Two years have passed since those transformative days of the July Uprising. But even now, public debates continue to revolve around constitutional reform, transitional justice, institutional restructuring, and other reform issues. These questions, though important for the country’s democratic future, reveal a common assumption: that the significance of July can be understood primarily through changes in authority, in terms of who governs, who exercises power, and which institutions should be reformed. This assumption is understandable but incomplete, as it treats the July uprising primarily as a political event reshaping or redistributing power while overlooking its equally significant role in redistributing public credibility.
This becomes clear when we reflect on the nature of our disagreements over the past two years. People do not just disagree about reforms, elections, or the conduct of political parties. They increasingly disagree about whose account of events deserves to be believed. Student leaders, political parties, journalists, civil society organisations, victims’ families, and government officials often offer competing interpretations of what the movement demanded, where the country stands today, and where it should be heading. The disagreement, therefore, is no longer confined to political choices or policy preferences. It increasingly concerns whose interpretation deserves credibility.
Unless we understand how July transformed the relationship between political authority and public credibility—and how that transformation continues to shape Bangladesh’s democratic life—we are likely to misunderstand both the achievement of the uprising and the challenges that have followed.
During the 2024 uprising itself, official narratives competed with smartphone footage, eyewitness testimony, independent reporting, and information circulating through countless informal networks. Rather than depending exclusively on institutional explanations, citizens increasingly relied on what they themselves witnessed and on evidence documented by thousands of ordinary people. Official statements often contradicted almost immediately by visual evidence, while many claims gained public acceptance not because they came from recognised authorities but because they could be independently examined and verified.
This experience helped change, perhaps permanently, how public credibility is earned, shifting it from an outcome of an institutional environment dominated by governments, newspapers, universities, courts, and other established institutions to one in which perceived credibility could also emerge from outside those traditional structures. This transformation exposed an important distinction between political authority and public credibility. Political authority concerns the legal power to govern, whereas public credibility concerns whether citizens regard a person or institution as worthy of their trust. Perhaps one of July’s most enduring legacies is that Bangladeshis are now less willing to accept claims simply because they originate from positions of authority.
Democracies become stronger when governments recognise that official authority alone cannot secure public trust. The ability of ordinary citizens to document abuses, question official narratives, and demand justification from those exercising power represents an important expansion of democratic accountability.
However, this achievement has also created a new challenge. The decline of unquestioned authority does not automatically produce trustworthy public institutions. Instead, it creates a more demanding public sphere in which people’s credibility itself becomes the object of political contestation.
Over the past two years, debates over constitutional reform, transitional justice, commissions of inquiry, the timing of elections, and even the “ownership” of July have increasingly become disputes over credibility. Social media usage has broadened democratic participation, but it is also used to accelerate the circulation of rumours, selective evidence, and politically convenient narratives. The challenge is no longer simply to distribute political power more fairly, but to cultivate institutions capable of earning public trust in this new democratic environment.
A certain temptation naturally follows this transformation. Once citizens lose confidence in inherited authority, they begin to suspect that every institution is simply another political actor in disguise: the government may be assumed to manipulate information, political parties to exploit July for political advantage, journalists to be partisan, universities to be ideologically compromised, and courts to deliver judgment according to political loyalties rather than legal principle. Such scepticism is understandable in a society emerging from authoritarian rule, and some of it is undoubtedly healthy. Democracies require citizens who question authority rather than submit to it uncritically. But scepticism and cynicism are not the same thing. A democracy cannot function if citizens conclude that no institution is capable of earning their credibility under any circumstances.
This is why the unfinished work of July 2024 extends beyond constitutional reform or institutional changes. Bangladesh also faces the more difficult task of restoring confidence in the judiciary, universities, the media, and public commissions, all of whose authority must rest not on inherited status or political loyalty, but on demonstrable integrity. Their credibility cannot be demanded and must instead be earned through institutional independence, professional competence, transparency, and a visible commitment to truth rather than political allegiance.
The responsibility to achieve this, however, does not belong to the institutions alone. It also belongs to citizens.
If we scrutinise only the claims of our political opponents while accepting those of our preferred leaders (without comparable examination), we have not strengthened democratic citizenship but merely redirected our political loyalties. The spirit of July is preserved by commemorating and also by sustaining the habits of public reasoning that gave the uprising much of its moral force.
Before asking who has inherited July politically, we should ask a more fundamental question: who is building the conditions under which July’s democratic aspirations can endure? The enduring significance of July lies not only in changing who governs Bangladesh, but also in transforming the standards by which authority is evaluated. Whether that transformation ultimately strengthens democracy in Bangladesh will be contingent on whether we succeed in building a public culture in which credibility is earned through evidence, integrity, and accountability rather than assumed through office, ideology, or “historical entitlement.”
Dr Kazi ASM Nurul Huda is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Dhaka and Zuzana Simoniova Cmelikova Visiting International Scholar in Leadership and Ethics at the University of Richmond’s Jepson School of Leadership Studies. He can be reached at [email protected].
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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