Bangladesh’s anti-corruption commission is paralyzed. Its human rights watchdog has been stripped of independence. The judiciary’s reforming ordinances were repealed. The bureaucracy is being packed with loyalists. And in every case, the party doing this is the party that spent fifteen years denouncing exactly this. The third article in our series on whether BNP 2026 is just BAL 2.0 — only this time, with the receipts.
There is a specific kind of cynicism that defines Bangladeshi politics. It is not the cynicism of a people who have given up — it is the cynicism of a people who have seen the exact same trick performed so many times they can call it before the magician reaches for the hat.
You know the trick. A party spends years in opposition documenting how the ruling government has captured state institutions, corrupted the judiciary, packed the bureaucracy with party loyalists, and emasculated the bodies that are supposed to hold power accountable. The party campaigns on reform. The party wins. And then, within months, sometimes weeks, the new government does every single thing it spent years condemning — usually with more speed and less shame than its predecessor managed.
Bangladesh has watched this happen before. It is watching it happen again.
Over the past three months, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party government under Prime Minister Tarique Rahman has moved systematically through the country’s core institutions: the judiciary, the anti-corruption commission, the human rights watchdog, the bureaucracy, the police, the military intelligence apparatus. In each case, the pattern is the same. Reforms enacted after the 2024 uprising — reforms that BNP publicly supported, in some cases demanded — have been repealed, allowed to lapse, or undermined through administrative action. Loyalists have been installed. Independent figures have been sidelined or driven out.
This is institutional capture. It is not subtle. And it is being done by the party that once made ending institutional capture its central political promise.
The Judiciary: A Promise Made, a Promise Broken
Start with what BNP said. Not once, not vaguely — on record, repeatedly, in writing.
On July 13, 2023, BNP announced its 31-point reform outline. Point 10 was unambiguous: effective judicial independence would be ensured, control of subordinate courts would be vested in the Supreme Court, a separate secretariat for the judiciary would be established, and legislation specifying qualifications and standards for Supreme Court judge appointments would be enacted.
These were not ambiguous aspirations. They were specific structural commitments. BNP did not merely endorse them in a party document — they reiterated them at the National Consensus Commission, endorsed them in the July National Charter (a reform framework signed by more than two dozen political parties and later endorsed in a nationwide referendum with approximately 70 percent support), and included all three elements explicitly in the BNP election manifesto for the February 12, 2026 election.
The interim government of Muhammad Yunus, which governed between August 2024 and February 2026, actually implemented these commitments. The Supreme Court Secretariat Ordinance 2025 established an independent secretariat with budgetary discretion and authority over the transfer, promotion, and discipline of lower court judges — taking those powers away from the executive. The Supreme Court Judges Appointment Ordinance 2025 established a Supreme Judicial Appointment Council, led by the chief justice, to recommend candidates for the Appellate and High Court divisions. For the first time in Bangladesh’s history, judicial appointments would not be subject to executive selection.
Under Bangladesh’s constitution, when parliament convened, these ordinances had to be placed before the house within 30 days. BNP, with a two-thirds parliamentary majority, could have passed them into law. It could have amended them if it found specific provisions wanting. Instead, on April 9, 2026, BNP’s parliamentary committee recommended repeal. The bills were introduced by BNP’s own law minister. Both ordinances were struck down.
The parliamentary committee’s reasoning was instructive. It argued that under the judges’ appointment ordinance, selections would be made based on the “subjective satisfaction of the Chief Justice” — apparently a greater threat than the previous system, in which the executive simply selected whoever it wanted. It argued that the secretariat ordinance gave the chief justice “excessive powers” that could “hinder coordination with the government’s operations.”
Read that phrase again: hinder coordination with the government’s operations.
That is not a concern about judicial fairness. That is a concern about executive control. The committee was explaining, in bureaucratic language, that a truly independent judiciary would be inconvenient for a government that wants courts to remain available as instruments of political management.
Dr. Sharif Bhuiyan, a senior Supreme Court advocate who acted as amicus curiae in the Article 116 case — the landmark constitutional case that had restored judicial control of subordinate courts to the Supreme Court — was direct: “After advocating for judicial independence for a long time, the BNP’s current position appears inconsistent to many.” He warned that repealing the ordinances while the High Court verdict remained in force could create a constitutional conflict — and noted that failure to comply with the court’s directive could constitute contempt.
What BNP built in 2001–2006, for context, was one of the most scandalously pliable judiciaries Bangladesh had seen. Justice Joynal Abedin was appointed to run a one-man investigation into the August 21, 2004 grenade attack. His findings shielded the government entirely. When the BNP government needed the chief justice’s retirement age extended to keep a loyalist on the bench heading into the 2006 election season — and to ensure the caretaker government would be headed by someone it could manage — it amended the constitution. That is the institutional history from which BNP is drawing its inspiration in 2026.
