A country’s Parliament or national assembly is the cornerstone of its democracy. Its internal procedures and processes provide the guarantee of popular representation and executive accountability. Their range and level of complexity range from the rights of opposition parties to adequate parliamentary time for debate and scrutiny of ministers, to the interrelationship between legislative and judicial power, and the procedures for parliamentary committees to gain access to official information.
The essentials of successful representative government, as Harold Laski once wrote, are a body of citizens fundamentally at one on all the major objects of governmental activity, that no class or group of importance in the country is excluded from power, and widely diffused habits of toleration throughout the nation.
However today, the functioning of Parliaments in almost every democracy in the world is facing huge challenges to their authority. They are struggling under immense pressures amid widespread dissatisfaction of a social and economic nature, magnified by the revolutionary technologies in mass communication. Populist tendencies in government are threatening to undermine and by-pass Parliaments altogether. The Bangladesh Parliament is no exception.
In this new book Dr Chowdhury provides a brilliant analysis of how and why the practice and procedures of the Bangladeshi Parliament have evolved over the period since 1972. He characterises it as a Westminster model of parliamentary government, but one that has been strongly moulded by Bangladesh’s indigenous political culture, problems, and pressures. He argues that the Bangladesh Parliament needs to address a “selective dictatorship” in terms of its domination by the executive, with undemocratic tendencies in the political parties and a culture of majoritarianism that on occasion has even threatened the parliamentary opposition’s right to exist.
The book looks to the future, setting out a realistic programme of moderate and incremental reform designed to strengthen the Bangladesh Parliament and its central role in the political process of the country. He puts forward a programme of valuable procedural proposals for strengthening the role and independence of individual Members and rebuilding public trust in Parliament with new techniques for public participation.
Robert Blackburn, kc (Hon) lld
Professor of Constitutional Law
King’s College London
October 2024