R OU T L E D G E HA N D B O O K O F

C O N T E M P O R A RY BA N G L A D E SH

In the past decade, Bangladesh has achieved significant social and economic progress. Despite
high population density, a limited natural-resource base, underdeveloped infrastructure, frequent
natural disasters and political uncertainty, the country has recorded positive developments in
terms of broad economic and social indicators. This Handbook presents a comprehensive and
interdisciplinary resource on the politics, society and economy of Bangladesh today. Divided
into six thematic sections, the Handbook focuses on relevant issues and trends on:

• History and the making of contemporary Bangladesh

• Politics and institutions
• Economy and development
• Energy and environment
• State, society and rights
• Security and external relations.

Written by a team of international experts in the field, the chapters provide an accessible
and up-to-date insight into contemporary Bangladesh. The Handbook will be of interest to
students and academics of South Asian studies, as well as policy makers, journalists and others
who wish to learn more about this increasingly important country.

Ali Riaz is Professor and Chair of Department of Politics and Government at Illinois
State University, Illinois, USA. Previously, he worked as a Broadcast Journalist at the British
Broadcasting Service (BBC) in London. His most recent publications include How Did We
Arrive Here? (2015) and Political Islam and Governance in Bangladesh (Routledge, 2010).

Mohammad Sajjadur Rahman is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Alternatives, Dhaka,
Bangladesh and a PhD student at Clark University, Massachusetts, USA. He has published a
number of articles in scholarly journals and contributed chapters in edited volumes.
This page intentionally left blank
R OU T L E D G E HA N D B O O K
O F C O N T E M P O R A RY
BA N G L A D E SH

Edited by
Ali Riaz
Mohammad Sajjadur Rahman
 First published 2016
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2016 Selection and editorial matter: Ali Riaz and Mohammad
Sajjadur Rahman; individual chapters: the contributors.
The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material,
and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance
with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Names: Riaz, Ali, editor. | Rahman, Mohammad Sajjadur, editor.
Title: Routledge handbook of contemporary Bangladesh / edited by Ali Riaz, Mohammad Sajjadur Rahman.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015027670| ISBN 9780415734615 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315651019 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Bangladesh–Handbooks, manuals, etc.
Classification: LCC DS393.4.R68 2016 | DDC 954.9205–dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015027670

ISBN: 978-0-415-73461-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-65101-9 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by Out of House Publishing
 CONTENTS

List of figures ix
List of tables x
Notes on contributors xii
Acknowledgements xix

Introduction 1
Ali Riaz and Mohammad Sajjadur Rahman

PART I
History and the making of contemporary Bangladesh 15

1 Bangladeshi politics since independence 17

Sarah Tasnim Shehabuddin

2 Nationalism and the ‘politics of national identity’ 28

Habibul Haque Khondker

3 Secularism and anti-secularism 40

Shantanu Majumder

4 The genocide of 1971 and the politics of justice 52

Navine Murshid

PART II
Politics and institutions 63

5 Political parties, elections, and the party system 65

Ali Riaz

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 Contents

6 The parliament 82
Nizam Ahmed

7 Public administration and bureaucracy 94

Habib Zafarullah

8 Civil–military relations 109

Al Masud Hasanuzzaman

9 Non-governmental organizations and civil society 119

David Lewis

PART III
Economy and development 129

10 Development policies since independence 131

Fahmida Khatun

11 Agriculture and food security 144

Uttam Kumar Deb

12 Industrialization 159
Rashed Al Mahmud Titumir

13 Labor 173
Farida Chowdhury Khan

14 Foreign trade 187

Selim Raihan

15 International labor migration and remittance 197

Tasneem Siddiqui

16 Urbanization 207
A. K. M. Riaz Uddin

17 Poverty, inequality and entrepreneurship 220

Syed Akhtar Mahmood

18 Microfinance 232
Muinul Islam

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 Contents

PART IV
Energy and environment 243

19 Power and energy: potentials, crisis, and planning 245

Moshahida Sultana

20 Climate change 259

M. Asaduzzaman

21 Water 271
Md. Khalequzzaman

PART V
State, society and rights 281

22 Human rights and the law 283

Mohammad Shahabuddin

23 The state of gender 293

Amena Mohsin

24 The CHT and the peace process 306

Bhumitra Chakma

25 Religious minorities 316

Meghna Guhathakurta

26 Print and electronic media 325

Anis Rahman

27 The education system 340

Manzoor Ahmed

28 Public health 352

Arafat Kabir

PART VI
Security and external relations 367

29 Foreign policy 369

Imtiaz Ahmed

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30 Bangladesh and its neighbors 378

Mohammad Sajjadur Rahman

31 Bangladesh and the great powers 389

Lailufar Yasmin

32 Borders, boundaries and statelessness 402

Bina D’Costa

33 UN peacekeeping mission 414

Rashed Uz Zaman

34 Terrorism and counter-terrorism in Bangladesh 425

Saimum Parvez

Index 438

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 FIGURES

4.1 Number of news reports, February–December 2013 57

5.1 Bangladesh Awami League fragmentation 74
5.2 Bangladesh Nationalist Party fragmentation 75
11.1 Trends in import of food grains, 1981–1982 to 2013–2014
(1,000 metric tons) 151
12.1 Diagrammatic representation of phases of industrial development 162
12.2 High-end technology export in total manufactured exports, 2003–2011 166
12.3 Flow of foreign direct investment, 2001–2013 169
12.4 Sectoral phase industrialization, 1947–2012 170
14.1 Trend in the total imports (million US$), 1972–2014 189
14.2 Trend in the import–GDP ratio, 1972–2014 189
14.3 Trend in exports (million US$), 1972–2014 190
14.4 Trend in the export–GDP ratio, 1972–2014 191
14.5 Bangladesh’s RMG exports, 1983–2013 192
15.1 Labor migration, 1976–2014 198
15.2 Destination countries of Bangladeshi migrant workers in 2014 199
16.1 Comparative growth in the ten largest urban agglomerations, 1950–2015 208
17.1 Poverty trends, 2000–2010 222
17.2 Extreme poverty trends, 2000–2010 222
19.1 Share of production of gas by operators 247
19.2 Power and energy institutions in Bangladesh 252
20.1 Pathways of climate change impacts 262
26.1 Growth of access to television media, 1995–2013 328
26.2 Audience reach of different media, 2006–2013 329
28.1 Bangladesh’s immunization coverage (polio among one-year-olds) 355
33.1 Bangladesh’s uniformed personnel in UN peacekeeping
operations, 2000–2014 415

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 TABLES

5.1 Ideological orientations of political parties 66

5.2 Taxonomy of Islamist political parties 72
5.3 Islamists’ share of the votes, 1991–2008 73
6.1 Composition and tenure of parliament, 1973–2014 83
6.2 Parliament walkouts and boycotts 92
10.1 Openness of economy, FY1981–FY2014 136
10.2 Changes in economic and social indicators, 1973–2014 140
11.1 Annual compound rate of growth of real GDP (2005–2006
constant prices) of different sub-sectors of Bangladesh agriculture,
1973/74 to 2013/14 (% per annum) 145
11.2 Trends in the average annual production of major crops,
1969/70–2012/13 146
11.3 Average per capita daily intake of major food items,
1991/92 to 2010 (grams) 152
12.1 State of sick industries 164
12.2 Export of different goods, 2011–2013 164
12.3 Percentage of employment by industry, 1995–2010 167
12.4 Consumer price index of labor in industry and real wage index (base
year: 1969–1970) 167
13.1 Employment of adults aged 15+ by branch of economic activity,
2001–2010 (%) 175
13.2 Labor force participation rate aged 15+, 2001–2010 (%) 176
13.3 Informal employment of workers aged 15+, 2001–2010 (%) 176
13.4 Safety of work in Bangladesh, 2002–2011 180
14.1 Average custom duties and para-tariffs, 1991–2011 195
16.1 Level of urbanization and urban growth, 1901–2011 210
16.2 Incidence of poverty in the divisions of Bangladesh,
2005–2010 (headcount ratio, HCR) 211

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16.3 Status of major urban infrastructure and facilities 214

19.1 Coal reserve of coalfields 247
22.1 Extrajudicial killings, 2005–2013 287
26.1 Media at a glance, 2014 326
26.2 Telecommunication and ICT growth, 2012–2015 330
27.1 Growth of the education system, 1995–2012 341
28.1 Health system indicators in South Asia 353
28.2 Development and health system output index in South Asia 357
33.1 UN reimbursement of money (as of July 2010) 418

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 CONTRIBUTORS

ADVISORY EDITORS

Bina D’Costa
David Lewis
Farida Chowdhury Khan

Imtiaz Ahmed is currently the Executive Director of Regional Centre for Strategic Studies
(RCSS), Colombo. Before joining the RCSS, Dr. Ahmed has been a Professor of International
Relations and Director, Centre for Genocide Studies at the University of Dhaka. His recent
publications are: Human Rights in Bangladesh: Past, Present & Futures, ed. (Dhaka: University Press
Limited, 2014), and People of Many Rivers: Tales from the Riverbanks (Dhaka: University Press
Limited, 2015).

Manzoor Ahmed is currently Professor Emeritus at BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh.

He was the Founding Director of the Institute of Educational Development (IED), BRAC
University. Ahmed served as the first Senior Education Adviser at UNICEF Headquarters,
1981–1986, and later served as UNICEF’s Representative in China, Ethiopia and Japan. He
earned his Ed.D in Educational Administration from the University of Northern Colorado,
USA. His recent publications include Education in Bangladesh: Overcoming Hurdles to Equity with
Quality (editor; University Press Limited, Dhaka, 2011) and Education and Training for Rural
Transformation (lead writer; International Research and Training Centre for Rural Education,
Beijing, 2012).

Nizam Ahmed is Professor of Public Administration at the University of Chittagong,

Bangladesh. He earned his PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia. His areas of
research interest are legislative behavior, local government, party politics and comparative
administration. His recent publications include The Bangladesh Parliament: A Data Handbook
(2013) and Forty Years of Public Administration and Governance in Bangladesh (editor; 2014).

M. Asaduzzaman is an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the Bangladesh Institute of

Development Studies (BIDS) in Dhaka, Bangladesh. In his three-decade-long career at the
BIDS he held various positions including the post of the Director General (2000–2002). An
economist by training, his areas of research interest are climate change, energy and agricul-
ture. He was a lead author for the Second Assessment Report of the IPCC and Chair of the
Consultative Group of Experts (CGE) for Non-Annex 1 countries under SBI/UNFCCC. His

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recent publications include a co-edited volume, A Ship Adrift: Governance and Development in
Bangladesh (2008), and a co-authored monograph, Surge in Solar-Powered Homes: Experience in
Off-grid Rural Bangladesh (2014) published by the World Bank Group.

Bhumitra Chakma is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Politics, Philosophy and International
Studies at the University of Hull, UK, where he teaches Security and Strategic Studies and
International Relations. He is also the Director of the South Asia Project. He previously taught
at the University of Dhaka and at the University of Adelaide. He obtained his PhD from the
University of Queensland, Australia. His research interests are security and strategic politics,
politics of nuclear weapons, arms control and disarmament, ethnic conflict resolution and peace
building, and Bangladeshi politics and foreign policy. His recent publications include South
Asia’s Nuclear Security (2015) and South Asia in Transition: Democracy, Political Economy and Security
(2014).

Bina D’Costa is a Fellow at the Peace, Conflict and War Studies Program of the School of
International, Political and Strategic Studies, the Australian National University, and a Visiting
Fellow at the Program on Gender and Global Change, the Graduate Institute, Geneva. Her
publications include Nationbuilding: Gender and War Crimes in the Asia-Pacific (2011), Children and
Global Conflict, with Kim Huynh and Katrina Lee Koo (2015), and Children and Violence: Politics
of Conflict in South Asia (forthcoming).

Muinul Islam is a Professor of Economics at the University of Chittagong, Bangladesh. He

earned his PhD from Vanderbilt University, USA. He was President of the Bangladesh Economic
Association from 2000 to 2002. His areas of research interest are economic development, migra-
tion, international trade, participatory action research and regional cooperation. His recent pub-
lications include books titled The Poverty Discourse and Participatory Action Research in Bangladesh,
A Profile of Bank Loan Default in Bangladesh and Economic Integration in South Asia: Issues and
Pathways and journal articles on illegal international trade, border trade, regional cooperation
and the role of the state in Bangladesh’s underdevelopment.

Uttam Kumar Deb is an Agricultural Economist. Currently, he is working at the International

Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), India, as Principal Scientist
(Economics). Prior to joining ICRISAT, he was the Head of Research Division at the Centre for
Policy Dialogue (CPD), Bangladesh. He has served at the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute
in various capacities. He has obtained bachelor and masters degrees in Agricultural Economics
from the Bangladesh Agricultural University, Mymensingh. He received his PhD in Agricultural
Economics from the University of the Philippines Los Banos. He has published extensively on
issues related to agricultural development, trade liberalization, and impacts of technology and
policies on economic growth, food security and poverty.

Meghna Guhathakurta is the Executive Director of Research Initiatives, Bangladesh (RIB), a

research-support organization based in Dhaka, which specializes in action research with marginal-
ized communities. She taught Politics at the University of York, UK. Her research interests are in-
ternational development, gender relations and minority politics. She is currently Associate Editor
of the Journal of Social Studies. Her recent publications include The Bangladesh Reader: History,
Culture, Politics, co-edited with Willem van Schendel and published by Duke University Press
(2013). Previously, Dr. Guhathakurta taught International Relations at the University of Dhaka,
Bangladesh, from 1984 to 2007. She earned her PhD from the University of   York, UK.

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 Contributors

Al Masud Hasanuzzaman is a Professor of Government and Politics at the Jahangirnagar

University, Bangladesh. He earned his MSc in Development Studies at the University of
Bath, UK, and PhD in Political Science at Dhaka University, Bangladesh. He was a Senior
Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University, USA, and a Japan Foundation Fellow at Kanazawa
University, Japan. His research interests are parliamentary process, political party affairs and
governance issues. His recent publications include Political Management in Bangladesh (editor;
A. H. Development Publishing House, Dhaka, 2010) and Parliamentary Democracy, Politics and
Governance in Bangladesh (in Bengali; University Press Limited, Dhaka, 2009).

Arafat Kabir is a writer and commentator on global and regional affairs. His articles have
appeared in media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, the National Interest and The Diplomat.
Currently, he is pursuing a masters degree in Political Science with a concentration in global
politics and culture at Illinois State University, USA.

Farida Chowdhury Khan is a Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Parkside,

USA. She earned her PhD from the University of Maryland, USA. Her writing focuses pri-
marily on trade and industrial policy and, more recently, on problems arising from social and
economic change and state-led development policies for women and non-dominant groups in
Bangladesh. Her recent publications include a co-edited volume, Bangladesh Economy in the 21st
Century, as well as articles in Applied Economic Letters and the International Journal for Development
Issues. She is currently undertaking a project on garment workers in Bangladesh.

Fahmida Khatun is the Research Director at the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) in
Bangladesh. She earned her PhD and masters in Economics from University College London,
UK. Previously she worked as a Research Fellow at the Bangladesh Institute of Development
Studies; as an Environment Specialist for the United Nations Development Programme; and
as an Economist for the USAID Mission in Bangladesh. Her areas of research interest include
macroeconomic issues, international development finance, climate change and the post-2015
development agenda. She has co-authored the Independent Review of the Bangladesh Economy,
published by the CPD, since 2002. She was a Visiting Scholar at the Christian Michelsen
Institute, Norway, the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade, South Korea, and the
Earth Institute, Columbia University, USA.

Habibul Haque Khondker is a Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social

Sciences, Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates. Previously he taught at the
National University Singapore. A graduate of the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, Khondker
earned his MA from Carleton University, Ottawa and PhD in Sociology from the University of
Pittsburgh, USA in 1985. His research interests cover globalization theories and global moder-
nity, national development, migration, sociology of disasters and political sociology. His publica-
tions include Asia and Europe in Globalization (Brill, 2006) edited with Goran Therborn, and
Globalization: East and West (Sage, 2010) with Bryan Turner.

Md. Khalequzzaman is Professor of Geology at Lock Haven University, Pennsylvania, USA.

