — claims of ‘supra-constitutional’ effect or clauses attempting to make the Charter unchallengeable — that strike directly at constitutional orthodoxy. However much one desires speed and certainty, Bangladesh’s constitutional order rests on judicial review and parliamentary sovereignty within a written charter. A political compromise document cannot, by declaration, place itself beyond challenge or above the Constitution without inviting a legitimacy crisis.

If there is a path to settlement, it runs through a thin corridor of law and trust. Legally, Bangladesh already possesses an instrument designed for precisely such moments of contested constitutionality: Article 106, which empowers the president to refer questions of great public importance to the Supreme Court’s Appellate Division for an advisory opinion. A narrowly framed reference — asking, for example, whether and how specific pre-election measures to implement agreed Charter items could be given effect consistent with the Constitution — could supply a neutral compass bearing without usurping parliament.

Politically, an Article 106 route could de-escalate the immediate standoff. Parties that distrust one another can, at minimum, agree to be bound by a publicly reasoned opinion from the highest court about the permissible ‘legal wrappers’ for any pre-election steps. It would not answer every question, but it would redraw the bargaining space. The BNP and allies would retain their core principle, that parliament legislates reforms, while Jamaat, NCP and allied groups would secure something firmer than handshakes: a court-blessed pathway that avoids constitutional adventurism.

Of course, a court reference cannot substitute for politics. The hard trade-offs still await: whether to temper Article 70 in ways that preserve government stability without turning MPs into rubber stamps; whether to institutionalise an appointments council that both sides can live with; whether to experiment with proportional representation in an upper chamber without destabilising the lower house; and how to sequence reforms so that the system changes are not contingent on who wins the next election.

On these, the Charter can reduce risk by adopting three implementation disciplines that comparative experience suggests are decisive.

First, package the ‘bankable ninety per cent’ now, and codify it in instruments that do not require constitutional amendment — rules of procedure, administrative orders, and ordinary statutes that are clearly constitutional. If an item demands an amendment, label it honestly and defer it to the elected House with a public, time-bound roadmap.

Second, any enabling statute that purports to operationalise parts of the Charter before elections should carry built-in guardrails: a sunset clause that forces parliamentary reconsideration within a fixed window after the election; an explicit non-derogation clause recognising the supremacy of the Constitution; and an open-courts clause preserving ordinary judicial review.

Third, shift from ‘can’t be questioned’ rhetoric to ‘must be measured’ discipline. Create a public implementation dashboard managed by the Comptroller and Auditor General or a cross-bench parliamentary committee, with quarterly scorecards on each Charter commitment. The temptation to declare success is overwhelming in transitional politics; the only antidote is verifiable progress.

Even with such scaffolding, sceptics ask whether the signatures themselves are likely to materialise. Here, the incentives are telling. There is palpable pressure on all sides to be seen as constructive at this stage. The BNP cannot look like the party that walked away from youth-led demands for systemic fixes; Jamaat and the NCP cannot look like groups that torpedoed a national accord in pursuit of maximalist pre-election leverage; the interim administration, having invested political capital in the Charter, cannot afford a collapse that confirms the worst suspicions about technocratic caretaking. Recent reporting suggests that the notes of dissent are real but not fatal and that the commission is emphasising a theory of change in which dissent signals engagement, not exit.

Still, a settlement is not inevitable. Two scenarios could sink it. One is the ‘supremacy trap’, in which insistence on supra-constitutional clauses becomes a red line. That would hand opponents an easy argument and invite the Supreme Court to swat the effort on first contact. The other is the ‘sequencing trap’, in which parties insist that every hard amendment be settled before polls. That makes the perfect the enemy of the possible and turns the Charter into a bargaining chip in the election itself — precisely what it was meant to transcend. The responsible way through is disciplined minimalism before the vote and disciplined maximalism after it: lock what you can without warping the Constitution now, and commit — publicly, measurably — to move the heavier constitutional pieces in the first legislative year.

History is unforgiving. Bangladesh has had moments of rupture before, and each time the promise of reform was narrowed to elite bargaining. Each time, citizens were told to wait while parties divided the spoils. Each time, disillusionment returned.

The July Charter is a chance to break that cycle. It can either be a milestone, remembered as the first attempt to institutionalise post-revolutionary reform. Or it can be another paper tiger, remembered for what it ignored. The choice depends on whether political leaders dare to look beyond their own disputes and see the citizens whose lives hang in the balance.

For health, for women, for media, for local government, for labour — for the forgotten frontiers of reform — the Charter must speak. Otherwise, the uprising will have been reduced to a footnote, and July’s promise will wither into silence. If that is what emerges over the coming days, sign it. Then measure it. Then, in the first year of the next Parliament, finish it. Only then will July be remembered not as a season of beautiful words, but as the month when a republic learnt to bind itself.

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H M Nazmul Alam is an academic, journalist, and political analyst based in Dhaka.