Palanbad seeks to reinvent the wheel
From Hakimiyya to Palanbad, reconceptualising power does not solve the practical problems of rule.
Palanbad re-entered Bangladeshi political vocabulary after July 2024, when Mahfuj Alam put it back into circulation around Maulana Bhashani's death anniversary. Farhad Mazhar later claimed the concept had reached him through his own teaching.
Palanbad is Bhashani's rendering of Rububiyyat, translated by his followers as Sustinocracy . In a 2024 essay , Mazhar explained this theory: man governs as the creator's deputy, so the Palanbadi state sustains not only its subjects but the whole of creation, the birds and the microbes included.
Mazhar positioned Palanbad directly against Thomas Hobbes’s conception of the state. The argument lies in this opposition, which answers Hobbes by changing the subject.
Hobbes asked what stops men from destroying one another, and Palanbad replies by describing a theory of rule characterised by the divinely ordained duty to care.
However, Anupam Debashish Roy has put the only question that matters to it. What guarantees that the one who nurtures will not slip, and that Palanbad will not slide back into the so-called Shasonbad by the second term?
If the guarantee is the ruler's own cultivated virtue, his jihad against the nafs, then this is Plato's philosopher-king arriving by another road. We have tested kings of every colour and concluded that none of them stays good once power is absolute.
Roy's conclusion follows without effort. You end up back in the polyarchic arrangement with its checks and balances, which means Palanbad can be an ideology but not a system, and a system needs institutions.
Our experience with Islamism should have settled this a generation ago. Mawdudi's Hakimiyya holds that sovereignty belongs to God alone and that men govern only as delegates, and this is routinely offered as a source of humility in political theory.
Humility was not the outcome.
Relocating sovereignty upward disarms nothing below it, and the delegate turns out to be whoever holds the state.
Olivier Roy made the structural version of this point in The Failure of Political Islam in the early 1990s. Islamism failed not at the ballot box and not in the streets but at the level of production, because it could not generate an Islamic state that behaved differently from the secular states it condemned.
Revenue still had to be extracted, an army financed, a bureaucracy staffed, dissent managed. The adjective changed and the machinery did not.
Consider what the vocabulary is now attached to. The Bengal Delta Conference 2026 convened at the InterContinental under the theme Uncharted Times, Emerging Orders, and the Politics of Care, with the local government minister as chief guest and panels on productivity, competitiveness and trade.
But the proceedings of the conference are by and large typical of any conference indifferent to Palanbad. They are concerned with the mundane issues of governance, to which Palanbad offers no distinctive solution.
The strongest claim made for Palanbad is ecological. Mazhar reads Bhashani's demand that Farakka be broken as the refusal of a purely engineering accounting of water, since no engineer computes the share owed to the fish, the frog and the snake, and he presents this as a philosophy the age now requires.
The claim is that secular political theory cannot house obligations to non-human nature. It can, and the literature saying so is thirty years old.
Robyn Eckersley's The Green State and the comparative work assembled by scholars of the environmental state treat ecological protection as an extension of the same logic that produced the welfare state, namely public authority correcting what markets destroy. The eco-welfare state literature makes the continuity explicit, since social and environmental protection are the same instrument aimed at different externalities.
None of this requires a theory of divine stewardship. It requires a state with the fiscal and regulatory capacity to say no to whoever is profiting from the destruction.
Bangladesh has already done the thing Palanbad promises, and done it through ordinary law. In 2019 the High Court declared the Turag, and then every river in the country, a living entity with the standing of a legal person , reasoning from the public trust doctrine and Article 18A of the constitution.
That is Rububiyyat in the register of a writ petition, and no metaphysics was needed to get there. The Appellate Division upheld it and named the National River Conservation Commission guardian of the rivers.
What happened next is the actual lesson. Over two hundred factories still discharge untreated effluent into the Buriganga and the Turag, and landfills backed by political patrons keep narrowing the banks.
The rivers did not lose because the state lacked a doctrine of care. They lost because the guardian was underfunded, the polluters were politically protected, and nobody was removed for failing.
What we need is not a ruler who cares. The question that confronts us is who removes the ruler when the caring stops, how fast, and at what price.
Until Palanbad answers that, it is an attempt to reinvent the wheel. The wheel was invented some time ago, and its name is constitutional safeguards.