He is a hydrologist with a strong background in coastal geology, environmental hazards, water
quality, sustainability and GIS. He earned his PhD from the University of Delaware, USA. His
research interests include impacts of agriculture, coal mining and gas-well drilling on surface
and groundwater in central Pennsylvania and coastal Virginia. His recent publications include

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 Contributors

‘Basin-scale Water Resources Management in the Context of Climate Change’. He is a founder

of the Bangladesh Environmental Network (BEN).

David Lewis is Professor of Social Policy and Development at the London School of
Economics, UK. His main research interests include international development policy,
non-governmental organizations and civil society, and the anthropology of development. He
was educated in the UK at the Universities of Cambridge and Bath. He is author of several
books including Development Brokers and Translators: The Ethnography of Aid and Agencies (2006,
edited with D. Mosse), Bangladesh: Politics, Economy and Civil Society (2011), Non-Governmental
Organizations, Management and Development (2014) and Anthropology and Development: Challenges
for the Twenty-First Century (with K. Gardner, 2015).

Shantanu Majumder is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of

Dhaka, Bangladesh. He earned his PhD from the Institute of Commonwealth Studies,
University of London. His areas of research interest are religion and politics, democracy
and civil society, and political economy of local governance. His recent publications include
Understanding Political Secularism in a Comparative Perspective: Analyses of the Experiments in
France, the USA, Turkey and India and People’s Participation in Local Government.

Syed Akhtar Mahmood is Lead Investment Policy Officer and Global Lead for Business
Regulations in the Trade and Competitiveness Global Practice of the World Bank Group. He
was part of the management team in the IFC facility, Bangladesh Investment Climate Fund,
from 2007 to 2010. He earned his DPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford in 1989.
His publications include The Political Economy of Development Policy Change (with Gustav Ranis;
Blackwell, 1991) and Direct Support to Private Firms: Evidence on Effectiveness (with Geeta Batra;
World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 3170, November 2003).

Amena Mohsin teaches at the Department of International Relations, University of Dhaka.

She graduated from the same department and later received her MA and PhD degrees from the
University of Hawaii, USA and Cambridge University, UK, respectively. She has written exten-
sively on rights issues, state, democracy, civil–military relations and human security. She is the
author of The Politics of Nationalism: The Case of Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh (UPL, 1997), The
Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh: On the Difficult Road to Peace (Lynn Rienner Publishers, 2002),
and Women and Militancy: South Asian Complexities (edited, with Imtiaz Ahmed; UPL, 2011).

Navine Murshid is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Colgate University, Hamilton,

NY. Her research and teaching interests include politics of South Asia, international polit-
ical economy, migration and minority rights. She is the author of Politics of Refugees in South
Asia: Identity, Resistance, Manipulation (2013).

Saimum Parvez is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Sociology at the
North South University, Bangladesh. Previously, he worked in the Department of International
Relations at the University of Chittagong, Bangladesh as an Assistant Professor and at the BBC
World Service Trust in Dhaka as an Assistant Producer. In 2015, Mr. Parvez graduated from the
Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University, USA under the
Fulbright scholarship program. He also completed an MSS in International Relations from
the University of Dhaka. His publications include Taming the Persians: US Public Diplomacy and
Iran (with Mahammad Sajjadur Rahman) in Jindal Journal of International Affairs (2011) and ‘Is

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Freedom a Click Away? New Media, Democracy and the Arab Spring’ (with Saima Ahmed) in
Identity, Culture and Politics: An Afro-Asian Dialogue (2010).

Selim Raihan is a Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Dhaka,

Bangladesh. He is also Executive Director, South Asian Network on Economic Modeling
(SANEM), and a Senior Research Fellow at the Effective States and Inclusive Development
Research Centre (ESID) at the University of Manchester, UK. He earned his PhD from the
University of Manchester, UK. His research interests include international trade and trade policy
issues related to the WTO, regional trading agreements and domestic trade policies. His recent
publications include The Political Economy of Food Price Policy in Bangladesh (2014).

Anis Rahman is an Instructor and PhD candidate at the School of Communication at Simon
Fraser University, Canada. Previously he taught Media Studies and Journalism at the University
of Liberal Arts Bangladesh, Dhaka. His research interests include political economy of global
communication, broadcast policy, media and credibility, and public media in the Global South.
Anis holds masters degrees from the University of London and University of Rajshahi. He was a
recipient of a Chevening Scholarship from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, UK. He has
published in Asian Journal of Communication, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Media
Asia and Eptic Online journals.

Mohammad Sajjadur Rahman is a PhD student at Clark University, Massachusetts, USA.

He is also Research Fellow at the Centre for Alternatives, Dhaka. Mr. Rahman has taught
International Relations at the University of Chittagong for more than eight years. His research
interests include international terrorism, mass violence and genocide, political Islam and South
Asian affairs. He graduated in International Relations from the University of Dhaka. In 2009,
Mr. Rahman completed his second master’s degree under the Fulbright Scholarship program
in International Policy Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, California.
He has published a number of articles in scholarly journals and contributed chapters in edited
volumes.

Ali Riaz is a University Professor at Illinois State University, Normal, IL, USA where he teaches
Political Science and is Chair of the Department. He earned his PhD from the University of
Hawaii, USA. He previously taught at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, Lincoln University,
UK, and Claflin University, South Carolina, USA. He also worked as a broadcast journalist at
the BBC in London. His forthcoming publications include Bangladesh: A Political History since
Independence (I.B.Tauris, 2016).

Mohammad Shahabuddin is a Lecturer in Law at Keele University in the UK. He previously

taught at Yokohama National University as a Visiting Professor and Jahangirnagar University,
where he was the Founding Chair of the Department of Law and Justice. He earned his PhD
from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His forthcoming
publications include Ethnicity and International Law: Histories, Politics, and Practices (Cambridge
University Press, 2016).

Sarah Tasnim Shehabuddin is an Assistant Professor of Politics at the Asian University

for Women in Chittagong, Bangladesh. She earned her PhD in Government from Harvard
University. A comparativist, she focuses on religion and politics, women’s rights and secularism
in Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia.

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Tasneem Siddiqui is Professor of Political Science at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh,

and Chair of the Refugee and Migrating Movements Research Unit (RMMRU), University of
Dhaka. She earned her PhD from Griffith University, Australia. Her research interests include
drivers and impact of labor migration, remittance, and climate change adaptation and migra-
tion. Her recent publications include ‘Adaptation to Climate Change in Bangladesh: Migration,
the Missing Link’ in Adaptation to Climate Change in Asia, ‘Climate-related Migration in Rural
Bangladesh: A Behavioural Model’ (coauthor), and ‘Impact of Arab Spring on Migrants: The
Case of Bangladeshi Returnees from Libya’ in Bangladesh in International Relations 2012–13.

Moshahida Sultana is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Department of Accounting

and Information Systems at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. She studied Economics at
Northeastern University, Boston and International Development and Regional Planning at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, MA, USA. Her research interests are political
economy, environmental and resource economics, and development economics. Her recent
publications include a Bengali fiction entitled Lobonpani, and a chapter in the book, Climate
Change Adaptation Action in Bangladesh.

Rashed Al Mahmud Titumir is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Department

of Development Studies at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, and the Chairperson of the
Unnayan Onneshan, a multi-disciplinary think-tank in Bangladesh. He is currently researching
ideas of state in capitalist transformation, focusing on five areas: namely, expansion of productive
capacity, fiscal and monetary policies, social policies, natural resource management and agrarian
transition. He has written articles and books on implications of structural adjustment, poverty
reduction strategies, world trading systems, regional economic cooperation, climate change,
poverty, agriculture, biodiversity, education and health. He has worked in diverse constituencies,
including academia, governments, think-tanks, international organizations and media. He com-
pleted his BSS in Dhaka and obtained MSc and PhD from London.

A. K. M. Riaz Uddin is a PhD candidate at the Regional Planning Department of the

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He completed a Bachelor of Urban and Regional
Planning from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in 2003. He has worked
for the Centre for Policy Dialogue, Unnayan Shamannay, Bangladesh Planning Commission
and BRAC University in Bangladesh at different periods. His current research interests include
regional science and planning, new institutionalism, urban economics, planning theory, trans-
portation economics and epistemology of spatial sciences.

Lailufar Yasmin is an Associate Professor at the Department of International Relations at

the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. She has been a recipient of the US Fulbright, British
Chevening and Australian International Post-Graduate Research Scholarships. Her area of re-
search includes secularism, maritime security, and gender and conflict. Her recent publications
include ‘The Last Glass Ceiling: The Interplay of Racism and Sexism in American Politics’,
‘The Tyranny of the Majority in Bangladesh: The Case of the Chittagong Hill Tracts’ and
‘Tussle between Secularism and Nonsecularism in Bangladesh’ in national and international
journals.

Habib Zafarullah teaches Social Policy and International Development at the University of
New England,Australia. He has a background in Political Science and Public Administration with
a PhD from the University of Sydney. His research and teaching interests include: public/social

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policy, globalization, international development, democratization and civil society, comparative

bureaucracy and public management. His recent books include Colonial Bureaucracies: Politics of
Administrative Reform in Nineteenth Century Australia (2014, Universal Publishers) and Managing
Development in a Globalized World: Concepts, Processes, Institutions (2012, CRC Press/Taylor &
Francis, with A. S. Huque). He has published extensively on political, administrative and devel-
opmental issues.

Rashed Uz Zaman is a Professor at the Department of International Relations, University of

Dhaka, Bangladesh. He earned his PhD from the University of Reading, UK. He was a recip-
ient of the Alexander von Humboldt post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Erfurt,
Germany, and was a Fulbright Scholar at Vanderbilt University, USA. He works on strategic stud-
ies and international security issues. His recent publications include ‘Bangladesh’s Participation
in UN Peacekeeping Missions and Challenges for Civil–Military Relations: A Case for
Concordance Theory’, International Peacekeeping, 21 (3), 2014.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are deeply grateful to a number of individuals for their advice and support, and it is with
great pleasure we would like to acknowledge their assistance. First and most importantly, we are
indebted to the authors. The project took longer than we anticipated, yet we received sincere
support from them. The delay in the editing process required some chapters to be updated, in
some instances more than once. The authors were happy to update without any hesitations.
Thanks are due to the members of the advisory panel of this volume: Farida Chowdhury Khan
of the University of Wisconsin–Parkside, USA; David Lewis of the London School of Economics
and Political Science, UK; and Bina D’Costa of the Australian National University, Australia.
They provided valuable and enthusiastic support in various capacities. Thanks to Dorothea
Schaefter, Senior Editor at Routledge, for her support and patience with the project. She was
a perennial source of inspiration. Sophie Iddamalgoda, Editorial Assistant, not only reminded
us of the deadlines of the project, but also extended help to ensure that the Handbook finally
sees the light of the day. Jillian Morrison and Rebecca Lawrence extended support and worked
with the authors over a long period of time and had to bear with our tardiness and messy
work pattern. We greatly appreciate the help of Marina Carter, a keen observer of South Asian
affairs, who provided immensely helpful feedback on all chapters without delay. Three of our
assistants deserve special words of appreciation: Breanna Sherlock of Illinois State University
maintained close contact with the authors, Nazmul Arifeen of University of   Waterloo, Canada,
took the pain of formatting the whole manuscript according to the publisher’s requirements
and Fahmida Zaman of Illinois State University helped us with proofreading. Without their
dedication and patience, this book could not have come to life. Thanks to Sudeepto Salam for
granting us the permission to use the photograph featured on the cover of the book. We must
thank the members of production team of Routledge for their attention to detail, identifying
the errors and working with us. We acknowledge, with thanks, Linda Ridley-Paulus of Out of
House Publishing, UK. Last, but not least, we owe special thanks to our loving spouses, Shagufta
Jabeen and Saima Ahmed, for their support. Needless to say, none of these individuals bear
responsibility for any errors that remain.

xix
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 INTRODUCTION
Ali Riaz and Mohammad Sajjadur Rahman

In a few years Bangladesh will celebrate its fiftieth year of independence. The country emerged
as an independent nation in 1971, although it has existed for centuries – as a part of the Mughal
Empire, as part of the British-colonized subcontinent, and then as the eastern province of
Pakistan (1947–1971). Located in South Asia, it covers an area of 147,570 km2 and is almost
entirely surrounded by India, except for a short south-eastern frontier with Myanmar and a
southern coastline on the Bay of Bengal. With a current estimated population of 165 million,
Bangladesh is the most densely populated country in the world, excluding city-states such as
Singapore, Bahrain, and the Vatican.
Since its independence Bangladesh has faced adverse situations – political, economic, and
environmental. Yet, it has not only survived but thrived. Once described as a ‘test case for devel-
opment’, the country has achieved significant social and economic progress in the past decades.
Despite high population density, a limited natural-resource base, underdeveloped infrastructure,
frequent natural disasters, and political uncertainty, the country has recorded positive develop-
ments in terms of both broad economic and social indicators. On the other hand, the country
has witnessed repeated breakdowns in governance.Weak political institutions and fragile demo-
cratic transition have remained the defining characteristics of the country’s political landscape
even after 44 years of existence. The future trajectory seems to be more tortuous and uncertain
than ever before. With increased integration with the global economy and culture in the past
decades, social norms and cultural practices have changed. These changes include adaptation
of outside cultural practices, on the one hand, and reaffirmation of its ethno-religious cultural
traits, on the other. The issue of national identity, once considered resolved, has re-emerged
and become a wedge issue. Also, religion as a political ideology is making its mark in this
Muslim-majority country. The dwindling share of religious minorities in the total population
cannot escape the attention of any observer of the country, nor the systemic marginalization of
ethnic minorities. Both represent a growing pattern of intolerance, which does not bode well
for a young nation that is struggling to develop institutions that ensure equal opportunity to
all its citizens. The dire prediction of some analysts in the early 2000s that the country would
become a ‘frontline’ state in the war against Islamist militancy did not come to pass, but the
potential danger of violent extremism becoming a part of the social and political fabric has not
disappeared either.

1
 A. Riaz and M. S. Rahman

In recent years, Bangladesh has garnered considerable attention from the international media
and Western policy makers for both positive and negative reasons.The microcredit lending pro-
gram, institutionalized by the Grameen Bank (GB), has received international acclaim, includ-
ing the Nobel Peace Prize, and has been replicated in various parts of the world. Bangladesh’s
dramatic successes in public health with limited resources, ensuring access to education to
children, particularly girls, and maintaining decent economic growth have contributed to the
positive global image, while its failure to deliver good governance, recurrence of violent politics,
growing intolerance within the society, and the presence of indigenous and regional militant
groups have remained issues of serious concern.
The geostrategic importance of Bangladesh has increased considerably in recent years. The
growing importance of Asia, particularly South Asia, in international politics has partly contrib-
uted to this development. A document prepared for US lawmakers aptly noted: ‘Bangladesh
is a nation of strategic importance not only to the South Asian sub-region but to the larger
geopolitical dynamics of Asia as a whole.’ Its importance as an emerging economy with valu-
able natural resources, particularly gas and coal reserves, has been underscored. In the context
of increasing rivalry between China and India, analysts believe that ‘Bangladesh has played, and
will likely continue to play, a role in the shifting regional balance of power between India and
China’ (Vaughn, 2010). The country is already a key player on the global stage as the largest
contributor to the UN Peacekeeping Force.
For a long time, Bangladesh’s unique topography has been noted by geographers and
environmental scientists. Consisting mostly of low, flat land with alluvial soil, the coun-
try presents unique biodiversity. It is the home of the largest mangrove forest in the world.
Sandwiched between the foothills of the Himalayas and the Bay of Bengal, with an exten-
sive network of large and small rivers, the delta is subject to frequent natural calamities,
such as floods, cyclones, tidal bores, and drought. But in recent decades, studies conducted
at the global level have demonstrated that Bangladesh is on the frontline of global climate
change. A one-meter rise in sea level would affect 17 million people and 15 percent of the
land, according to various reports. An Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
report predicts the displacement of 17–20 million Bangladeshis by 2050. The World Bank
has described Bangladesh as the most ‘climate vulnerable in the world’. These ongoing and
potential disasters make it imperative for the international community not only to watch
the country closely, but to stand with its citizens who are victims of circumstances not of
their own making. As one of those countries most vulnerable to global climate change,
Bangladesh has taken on the leadership role in climate change negotiations. This has made
the country an active participant in the global order.
As the country is gaining a salient position in regional and global economics and politics,
the international community is moving fast to work out an appropriate means to engage with
Bangladesh. Unfortunately, policy formulation sometimes precedes the development of a sound
understanding of socio-political and economic dynamics. Similarly, members of the academic
community are facing difficulties in explaining contemporary developments. This Handbook of
Contemporary Bangladesh is accordingly intended to help policy makers, journalists, academics,
and students of Bangladesh studies gain an in-depth and nuanced understanding of various crit-
ical issues of Bangladeshi politics, society, and economy.
The Handbook comprises six broad parts; they are: ‘History and the making of contempor-
ary Bangladesh’; ‘Politics and institutions’; ‘Economy and development’; ‘Energy and environ-
ment’; ‘State, society and rights’; ‘Security and external relations’. Every part includes a number
of chapters, each covering an important aspect pertinent to a better understanding of contem-
porary Bangladesh.

