BNP Manifesto Sets The Pace of Constitutional Reform
The parliamentary committee plans to submit recommendations by December, while opposition parties demand that the charter and referendum verdict be incorporated in full.
Dhaka — Bangladesh's constitutional rewrite is advancing on the ruling party's terms. Members of the Special Parliamentary Committee on Constitutional Amendment say the Bangladesh Nationalist Party's election manifesto will sit beside the July National Charter as a source of amendments, not behind it.
Chief Whip Nurul Islam Moni and committee member Zainul Abdin have told reporters that items in the manifesto will be taken up because voters gave the BNP a mandate on them. Committee chair and Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed has repeated that the party will implement the charter as signed, and will add manifesto pledges that need a constitutional change.
The list is specific. The BNP wants "Absolute trust and faith in Almighty Allah" restored as a fundamental principle of state policy. It wants the judiciary and the president kept out of any caretaker arrangement. It wants a 10-year ceiling on any one person's time as prime minister, while still allowing the prime minister to remain party chief, and it wants a vice-president created. The manifesto itself names the July National Charter, signed on 17 October 2025, as the highest priority, and pairs that pledge with the religious-phrase restoration.
Salahuddin has set a calendar. Recommendations are due by December so a bill can reach parliament's first session in January. After passage, changes that touch the preamble and Articles 48 and 56 would go to a referendum before the president signs them. He has said the whole bill need not be put to a vote, only the parts the constitution requires. Article 142, dropped by the Fifteenth Amendment and later ordered restored by the High Court, is part of that design.
The opposition is not buying the sequence. An 11-party alliance led by Jamaat-e-Islami wants the charter and the referendum verdict written into the constitution in full, and has marched in the north and southeast warning that selective use of the result could reopen a political crisis. National Citizen Party MP Hasnat Abdullah has mocked the body as an "Amra-Mamura amendment committee," saying the government has kept some referendum decisions and shelved others.
Outside parliament, SUJAN secretary Badiul Alam Majumdar has argued that the break with old politics promised after the uprising has not arrived, and that familiar party habits will produce a familiar crisis. Editors who met the committee noted that it has no opposition members, and pressed for limits on the prime minister, independent appointments to constitutional bodies, and a caretaker system that does not put the president or the courts in charge.
Salahuddin says the door is open if the opposition submits names and joins the talks, and that changes to parts of the charter could be discussed. He also says the government still wants the charter implemented as written. On the July uprising, the committee has told martyrs' families that recognition will go into the schedule, not the preamble — the position the BNP took while the July declaration was drafted. Hearings with women leaders, judges, lawyers and academics are still planned. Whether those sittings produce a shared settlement, or another partisan text, is the test the committee has not yet faced.