The Anti-Corruption Commission: Ground to a Halt
This one requires context to appreciate how extraordinary it is.
Between 2024 and early 2026, Bangladesh’s Anti-Corruption Commission undertook the most aggressive anti-graft campaign in its institutional history. Under the interim government, the ACC filed 874 cases in 2025 — compared to 451 in 2024. It approved 2,536 investigations, up from 845 the previous year. Assets worth Tk 30,352 crore were frozen or seized in 2025, compared to Tk 361 crore in 2024. Courts imposed four times more fines. Over Tk 1,500 crore was deposited into the state treasury, compared to Tk 81 crore the year before.
This was a functioning anti-corruption body doing exactly what anti-corruption bodies are supposed to do.
Then BNP came to power.
On March 3, 2026, the ACC chairman and both commissioners submitted simultaneous resignations. The commission ceased to function. Without a commission, the ACC cannot initiate investigations, file cases, approve charge sheets, or impose travel bans on accused individuals. An ACC official, speaking anonymously, described the situation plainly: “Over the past year and a half, the ACC carried out its largest anti-corruption drive in history. Now, without any commission approval, we cannot even initiate investigations or cases.”
The mechanism for appointing a new commission was provided by the Anti-Corruption Commission (Amendment) Ordinance 2025, which established a search committee led by a senior Supreme Court justice, with representatives from civil society and independent institutions. Under this system, the government’s role in selecting commissioners would be limited and transparent.
BNP did not pass this ordinance into law. It allowed it to lapse on April 11. The old system — under which the government’s influence over commissioner appointments is substantially less constrained — was restored.
Dr. Iftekharuzzaman, Executive Director of Transparency International Bangladesh, said what everyone already understood: “If the amended ordinance is not passed and the old system is reinstated, it may indicate reluctance toward reform.” He called the absence of a commission “paralysed anti-graft efforts.”
The timing requires no elaborate interpretation. BNP came to power in February 2026. The commissioner resignations came in March. The ordinance was allowed to lapse in April. The sequence does not suggest accident. It suggests management.
Worth remembering: the ACC under BNP 2001–2006 was not a serious institution. Bangladesh’s Bureau of Anti-Corruption, the predecessor body, was so thoroughly captured by political networks that Transparency International ranked Bangladesh the world’s most corrupt country for five consecutive years (2001–2005). It was only after the 1/11 intervention — led by the caretaker government and backed by the military — that Bangladesh’s anti-corruption apparatus began functioning with any independence. BNP spent the years after that experience condemning what had been done to its leaders and demanding a reformed, independent ACC. Now it has one. It has chosen not to keep it.
The Human Rights Commission: Stripping the Watchdog
The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) story follows the same structure. The 2025 ordinance expanded the NHRC’s powers significantly: it could independently investigate allegations against state agencies including police and security forces, had defined timelines and mechanisms for investigation, provided legal basis for compensation, and was granted administrative and financial autonomy. Crucially, it removed the requirement that the commission seek government permission before investigating abuses by security forces.
BNP’s parliamentary committee reviewed the ordinance. Its report recommended making government permission mandatory again for investigating security forces and increasing government representatives on the appointments committee. The NHRC ordinance was repealed. The 2009 law was reinstated.
Five outgoing NHRC commissioners, in an open letter, disputed the government’s stated justifications. Former commissioner Nabila Idris told Al Jazeera that the concerns cited by the government “were already addressed in the ordinance.” She warned: “When safeguards are weakened, it creates space for abuse. Leaving that space open is like leaving a door unlocked — eventually, someone will walk through it.”
The irony is almost too sharp to leave unobserved. Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir — now LGRD Minister in Tarique Rahman’s cabinet — once described the 2009 NHRC law as a “Commission to Suppress the Opposition.” That was his characterization of the law his own party has now reinstated. In Parliament, opposition NCP lawmaker Hasnat Abdullah reminded the chamber of Fakhrul’s exact words: “The commission produced the legitimacy to suppress the BNP. I have heard the commission saying, ‘It is legal to shoot Jamaat leaders and activists in the interest of maintaining human rights.’”
The minister sat and listened. The vote proceeded. The 2009 law was restored.
Enforced Disappearances: Closing the Legal Door
Between 2009 and 2024, under Sheikh Hasina’s government, Bangladesh’s security forces — particularly RAB, the elite force BNP created in 2004 — engaged in systematic enforced disappearances. A Commission of Inquiry established by the Yunus interim government received more than 1,900 complaints and confirmed at least 1,569 cases, including hundreds classified as “missing and dead.”
