Referendum: People voted, state blinked

They voted. They marched. They bled. And then, in the most direct democratic act available to them, they delivered a verdict through a referendum that left little room for misreading.

Now Bangladesh’s political establishment is testing just how much that verdict can be delayed, diluted, and debated before the people who delivered it run out of patience.

On Saturday, two gatherings on opposite sides of Dhaka — one a civil society seminar at the National Press Club, the other a diplomatic dialogue in Gulshan — converged on the same alarm: the referendum mandate is being treated as optional.

And the consequences of that treatment, speaker after speaker warned, could unravel everything the July 2024 uprising was supposed to build.

A Mandate Is Not a Suggestion
what is not in dispute. The people of Bangladesh participated in a referendum. They returned a clear verdict.

That verdict called for constitutional reform — structural, fundamental, and urgent.

North South University political science professor Mahbubur Rahman did not dress this up in legal hedging when he spoke at the National Press Club seminar, organised by the Rashtro Shongskhar Andolan under the title “Referendum: Is the Basis of Legitimacy the People or the Constitution?”

“A referendum is the people’s direct mandate,” he said flatly. “Converting the people’s will into a legal framework is a state obligation.” Not a preference. Not a political calculation subject to coalition arithmetic. An obligation.

He went further. To revisit the referendum outcome, to suspend it, to park it in procedural limbo — any of these, he argued, would be “contrary to the aspirations of the people.” The uprising produced a hunger for change.

The referendum gave that hunger a legal voice. “The people have entrusted the government with the responsibility of implementation,” Rahman said. “This must be fulfilled.”

The word he chose — must — was not accidental.

The People Were Always Ahead
To understand why the referendum carries this weight, it helps to understand where Bangladesh’s legitimacy has always actually come from.

Former Inspector General of Police Baharul Alam offered the seminar’s most historically grounded argument.

The country’s great political turning points, he said, have never waited for constitutional sanction.

They arrived first — raw, urgent, undeniable — and the constitutional architecture followed, accommodating what it could not resist.

The 1972 constitution was not the origin of Bangladesh’s sovereignty. The liberation war was.

The 1990 transition that ended military rule did not begin in a courtroom or a parliamentary chamber. It began in the streets, in the refusal of ordinary people to accept an illegitimate order any longer.

The July 2024 uprising belongs to precisely this lineage. But Alam argued it carries something the earlier moments did not — or at least, not so explicitly.

“The appeal of the student-people’s movement to eliminate discrimination and establish accountability is not merely a political change,” he said. “It is a moral reawakening.”
That distinction matters enormously.

A political crisis can be managed — negotiated, deferred, horse-traded into a compromise that satisfies no one completely but keeps the system running.

A moral crisis is different. It carries a standard against which all subsequent political behaviour is judged.

When a state born from a moral reawakening begins to behave as though the mandate behind that reawakening is negotiable, it does not just face a political problem. It faces a question about its own right to exist in its current form.

Alam was careful not to frame the constitutional framework as the enemy.

“If the conflict between the two can be resolved through coordination rather than confrontation,” he said, “it will be a great achievement.” But his ordering was clear: the people’s will is the source.

The constitution is the vessel. When the vessel no longer holds the water, you change the vessel.

When the State Denies Itself
Lyricist and political thinker Shahidullah Farayji, who delivered the seminar’s keynote paper, named the current crisis with surgical precision.

What is happening now, he argued, is not a legal complexity being carefully navigated.

It is something more damaging: a state that acknowledges the referendum verdict publicly while simultaneously leaving it suspended in judicial uncertainty — and in doing so, contradicts itself at the level of first principles.

“Accepting the referendum verdict on one side while keeping it pending on the other means the state is rejecting the very foundation of its own legitimacy,” Farayji said.

He called it “moral escapism” — and argued it was pulling Bangladesh toward a deep legitimacy crisis from which recovery becomes progressively harder the longer the evasion continues.
The logic is not complicated.

