The west-led international community is unduly worried about the credibility of recently concluded general elections in Bangladesh, boycotted by major opposition parties. This approach is fallacious and misses the woods for the trees.
So much is happening in Bangladesh with so little attention from the world. Stakes are higher than we recognize. Bangladesh is not a small state like Burkina Faso or a small island in the Pacific. It is a country with 155 million plus population with a gigantic youth community. It is overwhelmingly Muslim majority country. Millions of Bangladeshi migrate and eke out their living in Europe, America, Middle East, South East Asia and even in the neighboring India — a country that follows secular democracy. Bangladesh is increasingly a big market with very substantial economic potential that we have largely failed to realize.
The government led by Awami League leader Sheikh Hasina has reduced the gap between demands from existing power consumers and the available supply. Recently the government celebrated achieving installed capacity of 10,000 MW of electricity and plans an addition of capacity over 11,500 MW by 2018. This is no mean achievement considering that she took over from a level of less than 4,000 MW only 5 years ago.
Hasina’s achievements in past five years in the key sectors of education, health and agriculture are commendable given the difficulties in which the government operated and the low levels from which it took over. For years, textbooks of schoolchildren remained without revision. Most children could not get textbooks at all. In a poor LDC country, textbooks matter far more than one imagines. Hasina’s government got textbooks revised by progressive university scholars deleting topics, interpretations and references promoting fundamentalism and parochial religious outlook among young children for years.
Bangladesh is also one of the best performing countries as far as the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals are concerned. Some of its key health indicators are better than in the neighboring India with nearly double its per capita income in real terms. Land to people ratio is one of the worst in the world and yet Bangladesh has achieved food sufficiency during Hasina’s tenure.
The point here is not really to eulogize the Hasina’s government but to understand the context of the ongoing political turmoil. In spite of all these, the country is held down by a bloody political conflict marked by mutual hatred of top political leaders and by remarkably cruel street demonstrations by the rightist opposition. On the face of it reason for the ongoing conflict is government’s decision to conduct general elections (now completed) under the present elected government as it happens in most other democracies. Earlier there was a system of caretaker government of technocrats to conduct elections. The opposition, led by Khaleda Zia of Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), demanded re-introduction of the former system. The Hasina government did not agree.
Below the surface, there could be other factors. The government has embarked up on trials of those political activists who clearly committed great atrocities against fellow Bangladeshis who supported secession from Pakistan. In 1971 these political activists, mostly belonging to Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), led pillage, murder and rape of their opposition by way of helping the Pakistan Army. They also oversaw ethnic cleansing of minority Hindus, whose number saw drastic reduction in Bangladesh — marking possibly one of the largest enforced demographic changes anywhere in the world. Their trials are belated but they enjoy wide popular support. As can be expected most of those accused are now in JI and BNP. Obviously, BNP and JI are enraged. Progressive Bangladeshis feel that JI and its ally aim at creating anarchy and mayhem to dislodge the government.
Bangladesh is at a crossroads. It is either poised to leap frog to prosperity and secular way of life or to go down the slippery path of fundamentalism. Decades ago Pakistan held similar economic and social promises but the West allowed her to choose the worse path. Today the implications will be higher for the western world. Simply put, Bangladesh is not a problem or promise in South Asia, she is a global concern and should be acknowledged as such. The moot point is religious fundamentalism versus economic and social progress in a large and rising country. We cannot ignore possible takeover of Bangladesh by radicals.
- The writer is a New Delhi-based columnist and strategic analyst who tweets @Kishkindha.