The 2025 ordinance on enforced disappearances sought to address this: defining the crime in law, establishing investigation procedures, providing legal basis for prosecution. This was not a politically neutral provision. It was the foundation for accountability for abuses by the security services — the same services that BNP now controls.
The ordinance was allowed to lapse in April 2026.
The result, as Idris and other legal experts have documented, is a legal grey area. Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal can only handle enforced disappearances as part of widespread or systematic patterns, not individual cases. Ordinary criminal law does not clearly define enforced disappearance as a standalone offence. Without the 2025 ordinance, many victims’ families have no clear legal path to justice.
Jon Danilowicz, a retired US diplomat who served in Bangladesh and now leads Right to Freedom, a Washington DC-based human rights organization, was specific about the stakes: “A credible deterrent is essential to ensure security forces do not engage in such abuses again. Accountability mechanisms must convince both those who give orders and those who carry them out that they will ultimately be held responsible.”
Without a legal definition of the crime, that deterrence does not exist.
The Bureaucracy: The Familiar Purge
Institutional capture does not operate only through legislation. It operates through personnel.
Within a week of taking power, Tarique Rahman — who holds the Public Administration portfolio personally — began what observers described as a systematic purge. Senior secretaries associated with the Yunus interim government were moved to “attached” status in the Ministry of Public Administration — a bureaucratic purgatory with no substantive duties and no real authority, designed as a signal of disfavor. Contractual appointments of approximately nine senior secretaries made during the interim period were cancelled.
Inside the secretariat, an atmosphere of panic developed. Officials with any connection to the previous administration or to the Awami League era scrambled to demonstrate party loyalty. Former Chhatra Dal (BNP’s student wing) connections from university days were suddenly being revived as credentials. Proximity to BNP-aligned MPs was being cultivated as insurance against transfer.
The military was similarly reorganized. Lieutenant General M. Mainur Rahman was installed as Chief of General Staff. Brigadier General Kaisar Rashid Chowdhury was promoted to major general and appointed as the new head of the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence — the military’s principal intelligence organ. These appointments were widely understood as consolidating Tarique Rahman’s personal control over the armed forces by removing figures from the Yunus era and placing trusted figures in intelligence and operational roles.
City corporations in six major urban centers — including Dhaka South and Gazipur — were placed under active BNP leaders as administrators, in advance of promised local elections. The Dhaka South administrator, Md. Abdus Salam, is described as a veteran Tarique coordinator. The Gazipur administrator, Shawkat Hossain Sarkar, is president of Gazipur Metropolitan BNP. These are not technocratic appointments. They are the electoral infrastructure being built into the administrative machinery.
One hundred and twelve officers in the Election Commission Secretariat were transferred simultaneously. In a country where election rigging has historically been accomplished through the Election Commission as much as through ballot boxes, the message this sends about future elections is not subtle.
The Pattern: Twenty Years of Evidence
None of this is unprecedented. All of it is documented.
From 2001 to 2006, the BNP-Jamaat government operated what was, by any meaningful measure, a captured state. The judiciary was bent to serve political purposes — cases were filed and dropped based on party affiliation, judges were appointed for their reliability rather than their independence, and when the caretaker mechanism threatened to produce an impartial government, BNP extended the Chief Justice’s mandatory retirement age to ensure the caretaker would be headed by someone they trusted. This is not allegation. It is documented in reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the US State Department, and the International Crisis Group, every year of the BNP tenure.
The anti-corruption bureau under BNP was not merely ineffective — it was a weapon. Cases were filed against opposition figures and dropped against BNP members with a consistency that removed any ambiguity about its function. Bangladesh finished five consecutive years at the bottom of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. When the 1/11 caretaker government began real anti-corruption proceedings, some of the first prominent figures arrested were Khaleda Zia and Tarique Rahman.
BNP spent the next fifteen years presenting those prosecutions as political persecution. Some of them may well have been. But the underlying behavior that made those prosecutions credible to international observers — the documented kleptocracy, the Hawa Bhaban parallel government, the Tk 40 crore in Biman Airlines lease commissions, the FBI investigation into money laundering, the Singapore court proceedings — did not become fabricated simply because the prosecution was politically motivated. The evidence existed because the conduct had occurred.
What Bangladesh is watching now is the same party, with the same institutional instincts, running the same playbook — this time with the added sophistication of having spent fifteen years watching their opponents do it and identifying every technique they had missed.
