In colonial times, the eastern half of Bengal was one of the poorest areas in British India. After independence from the United Kingdom and the 1947 partition it became East Pakistan, one of the poorest areas in the country. And after declaring itself independent in 1971, Bangladesh became even poorer, as Pakistan fought a terrible war not to lose it, destroying a good part of its scarce resources and killing many of its best and brightest citizens.
Few could have predicted the course that events took. Fifty years have passed since Bangladesh’s first president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, declared independence on March 26, 1971. Since then, the country’s per capita income has surpassed that of Pakistan and is approaching that of India. Before the pandemic, economic growth had been above 7 percent for four consecutive years, surpassing not only Pakistan and India, but even China. Bangladeshis are not only much richer, but also healthier and better educated. About 98 percent of Bangladeshi children finish primary school, compared with less than a third in the 1980s. Literacy has grown a lot. Infant mortality has plummeted. Virtually all citizens have a toilet. In all these respects, Bangladesh fares better than both Pakistan and India.
Programs for women
As devastating as it was, the war of independence has set Bangladesh on the path to success in a way. Many emigrants are repatriated to help their new country recover. Zafarullah Chowdhury, who had left university in the UK, created a charity that helped distribute generics and contraceptives. Fazle Hasan Abed sold her London apartment to return to her homeland, where she founded another non-profit organization, Brac, which teaches mothers how to rehydrate diarrhea-stricken babies, turning a deadly disease into a mere nuisance.
The government, in great difficulty, was only happy to allow NGOs and charitable associations to carry out these activities. In the 1980s, in an effort to vaccinate children against diseases such as polio, the country was divided in half: the government took care of one side, Brac the other. By the end of the decade, the immunization rate had risen from 2 to 80 percent.
Charities such as Brac made a particularly strong impact because they targeted women. In the 1990s, Brac ran 64,000 schools, which not only educated girls but employed female teachers. Today there are more girls than boys in secondary schools in the country (another difference compared to India and Pakistan). Brac and other organizations also spread micro-credit, turning thousands of rural women into entrepreneurs.
A rapidly expanding clothing sector has also helped improve the well-being of women in the country, points out Rubana Huq of the Bangladesh Apparel Manufacturers and Exporters Association. The share of women among wage workers has risen from 3 percent fifty years ago to 36 percent today. About 80 percent of Bangladesh’s four million garment workers are women. The job “guarantees him economic freedom and dignity at home and away,” says Huq.
The clothing sector has become the second largest in the world, accounting for 11 percent of GDP and 80 percent of export earnings in Bangladesh. Governments have lent a hand, mostly by stepping aside, simplifying labor laws and eliminating import duties on inputs. This liberal approach has been key to fueling growth, says Fahmida Khatun of the Center for Policy Dialogue, a study center in Dhaka.
Behind the bars
But as much the development of Bangladesh is uplifting, so much is its political life depressing. Sheikh Mujib attempted to turn the country into a one-party state, but was assassinated. The current premier, his daughter Sheikh Hasina Wazed, appears determined to realize his vision. Since she came to power for the second time in 2009, she has abolished the practice of holding elections under the supervision of an impartial transitional government.
The main opposition leader, Khaleda Zia, was arrested in 2015. She has since been convicted of corruption and excluded from politics in a trial she denounced as a politician. Before the last elections in 2018, opposition parties claimed that more than seven thousand of their supporters had been arrested. Many opposition candidates, such as Zia, have been barred from standing due to criminal convictions. Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League party and its allies won 288 out of three hundred seats.
Not only opposition activists, but also journalists and other critics of the government, are ending up behind bars more and more often. In 2018, the digital security law was introduced, theoretically to combat religious extremism and online pornography. But its unclear boundaries, which include harsh prison sentences for those who publish “aggressive or scary” content, have been used to silence critical voices of all kinds. Writer Mushtaq Ahmerd was arrested in May 2020 after criticizing the government’s response to covid-19 on Facebook. He died in prison last month after being denied bail release seven times.
This measure, on the other hand, is easily granted to members of the Bengali People’s League who are also accused of serious crimes, if ever they are prosecuted. Government contracts often go to government allies. State-owned banks are weakened by the fact that those who borrow money and have the right contacts refuse to repay their debts. Going to a court is useless: the party with the closest ties to the Bengali People’s League always wins. “There are practically no more cases of contractual default,” explains Shahdeen Malik, a lawyer who deals with cases presented to the supreme court. Even the tax code, which relies more on taxes on consumption than on income or wealth, is bent in favor of the rich and those with political ties.
Poor again
The inequities of this system are beginning to be reflected in the economic data. Between 2010 and 2016, the richest families saw their incomes rise by almost a quarter, while the poorest saw their incomes fall by almost a third. Zahid Hussain, former chief economist for Bangladesh at the World Bank, blames the behavior of elites trying to secure a rent. According to estimates by the World Bank, corruption costs two points of GDP growth every year. Foreign investment is certainly stagnating, in part perhaps due to the whims of the courts.
Covid-19 exacerbated inequality, plunging millions of people out of it back into poverty. The share of Bangladeshis living below the national poverty line has risen from about 25 to 40 percent, says Asif Saleh, director of Brac. Nobody can go to work abroad anymore, which bodes badly for future remittance flows, which last year had reached nearly twenty billion. Factories in the apparel industry were sunk by order cancellations, while i lockdown overseas sales of clothes plummeted.
The increase in female participation in the workforce has slowed, Huq notes. Between 2005 and 2010 it had grown by an average of 1.7 per cent per year, but since then only by 0.7. According to her, women’s rights are also weakening. Without political responsibility and without the rule of law, men’s violence against women is uncontrolled.
By centralizing power in his hands, Sheikh Hasina also added an element of political uncertainty. However firm his control of the country may be, he will not be able to survive it. The premier is 73 years old and has no clear successor. Family members and other close allies appear to be preparing for a succession struggle. His son Sajeeb Wazed is a government adviser. His daughter Saima Wazed, who lived in Canada, recently received various government posts, generating rumors that she is the designated heir. Other contenders include their cousin Radwan Mujib Siddiq Bobby, who started out as an editor of a public policy magazine, and Sheikh Fazle Noor Taposh, the mayor of South Dhaka. His parents were murdered along with Sheikh Hasina’s in 1975. None of them, however, enjoy the veneration that surrounds Sheikh Hasina, and none of them are credible as reformers.
Some imagine that the change may come from the military, which has taken over power several times in the past. But Sheikh Hasina seems to have an iron grip on the military as well. Al Jazeera recently denounced the close ties between Sheikh Hasina and the current head of the armed forces.
Others fear Islamic radicalism. In 2016, religious extremists killed 24 people in a Dhaka restaurant. Sheikh Hasina repressed some Islamist groups, convincing the courts to ban an important Islamic party, Jamaat-e-Islami, which fought alongside Pakistan during the war of independence. But it has approached others, such as Hefazat-e-Islam, which campaigned against the secularism that the Bengali People’s League is supposed to defend. The Bangladeshis, who are 90 percent Muslim, have become more religious in recent years, but few seem drawn to the idea of a theocracy.
But the reality is that the Bengali People’s League’s control over the country has become so complete that it’s hard to understand what the citizens really want. It is likely that many would be satisfied with their economic condition to improve in the future as fast as it has over the past fifty years. But this happened, in large part, despite Bangladeshi politicians, not thanks to them.
(Translation by Federico Ferrone)
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