2
 Introduction

Part I, entitled ‘History and the making of contemporary Bangladesh’, addresses issues that
are central to the understanding of the Bangladeshi political landscape of the past four decades,
and are expected to remain so for the foreseeable future. These chapters, including the chapter
titled ‘Bangladeshi politics since independence’, by Sarah Tasnim Shehabuddin (Chapter 1), is
not intended to provide a chronological listing of events and personalities. Instead, we con-
sidered that a critical examination of the overall picture should be followed by the three
foremost issues that have shaped and perhaps dominated post-independence political events
and discourse. It is from this perspective that identity politics, secularism, and the 1971 geno-
cide were chosen for discussion. Shehabuddin sets the scene by explaining the persistence of
political instability and violence in the country. She argues that the institutional weakness of
governance, a legacy of the colonial era that has been perpetuated for political expediency by
post-colonial leaderships, has created the environment of instability and violence. She further
argues that Bangladesh’s initial endowment of weak and unresponsive institutions incentivized
centralized decision making and the development of patronage networks, which in turn inten-
sified competition between political actors over power and resources. The electoral system,
which is the first-past-the-post system, has exacerbated the problems and vitiated the system
to a great extent. It has engendered a zero-sum mentality and inhibited the rise of a consen-
sual model of politics. In this political culture, three issues have remained pivotal. The issue of
nationalism and national identity have both created a sense of unity and emerged as an issue
of deep division among the citizens. This seemingly contradictory role of nationalism is not
unique to Bangladesh; however, the nuances and the modus operandi warrant closer inspection,
which Habibul Haque Khondker does in his chapter, ‘Nationalism and the “politics of national
identity” ’ (Chapter 2). Within this frame of interpretation there exist two strands of national
identity: the culturalist and the structuralist. These two strands coalesced in pre-independence
Bangladesh. But in the past decades the two strands have taken different directions. With the
growing salience of religion in public and political lives, the culturalist narrative has gained
ground. This is obvious in the apparent contestation between ethnic Bengali identity and reli-
gious Muslim identity. But Khondker’s argument takes us beyond this simple dichotomization.
In some ways, Shantanu Majumder’s chapter, ‘Secularism and anti-secularism’, takes this as a
point of departure (Chapter 3). His examination of secularism’s rise–demise–rise cycle, or, to
use his phrase, ‘Acceptance, Abandonment, Reintroduction and Compromise’ cycle, shows
how political events such as military rule have shaped the debate and the trajectory of secular-
ism in Bangladesh. He opines that the ideal secularism is a tall order for Bangladesh, thanks to
the Muslim majority and the presence of ‘anti-secular’ forces; therefore, a compromise version
is what the nation will have to live with for the foreseeable future. Notwithstanding the diffe-
rence many analysts will have with this approach, it does lay out a strong sentiment prevailing
in Bangladesh. In the context of the debate on secularism, Majumder mentions that the secu-
larists have identified the issue of the war crimes trial as a critical element for confronting the
‘anti-secular’ forces in post-2008 Bangladesh.
The war crimes trial, revived in 2010 after its initial abandonment in 1973, is connected
to the genocide perpetrated by the Pakistani Army and its collaborators in 1971. The shadow
of the genocide looms large in Bangladesh, at least on two counts: the failure to bring to
justice those who committed the crimes against humanity, and the fact that some of these
collaborators were rehabilitated and became part of the government in post-independence
Bangladesh. Navine Murshid looks at the war crimes trial from the perspective of restorative
justice (Chapter 4). In the context of the spontaneous movement in 2013 called the Shahbag
movement (named after the city square in which the protestors held a sit-in for months, akin
to Tahrir Square of Cairo) and its co-optation by the government, Murshid underscores the

3
 A. Riaz and M. S. Rahman

necessity for trying those who committed war crimes, in order to bring about closure to a pain-
ful chapter of the nation’s history. She noted that the activists of the Shahbag movement used
the rhetoric of self-determination, of a new state, of renewal and cleansing, and of retributive
justice, and slowly found themselves first empowering the state, then being co-opted by it, and
soon becoming embroiled in various contradictions. Her comment about the movement – that
a transformative movement would not have made demands only from the existing playbook,
it would have sought to change the rules of the game – points to the inherent weakness of an
unprecedented popular uprising and its trajectory. However, this does not take away the impera-
tive for addressing the issue and providing justice to the nation. One cannot agree more with
her conclusion: the path toward restorative justice and a culture of progressive politics is strewn
with challenges.
The five chapters of Part II, ‘Politics and institutions’, are designed to look at various
institutions of politics and governance. In any system of governance institutions are cen-
tral to gain legitimacy and deliver common benefits including justice and rule of law. As
Bangladeshi citizens have repeatedly expressed their longing for a democratic system, and
Bangladeshi politicians of all stripes have claimed themselves to be democratic, one must
examine the state of key institutions to assess the progress of the nation. Ali Riaz analyzes
the results of ten parliamentary elections held since independence, the nature and role of
political parties, and the party system in his chapter, ‘Political parties, elections, and the party
system’ (Chapter 5). Despite a lack of institutionalization of democracy, the country has a
plethora of parties. This can be viewed as a mark of popular commitment to democracy. The
range of these parties is wide, but the chapter also demonstrates that since 1991, a de facto
two-party system (consisting of the Awami League (AL) and the Bangladesh Nationalist
Party (BNP)) has emerged. Two smaller parties, the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami (BJI) and the
Jatiya Party (JP), have played a significant role as they switched their support between the AL
and the BNP. The party landscape is characterized by two contradictory patterns – fragmen-
tation of parties and building alliances. Since independence, incumbent parties have tried
to create a dominant party system, a system that ensures the unbridled control of one party
over state and politics and turns the election into a formality to anoint the same party. To
date, these efforts have not succeeded. But whether the 2014 election, boycotted by major
opposition parties, including the BNP, will bring success is a matter for concern. The lack of
intra-party democracy, the presence of a clientelistic culture within parties, and unrestrained
power of the party chiefs seem to be common to all parties.
Nizam Ahmed explores the workings of the national parliament (Chapter 6). As Bangladesh
is a unicameral parliamentary system, the national parliament, called Jatiya Sangsad, has enor-
mous power. However, as Ahmed reminds us, the parliament does not enjoy unfettered author-
ity. The constitution sets some limits on its permissive powers. It provides for judicial review
of legislative actions, thereby imposing some checks on the arbitrary exercise of power by the
parliament. Between 1975 and 1991, parliaments had far less power as the country was gov-
erned under a presidential system. Post-1991, the parliaments have survived longer than their
predecessors, but the zero-sum mentality of the politicians, which Sarah Shehabuddin refers to
in Chapter 1, has turned the parliament into the rubber-stamp of the ruling party. Conversely,
the opposition, irrespective of the party, has often refrained from participating in parliamen-
tary deliberations. There are long periods of boycott by opposition members of parliament.
The tenth parliament, which was elected in January 2014, is facing an unprecedented situation
as there is no effective opposition. The JP, which is named as the official opposition, has a few
Cabinet members. Therefore, there are apprehensions, echoed by Ahmed, as to whether the
current parliament can play any effective role.

4
 Introduction

Habib Zafarullah’s chapter on public administration and bureaucracy argues that Bangladesh,
at independence, inherited a post-colonial administrative system that was highly central-
ized, bureaucratized, overbearing, economically monopolistic, and distanced from the people
(Chapter 7). This description resonates with the institutional weaknesses discussed in earlier
chapters. Zafarullah states that 20 years down the track, a ‘democratic’ set-up was put in place
but the basic administrative format still endures, albeit with minor modifications. He argues
that the extreme politicization of the bureaucracy, producing divided political loyalties within
it, has been an offshoot of democratic politics. Partisan bureaucrats now serve their respective
parties when one is in power; those in the opposing camp are victimized. Political patronage
has served both ruling parties to their advantage. Policies are easily made and implemented with
loyalist support, but the presence of partisan bureaucrats in key positions calls into question the
objectivity and efficacy of the policy-making process. Perennial generalist-specialist discord and
intense bureaucratization within the state apparatus impair administrative integrity and per-
formance, while non-transparent actions, unaccountable bureaucratic behavior, and inequitable
recruitment patterns counter the norms of sound governance. These undesirable features of the
bureaucracy are not unique to any one regime; however, they have diminished its standing in
the eyes of the citizens.
As Bangladesh was ruled for almost one-third of its existence by military or quasi-military
governments, it is imperative to examine the civil–military relationship.This is a topic dealt with
by Al Masud Hasanuzzaman in Chapter 8, who argues that legacies of overt and covert military
interventions have a lasting impact on the relationship. Besides, the lack of institutionalization of
civilian control has made the army a significant element in power play. Despite the restoration of
civilian rule and democratization in 1991, the military remains an active element of Bangladeshi
politics due to the ‘appeasement policy’ of the civilian regime, he argues.The role of the military
during 2007–2008, described as a ‘soft coup’, has further strengthened the corporate interests
of the military. Despite politicization, it appears that the profitable participation in UN peace-
keeping missions has diminished the army’s desire for state power. But in the context of weak
institutionalization each political crisis generates the question of whether the army will step in
to mediate between the contending political forces.
The last chapter of Part II, by David Lewis, examines the role of the civil society and
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the social and political arenas (Chapter 9). He
demonstrates that there are two roots of the NGOs in Bangladesh: in local forms of volun-
tary organization and action, which has a long tradition, and Bangladesh’s growing relation-
ship with the international aid system in the post-independence period. Although the NGOs
played a pivotal role in the economic and social development of the country until the 1980s,
Lewis argues their roles have relatively declined. He further argues that it is because of increas-
ing hybridization that boundaries between the private sector and the state have become more
blurred. Lewis’s chapter also locates the issue of NGOs within the broader issue of civil society
and makes a distinction between the civil society and NGOs; in the public discourse NGOs are
often equated with civil society. In some ways, his characterization of the changes in civil soci-
ety as moving from an ‘unstated secular consensus’ to ‘secular–religious–nationalist composite’
vindicates the discussion of Khondker on the shifting meaning of identity (Chapter 2).
Part III of the Handbook examines issues of economy and development. At the heart of this
part’s chapters is an effort to identify the actors of the significant economic growth since the
1990s, the contributions of various sectors to this growth, the impacts of growth on poverty
and inequality, and the role of the state. In some measures, together they constitute an endeavor
to unpack the economic success of the country, in a political environment that cannot be
described as conducive. Many have called this the ‘Bangladesh paradox’. Whatever we call it,

5
 A. Riaz and M. S. Rahman

there is no denying that contemporary Bangladesh cannot be understood without a probing

analysis of its economic success.
The chapter authored by Fahmida Khatun, titled ‘Development policies since independ-
ence’, sets the scene by examining the development policies of various regimes since 1972
(Chapter 10). It points out that development policies have often been guided by the broad
political philosophy of the political parties that ruled the state. Consequently, the country has
experienced development policy shifts in the 1970s and 1980s from a closed socialist type of
economic structure toward a market-oriented liberal economic framework. Sectoral policies
have been formulated in view of such ideological changes. However, it is well to bear in mind
that despite regime changes, the broad policy shift in the late 1970s has remained in place, and
perhaps is set on an irreversible course. The chapter further delves into policies in the agricul-
ture, industry, trade, financial, and human development sectors. Khatun argues that although
impressive progress on both economic and social fronts has been made during the last four
decades, Bangladesh currently faces a number of challenges including large population size and
vulnerability to the impact of climate change. Not surprisingly, lack of governance and political
uncertainty are identified as crucial challenges for the nation.
Since the devastating famine in 1974, which cost 27,000 lives according to the official figure,
while an unofficial figure puts it at a few hundred thousand, policy makers have prioritized the
food security issue. It is against this background that Uttam Kumar Deb looks at the agricul-
ture sector and food security (Chapter 11). The chapter demonstrates that despite inter-year
fluctuations, production of food grains and edibles has increased over the years. Major drivers
of increased agricultural production in the country have been the development and diffusion of
improved crop varieties, expansion and better management of irrigation, effective input (seed
and fertilizer) delivery, policy reform, and investment in agriculture. Access to input and output
markets through better road networks in the country and to the international market through
trade policy reform (reduction of tariff rates for inputs and cash incentive for export of vegeta-
bles and fisheries products) also contributed toward increase in domestic production. The food
security situation, based on four criteria devised by the FAO – food availability, economic and
physical access to food, food utilization, and stability over time – has improved and hunger has
reduced substantially; however, disparity in consumption exists among the poor and non-poor.
The third chapter of this part, authored by Rashed Al Mahmud Titumir, examines the state
of industrialization of the country over the past four decades (Chapter 12). One of the key
aspects of the changes in the structure of the Bangladeshi economy is the decreasing contri-
bution of agriculture to GDP.   The share of the service sector has taken a leap in past decades,
while the share of the industrial sector has registered slow but steady growth. In large meas-
ure, this change began in the 1980s, when Bangladesh embraced market-oriented policies. In
1980–1981, the contribution of the industrial sector to GDP was 17.31 percent; by the end of
the decade it registered a slightly larger share at 19.13 percent. By the early 2000s, it reached
26.2 percent, and in 2013–2014, it stood at 29.61 percent. Although the share has increased, the
rate of growth is evidently slow. Titumir also notes that the sector is characterized by a narrow
product base, limited absorption of labor, inadequate innovation and technological advance-
ment, and insufficient capital deepening.
Titumir’s point that there is a limited absorption of labor is reinforced by Farida Chowdhury
Khan in her chapter on labor (Chapter 13). Khan demonstrates that the sectoral change, par-
ticularly the growth in the industrial sector, can be ascribed to the increase in labor-intensive
light manufactured products, primarily ready-made garments (RMG). The extent of RMG’s
contribution to the economy can be understood from the fact that in the late 1980s garments
accounted for only 39 percent of all exports but by 2011 almost 80 percent of all export earnings

