Law

Constitutional Corrections of Bangladesh

The root of all our political and governance problems lies in the hasty drafting of the Constitution of our country. In 1972 November our Constitution was adopted which concludes that the most of the drafting took around 7-8 months by Dr. Kamal Hossain, an academician of law faculty of Dhaka university, which should be an impossible task for anyone to do in such short period of time. Being the Law Minister in 1972 he headed the committee for drafting the Constitution which was completely revised within 3 years by the National Assembly. Ironically, Dr. Kamal was an active member of that Assembly at the time it was being completely revised by the same Assembly which had just adopted it 3 years back. From pulp directly to the constitute questions adequate attention given to the drafting of the Constitution. Since then, our Constitution has been amended by the law experts, which neither satisfied the public nor the rulers. Major overhaul in every 5-9 years created many political crisis whereas the executive branch remains more or less the same. The general members of the public feel that the Constitution does not even ensure sovereignty of the state. Eventually, we are an unstable country, unhappy nation altogether. What is the remedy?

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Remedy to our Recurrent Political Crisis

The Remedy of our political crisis lies in a complete composition of our Constitution.

I would be happy if a national council for "Constitute Reform" is formed comprising of reps from all professions from our country and sit like an assembly. This small cabinet of 18 people is not enough.

The National Parliament Building is empty now. We can use this facility to hold debates and discussions to adopt the appropriate amendments to our Constitution. It looks to me that the formation of our first Constitution was wrong. Otherwise, why would the founding father (so was he called at that time) would discard it and form another within 3 years?

The legislative body of our country usually does all the changes in our Constitutional structure. Unfortunately, the MPs have little to initiate those. We see them discussing local problems and petty issues in the Parliament as there is no lower house for them. The system made the members of the National Parliament almost useless by giving them no power to initiate any change at all. Therefore, they sing panegyrics, dance, cry, recite poems, saga, tell stories, giggle, joke, etc.

The changes to the constitute, according to our country modus operandi, initiate at the Law Commission who actually decides the fate of our legislative corrections. So, from the birth of our nation, we have seen that the Constitution is the business of all lawyers, not of the political scientists. We did not see engineers, physicians, bankers, political scientists, journalists, teachers coming to add value to the Constitution of Bangladesh. Lawyers should be mere users of the laws, ought not be the sole creators of them.

We can follow a Japanese model in this regard.

Japan has got regular legislative body and executive body like us. But they also have many independent national councils comprising of the think tanks to assist these two bodies. Therefore, none can be autocratic. Mind you, Japan also has corruption and many political irregularities. Shinzu Abe was assassinated for some specific genuine reason. The Japanese put it under the carpet.

The Science Council of Japan (The SCJ) can be taken as a role-model for Bangladesh. It consists of 210 Council Members and some 2,000 Associate Members, elected as representatives of the approximately 870,000 scientists nationwide. The SCJ conducts activities from a universal perspective and a comprehensive and multifaceted point of view, taking advantage of the fact that The SCJ is comprised of scientists from a broad-range of fields spanning over humanities, social sciences, life sciences, natural sciences and engineering. So, for example, COVID restrictions were rather discussed in the council and then advised to the government to implement in Japan unlike our country.

You can visit their website for reference: https://www.scj.go.jp/en/scj/members.html

If you want change it must be done by us from the bottom within not some cosmetic changes on the surface. My job is to bring these references to our youngsters so that they can bring about the changes.

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