A state’s authority ultimately rests on the consent of the governed.

When the governed express that consent directly — through a referendum, the purest form of democratic expression available — and the state’s response is to neither implement nor formally reject but simply to stall, it hollows out the very basis on which it asks citizens to recognise its authority.

A state in that position is not managing a political transition. It is sawing off the branch it is sitting on.

The Constitutional Trap — and the Only Exit
Constitutional lawyer Sharif Bhuiyan identified the legal mechanism through which this evasion operates — and why it cannot be resolved from within the existing framework.
Courts protect constitutional continuity.

That is their mandate. But when the changes a country needs are precisely the changes that rupture continuity — when the uprising demands something the constitution cannot accommodate without being fundamentally rewritten — the court’s mandate becomes an obstacle.

If the parliament passes sweeping constitutional amendments, a court committed to continuity may strike them down.

The reform process then collapses, not because the people rejected it, but because an institution designed to protect an older order exercised its designed function.

The people’s mandate is defeated — not at the ballot box, but in the procedural machinery of a system the mandate was supposed to transform.

There is, Bhuiyan said, only one structural exit: a constituent assembly.

“The people are also the owners of the constitution,” he said. “Therefore, only a constituent assembly can preserve the spirit of the uprising.”

A constituent assembly draws its authority from the sovereign people directly — above and prior to the existing constitution — meaning its decisions rest on a foundation courts cannot simply override.

He was also clear about what the referendum had already decided: “The people, through the referendum verdict, have entrusted the task of implementing constitutional reform to their elected representatives.” The mandate has been issued.

The question is whether the recipients are willing to honour it.

An Uprising’s Price Tag
Hasnat Kayyum, chief coordinator of the Rashtro Shongskhar Andolan and the seminar’s chair, grounded the entire debate in something more immediate than political philosophy — the human cost already paid.

The July uprising, he said, extracted from Bangladesh’s people the highest price since 1971. Lives were lost. Families were shattered.

A generation stepped into the street knowing the risks and stepped forward anyway.

That sacrifice purchased something — a mandate, a moment, an opportunity to reshape a state that had become unrecognisable to those it was supposed to serve.

And now, Kayyum said, that purchase is in danger of being voided — “for the benefit of five percent of plunderers.”

He noted that the BNP has objected to elements of the referendum’s four questions, but held the door open: “If those objections stem from party interest rather than public interest, the opportunity for national consensus still exists.” His tone made clear the window is not indefinitely open.

The Opposition’s Warning

Across town, at a Gulshan hotel, National Citizen Party convenor and parliamentary opposition chief whip Nahid Islam was delivering the same message in a different register — directly to European Union diplomats, in a gathering titled “Reform Deadlock: The Way Forward.”

Nahid’s language was restrained, deliberately so. His party does not want instability. It does not want confrontation. It has not given up on dialogue.

But beneath the diplomatic tone ran a current of hard warning that the assembled ambassadors and representatives could not have missed.

“We do not want to go to the streets again for reform implementation. We do not want any instability,” he said. “Going to the streets is our last option. But if the government ignores the cooperation of the opposition party, we will be forced to go to the streets.”

He accused the ruling party of already defaulting — declining to take the oath of the Constitutional Reform Council, and manufacturing what he called “a false binary” between the July Charter and its implementation order.

These were not errors of navigation, he implied. They were choices.

His reform agenda is specific: an upper chamber of parliament to introduce balance into the constitutional amendment process; a caretaker government mechanism; independent appointments to the Election Commission and the Anti-Corruption Commission; and a genuinely independent judiciary. None of it, he was at pains to emphasise, is a party project.

“Reform is not a party agenda or idea,” Nahid told the diplomats. “It will not only help the NCP or any other party.

It is needed for our national reconstruction, ensuring democratic practice, and rebuilding national institutions.”

He closed with a line that functioned simultaneously as an invitation and a deadline: “The ball is now in the government’s court. They have to decide how they want to manage the situation and fulfil expectations.”