The easiest way to dismantle a constitutional settlement is to say you support it. Since taking office in February, Bangladesh's BNP has done exactly that with the July National Charter, praising its mandate while systematically declining to be bound by it. Voters endorsed the Charter in a referendum on the same day they gave the BNP a two-thirds majority, and the party has since used the second mandate to hollow out the first. The result is less a story of broken promises than of a government discovering which ones it can afford to keep.

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