Bangladesh:

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Bangladesh

• Development and
• political economy
• Link to map

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RecapTurning points in History

• 1952 Language revolution
• 1971 march Beginning of the Liberation War
• 1971 - Sheikh Mujib arrested and taken to West
  Pakistan. In exile, Awami League leaders proclaim
  the independence of the province of East Pakistan
  on 26th March. The new country is called
  Bangladesh. Just under 10 million Bangladeshis
  flee to India as troops from West Pakistan are
  defeated with Indian assistance
• Dec 16 1971 Surrender of the Pakistan Army
  (termed Victory Day)

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Birth of Bangladesh

• Internal colonialism
• Challenge of facing both a state apparatus and a
  political community
• Disarray of civil bureaucracy and the military
• Schism between collaborators and patriots

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Bangladesh

• Continuing militancy
• Debates over the constitution extent of
  political power of the Prime Minister
• Mujibbad Mujibism nationalism, socialism,
  democracy and secularism
• Supposed to correct the deficiencies of communism
  and capitalism (the third way)

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Indicators  SL  I  P  B
Children underweight for age ( under age 5) 29 46 38 48
Population living below 1.25 a day () 14.0 41.6 d 22.6 49.6
Population living below 2 a day () 39.7 75.6 d 60.3 81.3
Total GDP (PPP US billions) 84.9 3,097 405.6 196.7
Annual growth rate of GDP per capita () 3.9 4.5 1.6 3.1
Income/expenditure share of the richest 10 of the population () 2.9 3.6 f 3.9 f 4.3
Income/expenditure share of the richest 10 of the population () 33.3 31.1 26.5 f 26.6
Ratio of the richest 10 to the poorest 10 11.7 8.6 6.7 6.2
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Bangladesh timeline

• 1971-5 The Mujib era. This is the formative
  period, associated with a strong nationalist and
  statist fervour, with Mujibur Rahman and his
  party Awami League in power
• 1977-81 The Zia regime. This is the beginning
  of military rule in Bangladesh, marked by the
  adoption of Islam in the constitution
• 1982-91The Ershad regime. Military rule, and
  declaration of Islam as state religion
• 1991-6 the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP)
  regime, with Khaleda Zia as Prime Minister
• 1996-2000 The second Awami League regime, with
  Sheik Hasina as leader
• 2001-6 Coalition government headed by the BNP
• 2006-9 Caretaker government, postponement of
  elections, declaration of a state of Emergency
  and political violence
• 2009 The third Awami League regime, with Sheik
  Hasina as leader

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The story of Bangladesh stunning ironies

• On the one hand, it affirms the power of popular
  discontent and the eventual vulnerability of a
  minority elite, however powerful, to such
  discontent.
• On the other hand, it suggests the irony that
  states may well reproduce processes of exclusion
  which they themselves are born out of.

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Origins

• In 1971 Bangladesh inherited an economy with a
  high external dependence on food, inequity, and
  landlessness. The Liberation War caused
  large-scale death and displacement, along with
  the withdrawal of the Pakistani industrial
  classes from the productive economy. The
  immediate problem was to rehabilitate ten million
  refugees a task for which foreign aid became
  the only feasible option.

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Dependent development

• The very premises of autonomy and
  self-sufficiency on which the liberation struggle
  was based became marginalized, as state power
  became directed towards a strategy of dependent
  development
• It offered certain classes legitimate instruments
  to institutionalize their monopoly over domestic
  and external resources, in particular the state.

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Dependent developmenttwo elements

• the strategy of promoting a local capitalist
  class through state patronage
• and a systematic dependence on foreign aid. As
  elsewhere in the Third World, the process
  engendered a rather unhealthy symbiosis between
  the bureaucracy and the emergent indigenous
  capitalist class. What evolved was therefore a
  predatory state par excellence, couple with a
  distorted and primitive form of capitalism.

