Urges grassroots mobilisation and prioritised reform ahead of national elections
Civil society in Bangladesh must rise above fragmented efforts and take collective responsibility to ensure meaningful reforms, said Rehman Sobhan, chairman of the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD).
"Exercising a watch function is not just about documenting which reforms should go ahead but also about tracking how they are progressing and mobilising citizens to demand accountability," he said while chairing a citizens' dialogue in Dhaka today.
The event, organised by the Citizen's Platform for SDGs, Bangladesh, marked the launch of a new platform titled Bangladesh Reform Watch.
Rehman questioned the current reform discourse, pointing out that while the government has referred to dozens of reforms – later narrowed down to 84 – the public has little knowledge about their content or priority.
"The fact that you want to implement 84 reforms means that no one is going to take you very seriously," he said, stressing that real reform requires prioritisation, legislation, and effective implementation.
With elections scheduled for February, as reaffirmed by Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus, Rehman expressed doubt about the possibility of substantive change.
"If you had any reforms that you wish to implement presumably this should have been articulated six months ago," he said.
Recalling CPD's past involvement in reform monitoring, including task forces under caretaker governments and agendas set before the 2001 and 2006 elections, he admitted that these largely failed to produce tangible outcomes.
Reflecting on Bangladesh's 54-year history, he said that the absence of a credible reform process results from the inability of parliament to effectively debate, legislate, and monitor reforms.
This gap, he said, has forced civil society to assume a role it has not yet been able to fulfil.
"There is in a way no such thing as a functioning collective of civil society coming together to generate collective action in support of a reform process," he said.
He urged NGOs and CSOs to break out of their silos and mobilise citizens at the grassroots level.
"Until we demonstrate this capacity for collective action and our capacity to mobilise people not just to come and participate occasionally in seminars and dialogues but actually in each district… I am not really sure that we will have delivered what we set out to do."
Drawing on his own experience from the pre-independence era, Rehman reminded the audience that civil society once played a transformative role in shaping the Six-Point Movement, which became the foundation for Bangladesh's liberation struggle.
"Six points did not drop from the sky -- it was the end product of civil society initiatives, mostly teachers and academics coming together," he said.
He called on the new platform and civil society at large to take on this historic responsibility:
"You have to commit yourself to a process which takes you out of the seminar rooms and makes you into a major political and social resource to take Bangladesh forward."
