Unless one is a fatalist, one must be in a soulful struggle against injustice. People in autocracies may have a tendency to surrender to fate. However, the uncorrupted souls of Bangladesh did not. They moved Bangladesh. They inspired awe in the world.
The revolutionary mass uprising of 2024 (the July Revolution) in Bangladesh ousted one of the worst dictators in the world. You must remember how it began. Of many institutional injustices that Bangladesh has so far wrestled with is the quota system in public service jobs. It would be naive to say that the quota is injustice per se. It was once a mechanism for establishing equity, apparently grounded in affirmative action under the constitution. However, it degenerated into an institutional injustice. Around 45% of posts were reserved for quota candidates, of which 30% were for freedom fighters and their children and grandchildren. The demand was not to remove it but to reform it. In 2018, it was removed. In 2024, an attempt to reinstate the quota sparked the revolutionary mass uprising. Though a detailed assessment is not provided here, the system was flawed for extending the freedom fighter quota beyond the years initially proposed in 1972, for extending it to include the children and grandchildren of freedom fighters, and for not aligning with the constitutional categories of affirmative action. In addition to these, the worst aspect was providing it for fake freedom fighters and their progeny (The Daily Star, 2025).
However, the quota system in public service is the tip of the iceberg. The country experienced an autocracy—many prefer to identify it as fascism—with a combination of dynastic and clientelist ecosystems of the state.
One of the slogans of the movement captures the core policy debate here: Quota or Merit. They preferred merit. Even girls who could have enjoyed a quota were in the protests, preferring merit-based recruitment in public service. This was one of the most significant events in the history of Bangladesh, where the people of this land were demanding a system based on meritocracy instead of other competing principles like heredity, loyalty, wealth, etc.
The caste system in ancient Bengal is the violent history of the heredity principle, where people of the lower castes were not deemed fit for public service jobs (Munshi, 2019). Loyalty has played a role since the independence of the country—people who had allegiance to a party were given opportunities for public service jobs. The very nature of the major political parties may reveal that besides so-called ideological allegiance, the parties are organized on hereditary claims and mutual altruism (clientelism, they say).
Yet, in this country of hereditary pirs, family businesses, and dynastic politics, merit is still highly commended. A Bangla proverb roughly says that it is idiotic to be known by one’s grandpa, it is half a life if known by one’s papa, but you are a prince if you are known by your own name. That is motivational for one to be ‘self-made.’ We are here to explore a bit more.
When students protested for reforming the quota system and prioritized merit over quota through their slogans, perhaps they did not demand meritocracy in all other areas of state and society. However, we may analyze the unprecedented support of the people as indicative of a lack of merit in the politics of Bangladesh. The demand and protest for democracy were not absent in the country. They were always there. But the movements led by political parties in the country failed to ensure a democratic transition of power. Unlike the earlier democratic movements of the political parties, people’s participation in the July Revolution was unprecedented. Not to be reductive, people saw hope, felt empathy for justice, and became angry at state violence, and so on.
Even if the desire for meritocracy in politics was not a cause of the July Revolution, it is a consequence of it. It created the desire. One of the perceptions about politics in Bangladesh is that the political leaders are not competent, in terms of merit. It is sadly true that politics no longer attracts the most meritorious section of the highly educated youth, as it did in the sixties or seventies of Bangladesh or before that. Why did it happen? In our experimentation with democracy, we criminalized the politicians. A trend that has been very much active since the creation of Pakistan. Even military rule was justified on the claim of failure of the political leaders (Amundsen, 2013). However, that led to the danger of criminalization of politics in the country.
This is one side of the story. Is there some truth in the claim that politicians are not the most meritorious of the people? How did it happen?
One reason may be that instead of a competitive democracy, where party politics are determined by merit—at least in politics—it has been increasingly turned into dynasties. The major political parties of the country are not merit-based. They are based on heredity, loyalty, and mutual altruism—in that order. Heredity is at the core of the two major political parties and in local politics of many areas of the country.
The dynastic character of politics in Bangladesh is almost a structural feature. Political parties like the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) are dominated by descendants or relatives of the country’s founding leaders. They leverage kinship networks, control over party resources, and symbolic legitimacy derived from the liberation war to maintain their grip on power. Their dynastic control extends to parliamentary nominations, local government bodies, and even student and youth wings of political parties (Ruud and Islam 2016). This dynastic politics is reflected in the fact that leadership succession is not determined by meritocracy or party democracy but rather by hereditary claims. This has closed the doors of politics to the most meritorious minds of the country. Perhaps people joined the July Revolution—including the educated segments of society—with the hope that they would find a route into politics beyond dynastic discrimination against natural merit.
However, meritocracy in governance and democracy may become contradictory. They are considered different philosophies. Instead of detailing their incompatible narratives, I would like to mention my preference in following both of them. Democracy should have primacy over meritocracy as a first principle. Otherwise, the core value of human dignity will be denied. Meritocracy should be the most important operational principle within parties, but without compromising diversity. Or put simply, if there is a conflict between meritocracy and democracy, we should prefer democracy in public policy, education, and redistribution of resources. And by all means, we need to get rid of dynastic politics.
Merit, in its ancient application in governance, led to aristocracy. Aristotle advocated for aristocracy as the best form of government (Giorgini, 2019). His guru Plato’s obsession with merit led him to propose the government of a philosopher-king. Neither of the two were friends of democracy. Democracy has a middle line—one of procedure and consequence. Justice in both the means and ends of governance.
Meritocracy, thus, has its limits. Instead of generalizing the limits for all cases or negating meritocracy altogether, we may focus on the sectoral relevance of the principle. It has been a wonderful solution for creating a bureaucracy. The Confucian model of it successfully sustained the Chinese dynasties. It was claimed to be implemented in the British colonial administration in the Indian subcontinent (Cornell & Svensson, 2020).
Bangladesh has not yet reached the problem of the tyranny of merit, as meritocracy turned into credentialism in the USA or became an obstacle to social mobility in the UK. The sons of Einsteins are not Einsteins. The author of the dystopian novel The Rise of the Meritocracy reminded us nearly two decades ago: “It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others” (Young, 2001). In advancing merit, we should be aware of the danger of a “merit class” or a dynasty based on the merit or talent of someone. In that case, it is no longer meritocracy, but rather the hereditary principle replacing meritocracy.
Bangladesh could not unleash its full potential through meritocracy, for it did not comply with the principle in many aspects. Politics has not been democratic but has been severely crippled with dynastic rot. The reform proposal for a bicameral legislature may ensure both democratic justice in governance, epistemic diversity in decision-making, and meritocratic efficiency through an upper house. In order to make politics democratic and meritocratic, we may need a framework—legal, cultural, and economic—to overcome the dynastic political rot. The legal frameworks of the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and several countries of Latin America may serve as examples. The Philippines has a constitutional ban, in Latin America it has been seen that anti-dynastic laws have positive impact in democratization (Cruz & Mendoza, 2015), and Sri Lanka has in recent years set itself on a path to overcome the misfortunes of dynastic politics. Bangladesh should recognize that its long autocratic regime was dynastic, and its dynastic opposition was not successful.
Until now, there has been only democratic and meritocratic hope. Finding leaders like Dr. Muhammad Yunus should not always depend on the mercy of extraordinary political events. We must make our politics meritocratic so that we get leaders like them through the ordinary events of politics.