6
 Introduction

were derived from RMG. After China, Bangladesh became the second largest exporter of RMG
to the global market. This expansion of RMG opened up job opportunities for a significant
number of people, especially women. Yet what is discernable from data provided by Khan is
that the share of the female worker in the formal sector has dropped. The percentage of women
working in the formal sector has fallen over the decade – from 20.3 percent of workers in 2000
to only 8.9 percent of workers in 2013. Another unfortunate feature of the labor situation in
Bangladesh is the low priority accorded to wages, productivity, and worker safety. This is due to
the vast supply of unskilled labor, and predominance of the informal sector. The labor unions,
which have a long tradition of activism in protecting workers’ interests, have weakened in the past
decades; therefore they are currently unable to protect wages and working conditions.
As the previous two chapters point out, RMG has become the mainstay of Bangladesh’s
exports to the global market. This is definitive proof of the changes in Bangladesh’s trade
policy. The policy changes in the early 1980s, which shifted the trade orientation from
import-substituting industrialization to a liberal regime that spurred exports but also led to a
large growth in imports, inform Selim Raihan’s chapter on external trade (Chapter 14). The
surge in imports increased the share of total imports in GDP. Data provided by Raihan show
that the import penetration ratio increased from about 12 percent in the early 1970s to more
than 32.1 percent in 2012. During the same period the ratio of exports to GDP rose signifi-
cantly from only 6.5 percent to 23.2 percent. Unfortunately, this increase in exports was not
matched by diversification of commodities or export destination; as noted earlier by Titumir
and Khan, it is RMG that remains the principal export, and Raihan adds that North America
and the European Union remain the major destinations. In 2012–2013, around 54 percent
of the country’s total exports went to the European Union, while another 23.5 percent was
destined for North America. The change in trade policy reduced protection for the domestic
sectors. Substantial reductions in quantitative restrictions, drastic opening up of trade in many
restricted items, significant rationalization, and diminution of import tariffs are the character-
istics of the new trade regime. The floating exchange rate system and considerable adjustments
to monetary and fiscal policies are also parts of the new regime. The conspicuous absence
of discussion on regional trade needs to be pointed out. Despite the presence of a number
of forums for regional cooperation, such as the South Asia Free Trade Association (SAFTA),
the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC), the SAARC Preferential
Trading Arrangement (SAPTA), the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and
Economic Cooperation (Bimstec) and the Mekong-Ganga Cooperation (MGC), very little has
been achieved in terms of sustained cooperation among South and Southeast Asian countries.
In addition to the RMG sector, remittances from short-term migrants have become the
principal driver of economic growth in the country. Currently, the remittances sent by migrants
are equivalent to 11 percent of the country’s GDP. Between 1976 and 2013, at least eight mil-
lion Bangladeshis were engaged in short-term migration. As the number grew, quite phenom-
enally, in the 1990s, the amount of remittances grew and became the second largest source of
foreign currency. The country received about US$14 billion in 2013. Tasneem Siddiqui exam-
ines the nature and scope of the migration and its impact on the economy in Chapter 15. We
gather from the data provided in the chapter that in 2010, flows of incoming remittances were
almost 12 times higher than foreign direct investment to the country and six times higher than
total foreign aid received. While labor migration has lessened the pressure on creating jobs at
home, whether the global economic environment will continue to allow such dependence
remains a question.
A. K. M. Riaz Uddin’s chapter on urbanization (Chapter 16) depicts the social and eco-
nomic reality of Bangladesh in a way that connects the journey from traditional rural landscape

7
 A. Riaz and M. S. Rahman

to the emerging urban agglomerations inexorably linked with and unavoidably shaped by the
global marketplace. In doing so he describes the transformation of the economy, spatial struc-
ture, demography, social and political relations and institutions, and future possibilities from a
multi-disciplinary perspective. He urges readers to recognize that the future of Bangladesh is a
predominantly urban one. Since little is known about the urban reality for a Third World nation
like Bangladesh and the chances of the state’s emergence as a powerful agent of urban change,
seeking alternative agents and mechanisms of change is of great importance.
Bangladesh’s consistent economic growth in the past decades neither can nor should be
discussed in isolation from its impact on poverty and inequality. Syed Akhtar Mahmood takes
on that task in his chapter, ‘Poverty, inequality and entrepreneurship’ (Chapter 17). In 1973,
Bangladesh was listed among the very poor countries with 74 percent being classified as living
below the poverty line. But four decades later it can take pride in the fact that, in 2010, the
Poverty Headcount, i.e., the proportion of the population living below the poverty line, came
down to 31.5 percent. Indeed, Bangladesh has achieved significant progress in reducing poverty,
especially in the last decade. After a slow start in the early years of its independence, the pace
of poverty reduction accelerated during 2000–2010 when roughly 16 million Bangladeshis
escaped poverty; the number of people living below the poverty line dropped from 63 million
to 47 million; and the number of extreme poor fell from 44 to 26 million. As for inequality,
although it did not match the pace of poverty reduction, especially in the 1990s, the situation has
improved in recent years. Mahmood writes, ‘During the 2000s, nationally, there was a modest
decline in consumption inequality, as measured by the Gini index.’ A confluence of policy, pro-
vision of social services, and entrepreneurship has contributed to this. Government policy has
played an important role in modernizing agriculture, enhancing connectivity, and promoting
export-oriented manufacturing. Government and NGO programs, sometimes working separ-
ately and sometimes in tandem, have led to significant improvements in human development
indicators. An entrepreneurial spirit has been unleased that has responded to opportunities, both
domestic and international, and thereby helped generate growth and created scope for poor
people to participate in the growth.This is not to say that the country does not have challenges;
Mahmood concludes,

There is a large unfinished task. Some 26 million Bangladeshis are still classified
as extreme poor and about 50 million non-poor people are still vulnerable given
that their consumption is less than 1.5 times the poverty line. Child malnutrition
remains high.

While we expect that pro-poor development policies, pursued thus far by all regimes, will be
able to lift up these marginalized and vulnerable citizens, we cannot take it as guaranteed.
Mahmood’s list of interventions that contributed to the declining rate of poverty includes
microfinance. The concept may not have been invented in Bangladesh, but it surely has been used
here in an unprecedented manner to address poverty and empower women. Notwithstanding
the recent debates in Bangladesh and India, there is a broad agreement among economists on
the positive impact of microcredit in changing the livelihoods of marginalized people. The GB
and Professor Yunus being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 is a testimony to this impact.
Muinul Islam examines the history of the GB and the microcredit model (Chapter 18). Islam
reminds us that, in the last 31 years of its phenomenal progress, the GB has proven that the
poor are more bankable than the rich, provided suitable mechanisms are innovated to ensure
proper utilization of credit in income-generating activities. GB has successfully built a system
where repayment rates of loans disbursed stay around 98 percent. Islam also provides a critique

8
 Introduction

of the model and addresses criticism of the GB. Since writing the chapter, in February 2015,
the government was set to take control of the GB through the Central Bank. This concluded
the government’s efforts since 2010 to oust Yunus from the GB and establish its control over
the bank. Currently the government owns a 25 percent share, up from about 3 percent in 2008.
When the bank was set up in 1983, the government had a 60 percent share, which decreased
as borrowers, primarily poor women, increased their stakes. Professor Yunus was removed from
the Managing Director position in 2010, with critics of the move insisting that he is a victim
of a political vendetta.
Part IV of the Handbook consists of three chapters on energy and the environment.
Discussions on economic growth and development in Bangladesh frequently identify the poor
state of infrastructure and the energy crisis as two major hurdles. Governments in the past
decades have acknowledged the issues, paid lip service to them, yet none has been addressed
robustly. Moshahida Sultana examines the state of the energy situation in her chapter, ‘Power
and energy: potentials, crisis, and planning’, and argues that the power and energy crisis today
cannot be called merely a problem of scarcity (Chapter 19). Rather it is a result of how the
power and energy institutions were established, reformed, developed, and controlled by the dif-
ferent political regimes of Bangladesh. The planning, policies, and developments of this sector
have brought the country to the situation it is in now. She further insists that historically, the
unplanned development of the energy sector, prioritizing the power sector without ensur-
ing energy sources, lack of coordination between energy and power sectors, and international
financial institutions’ neoliberal reform agenda have significantly influenced the policy and
planning of the energy sector. There was no single integrated energy policy that could accom-
modate the short-term and long-term national goals and objectives of the power and energy
sectors. In most of the situations, foreign consultants from international financial institutions
and donor countries have influenced the planning, policies, guidelines, and roadmaps. One of
Sultana’s key conclusions is that the short-termism of the government has dominated the plan-
ning and policy making of the past four decades. This mindset, in combination with external
dependency, has precluded Bangladesh’s capacity building.
As we noted at the beginning of this Introduction, global climate change is no longer a
matter of future possibility but an unfortunate daily reality for the citizens of Bangladesh. The
country has faced erratic weather and severe natural calamities in the past decade. Media and
policy makers have, therefore, aptly described the country as ‘the frontline of climate change’.
The issue is further explored in Chapter 20, ‘Climate change’, by M. Asaduzzaman. He looks at
various manifestations of climate change on Bangladesh. The rise in temperature, projected at
4 °C by the end of the year 2100, will have a disastrous impact. Weather extremes will become
the norm over time. These will be disruptive for water availability and quality, agriculture and
food production, and health. Salinity ingress, an issue that has received significant attention, is a
major threat to the country. At present, 10 and 16 percent of the coastal zone is under salinity
levels of 1 and 5 parts per thousand (ppt), respectively. By 2050 it is expected that the area under
1 ppt salinity will increase to 17.5 percent; for the 5 ppt salinity level, 24 percent. This will cost
the nation dearly in terms of food production. For salinity levels up to 0.5 ppt, nearly 40 percent
of crops may be lost, while for salinity between 0.5 and 1 ppt the damage may be up to 60 per-
cent. For even higher salinity levels, the whole output may be lost. Although Bangladesh has
made remarkable efforts and achieved significant success in adaptation and mitigation, whether
they are enough to confront the enormity of climate change is an open question.
The future rise in sea levels due to climate change will result in severe challenges for all
aspects of water resources management in Bangladesh, writes Md. Khalequzzaman in his chap-
ter on water (Chapter 21). One cannot exaggerate the role of the rivers while discussing a

9
 A. Riaz and M. S. Rahman

delta. Bangladesh, being a delta, stands at the receiving end of three main rivers – Ganges/
Padma, Brahmaputra, and Meghna, known collectively as the GBM river basin. Therefore, as
part of the GBM basin, it is highly vulnerable to the water management policies and actions of
the upper riparian countries, namely China, Nepal, and India. Of the total annual renewable
flow of 1,211 billion m3 of water in the GBM basin, only 105 billion m3 (8 percent) originate
within the territory of Bangladesh, which is equivalent to 656 m3 per capita. In the face of the
sea-level rise, Bangladesh requires a steady supply of water and sediment flow for the natural
functioning of the delta ecosystems.The average annual rate of sediment flux to Bangladesh has
declined from 2 billion tons to 1 billion ton in recent decades, resulting in inadequate growth
of coastal areas. Khalequzzaman points out that this is one aspect of water issues, the other being
water management inside the country. In the absence of a water resources management plan,
policies, and mechanism by which all stakeholders living in a (sub)watershed can participate in
decision-making processes, both the quality and quantity of water in Bangladesh have reached a
very critical situation. Formulation of the Water Act 2013 and the establishment of the National
Water Resources Council are steps in the right direction, but it is too early to say whether
they will have significant impacts. We also need to echo Khalequzzaman’s conclusion that sus-
tainable development of water resources in Bangladesh needs to be viewed in the context of
an integrated water resources management plan for the entire GBM basin that will involve all
stakeholders in the co-riparian countries.
One of the concerns that observers of Bangladeshi society and the state have consistently
expressed is the state’s failure to uphold the rights of its citizens. Overall the human rights situ-
ation, or to put it bluntly the progressive deterioration of the human rights situation irrespective
of regimes, reflects the lack of rule of law and absence of institutions that can protect citizens
from the predatory use of the state apparatuses. Minorities, both religious and ethnic, have been
doubly marginalized as they face systemic discrimination as well. These are some of the issues
dealt with in Part V of the Handbook.Two chapters, ‘Human rights and the law’ by Mohammad
Shahabuddin (Chapter 22) and ‘Religious minorities’ by Meghna Guhathakurta (Chapter 25),
confront them head on. Shahabuddin’s chapter discusses the extant laws and constitutional pro-
visions that guarantee citizens’ fundamental rights.These may not be perfect, but they are defin-
itely enough to ensure fundamental rights if adhered to. Besides, Bangladesh has also committed
itself to the international responsibility of protecting and promoting civil and political rights by
ratifying and acceding to the ICCPR on September 6, 2000. Earlier, Bangladesh acceded to the
Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment
(CAT) and International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), both
on October 5, 1998. But as Shahabuddin proceeds, it becomes evident that these rights are
trampled on at will. He writes,

Yet, despite these constitutional guarantees, the actual state practices often fall much
below the constitutional and, in this sense, international human rights standards. Law
enforcement agencies in Bangladesh often fail to uphold the legal standard while deal-
ing with suspects or convicts.

Extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and torture in custody have increased over time.
Then the question arises, why have human rights activists not been able to raise awareness
and engage in popular resistance? He argues that this is because human rights advocacy in
Bangladesh has failed to engage with people beyond a privileged circle and, therefore, remains
alien. Meghna Guhathakurta’s chapter focuses on the state of religious minorities in the coun-
try. The dwindling Hindu population in Bangladesh documented in the censuses – from

10
 Introduction

13.5 percent in 1974 to 8.5 percent in 2011 – is testimony to the large migration of members
of the Hindu community from Bangladesh as a result of socially accepted systemic discrimin-
ation. Her chapter explores the state of other minorities, including the Ahmadiyya community,
who have become a target of violence perpetrated by Islamists. Guhathakurta argues that reli-
gion has been used as an instrument of state policy, thereby adversely affecting the minority
population. The constitutional amendments, particularly that declaring Islam the state religion
in 1988, are cases in point. Expedient politics of the AL and the BNP accentuated the situation
as minorities have been treated as vote banks and consequently became victims of the political
opponent.
The systemic discrimination and the denial of the distinct identity of the indigenous people,
commonly referred to as the tribal population, of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) led to an
insurgency in the mid-1970s that lasted until 1997. The insurgency was met with a large-scale
military operation and a long-term plan of transmigration, that is, the settlement of a Bengali
population in the CHT. This has changed the demographic composition of the region – the
ethnic Bengali people constituted 50 percent of the population in 2011, a staggering jump
from 9 percent in 1951. It was expected that the dispossession of land and their identity would
come to an end after a peace treaty was signed between the Bangladeshi government and the
rebels, known as the Parbattya Chattagram Jano Samhati Samiti (United Peoples Organization
of the CHT, or JSS), in 1997. But as Bhumitra Chakma demonstrates, this has not been the
case (Chapter 24). The post-conflict peace-building process was ignored and discriminatory
practices continued. Recurrent eruptions of violence and instability mark the region. Chakma
aptly concludes that the peace-building process after 18 years largely remains, at best, a work-in-
progress or, at worst, a failure.
Amena Mohsin, in Chapter 23, ‘The state of gender’, sheds light on the state of gender in
Bangladesh and identifies the inadequacies of extant laws and social norms; in the process she
unmasks the masculine nature of the state. Mohsin argues that there are built-in discriminatory
features within existing laws and norms that regulate the daily lives of women. The chan-
ging status of women in Bangladeshi society is a result of the domestic environment and the
state’s commitment to global rules and norms. Although the country has ratified all of the six
core human rights documents, including the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of
Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), its failure to implement Article 2 is an important
drawback. Article 2 is considered the heart and soul of the treaty as this obligates the state to take
measures to do away with all kinds of discrimination, including legal, customary, and traditional
ones against women; and to take policy measures in this regard has weakened its position on
women’s rights. This state’s reservation regarding this Article is also contradictory to the con-
stitution of Bangladesh, which guarantees equality of rights and non-discrimination between
men and women in all spheres of life. The existence of a religion-specific personal law that
determines the personal lives of women including inheritance is not only a matter of concern
but also a demonstration of a gendered legal system, Mohsin aptly argues.
Since the democratization process began in 1991, there has been a significant change in the
media landscape, both print and electronic. Anis Rahman documents this change, and demon-
strates that in the era of economic globalization the media has emerged as an influential factor
in the politics, history, and culture of Bangladesh (Chapter 26). But whether the expansion has
contributed to the democratization remains an open question, especially because of various pol-
icies enacted in the past decades. He continues that the democratizing potential of the media is
being mired by political and market controls such as ownership, advertising, and self-censorship.
A key success of the country in the past four decades, particularly since the 1990s, has been
the expanding education opportunities for children. Manzoor Ahmed’s chapter on education