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Proto capitalism

• The political-economy that evolved in Bangladesh
  has been labeled in various ways. Broadly
  speaking, it has had the character of petty
  mercantilism and has often been referred to as
  proto capitalism or shopkeeper capitalism.
  Various kinds of rents emanating from state
  patronage, price manipulation and overt
  exploitation of workers became the hallmark of
  this structure of predation

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Recent insertion into the global economy

• myriad forms of oppressive social relations
  drawn from different types of social formations
  ranging from feudalism to flexible accumulation
  exist quite comfortably in synergy with one
  another.
• The extraordinary development of the textile
  sector in Bangladesh. This new growth sector is
  the lifeline of todays Bangladesh. It has drawn
  millions of Bangladeshi women into the orbit of
  factory production, generating profound and often
  irreconcilable contradictions in social
  relationships at the level of the family, the
  community, the workplace, and the nation-state

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From Womanmachine

• Both economically, and in literal terms, workers
  feel trapped by their machines the operators of
  machines experience the machine operating them at
  multiple levels. In the eyes of many workers,
  they are part of a machine that men are in
  control of. It is men who throw on the switches
  to turn the giant on, men who guard its products,
  and of course, men who own it. Moreover, the
  promise of empowerment through paid labor is
  belied by the knowledge of workers entrapment in
  the labor market. It is not only that women are
  perceived as inhabiting the space of men
  certainly the factory is an archetypically
  masculine site. Of critical import here, however,
  is the specific conditions under which women come
  to displace male labor. Since womens access to
  the factory occurs in the context of inequality
  and severe male unemployment, female garment
  workers have come to represent a socially
  disruptive labor force.

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Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHTs)

• Inhabited by indigenous communities who inhabit
  the south-eastern region of the country and
  comprise less than 1 per cent of the population.
  The conflict between the Bangladeshi state and
  the indigenous communities continues to result in
  much violence and destruction.

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The people of CHT

• The people of CHT belong to thirteen different
  indigenous tribes primarily of Sino-Tibetan
  descent. A majority of them are Buddhists or
  Hindus. Bengali, which is the language spoken by
  the majority of Bangladeshis, is not their
  language. They speak a variety of languages and
  are governed by different legal, social and
  cultural customs What explains the intensely
  conflictual relationship
• It appears to be a conflict between two
  fundamentally opposite understandings of justice
  and development and of the relationship between
  the state and its people. The state took recourse
  to violence to resolve these oppositions,
  unleashing an armed conflict in response.

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History

• During British colonialism, the CHT region
  enjoyed a special status and limited
  self-government. Migration into the region was
  strictly prohibited during colonial rule, and the
  local populace was allowed to live by its
  distinctive cultural and economic practices with
  relatively limited interference from the state.
  The special status was lost in 1963 as a result
  of an amendment to the constitution of Pakistan.
  With this amendment began two processes of
  enduring impact on the region the in-migration
  of Bengalis from other parts of Bangladesh, and
  the initiation of large-scale development
  projects. Approximately 54,000 acres of settled
  cultivable land, mostly farmed by the Chakma
  tribe, were lost as a result of these processes.
  Some 100,000 people lost their homes and
  livelihoods, leading to a fairly large
  out-migration of Chakma tribals into India. The
  Government of Pakistan also embarked on a policy
  to encourage poor Bengali families to settle in
  the region, a policy that the government of
  independent Bangladesh decided to continue and
  expand.

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Structural inequality

• Structural inequality does not affect people as
  individuals but as collective entities who share
  similar structural locations that similarly
  condition their opportunities and life-chances
  and their ability to act as agents. It is in this
  sense we argue that collectivities such as
  gender, race, ethnicity or class are best
  understood as structural. The structural
  locations shared by these collectivities are
  engendered through historical processes and
  reflect the intersection of the realms of
  economics, politics, culture and knowledge.

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Origins of structural inequality

• intermingling of several distinct historical
  forms
• different varieties of proto capitalism
• predatory and rentier states and associated
  patterns of governance
• the dominance of religion in the cultural and
  political realms
• the pervasive patterns of subordination of women,
  etc.

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