How should the opposition help shape economic policy
The opposition in the 13th parliament has three mediums for influencing the government's economic policies. It can take the argument to the street, make it on the floor of the House, or put it on Facebook. It is using all three, and choosing between them by instinct rather than evidence. But are they doing it right?
My argument is that these are not three alternatives. They are three stages of one job. Social media gathers the audience, the street raises the price of ignoring it, and only the parliament writes the text that lasts. Used alone, each of the three fails.
This matters as the economy leaves no room for a wasted year. Growth came in at 4.14% last year against a 6.5% target, and non-performing loans stood at 32.78% of all bank loans at the end of June. The National Board of Revenue missed its target for a tenth consecutive year, and the new budget asks it for about 45% more than it actually collected.
The government left its IMF programme in May and has yet to agree a replacement. The decisions of the next twelve months on revenue, the banks and the 41,000 crore taka power subsidy will set the terms for the next decade. So how should the opposition help shape the economic policy?
Historically, our opposition parties relied on street protests, which cost the economy, while the alternative was never tried. Rounaq Jahan and Inge Amundsen counted the main opposition's boycott of working days rising from 34% in the fifth parliament to 74% in the ninth, with 332 hartal days in the seventh alone. The World Bank put the value-added loss from the turmoil of late 2013 at $1.4 billion.
CPD cost the 2015 blockade at 4,900 crore taka. Ain o Salish Kendra counted 507 political violence deaths in 2013, and the UN put the toll of the July and August uprising in 2024 at up to 1,400. Why should Bangladesh pay for street-based politics? That leads to a harder question: why would an opposition want the government to perform at all? If it performs and the election is fair, why would people change it? Perhaps that thought has pushed every opposition in our history towards the street, as the street keeps a party visible without requiring it to improve the government's performance.
On August 6, the Jamaat-led eleven-party alliance launched a three-month programme on the energy crisis, with nine demands. By the Chattogram long march on 5 September, the list had come down to six, three of them economic, so the alliance was already choosing. It had to.
Some demands should lead to savings if met, such as measures against gas theft and system losses and action against corruption in the sector. Some would cost more, such as withdrawal of the LPG price rise. Some are not feasible, as domestic gas production cannot be raised overnight and would need billions of dollars the government does not have. The demands also pull against each other.
Holding the LPG price down protects the household, while supplying more gas to industry means importing more LNG. Both cost money, and both would draw on a budget whose revenue is already falling short. The opposition's demands cannot be accepted as a package. There has to be a trade-off, the same one we face in asking where the opposition should concentrate its effort.
Social media gathers the audience, the street applies pressure
The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics found in 2025 that 59% of people read their news on a mobile phone while 27% read a printed newspaper. Broadcast and print now depend on social media traction for their own viability, so a strong presence there is treated as decisive even in campaigns.
When the Prime Minister challenged the opposition on 15 August to produce a six-month plan for the power crisis, the NCP answered that night with a Facebook post by Hasnat Abdullah, so the debate went to social media instead of parliament. Is it effective? These are still early days for us, as much of the formative period of social media here was spent under censorship. Cases from the Global South offer some answers.
An image posted on X put Indonesia's election law bill on the national agenda within hours in August 2024. In June that year, young Kenyans read the Finance Bill to each other on X and TikTok and organised from there. In Pakistan, Imran Khan campaigned from prison through social media, and in February 2024 his candidates won 92 directly elected seats, the largest bloc. In each case, the platform assembled an audience fast, but the concession came from elsewhere.
Indonesia's parliament never voted on the bill, as too few members attended for a quorum. Kenya's President withdrew the Finance Bill himself, the day after protesters stormed parliament, at a cost of 60 lives. In Pakistan, the payoff came at the ballot box, and the march that followed in November 2024 won nothing. Social media did the first stage and could not do the second.
These cases are political. My question is about economic bills. Which medium works there?