11
 A. Riaz and M. S. Rahman

provides an overview of the size and growth of the education system in the last two decades
(Chapter 27). At the primary level, close to universal initial enrollment has been achieved, and
both at the primary and secondary levels gender equality in enrollment has been attained.
But challenges are obvious from the fact that about a third of those enrolled at primary level
drop out before completing the primary stage. It is worth noting that during the period under
review Islamic seminaries, namely madrasas, have grown and attracted a sizeable proportion of
school-age children. Quality of education, at all levels, has continued to be an issue that warrants
but does not receive ample attention by policy makers.
Another field where the country has achieved extraordinary success is in public health. Despite
remarkably low allocations of public resources to the health sector (e.g., 3.6 percent of GDP on
average in 2010–2014) the country has reached several significant milestones. The success in
reducing the infant mortality rate and reducing the total fertility rate are cases in point. Arafat
Kabir highlights these successes and traces the conditions for such gains (Chapter 28). He argues
that four factors should be credited for these successes: they are equity, pluralism, innovation, and
resilience. He further argues that Bangladesh has been able to address the first-generation health
issues, and has outperformed many countries of similar socio-economic conditions. As with the
arguments made about economic growth, this chapter shows that it is the combination of NGOs
and the state that paved the way for these successes. However, there are several challenges that
warrant immediate attention. The most important among them is the absence of a strong foun-
dation of public health service delivery system. The small number of state hospitals and health
clinics with limited facilities makes the recent achievements vulnerable.
No state operates in isolation from the global system. It is truer now than ever before due
to globalization and the changing global political order. As a participant in the global eco-
nomic and political system, Bangladesh is influenced by and influences the system. Global pol-
itics, especially the bipolar structure, had an impact on the emergence of Bangladesh. During
the War of Liberation in 1971, the Soviet Union joined India in supporting the Bangladeshi
government-in-exile, while the United States and China sided with Pakistan.This impacted the
newly independent country’s foreign policy orientation. Until the demise of the Sheikh Mujib
regime in 1975 in a violent military coup, Bangladesh remained aligned with the Indo-Soviet
axis. Subsequently, the foreign policy orientation changed; its relationship with the United
States warmed up, China recognized the country, and Bangladesh became closer to the coun-
tries of the Middle East and the Gulf. The pattern has remained largely unchanged since then.
In the initial years, the Bangladeshi economy’s dependence on external aid made the Western
donors key players in shaping economic policies and influencing domestic politics.With further
integration with the global economy, and changes in the structure of economy, Bangladesh’s for-
eign policy has undergone changes. Six chapters in Part VI of the book delve into these aspects
from various vantage points.
Imtiaz Ahmed divides this transformation into two broad phases (Chapter 29). Within this
frame, the first phase was the diplomacy of recognition when the primary objective was to
ensure recognition from influential as well as a wide range of countries; the second phase was
the economic diplomacy era. During this phase, cementing the relationship with the West to
ensure aid and assistance was the cornerstone of Bangladeshi foreign policy. Ahmed also insists
that the country’s policy options are constrained by energy insecurity and climate change.
Although both have been, in some measure, integral parts of its foreign policy, Bangladesh needs
to embark on a new phase pursuing its energy and climate diplomacy.
While Imtiaz Ahmed presents a macro-level picture, Mohammad Sajjadur Rahman looks
closer to home: Bangladesh’s relationship with its neighbors (Chapter 30). As India surrounds
Bangladesh and played the pivotal role in the independence of the country, it looms large in

12
 Introduction

Bangladesh’s domestic politics and foreign policy. However, a gamut of issues have remained
unresolved between these two countries; these include water sharing, border demarcation, and
cross border migration, to name a few. The relationship is often characterized as a ‘love–hate’
relationship. Dhaka’s dwindling interest in developing strong ties with Islamabad is addressed
in the chapter. Rahman also deals with the recent developments of Bangladesh–Myanmar rela-
tions, particularly within the context of the maritime border dispute.
It is not only the relationship between Bangladesh and India that has changed in the past
44 years; so has the country’s relationship with the big powers, argues Lailufar Yasmin in her
chapter, ‘Bangladesh and the great powers’ (Chapter 31). One of the important points from
Yasmin’s chapter is that Bangladesh’s strategic importance is on the rise in an age that has seen
the return of geopolitics, and that Bangladesh is increasingly turning into a destination for great
powers in its own right. The chapter examines the relationship with the United States, Russia,
China, and major economic powers such as Japan and the European Union. Looking at the
post-2008 developments, she identifies a closer relationship with Russia. She notes that internal
political instability since the 1990s has created scope for foreign diplomats to play a ‘political’
role. During each crisis surrounding the transfer of power of political governments, groups of
diplomats undertook activities to mediate political crisis.
Discussions on any state take the territorial boundaries and citizenship as given, but they are
not always unproblematic. In the case of Bangladesh, Bina D’Costa shows us that the presence of
two communities exposes the inadequacy of the typical nation-state formulation in understand-
ing citizenship in her chapter titled ‘Borders, boundaries and statelessness’ (Chapter 32). These
two communities are Rohingyas and Biharis. Rohingyas are members of an ethnic community
of Myanmar, who have faced persecution in their homeland and have been forced to take ref-
uge in the CHT since the 1980s. The Biharis are the Urdu-speaking population, whose elder
generation opted to migrate to Pakistan after the independence of Bangladesh.They are, in large
measure, located in the intersection of domestic and foreign relations issues. Both these commu-
nities have been stateless for decades. D’Costa argues that contesting claims about identity, race,
and nationality reinforce the social and political boundaries within and beyond state borders.
The chapter articulates how the Rohingya and the Bihari people are constructed as the ‘Other’
in the name of national security and state sovereignty.
Bangladesh’s heightened role in the international arena is in part due to its large-scale par-
ticipation in UN peacekeeping missions. Rashed Uz Zaman, in Chapter 33, relates that over
the past few years Bangladesh has been one of the top troop-contributing countries to United
Nations Peacekeeping Operations (UNPKOs). From a very modest participation of 15 military
observers to the UN Iran–Iraq Military Observation Group (UNIIMOG) mission in 1988,
Bangladesh’s participation has grown to 8,758 in 2014. As of April 2014, Bangladesh had con-
tributed a total of 120,587 personnel from the uniformed services (armed forces and police)
in 52 UN peacekeeping missions in 40 countries. There are a number of factors behind such
significant participation; financial incentive is one of them. Between 2001 and 2010, the gov-
ernment received a total of US$1.28 billion from the United Nations as compensation for
troop-contribution, contingent-owning equipment, and other forms of compensation. But
diverting the armed forces’ attention away from any praetorian desire is considered another key
factor. His point echoes Al Masud Hasanuzzaman’s observations (Chapter 8) that it precludes
the military from intervention in domestic politics.
In the final chapter of the volume, we turn our attention to terrorism and counter-terrorism.
Since 2005 Bangladesh has drawn the attention of the international media due to the increas-
ing threat posed by Islamist militant groups. Saimum Parvez writes that in addition to small
groups of Islamist militants, there are left-wing groups that have demonstrated their presence

13
 A. Riaz and M. S. Rahman

(Chapter 34). However, both left-wing and Islamist terrorist groups have very little public
support and are limited to small geographical pockets. As for the emergence of Islamist mili-
tancy, a convergence of domestic, regional, and international factors are to be blamed. Parvez
also suggests that connections between these groups and transnational terrorist groups are
being forged. In this regard his concluding comment about the future trajectory is worth
paying attention to:

Currently, the radical groups are a minority; perhaps they will remain in the minority
in future, but political instability, violence and rancorous relationships between pol-
itical parties may create an opportunity for them to thrive again and to turn danger-
ously hostile and aggressive.

In conclusion, we would like to make two points about this volume. It would be prepos-
terous to claim that this Handbook presents a complete picture of contemporary Bangladesh.
We acknowledge that our appraisal of the past four decades is somewhat incomplete. There are
a number of aspects that also deserve to be discussed. For example, issues related to literature
and culture have not featured in this volume. Space constraints and other considerations have
precluded us from venturing into that realm; however, it by no means suggests they are less sig-
nificant. Perhaps a separate volume can present the literary and cultural landscape of the nation.
The country has a rich cultural tradition that goes back a thousand years, and has been further
enriched since independence. Second, while each chapter addresses a specific topic and provides
an overview, some of them overlap because of the close correspondence between the issues dealt
with. In doing so, different perspectives have also emerged, and variations in interpretations
have become evident. As editors, we neither intended nor tried to impose conformity. However
inconsistent they may appear on first reading, we hope that readers will soon appreciate the
nuances and diversity; contested perspectives should supplement their understandings. In a simi-
lar vein, these chapters provide the current snapshot, locate them in the historical background
of the past decades, and point to some trajectories. Despite these weaknesses we hope this
Handbook can serve as a point of departure for anyone interested in understanding Bangladesh
from a contemporary perspective.

Reference
Vaughn, B. (2010) Bangladesh: Political and Strategic Developments and U.S. Interests. Congressional
Research Service (CRS). April. p.13.

14
 PART I

History and the making of

contemporary Bangladesh
This page intentionally left blank
 1
BANGLADESHI POLITICS
SINCE INDEPENDENCE
Sarah Tasnim Shehabuddin

On June 29, 1974, security forces escorted a 94-year-old leftist dissident back to his hometown
after he criticized the government at a rally in Dhaka (Maniruzzaman, 1975, p.121). The dis-
sident, Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, was a veteran politician, popularly known as the ‘Red
Maulana’ due to his socialist orientation and religious educational background. Decades later,
on May 6, 2013, state security officers dispatched yet another nonagenarian dissident Maulana
back to his hometown after his movement, Hefazat-e-Islam, challenged the government’s legit-
imacy at a rally in the capital. This dissident, Shah Ahmad Shafi, had recently ventured into
politics to demand that the government align the country with his movement’s socially conser-
vative interpretation of Islam. Between the two rallies, the world stage had witnessed massive
changes: the systematic weakening of leftists and increased visibility of Islamists, the end of the
Cold War and the onset of the War on Terror, and the complex consequences of neoliberalism.
The two rallies not only reflect interconnections between domestic dynamics and the global
context, but also underline the diverse challenges the Bangladeshi state has faced.
Bangladesh is one of the few Muslim-majority countries to have sustained procedural dem-
ocracy for a significant period of time and has been upheld as a model for other developing
countries due to its gains in human development, but has also drawn attention because of the
intensity of its conflictual politics. In 2013, 507 people died as a result of political violence, while
22,407 were injured (Ain o Salish Kendra, 2014). Much of the political violence occurred dur-
ing hartals or general strikes called by opposition parties to put pressure on the government to
meet various demands. The Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry
has estimated that each hartal day costs the economy over US$200 million (Wall Street Journal,
2013). During hartals, opposition party cadres clash, sometimes fatally, with ruling party cadres
and the police. Opposition party cadres violently enforce strikes whenever possible, by threaten-
ing or attacking vehicles and citizens who defy the hartal.
The persistence of political institutions that do not effectively distribute power and eco-
nomic resources makes instability a recurring feature of politics in Bangladesh. This chapter
traces how Bangladesh’s inheritance of weak institutions at the time of independence has
fueled the expansion of patronage networks, manipulation of institutions for political gain,
and intense competition over economic and political resources. Bangladesh’s first-past-the-post
electoral system tends to exacerbate these problems: it deprives the opposition of parliamentary

17
 S. T. Shehabuddin

authority and reduces checks on the ruling party’s power, multiplies opportunities for cor-
ruption, facilitates the use of state resources to marginalize opponents, and pushes opponents
toward extra-parliamentary measures, such as insurgency, assassinations, coups, street protests,
and hartals (Siddiqi, 2011, p.7). After introducing four political parties that have influenced
Bangladesh’s political development, this chapter traces the impact of institutional weakness on
democratic commitment and political instability during different episodes of Bangladesh’s his-
tory: Bangladesh’s first democratic experiment from 1972 to 1975; military rule from 1975 to
1990, and civilian rule from 1991 to the present.

Major political parties

Bangladesh has a first-past-the-post parliamentary electoral system with single member districts.
Such systems tend to be dominated by two large parties. The center-left Awami League (AL)
and the center-right Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) currently dominate the political stage.
Other political parties have had difficulty competing with these two parties at the national level.
As citizens can elect only one representative for their constituency, they are less likely to vote for
candidates from smaller parties that do not have the reach and resources necessary to win at the
national level and thereby influence the allocation of resources. Two other parties, the centrist
Jatiya Party (JP) and the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), have also played important roles in national
politics in spite of their relatively smaller vote shares.
Awami League (AL): Under the leadership of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (popularly known
as Sheikh Mujib), the AL won the national parliamentary elections of Pakistan in 1970, but
President Yahya Khan annulled the results, cracked down on Bengalis in East Pakistan, and
arrested Sheikh Mujib in March 1971. After a nine-month-long Liberation War, during which
AL leaders formed a provisional government-in-exile, Bangladesh emerged as an independent
country on December 16, 1971. Sheikh Mujib, celebrated as Bangabandhu (literally ‘Friend of
Bengal’) and the Founder of the Nation, ruled Bangladesh from 1972 until his assassination by
army officers in 1975. In 1981, his daughter, Sheikh Hasina, was elected leader of the AL. Sheikh
Hasina served two terms as prime minister from 1996 to 2000 and 2008 to 2013. In January
2014, after the AL claimed victory in elections boycotted by the major opposition party, Sheikh
Hasina continued serving as prime minister. A center-left party, the AL initially articulated a
platform based on socialism, secularism (non-communalism), Bengali nationalism, and close
relations with India and the Soviet Union, but over time, it has embraced economic liberaliza-
tion, emphasized its commitment to Islam, and strengthened relations with the United States.
Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP): In 1978, the then president, General Ziaur Rahman,
founded the center-right BNP. Ziaur Rahman was the army officer who had declared Bangladesh’s
independence on behalf of Sheikh Mujib in March 1971 and taken power after Sheikh Mujib’s
assassination in 1975. As a response to the AL’s emphasis on Bengali nationalism, the BNP
sought to develop a ‘Bangladeshi nationalism’ that would distinguish Bangladeshi Bengalis from
Indian Bengalis and emphasize the Muslim identity of the majority of Bangladesh’s citizens. It
also sought to establish stronger relations with the United States and Muslim-majority coun-
tries, particularly oil-rich ones, and adopted economic liberalization programs. An umbrella
party, the BNP attracted people with grievances against the AL, including military personnel,
business people, pro-China leftists, and Islamists.The BNP ruled the country from 1979 to 1981
under Ziaur Rahman and then from 1991 to 1996 and 2001 to 2006 under the leadership of
his widow, Khaleda Zia.
Jatiya Party (JP): In 1986, Hussain Mohammad Ershad, the former army chief who had taken
power in 1982, shortly after Ziaur Rahman’s assassination, founded the JP. Similar to the BNP,

18
 Bangladeshi politics since independence

the JP advocated economic liberalization and close ties with Muslim countries and the United
States. The JP won parliamentary elections in 1986 and 1988 and dominated the parliament
under Ershad’s leadership until he resigned in 1990.
Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh (JI): The JI is Bangladesh’s main Islamist party. During the
Liberation War, the JI refused to support freedom fighters and several members collaborated
with the Pakistani Army. The 1972 constitution banned religion-based political parties, but
Ziaur Rahman allowed the JI to resume political activities. The JI’s vote share in elections has
been small, but the BNP has sought (and received) its support to compete against the AL and
enabled it to play a disproportionately important role in politics. The JI has made some doc-
trinal compromises, such as accepting a woman’s political leadership and supporting women’s
political participation (Shehabuddin, 2008; interviews, JI members, Dhaka, 2010). It has, how-
ever, advocated various restrictions on civil and political liberties. For example, it demanded an
anti-blasphemy law in the early 1990s and the declaration of Ahmadiyyas, who self-identify as
Muslim, as non-Muslims. The JI’s student wing, the Islami Chhatro Shibir, maintains an active
presence on several university campuses. In 2009, the AL-led government set up an International
Crimes Tribunal, which convicted several JI leaders for war crimes, amidst accusations from the
BNP and JI that the trials sought to incapacitate the opposition rather than serve justice.

