Bangladesh has lived for years on big promises. Campaign season brings speeches, banners, and slogans. Those slogans feel urgent and comforting. But they rarely explain exactly how change will reach people’s lives. That is why BNP’s recent shift matters. For the first time in a long time, a major party has tried to make policy a central part of its campaign.

Long before the fall of Awami League regime, BNP published a 31-point outline. It then produced leaflets and trained organisers to explain the programme face-to-face. That is a useful start. It marks a change from pure rhetoric to something that looks more like planning. Yet a plan on paper is not a plan in practice.

We must now ask how those ideas will reach a classroom, a hospital ward, a rice field, or a kitchen. We must ask too whether the planners have thought enough about who will be excluded by simple technicalities, like a voter list or a digital login. These are not minor details. They will decide whether the next government delivers, or whether it hands out attractive cards that never function for the poorest families.