Take the street first. Kenya's Finance Bill was withdrawn in June 2024, and by December the government had legislated much of it back through another bill, including a change that made fertilizer costlier for the farmer. What did not come back were the taxes people had marched against, on bread, mobile money and vehicles, and the gap was filled with borrowing.
India's farmers won the repeal of three farm laws in November 2021 after a year on the road, and the committee promised in their place, on a legal guarantee for crop prices, has met six times since and published nothing. Ecuador's protesters forced a fuel subsidy decree to be cancelled in twelve days in 2019, and the subsidies went anyway by 2025. In each case, the street won the deletion but lost the policy, as the pressure never reached the chamber where the replacement was written. The street did the second stage and could not do the third.
There is another problem with conducting the economic argument on social media. The Bureau of Statistics puts rural internet use at 36.5% against 71.4% in the cities, and the gap has widened. A third of us own a smartphone, two in five in Chattogram and one in ten in Rangpur.
The country's 64 million social media accounts are about a third of the population, and 63% of them belong to men. Six in ten of us live in villages. Social media is exclusionary by design and leaves out most of the people who suffer most from poor economic policies.
Parliament is where pressure becomes policy
Parliament, in contrast, is designed to represent the voices of all. Three hundred members are elected from three hundred constituencies. An MP from a rural constituency is there to voice rural people, including those who might not have access to social media to interact and raise their voice.
When that happens, we get to know what the June tariff rise did to the irrigation pumps of a named upazila, costed and placed before the finance committee before the bill was written. That allows the House to decide on policies that would work.
Parliaments are designed to make policies work, and elsewhere they do. In South Africa, the finance minister proposed a VAT rise this year, the finance committee wrote the reversal into its report, and VAT stayed at 15%. In Kenya, the finance committee works through the Finance Bill before the chamber votes, and it halved a proposed payroll levy for housing, from 3% to 1.5%.
An opposition that walks out cannot do that. In Ghana, the minority fought a new levy on electronic transactions, then walked out before the second reading, and its amendments were never moved. That is the third stage abandoned by those who needed it most.
The clearest evidence is our own. Five things changed in the Finance Bill between the budget and its passage, among them the rise in the tax-free threshold and the withdrawal of the provision on undisclosed money. Each is credited to requests the Prime Minister made on the day it passed. The one change from outside the treasury bench came when the Shop Owners Association held a press conference and the retail VAT proposal was dropped.
The clause returning merged banks to their former owners was repealed on 9 September, after the World Bank was reported to have made its removal a condition of a $500 million credit. The June tariff rise survived a national protest. In six months, every change in economic policy came from one of three places: the treasury bench, a trade association, or a lender. None came from the street, and none from the opposition benches. Yet every one was made law in the chamber where the opposition sits.
So, the question is not which medium but in what order. Social media decides what a third of the country argues about, and it does not reach the rest. The street can enforce withdrawal of a tax but cannot write the one that replaces it, so the replacement is written by the people who lost. Parliament is slow and the government has the votes there, but it is the only place where the rate was changed and stayed changed, and the only one where every walk of life, village, town, peri-urban settlement and slum, is represented, whatever its access to smartphones. The case has to be gathered in the constituency, made in the committee, and carried on the feed. Drop any one and the other two are wasted.
For our opposition, that means four things. It should fight the NBR's target in the finance committee, where the text is settled before the House sees it. It should file amendments even when they will lose, as a defeated amendment is the record to hold up when the target is missed. It should use the Public Accounts Committee on an annual development programme that spent two-thirds of its allocation last year.
And it should take the Shop Owners Association as its model, as one costed objection from people who knew a single clause did more than nine demands on a long march. Its members should bring back objections of that kind from their constituencies. Each should go to Facebook the same day. The street should be kept for one job: raising the price of refusing to answer the people's demand.
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Md. Rubaiyath Sarwar is the Managing Director, Innovision Consulting and Lead, Inclusive Development and Socio-Economic Equity, Panam Institute