Bangladesh’s first democratic experiment: 1972–1975

An inheritance of institutional weakness: the roots of conflictual politics

Kiren Chaudhry (1993) has argued that post-colonial states often struggle to build responsive
political institutions, because these would threaten entrenched interests and require financial
and administrative resources that such states usually lack. In order to consolidate power, many
leaders preferred to assume direct control over institutions, national resources, and industries in
order to build patronage networks, expand their own base of support, and weaken opponents.
After the Liberation War in 1971, Bangladesh dove into the challenges of reconstruction and
state building with a weakened civil bureaucracy, a factionalized military, and a depleted econ-
omy, amidst concerns about Indian hegemony and uncertainty about international recognition
and financial support. Such factors made it difficult for leaders to focus on building responsive
institutions that could effectively distribute power and economic resources and address citizens’
needs and grievances. Leaders therefore often relied on centralized decision making and patron-
age to consolidate power and address pressing problems.
Upon his return to Bangladesh from Pakistan in January 10, 1972, Sheikh Mujib embarked
on the ambitious task of creating a secular, democratic, and socialist state, while trying to restore
order and coordinate reconstruction.The AL won a landslide victory in the 1973 parliamentary
elections, but the Mujib regime faced multiple challenges to its authority due to the diver-
gent ideological and material expectations Bangladesh’s liberation had generated. Major leftist
opposition groups including the Jatiyo Samajtrantrik Dol (JSD – National Socialist Party) and
Maulana Bhashani’s National Awami Party (NAP) accused Sheikh Mujib of failing to meet
the needs of citizens, especially workers and peasants. The state also struggled to control insur-
gents such as radical leftists who sought a ‘Second Revolution’ that would overthrow Sheikh
Mujib’s ‘petty bourgeois’ rule (Maniruzzaman, 1975, p.121). Other domestic and international
actors found Sheikh Mujib’s professed support for socialism and state-led economic planning
objectionable and wanted Bangladesh to adopt a less pro-Soviet and more pro-US stance.
Sheikh Mujib’s emphasis on Bengali nationalism also generated grievances among non-Bengali
communities. Manabendra Narayan Larma, an MP from the Chittagong Hill Tracts, criticized

19
 S. T. Shehabuddin

Sheikh Mujib’s call for indigenous communities to embrace Bengali culture. Amidst multiple
challenges to his authority, as well as devastating floods and famine, Sheikh Mujib gave para-
mount importance to the assertion of political stability in Bangladesh.
Restoring order proved to be a difficult task, as two of the most important state institu-
tions for stability, the civil bureaucracy and military, were weak and fragmented. According to
Jahan (1974), tensions and competition arose between bureaucrats who had worked with the
government-in-exile during the Liberation War and those who had not. The fragmentation
of the bureaucracy complicated the task of reconstruction and restoration of order. A 1972
Presidential Order that permitted the non-appealable dismissal of civil servants fueled concerns
about job security, while parliamentary supervision constrained the autonomy of the bureau-
cracy (Jahan, 1974, pp.129–130; Maniruzzaman, 1975, p.125).
The military was also factionalized and some personnel developed strong grievances toward
the AL government. By rewarding officers who had fought for Bangladesh’s liberation with
early promotions, AL leaders generated resentment among officers who had been stranded
in West Pakistan and repatriated after the war. The Mujib government’s close relations with
India, which the Pakistani Army had trained both Bengali and non-Bengali officers to con-
sider the enemy, also irked some army officers (Khan, 1982, p.169; Maniruzzaman, 1975, p.123).
Furthermore, certain army personnel complained that most of the annual defense budget went
toward supporting the Rakkhi Bahini, a paramilitary force formed by the Mujib government in
March 1972 to fight armed insurgents (Jahan, 1973, p.206; Maniruzzaman, 1976, p.122). The
fragmentation and perceived marginalization of the army in independent Bangladesh therefore
deprived the AL government of a crucial source of political stability.

The demise of Bangladesh’s first democratic experiment

The majoritarian parliamentary system gave Sheikh Mujib yet another means by which to con-
centrate power in his own hands amidst intensifying challenges to his government. In January
1975, Sheikh Mujib used the AL’s parliamentary dominance to pass a constitutional amend-
ment that established a presidential system, banned existing political parties, and invited citizens
to join a single national party, BAKSAL (the Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League). He
argued that a one-party presidential system would bolster national unity and reduce political
strife, but this move aggravated grievances and heralded the end of Bangladesh’s first democratic
experiment.
In the context of the Cold War, Sheikh Mujib’s adoption of a one-party model deepened
anxiety among domestic and international anti-socialist forces. Eight months later, disgrun-
tled army officers assassinated Sheikh Mujib and all but two members of his family on August
15, 1975. As a result of this coup, an anti-socialist faction took power and imprisoned four
high-profile AL leaders. This faction also promoted Ziaur Rahman from deputy chief of army
to chief of army. A complicated power struggle ensued among various factions. On November
3, a pro-Mujib faction moved to regain power from the anti-socialist faction, which, fearing the
return of the AL, ordered the murder of the four jailed AL leaders, including Tajuddin Ahmed,
Bangladesh’s wartime prime minister. Bangladesh thus lost two of its most iconic civilian politi-
cians, Sheikh Mujib and Tajuddin Ahmed, within three months. For the next 15 years, the pol-
itical stage would be dominated by the military.
The restorationist pro-Mujib faction had placed the army chief, Ziaur Rahman, under house
arrest, but a soldiers’ revolt freed him on November 7 in a coup led by Colonel Abu Taher, a
leftist freedom fighter who wanted to eliminate differences between soldiers and officers in the
army. In his drive to consolidate power, Ziaur Rahman eventually ordered the arrest of Colonel

20
 Bangladeshi politics since independence

Taher, who was convicted of treason by a military tribunal and hanged on July 21, 1976. Ziaur
Rahman would continue to purge the army of revolutionary leftist officers and eroded the
strength of leftists in Bangladesh.

The military strikes back: 1975–1990

Rather than developing autonomous and responsive political institutions, Bangladesh’s leaders
repeatedly used and reshaped political institutions to consolidate their own power. Military rule
under Ziaur Rahman (1975–1981) and Ershad (1982–1990) would continue to treat institu-
tions as malleable and subservient to political interests. Both leaders used constitutional amend-
ments to legalize their actions, indemnify themselves from prosecution, and emphasize their
Islamic credentials to gain domestic and international support. Ziaur Rahman replaced ‘secular-
ism’ with ‘Absolute Trust and Faith in Almighty Allah’ and inserted ‘In the Name of Allah, the
Beneficent, the Merciful’ into the preamble of the constitution, while Ershad declared Islam the
state religion. Their adoption of neoliberal policies such as privatization reinforced patronage
networks through crony capitalism. The sale of state-owned enterprises in the 1970s and 1980s
gave the leaders a valuable tool for rewarding and gaining supporters. In addition to reshaping
institutions to consolidate power, the two leaders also emphasized their contributions toward
restoring order, attracting foreign aid, and intensifying development activity (Bertocci, 1982).
Ziaur Rahman and Ershad adopted similar methods to civilianize their rule (Bertocci, 1985,
pp.156–157). They organized parliamentary elections only after they had built grassroots sup-
port through local elections, won presidential elections to retain leadership of the country, and
launched their own political parties. Ziaur Rahman created the BNP in September 1978 to
compete with the AL, while Ershad created the JP in January 1986 to compete with the AL and
the BNP. Parliamentary elections took place under Ziaur Rahman in February 1979 and under
Ershad in May 1986 and March 1988.
In spite of such efforts, Ziaur Rahman and Ershad faced considerable challenges to their
rule. Ziaur Rahman was assassinated by army officers in May 1981. Ershad managed to minim-
ize challenges from the army by providing officers considerable benefits, such as bureaucratic
appointments, opportunities for corporate engagement, strengthening the Sena Kalyan Sangstha
(Army Development Committee), low-cost land acquisition, higher salaries and allowances,
improvements in housing and infrastructure in cantonments, and participation in UN peace-
keeping missions. Ironically, Ershad’s attempts to win the military’s support through economic
incentives eventually increased the army’s stake in maintaining their privileges, rather than
keeping Ershad in power (Rahman, 1989; Bhattacharjee, 2010). As Eva Bellin (2012) has argued,
the military’s ability to dissociate its interests from the leader’s fate decreases its willingness to
repress protestors and generates opportunities for regime change.

Inter-party cooperation and the fall of Ershad in 1990

The anti-Ershad movement stands out as one of the few examples of inter-party cooperation
in Bangladesh. The AL and BNP jointly formulated five demands: the end of martial law, res-
toration of constitutional rights, parliamentary elections prior to local and presidential ones,
the release of political prisoners, and the trial of those responsible for five students’ deaths in
mid-February 1983 (Bertocci, 1985, p.158). In 1984, they also agreed to allow the JI to par-
ticipate in the anti-Ershad movement. Through strikes and sit-ins, the AL, BNP, and JI sought
to put pressure on Ershad, even though their alliance often collapsed in the face of political
calculations. In 1986, the BNP called for a boycott of parliamentary elections and saw the AL’s

21
 S. T. Shehabuddin

decision to participate in them as a tremendous blow to the anti-Ershad movement (Islam,

1987, pp.164–165). The JI also decided to contest the elections. Shortly after the JP, Ershad’s
party, won majority control of parliament, however, the AL boycotted parliament and rejoined
the anti-Ershad movement, because its demands continued to go unheeded. In the summer of
1987, the BNP and AL succeeded in using hartals to force Ershad to withdraw a bill institution-
alizing military participation in district councils (Islam, 1988, p.165). On November 10, 1987,
the parties organized a rally to demand Ershad’s resignation. The police shot several protestors,
including Noor Hossain, an activist with the words ‘Let Democracy Be Free’ painted on his
back (New Age, 2012). The AL, BNP, and JI all boycotted the parliamentary elections of 1988
(Blair, 2010, p.100).
Women’s rights organizations, workers, and students also challenged Ershad’s rule. The par-
ticipation of Islamists in the anti-Ershad movement, according to a member of the JP, pushed
Ershad to declare Islam the state religion of Bangladesh through the Eighth Amendment to the
constitution in May 1988 to ‘take the wind out of Islamist opponents’ sails’ (interview, member
of the JP, Dhaka, March 10, 2010). In response to this instance of institutional manipulation,
women’s rights organizations argued the amendment contradicted the constitutional equal-
ity of citizens and was unconstitutional. Naripokkho, a feminist organization, filed a case to
challenge the amendment (Karim, 2011, p.12). The Ershad regime also generated grievances
among trade unions when it broke a promise to ensure workers’ rights (Maniruzzaman, 1992,
pp.205–206). In October 1990, student organizations, including the student wings of the BNP
and AL, formed the All Party Students’ Unity to demand Ershad’s resignation and parliamentary
elections under a non-partisan caretaker government. This put pressure on their parent political
parties to maintain a unified front and jointly participate in protests and strikes.
On November 27, 1990, the killing of a doctor, Shamsul Alam Khan Milon, on the Dhaka
University campus triggered acts of civil disobedience by journalists, doctors, civil servants,
and business people. Ershad sought the military’s support to reinstate martial law, but the army
chief, Lieutenant General Nuruddin Khan, refused to support this move and Ershad resigned
on December 4 (Maniruzzaman, 1992, pp.207–208). In 1990, the high level of social mobil-
ization and the army’s concerns about economic assets and access to UN peacekeeping mis-
sions eroded its willingness to repress protestors. Ershad’s attempts to keep the army satisfied
through patronage during his tenure had paradoxically increased the officers’ willingness to
replace their patron with one of his political opponents in order to preserve their economic
interests (Maniruzzaman, 1992, p.208). On December 6, 1990, in accordance with the demands
of the opposition parties, Ershad handed power over to a non-partisan caretaker government,
which organized parliamentary elections.

Institutional manipulation and fragmentation

under civilian rule: 1991–present
On February 27, 1991, the BNP won 30.81 percent and the AL 30.03 percent of the national
vote. The two parties won similar vote shares, but the BNP defeated the AL in a greater num-
ber of the 300 constituencies: the BNP received 140 seats and the AL 88 (Blair, 2010, p.100).
Securing the JI’s support enabled the BNP to gain majority control of the parliament and
appoint Khaleda Zia as prime minister. The BNP’s parliamentary victory possibly, however,
enabled the BNP and AL to resolve their long-standing disagreement about the form of gov-
ernment. The BNP had wanted to preserve the presidential form of government, but the AL
wanted the restoration of the parliamentary system. Perhaps reassured by its victory in the par-
liamentary elections, the BNP agreed to pass the Twelfth Constitutional Amendment, which

22
 Bangladeshi politics since independence

restored a parliamentary form of government and nullified the need for separate presidential
elections.
After 15 years of military rule, Bangladesh thus relaunched its democratic transition with a
first-past-the-post parliamentary system, a literacy rate of 35.52 percent, and a low per capita
GDP. As such, it seemed to lack several ‘prerequisites of democracy’. Adam Przeworski (2004)
has argued that democracy is more likely to endure at higher levels of economic development,
as people tend to enjoy greater economic security under democracies than dictatorships. Yet,
by 2001, Bangladesh seemed to have passed Samuel Huntington’s (1993) two-turnover test for
democratic consolidation, meaning there had been two peaceful transfers of power through
elections: the AL won elections in 1996 and the BNP won elections in 2001. Bangladesh
became one of the few Muslim-majority countries to experience regular transfers of power
through independently monitored free and fair elections.
Anxieties about the neutrality of electoral institutions and the need to sustain patron–client
relations have, however, fueled political antagonism and violence under civilian rule. Ruling
parties’ attempts to weaken the opposition through human rights violations such as extrajudi-
cial killings and restrictions on political and civil liberties have reflected the expansion of state
power and constrained substantive democratization (Hossain, 2004; Human Rights Watch, 2013;
Mohaiemen, 2013). Bangladesh shows how ostensibly democratic institutions can cannibalize
democracy when they do not adequately ensure power sharing. Bangladesh’s winner-takes-all
electoral system accords little power to electoral losers, so winning elections becomes a mat-
ter of survival to political parties who fear their elaborate support networks may disintegrate if
they are unable to distribute money, administrative positions, jobs, contracts, and protection to
supporters. Bangladesh’s economic growth, fueled by ready-made garments exports and remit-
tances from migrant workers, has decreased the country’s reliance on donors for aid and for-
eign exchange and made losing elections all the more costly. As Akhtar Hossain (2000) writes,
‘economic stakes are too high to lose gracefully’. The struggles over the caretaker government
provision illustrate how political actors have continued to see politics as a zero-sum game and
resorted to multiple forms of violence to gain access to political and economic resources.

Political parties and the caretaker government

provision: a love–hate relationship
Debates about the need for a neutral caretaker government system to oversee parliamentary
elections have been at the heart of the tug-of-war between incumbents and the opposition.
When in power, political parties criticize the caretaker government system as undemocratic,
but when in the opposition, they seem willing to sacrifice hundreds of lives to ensure its imple-
mentation. In 1994, the AL accused the ruling BNP of rigging a by-election in a constituency
and argued that the BNP could not be trusted to hold free and fair parliamentary elections in
1996. For two years, the AL held mass protests, strikes, and blockades to force the BNP to con-
cede to a non-partisan caretaker government that would organize the parliamentary elections.
The BNP argued that such an unelected body would be unconstitutional and decided to go
forward with elections in February 1996, even though the AL boycotted the elections. The
BNP won the elections, but came under massive criticism from civil society, the business com-
munity, and civil servants (Kochanek, 1997, p.137). It then passed the Thirteenth Constitutional
Amendment, which institutionalized the caretaker government provision, and handed power
over to a non-partisan caretaker government, which held new elections in June 1996. The AL
won these elections and, at the end of its five-year term in 2001, handed power over to a care-
taker government. A BNP-led alliance, which included the JI, won the parliamentary elections

