Abstract
Although Bangladesh has been a parliamentary democracy with a popularly elected government in power for the last two decades, citizens experience neither the formal promise of equality, nor an accountable and transparent state. Indeed, citizen participation in the democratic process is limited to voting at the time of five-yearly elections. State-citizen relations are fragile in most sectors and the state is near absent in the governance structures of the arenas and institutions that the poor populate. This disjuncture between ‘the people’ and the so-called democratic state is evident from the fact that many rural poor people perceive the state/government as a group of powerful, distant, inaccessible people or an individual who rules the land or ‘kingdom’ (Mahmud and Huq 2008).
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