The Case For Voting Yes

Bangladesh now faces one of those rare moments when a country can alter not only who governs, but how it is governed.

On February 12, voters are being asked to say yes or no to a package of constitutional reforms derived from the July Charter, reforms intended to tame the winner-takes-all politics that turned the Awami League into a monster that had to be removed by people power in July and August of 2024.

The Perfect Versus the Possible

Commentatros such as Ryan Kabir and David Bergman in Counterpoint object that the referendum compresses too many questions into a single answer: Institutional restructuring, electoral rules, an upper chamber, strengthened constitutional bodies, even questions of nationhood. 

They argue that such bundling “erases” the citizen’s right to decide issue by issue.

Yet insisting that every reform be voted on separately is to demand a standard of democratic purity that almost no real world democracy attempts.

Italy, Sweden and several Latin American states have all put broad constitutional packages to a single popular vote when revising governing arrangements.

The criticism mistakes an ideal for a baseline. Of course, it would be tidier if every element of the July Charter could be perfectly disentangled and presented à la carte. But politics, like surgery, is rarely so neat. When a patient needs several related procedures to survive, we do not demand a separate operation for each.

We ask instead whether the overall intervention is necessary, coherent, and performed with informed consent.

Bundled Choices are Normal

Bundled constitutional referendums are not some exotic Bangladeshi improvisation; they are part of the ordinary repertoire of modern democracies when they attempt integrated reform. Italy’s 2006 and 2016 constitutional referendums, for example, put multi-part restructuring of parliament and regional powers to single yes or no votes.

Sweden has used package referendums in the context of constitutional amendment cycles, where the public ratifies a suite of interlocking changes after parliamentary approval.

Several Latin American countries have likewise submitted comprehensive reform charters -- touching everything from presidential powers to judicial arrangements -- to unified popular votes.

Comparative guidance from bodies such as International IDEA recognizes this practice and treats it as acceptable when the proposals form an integrated programme and are transparently explained.

It warns, rightly, that such packages can reduce the granularity of voter choice and may be abused when unrelated issues are lashed together like decorations on a political Christmas tree.

But it does not hold up the single issue referendum as the only democratic gold standard. Instead, it invites a more modest question: In this particular case, does the package hang together, and do citizens understand what is at stake?

Institutions Shape the Culture that Lives in Them

Kabir suggests that the real problem in Bangladesh is “political culture,” not the institutional wiring of the state. The implication is that changing the constitution is at best a distraction and at worst a technocratic illusion. Alexis de Tocqueville saw the matter differently.

Observing the young American republic, he argued that its formal arrangements -- federalism, local self government, an independent judiciary -- did not merely reflect an existing democratic culture; they cultivated it, training citizens in habits of participation and restraint that gradually became second nature.

Bangladesh’s problem is not a shortage of political passion. It is the absence of strong, neutral guardrails within which that passion can be channeled.

The July Charter proposals aim precisely at that missing architecture: Restoring a form of caretaker government for elections, empowering constitutional bodies, introducing an upper house elected by proportional representation, limiting executive tenure, and bolstering judicial independence.

To say that such changes are irrelevant to political culture is to ignore two centuries of experience showing that institutions teach citizens, parties, and leaders what is normal, what is possible and what is forbidden.

Choice, Not Coercion

Another line of attack claims that the referendum “coerces” voters by forcing a single decision on a complex set of reforms. But coercion means being deprived of a meaningful choice.

Here, citizens are offered a binary decision about a multi-faceted proposition, and they are free to judge whether the elements they favour outweigh those they dislike. This is how all serious political decisions are made, from elections to peace treaties: as bets on the future under conditions of uncertainty.

The referendum does not terminate deliberation; it relocates it. If the package passes, the newly elected parliament will double as a constitutional reform council, under a legal mandate and time limit -- 180 to 270 days in current proposals -- to translate the July Charter into concrete amendments.

Ambiguities in the text, which worry Bergman, do not become blank cheques; they become agenda items for negotiation among parties that have won parliamentary representation. The voters’ role is not to micromanage all 47 items of the Charter but to decide whether such a structured process of reform should exist at all.

The Real Alternative

Opponents of the referendum write as though rejecting this package will clear the way for a more measured, item by item process of constitutional improvement. But nothing in Bangladesh’s recent history suggests that such a sequence will materialize on its own.

The July Charter emerged after a popular uprising against a government that had learned to rule with few effective checks. The fear that any new government, once comfortably in office, would quietly shelve the more constraining reforms is not paranoia; it is a rational reading of incentives in a winner-takes-all system.

A “yes” vote, by contrast, would lock in a new equilibrium: the next parliament, whatever its partisan composition, would be legally obliged to act as a constituent assembly, to debate and enact reforms that curb executive overreach, strengthen oversight bodies, and create a bicameral legislature better able to reflect plural views.

A “no” vote would leave the old equilibrium largely intact, handing near untrammeled power to whichever party scrapes a plurality -- a tyranny of the 40-odd per cent. The critics are not defending an ideal republic against a crude plebiscitary shortcut. They are defending the comfort of postponement against the risks of actually changing the rules.

Making History Under Constraint

“Men make their own history,” Marx reminded us, “but they do not make it under self selected circumstances.” Bangladeshis did not choose the timing of this referendum, the exact drafting of the July Charter, or the full cast of political actors now vying for advantage.

They must decide within conditions they did not design. But that has always been the human condition in politics. The question is not whether the choice is perfect; it is whether it is better than the likely alternative.

On February 12, voters are not being asked to endorse a flawless constitutional settlement. They are being invited to decide whether their next parliament should be bound to tackle the root causes of unchecked power, or free to repeat the cycle.

To reject that chance because the package is not arranged in the most philosophically satisfying way is to elevate the perfect over the good -- and, in the process, to risk losing both.

Whit Mason is a British/Australian/American political communications advisor and analyst on conflict, governance, and the rule of law, with decades of international experience including, since December 2024, Bangladesh.