23
 S. T. Shehabuddin

in 2001.The caretaker government mechanism thus bolstered the legitimacy and fairness of the
June 1996 and October 2001 elections and facilitated the transfer of power from one party to
another.
Ahead of the parliamentary elections scheduled for January 2007, however, the BNP’s
attempt at manipulating the mechanism led to political violence and instability. The AL
argued that the chief advisor of the caretaker government was a BNP loyalist and could not
be trusted to ensure free and fair elections. The BNP’s refusal to change the composition of
the caretaker government intensified the AL’s program of street protests, hartals, and block-
ades (Hagerty, 2007, p.106). This eventually led to the military’s intervention on January 11,
2007, the installation of a technocratic caretaker government, and the postponement of par-
liamentary elections. The caretaker government promised to prepare the country for free and
fair elections by issuing voter identity cards with photos to reduce fraud. It also launched an
anti-corruption drive that imprisoned several prominent politicians, including Sheikh Hasina
and Khaleda Zia. Mehnaaz Momen (2009) suggested that the caretaker government’s treat-
ment of politicians and two-year tenure might lead to efforts to restrict or abolish the system
after the elections.
Momen’s prediction was correct. The AL won a landslide victory in the 2008 elections: it
won three-fourths of parliamentary seats and gained the clout necessary to make constitutional
amendments unilaterally. In June 2011, the AL-dominated parliament passed the Fifteenth
Constitutional Amendment, which abolished the caretaker system, ostensibly due to a recent
Supreme Court ruling that deemed the provision unconstitutional. The BNP accused the rul-
ing party of taking steps to deliberately disadvantage the opposition. The AL retorted that the
caretaker system was undemocratic, as it enables an unelected body to rule the country during
the 90-day transition from one elected government to the next, and therefore unconstitutional.
It argued that the Electoral Commission would conduct free and fair elections, as do its coun-
terparts in other democracies without a caretaker government system.
Bangladesh therefore witnessed a stunning, albeit unsurprising, reversal of roles: the AL, the
party that had launched a two-year campaign of parliamentary boycotts, hartals, and blockades
from 1994 to 1996 against the then ruling BNP for the institutionalization of the caretaker
government, now, as the ruling party, abolished the provision in June 2011 and watched the
BNP and other opposition parties violently enforce hartals and blockades through December
2013. Just as the AL refused to participate in elections organized by the BNP in February 1996,
the BNP boycotted the parliamentary elections on January 5, 2014. The AL declared an elect-
oral victory and, as of February 2015, did not concede to the BNP’s demand for new elections
under a non-partisan caretaker government.
After the election on January 5, 2014, Bangladesh experienced relative calm for a year, as
the BNP seemed to focus its efforts on strengthening its grassroots support amidst popular
fatigue with hartals and blockades, but in January 2015, the intransigence of the political
parties drew the country into yet another round of intense instability and violence. The
BNP wanted to hold a protest rally in the capital on January 5, 2015, the one-year anni-
versary of the election it had boycotted. When the AL did not give the BNP permission to
hold the rally, the BNP accused the ruling party of denying it a space for legitimate political
protest and launched a nationwide transport blockade program and frequent hartals. The
AL accused the BNP and JI of terrorism due to the proliferation of petrol bombs hurled
at vehicles operating during the blockade and hartals (Mahmud, 2015). Several cases have
been filed against BNP and JI leaders for the attacks (Daily Star, 2015). The Economist (2015)
reported that 10,000 opposition activists have been arrested. The BNP has alleged that the
ruling party’s cadres have executed the attacks in order to discredit the opposition (UNB,

24
 Bangladeshi politics since independence

2015). As a result of the violence, over 60 people died during the first two months of 2015
(The Independent, 2015). In spite of the heavy toll political instability has inflicted on citizens
and the economy (Hossain, 2015), the BNP has pledged to continue its anti-government
programs and the AL has emphasized it will not engage in negotiations with terrorists
(Molla, 2015).

Conclusion
In 2011, the AL-dominated parliament passed an amendment to reinstate ‘secularism’ in
the constitution. Although the amendment made secularism an immutable constitutional
principle, the BNP vowed to strike it from the constitution whenever it comes to power.
Conflictual politics in Bangladesh has made policy continuity and stability elusive as power
holders rewrite the rules of the game in order to consolidate power and marginalize oppo-
nents. Bangladesh’s first-past-the-post single member district electoral system paves the way
for elective dictatorship, whereby the winning party dominates decision making, marginal-
izes opponents, and thereby increases the likelihood of political violence. Arend Lijphart
(1996), in Constitutional Choices for New Democracies, argues that majoritarian models of gov-
ernment, such as the first-past-the-post parliamentary system, tend to foster more conflictual
politics than consensus models, such as parliamentary proportional representation, because
they foster winning party dominance in parliament, wasted votes, high barriers to entry for
smaller parties, and fewer opportunities for power sharing. Bangladesh’s electoral system
increases the possibility of landslide victories that enhance the winning party’s ability to
make unilateral decisions and thereby intensify inter-party conflict (Przeworski, 2004; Riaz,
2013; Kalimullah and Hasan, 2014).
As Sheri Berman (1997) has argued, the absence of responsive political institutions may
contribute to citizens’ increased reliance on non-state actors for access to goods and services,
but may also erode state actors’ legitimacy and exacerbate political instability. In explaining
Bangladesh’s admirable gains in educational access, health, and poverty alleviation, observers
recognize the contributions of non-state actors, who supplemented government policies and
initiatives (The Economist, 2012; Chowdhury et al., 2013; O’Malley, 2013). Two of the world’s
most celebrated non-governmental organizations (NGOs) originated in Bangladesh: BRAC
and the Grameen Bank. NGOs such as Ain o Salish Kendra, Naripokkho, and Nijera Kori
have played a vital role in criminalizing fatwa-related extrajudicial punishments, reducing
acid attacks, stalling unjust evictions, challenging land grabs, and strengthening workers’ and
minorities’ rights (interview, human rights lawyer, January 25, 2010).While such NGOs have
generally sought to strengthen the social foundations of democracy in Bangladesh, non-state
actors who do not necessarily support political and civil liberties have also emerged and
challenged the very authority and legitimacy of the government, as Hefazat-e-Islam did
in 2013.
As this overview of Bangladesh’s political history has shown, challenges to state authority
in Bangladesh have generally stemmed from the inability of institutions to adequately ensure
power sharing, consensual decision making, and distribution of resources. Yet, political will
for electoral reform is likely to be elusive among the two major parties (interviews, BNP
and JP members, Dhaka, 2010), as an alternative system might threaten to dim the seem-
ingly irresistible prospect of controlling state resources, require engagement in consensual
decision making, and increase opportunities for inter-party checks on power. Until struc-
tural problems are addressed, however, attempts to suppress challenges are unlikely to foster
sustainable political stability.

25
 S. T. Shehabuddin

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27
 2
NATIONALISM AND THE
‘POLITICS OF NATIONAL
IDENTITY’
Habibul Haque Khondker

In 1971 Bangladesh emerged as a sovereign, independent state embracing the principles of

secularism and nationalism. But the secular character of nationalism changed along with the
political regime in the mid-1970s.This chapter begins with a discussion of the conceptual issues
of nationalism, national identity and identity politics to frame the historical developments of
nationalism and shifting national identity in Bangladesh. The transformation of identity and
the rise of a politics of national identity is not to be confused with the discussion of ‘identity
politics’ (Gutman, 2003; Appiah, 2005; Eisenberg and Kymlicka, 2011). The discourse of iden-
tity politics is more germane to the multi-cultural democracies in the West. In Bangladesh the
discussion of national identity has been politicized and problematized by a confluence of forces
that this chapter attempts to unravel. The religious turn in the political and cultural landscapes
has impacted the discourse of national identity in Bangladesh.
The religious turn was dramatically revealed in a mammoth gathering of the members of
a little-known, Chittagong-based Islamic organization, Hefajat-e-Islam, and their sympathiz-
ers in the capital city Dhaka on April 6, 2013. As many as half-a-million Muslim supporters
of this organization, many of whom were madrasa students, gathered at Shapla Chottor, the
heart of the commercial district of Dhaka. A number of incendiary speeches were made.
The speakers called for a return to the Middle Ages as far as the presence of women in the
public space was concerned. They issued 13 demands that included a call for reinstating
several Islamic principles in the constitution. That April day marked a visible shift in the
ideological preference of Bangladesh. Apparently, the Islamists had come in droves to pro-
test the alleged persecution of Islamists and to protest the so-called anti-Islamic blogs posted
by the so-called ‘atheist’ bloggers who were supporting a students’ movement known as the
Shahbag Movement, in the vein of ‘occupy movements’ in several cities across the globe. The
students, who had initially occupied an intersection near Shahbag, a busy junction in the
middle of the city, were persuaded to move into the open space. They had been protesting
in favor of harsher punishment, including death, to the war criminals who were being tried
by a war crime tribunal. Several of the young protestors were active in social media, which
they used effectively to organize the demonstration. Some of them were regular contribu-
tors to the blogosphere. These bloggers, in the eyes of the Islamist groups, were perceived as

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 Nationalism and the ‘politics of national identity’

being engaged in anti-Islamic propaganda. For these Islamist groups, bloggers became another
name for atheists, without realizing that a significant number of pro-Islamic activists and even
extremists write blogs on a regular basis.
The Islamist demonstrators had permission from the government to present their 13-point
demands and then return to their villages. Termed, ironically, the ‘Long March’, the strength
of the Islamists in Bangladesh was underscored. The major opposition political parties that
included the BNP (Bangladesh Nationalist Party) attended the rally to express their solidarity
with the Islamists. The veneer of secular Bengali culture was almost lost that day.
Bangladesh was exposed as a divided nation.The two major political parties – the Bangladesh
Awami League (currently in power) and the BNP – represent two different narratives of nation-
alism and national identity. The BNP narrative comes dangerously close to the narrative of
Jinnah’s two-nation theory. Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founding father of
Pakistan, was the author of the two-nation theory as he claimed that Hindus and Muslims were
not only divided by religion, they were two different nations. They are different in culture, in
the food they consume and so on. Such division and accentuation of differences can be linked
to the colonial domination.

Conceptual matters
The term ‘nation’ was first used in the thirteenth century to demarcate students from various
foreign countries who came to study in some of the oldest European universities. Students at the
University of Paris or the University of Bologna who came from other regions of Europe were
divided into ‘nations’ based on language and their place of origin (Connor, 1978; Seton-Watson,
1994). The classic definition of nation comes from an unlikely source, namely, Joseph Stalin.
According to Stalin, a nation is a stable community of people with a common language and a
common territory, common economic life and physiological make-up manifested in a common
culture (Hutchinson and Smith, 1994, p.21). A variation of that classic definition is offered by
Anthony Smith, who describes a nation as a ‘named human population sharing an historic ter-
ritory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and
common legal rights and duties for all members’ (Smith, 1991, p.14). Nationalism is a sense of
belonging, a belief in common ancestry. ‘Nation’ originally meant ‘birth’ or ‘descent’; a commu-
nity to which an individual belonged by reason of birth (Connor, 1978).
Anthony Smith distinguishes two antagonistic schools of thought about nations and nation-
alism: the perennialists and the modernists (Smith, 2002, p.98).The former suggests that nations,
if not nationalism, have existed throughout recorded history (Smith, 2002, p.5), and runs the
risk of committing ‘retrospective nationalism’ (Smith, 2002, p.99).This view also implies a teleo-
logical inevitability best expressed in Nehru’s ‘tryst with destiny’ formulation. The modernist
perspective presents a contingent view of nation and nationalism that plays an important role in
social solidarity in the modern age of fragmentation and decentering. One can also think of a
parallel duality: the primordial versus the constructive. The primordial view shares some com-
mon ground with the perennial view as the constructivist or the instrumentalist view overlaps
with the modernist position.
Benedict Anderson famously defined the nation thus: ‘it is an imagined political commu-
nity – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’ (Anderson, 2006, p.6). Anderson
distinguished his notion of ‘imagination’ from Ernest Gellner’s ‘invention’. For Gellner,

nationalism is not the awakening of an old, latent, dormant force, though that is how
it does indeed present itself. It is in reality the consequence of a new form of social

29
 H. H. Khondker

organization, based on deeply internalized, education-dependent high cultures, each

protected by its own state. It uses some of the pre-existent cultures, generally trans-
forming in the process.
(Gellner, 1983, p.48)

The contingent nature of nationalism is enmeshed with changes in human society. Observers
of social change view social transformation in light of historical convulsions, contractions,
non-linearity and discontinuity. Nationalism may evolve in certain junctures of historical trans-
formation and, of course, in the emergence of nations, nationalism and national identity. The
purely constructed nationalism follows the formations of nation states with the instrumentalist
needs of creating a solidary nation out of a chaotic ensemble of peoples.
Anderson (2006) provides a useful threefold typology of nationalism: the creole, the ver-
nacular and the official. Creole nationalism evolved in the anti-imperialist national struggle in
late-eighteenth-century America, where neither language nor religion nor a common culture,
nor even print capitalism played a critical role. The leaders of this nationalism were not even
the middle class or intellectuals; rather they were a narrow coalition of ‘substantial landowners,
allied with a smaller number of merchants, and various types of professional (lawyers, military
men, local and provincial functionaries)’ (Anderson, 2006, p.48).
Vernacular nationalism can be taken to be the basis of nationalism in Europe in the nine-
teenth century, where ‘“national print languages” were of central ideological and political
importance’ (Anderson, 2006, p.67). The formation of maternal language-based nation-states in
Europe is of fairly recent origin. The distinction made by Anderson (2006, p.41) between ‘state
language’ and ‘national language’ has relevance for understanding the contemporary discourses
on nationalism. As Anderson shows, England, for example, evolved from using Latin as the
administrative or state language, which gave way to French between 1200 and 1350, and then
English became the state administrative language only in the later part of the fourteenth century.
While the languages of administration changed, most people ‘knew little or nothing of Latin,
Norman French, or Early English’ (Anderson, 2006, p.41).
Drawing on the work of Aira Kemiläinen (1964), Anderson posits: ‘The word nationalism
did not come into wide general use until the end of the nineteenth century. It did not occur, for
example, in many standard nineteenth century lexicons’ (Anderson, 2006, p.4). Official nation-
alism emerged in late-nineteenth-century Europe in the context of dynastic rule and empires
where print capitalism played an important role, along with the help of schools, and the imperial
system was able to spread this nationalism to the periphery of the European empires, notably in
India, Japan and Thailand.
In the twentieth-century wave of nationalism, the educated middle class, aided by their
intellectual spokespersons, played an important role. Here Tom Nairn’s formulation of the role
of the middle class in the European nationalism of the nineteenth century has a resonance.
‘The new middle-class intelligentsia of nationalism had to invite the masses into history; and
the invitation-card had to be written in a language they understood’ (Nairn, 1977, quoted in
Anderson, 2006, p.80). In the twentieth-century version, middle-class intellectuals formed a
bridge between the masses and the leadership, performing a crucial mobilizing role. Charles
Tilly’s classification (1994) of ‘state-led nationalism’ and ‘state-seeking nationalism’ is also
important to note. Here a useful caveat is provided by Tilly’s argument (1991, pp.2–3) that his-
torically most states were non-national (empires, city-states, etc.) and national states are new, yet
they pre-date the nation-state infused with national identity.
Bhikhu Parekh holds that ‘National identity is not primordial, a brute unalterable fact of
life and passively inherited by each generation’ (Parekh, 2008, p.60). Against the constructivist,

30
 Nationalism and the ‘politics of national identity’

Parekh cautions, ‘No political community is a tabula rasa … It has a certain history, traditions,
beliefs, qualities of character and historical memories, which delimit the range of alternatives
open to it … National identity is both given and periodically reconstituted’ (Parekh, 2008, p.61).
The discussion of the construction of national identity in Bangladesh also has to take note of the
historical preconditions that inform the various constructions of national identity.

Nationalism and national identity in Bangladesh

There are two strands of discussion of the development of national identity in Bangladesh: the
culturalist and the structuralist. According to A. F. Salahuddin Ahmed: ‘From time immemorial
the Bengali-speaking people have looked upon themselves with pride as Bengalis.’ The switch
to a new nomenclature, ‘Bangladeshi’, according to Ahmed, ‘does not conform to historical
reality’ (Ahmed, 1994, p.9). For Ahmed, although rooted deep in Bengali cultural traditions,
Bengali nationalism was formed during the Pakistan period (1947–1971) when people in this
region became ‘deeply conscious of their distinct Bengali identity’ (Ahmed, 1994, p.9). Ahmed
quotes Hans Kohn’s suggestion that ‘Nationalism is first and foremost a state of mind, an act
of consciousness, which since the French Revolution has become more and more common to
mankind’ (Kohn in Ahmed, 1994, p.15). Ahmed also invokes Ernest Renan’s claim that

A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle.Two things, which are really one, constitute this
soul, the spiritual principle. One is the past, the other is the present. One is the posses-
sion in common of a rich inheritance of memories. The other is the present consent,
the desire to live together.
(Renan in Ahmed, 1994, p.16)

In fact, the quest for nationalism in Bangladesh fits more closely to Gellner’s appraisal of nation-
alism ‘as the striving to make culture and polity congruent, to endow a culture with its own
political roof ’ (Gellner, 1983, p.43).
The culturalist view was not shared by the structuralist or Marxist interpretations.
Borhanuddin Jahangir provides a class-based, ergo Marxist, analysis of nationalism. Nationalism,
according to this view, is an expression of articulation of class hegemony and also an expres-
sion of interrelations of people in a historical situation. It is, to borrow Laclau’s words, ‘the first
movement in the dialectic between the people and classes’ (Jahangir, 1986, p.36). For Jahangir,
nationalism and populism are twin ideologies that are fused into a strategy of petty-bourgeois
politics. The class basis of nationalism does not advance our understanding of nationalism as a
supra-class ideology other than to rehash an old doctrinaire understanding of nationalism as a
petty-bourgeois ideology. In Jahangir’s analysis the seemingly variant forms of secularist nation-
alism of Sheikh Mujib and the Islam-based nationalism of Ziaur Rahman are both manifesta-
tions of the ideology of different factions of the petty bourgeoisie, and yet sought to represent
the aspirations of all the people, presumably the predominant working classes of Bangladesh.
Whether nationalism is an ideology of the petty bourgeoisie or what can be called a middle class
in non-Maxist discourse, it will be useful to consider nationalism as a unifying ideology origin-
ating in the middle-class intellectuals reaching out and mobilizing the entire society to achieve
a defined set of objectives – one of which is to establish its own state and political community.
Whether this unifying supra-ideology overpowers class-based ideologies and class antagonism
is but an unintended consequence of nationalist movements. For Tom Nairn, an important
Marxist scholar, ‘the theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failure’ (Nairn,
1975, p.3).

