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