The 70 Percent Who Voted Yes
The July National Charter was not a document produced by BNP or by its opponents. It was a political compact, signed by more than two dozen parties, designed to function as a floor on democratic reforms regardless of which party won the February election. It committed every signatory to judicial independence, human rights accountability, anti-corruption reform, and institutional autonomy. It was put to a nationwide referendum alongside the February 12 vote. Approximately 70 percent of Bangladeshis who voted endorsed it.
BNP signed that charter. BNP asked voters to vote “yes.” BNP won the election on a manifesto that incorporated the charter’s commitments verbatim.
NCP lawmaker Akhter Hossen, a July uprising leader, put the contradiction directly: “The government is ignoring the will of the people reflected through the referendum.” He warned: “This was not meant to be business as usual. The idea was to pursue structural transformation, not just pass or drop laws through a simple parliamentary majority.”
Jamaat opposition MP Muhammad Nazibur Rahman was blunter in parliament, on the judiciary bills: “The bill amounted to a blatant interference in judicial independence and a grave violation of the independence of the apex court.” He accused the government of attempting to bring back the practice of transferring non-compliant judges to remote postings.
The government’s response has been consistent: we are not rolling back reform, we are reviewing. The law minister has said new, improved legislation will follow after consultation. The home minister has said 133 ordinances could not be processed in ten days.
These arguments might carry more weight if any of the lapsed or repealed ordinances were clearly defective in ways unrelated to executive control. Instead, the pattern is precise: every ordinance that limited the government’s ability to influence the judiciary, the anti-corruption commission, the human rights watchdog, or the security forces was either repealed or allowed to die. Every ordinance that expanded services or amended labor law was approved. The pattern is not random. It is surgical.
Why This Is the Story Nobody Wants to Tell
There is a reason this documentation is uncomfortable. Bangladesh’s political commentary has spent years — rightly — documenting the authoritarian excesses of Sheikh Hasina’s government. The July 2024 uprising was a genuine popular movement. The students who died in those protests were real. The grievances were real. The demand for structural change was real.
Pointing out that BNP is now doing what it condemned does not invalidate any of that. It does not mean Hasina was right. It does not mean the uprising was wrong. It means that institutional capture is not an Awami League pathology. It is a Bangladeshi political pathology — practiced by every party that has held power, justified by each using the language of the party it replaced.
BNP leaders, when pressed, invoke what was done to them. Khaleda Zia was imprisoned. Tarique Rahman was convicted in absentia. Thousands of party activists were prosecuted under the Digital Security Act. These things happened. The response to having experienced institutional abuse is not, however, to institutionalize the ability to do the same to your opponents. The response, if the reform commitments were genuine, is to dismantle the machinery. BNP has not dismantled it. It has inherited it and, in key places, reinforced it.
Jon Danilowicz of Right to Freedom offered the most precise framing: “The real question is whether the government respects the will of the people who supported the July Charter and demanded reform. The current government still has an opportunity to prove the sceptics wrong.”
Three months in, the evidence does not suggest the opportunity is being taken.
The Accountability Gap
Bangladesh’s institutional failures are not primarily failures of individuals. They are failures of structure — specifically, the failure to create institutions that are genuinely independent of whoever holds political power at any given moment. The 2025 ordinances were precisely designed to close that structural gap: to create a judiciary that couldn’t be managed, an anti-corruption commission that couldn’t be captured, a human rights watchdog that could investigate the security forces without asking the security forces’ political masters for permission.
Those structures existed, briefly, from November 2025 to April 2026. They are now largely dismantled.
What replaces them is the familiar Bangladesh default: institutions that function when their political principals want them to function, investigate who their political principals want investigated, and protect who their political principals want protected. Under BNP 2001–2006, that meant impunity for grenade attacks, arms hauls, and a corruption epidemic. Under Hasina 2009–2024, it meant enforced disappearances, prosecutions of journalists, and the Digital Security Act. The faces change. The machinery does not.
The Bangladesh that emerged from July 2024 had, for a moment, a genuine chance to break that cycle. The institutional architecture for something different was built and operational. The people voted 70 percent in favor of it.
The question Bangladesh is now living through is whether that mandate will be honored — or whether it will be archived, the way every reform mandate in the country’s history has eventually been archived, while the new government explains that things are more complicated than they looked from opposition.
We have seen this before. We are seeing it again. The playbook has not changed. Only the party holding it.
This is Part 3 in Bangladesh Untold’s Series 9: BNP 2026 = BAL 2.0? Read Part 1: When Victims Become Perpetrators and Part 2: Press Freedom Then and Now. All sources cited are on record from The Daily Star, Prothom Alo, Al Jazeera, The Business Standard, and New Age Bangladesh.
Leave a Reply