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 H. H. Khondker

To ignore the ideological differences between secularist and Islamist nationalism owing
to an intra-class conflict would be highly reductionist. The power of ideas and beliefs in the
late-twentieth-century world has been proven time and again, and no amount of referencing
the Marxist literature will help resolve faultlines that are more ideological than class-based. The
autonomy of ideology has to be reckoned with.
Jahangir, in his neo-Marxist analysis studded with quotations from Ernesto Laclau and Nicos
Poulantzas, approvingly quotes Anthony Smith to suggest that ‘urban populism is a phase or moment
of nationalism … One which answers to the cultural needs of intelligentsia in less developed soci-
eties overshadowed by the scientific and political preeminence of the West’ (Smith, 1983, p.109).
Jahangir captures the conflation of populism and the cultural bases of nationalism when he says that

Zainul Abedin the painter, Jasimuddin the poet, Abbasuddin the singer and Sheikh
Mujib the politician: all in their own way interpreted the different moments of popu-
lism, answered the needs of the ‘small man’s’ longing for warmth and security of
the indigenous framework and cheered a romantic nationalism’s yearning towards an
urban populism that extols rural folkways.
(Jahangir, 1986, p.47)

The appeal to an originary culture and a nostalgia for a past that probably is more imagined
than historical are the standard features of nationalism. What makes the discussion of national-
ism truly problematic is who defines the past and what aspects of the past are given attention
in the reconstruction. Here lies the nub of the problem. The so-called secularist nationalism
in Bangladesh also draws from Bengali folk cultures that are admixtures of folk religions and
mysticism, and are thus not free from religious content. Multivocal and synthetic make-up is
the primary source of the strength of the folk traditions. The constructivists created a purified
Islamic tradition as the base of their nationalist ethos. This distinction is difficult to overlook.
The penetrations and coexistence of multiple religious traditions in the folkways of Bangladesh
provide a strength and durability.
In the absence of any empirical research done on the changing identities of Bengalis, we
often see a tendency in nationalistic narrative to draw a straight line in the rise of Bengali
nationalism from the language movement of 1950s to the movement for provincial auton-
omy and so on. A study conducted on factory workers and cultivators in 1963–1964 asked
the following:

Apni Nijeke pradhanata ki mane karen?

1. Pakistani? Naki?
2. Banagali? Naki?
3. (name of the district) er bashinda? Naki?
4. (name of the village) er bashinda?
[Do you consider yourself first and foremost a:
1. Pakistani?
2. Bengali?
3. A man from [insert respondent’s district of origin]? Or
4. A man from [insert respondent’s village of origin]?]
The survey revealed that 48 percent of the respondents considered themselves Pakistani, 11 per-
cent Bengali, 17 percent identified with their districts and 25 percent identified with their

32
 Nationalism and the ‘politics of national identity’

villages. The author concludes that even in the early 1960s the sense of Bengali identity was
not a widespread form of identity for the average ‘man in the street’ and the ‘man in the field’
(Schuman, 1972, p.291). It is important to deal with the puzzle that, less than a decade before
the birth of a full-scale nationalist movement, nearly half the respondents identified themselves
as Pakistani. And what would explain the conversion to a Bengali identity in such a short period
of time?
Most nationalist historians – with the notable exception of Anisuzzaman – tend to down-
play the ideological anchors of Pakistani ideology among a section of the Bengali intellec-
tuals. Pakistan did not stand on an ideological void. There was some evidence of successful
ideological work as a number of writers declared their support for Pakistan and did not see
any problem or paradox in assuming Pakistani identity. True, some of these writers eventu-
ally shifted their ideological and political position, and their loyalty to Pakistani nationalism
wavered. However, the fact that they retained a Pakistani identity and became the ideological
foot soldiers of Pakistan for a period is a credit that cannot be denied to the leaders of Pakistani
nationalism.
For most of the Muslim writers, the demand for Pakistan seemed to promise a greater
opportunity to play the role of a Muslim as well as a Bengali writer. As Muslims they could
not reach out to the larger community because they were limited by their linguistic skills; they
also sought a space for themselves free from the competition of Hindu writers. According to
Anisuzzaman, ‘Two literary organizations grew up in 1942 to lend support to the Pakistan
movement: the Purba Pakistan Sahitya Sangsad in Dacca (Dhaka) and the Purba Pakistan
Renesa Society in Calcutta (Kolkata)’ (Anisuzzaman, 1993, p.95). In Chittagong the chair of a
literary meeting averred that ‘I was a Bengali and now I am a Pakistani’ (Anisuzzaman, 1993).
The chair was Maulavi Abdur Rahman, a writer from Chittagong (whose son, Professor Nurul
Islam, was the head of the first Planning Commission of Bangladesh; personal communication
with Anisuzzaman, 2014).
The concept of nation has grown from a more exclusive category to become more inclu-
sive. For Montesquieu in the mid eighteenth century, the nation was equivalent to the nobility
and the clergy. In Hungary and Poland, the term nation applied to the aristocracy alone. The
label ‘nationalists’ applied to the rising middle-class intellectuals. Miroslav Hroch, writing in the
context of Eastern Europe, developed a three-stage schema of the growth of nationalism having
originated among intellectuals, which was fostered by political agitators and activists who in
turn communicated it to the mass of the population (Smith, 2011, p.225).
The emergence of Bengali nationalism followed a similar trajectory. First, it was the intellec-
tuals, poets, playwrights and Dhaka University intellectuals who issued the call of nationalism.
Most commentators would agree that it was cultural nationalism that preceded political nation-
alism.The attack on Bengali culture was manifested in the ban imposed on playing Tagore songs.
Begum Sufia Kamal organized a protest against Ayub Khan in 1961, when a ban on Tagore
songs was imposed. Before 1961, celebration of Pahela Baiskhak was not a big event, but after
1961 Chayyanot started organizing the performance of Tagore songs at Ramna Park (Uddin,
2006). Commemoration of Ekushey was also expanded after 1961. Chayyanot became a citadel
of resistance in the early 1960s.
In fact, it was cultural nationalism, reinforced by the call for economic nationalism, that
infused political nationalism in Bangladesh. In concrete historical terms, it was the language
movement that inculcated the spirit of autonomy of language and culture. Now in hindsight
many commentators, often toeing the line of official narrative, draw a single unilinear trajectory.
But the demand to include Bangla as an official language was a demand for granting the Bengali
language the status of one of the official languages in the context of Pakistan.

33
 H. H. Khondker

The intellectuals affiliated with Dhaka University were mainly responsible for formulat-
ing a two-economy thesis and proposed remedies in a proposition of economic nationalism.
Economists such as Nurul Islam, Rehman Sobhan, Anisul Islam et al. worked with the Pakistan
Institute for Development, focusing on economic plans for the newly independent Pakistan,
and were able to identify the exploitative relationship between the jute-dominated East Pakistan
and West Pakistan. First the two-economy formula came out of the pens of these economists,
which eventually sowed the seeds of political nationalism. The publication of the weekly Forum
by Rehman Sobhan, with Hamida Hossain as the executive editor and Kamal Hossain as the
publisher, played a crucial role in the recruitment of a small number of intellectuals in the
service of Bengali nationalism. Certainly, the magazine, with its powerful and inspiring con-
tents, had a small readership but those who read, patronized or became involved with the
group had a role in disseminating the idea of autonomy and incipient nationalism. While the
English-language weekly Forum and other English-language newspapers reached out to a small
number of intellectuals in the then East Pakistan, the Bengali intellectuals, despite attempts to
co-opt them under the rubric of an Islamicized Bangla language and culture, started expressing
their nationalist sentiments.
Neville Maxwell perceptively pointed out that ‘Pakistan was pregnant with Bangla Desh
from the moment of its own birth. Labor was brought on unexpectedly by the decline of Ayub
… and birth was achieved by Caesarian section’, with India ‘acting as the scalpel’ (Maxwell,
1972). In his review article, Maxwell summarized Loshak, who argued that

Pakistan was ‘doomed from the start’ because in a real sense it was never a nation at
all. Bengali nationalism, the sense of ethnic and historical identity of the population of
what was East Pakistan, was from the beginning a far stronger force than the sense of
Pakistani [italicized in the original] identity. It was already clearly developed by the end
of the 1950s, and looked, as early as that, to separation and establishment of a sovereign
Bengal; through the 1960s it grew, fed by resentment at the disparity in economic
and political advantage that left East Pakistan the poor sister, steadily and irremediably
becoming poorer, notwithstanding the fact that its jute exports contributed largely
to Pakistan’s foreign exchange earnings. [The issue of channeling foreign exchanges
on an equitable basis was one of the planks of] the Awami League’s six-point demand
for regional autonomy. Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman, the Awami League leader, and his
associates used to deny that the six points were a secessionist program, but while ‘it
might call for mere autonomy, and not spell out secession,’ it was always plain – or
should have been – that ‘secession would be its effect.’
(Maxwell, 1972)

For David Loshak,

the paradox was this: while the six-point formula went far beyond what West
Pakistan could conceivably grant, it was the least that East Pakistan could demand.
The formula, in short, succinctly implied the fundamental irreconcilability of the
two wings of Pakistan.
(Loshak, 1971, quoted in Maxwell, 1972)

While differences in ethnicity and historical memories separated the Bengalis from the West
Pakistanis, political and economic disparity bred resentment among the Bengali intelligentsia.

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 Nationalism and the ‘politics of national identity’

Bengali representation in the national bureaucracy remained extremely low. According to one
estimate by the influential newspaper Dawn,

nine years after the creation of Pakistan, only 51 top level policy-making positions
were occupied by Bengalis in the Central Secretariat out of a total of 741 such posi-
tions. Bengali representation in the army was minimal – 98 percent of the officer corps
of the army, navy, and air force was composed of West Pakistanis.
(Dawn, January 9 and 18, 1956, quoted in Islam, 1981, p.63)

The construction of Muslim identity can also be seen as a devious ploy of the colonial
administration. The partition of Bengal in 1905, mainly along religious lines, was done osten-
sibly to advantage the economically and politically weaker, but numerically larger, Muslim
community of Bengal. The partition was disputed both by the Hindus and by a section of the
Muslims in Bengal who saw in it a cynical manifestation of a ‘divide and rule’ policy of the
colonial rulers. The partition was annulled in 1911 in the face of the growing resistance of
the middle-class elites. During the years of divided Bengal, the Muslim League was formed in
Dhaka, the capital of East Bengal in 1906, and a provision for a separate Muslim electorate was
legislated in 1909. The annulment created resentment among the Muslims and helped form a
constituency that was receptive to Jinnah’s ‘two-nation theory’, which was the basis for the cre-
ation of Pakistan in succeeding decades.
At the All India Muslim League Conference in 1940, Jinnah articulated his ‘two-nation the-
ory’ as follows: ‘The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophy, social
customs, literatures.They neither intermarry, nor dine together, and they belong to two different
civilizations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions’ (quoted in Islam, 1981,
p.55). ‘In a surprisingly short time, the Muslim League was able to mobilize the Muslim masses
behind the slogan of Pakistan – a homeland for Muslims where they would be able to organize
their lives according to Islamic ideology’ (Islam, 1981, p.56). This was remarkable in the face of
the ulamas who never really supported the cause of Muslim nationalism, as they did not believe
in the symbolic use of Islam, as did the non-religious elites (Islam, 1981, p.59). During the last
phase of the campaign for the freedom of Pakistan, the Muslim League leadership tried to co-opt
some ulema and pirsto leadership positions; after failing to do that, they conferred the religious
titles on the ordinary landlords, thus giving them the pretense of being spiritual and religious
leaders. Mr. Jinnah ‘always appeared in public meetings dressed in a sherwani’ (Islam, 1981, p.57).
Although the creation of Pakistan cannot be dismissed as either an accident of history or the
manipulation of self-serving Muslim elites, it provided an excellent example of a constructed
nation. It showed that construction is not pure fabrication. There had to be some basis in the
material and ideological circumstances historically formed that could be used by the leaders of the
nationalist movements.With the help of hindsight, one could agree with Jinnah’s detailed descrip-
tion of the differences between Hindus and Muslims, and then one could ask ‘So what?’ The two
major religious communities lived in India for centuries with a remarkable absence of conflict and
animosity. Differences between the two communities remained unproblematic until the political
need for differentiation arose. It was only in the fervor of nation construction that differences were
problematized and politicized; minor differences were accentuated and amplified and substantive
areas of cooperation forgotten.The invention of a nation relies on both remembering and amnesia.
Yet, soon after the creation of Pakistan, supposedly a homeland and sanctuary for the Muslims
of the Indian subcontinent, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, its founder, downplayed the religious theme.
In his speech as the first president of the Pakistan Constituent Assembly, he declared:

35
 H. H. Khondker

You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or
to any other places of worship in this state of Pakistan.You may belong to any religion,
caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the state.
(Quoted in Ahmed, 1990, p.19)

However, Pakistan as a nation-state was divided geographically – with two parts separated by
1,200 miles of Indian territory, it had to use common religion as the basis for nationhood.
The movement for autonomy in the eastern part of Pakistan led to the emergence of Bengali
nationalism, which underlined language rather than religion as the basis of nationhood. The
long-standing linguistic identity was an essential ingredient in the formation of national identity
in Bangladesh. Philosophers such as Herder, who maintained that ‘every language has its definite
national character’ (quoted in Kohn, 1951, p.432), recognized the importance of language as a
basis of nationality.
Both language and secularism became justifications for a separate identity for the inhabit-
ants of Bangladesh from its very inception. Bangladesh emerged as a nation on four cardinal
principles, which were enshrined in the constitution. Nationalism, secularism, democracy and
socialism were the four pillars on which Bangladesh stood. However, the political turn of events
that led to the tragic coup d’état in August 1975 dislodged not only the rule of Sheikh Mujibur
Rahman, the founding leader of the country, but also took the country toward a path of reli-
gious orthodoxy. Bengali nationalism based on ethnic, linguistic and cultural identity was rede-
fined after the 1975 coup on the basis of political calculations (Murshid, 2001). Not that the
new rulers were any more religious than the ones they replaced, but in order to show that they
were different, they began to pose themselves as the custodians of religion. Since 1975, the
country has clearly drifted toward Islam. This coincided with the global resurgence of Islam.
Islamic revivalism in Bangladesh was also supported by the funds received from the Gulf states
that began to establish links with various religiously affiliated political parties in Bangladesh.
The shift in the nomenclature from Bengali nationalism to Bangladeshi nationalism was
justified by the post-1975 regimes as more integrative because it would include the Hill peo-
ples of Bangladesh who do not see themselves as Bengalis. However, Mohsin argues that there
are two meanings of ‘Bangladeshi nationalism’; one meaning is integrative to include the Hill
people. Manabendra Larma raised this issue in the parliament in 1972. The post-1975 call for
Bangladeshi nationalism ‘was in essence a reassertion of the Muslim identity of the Bengalis
in Bangladesh’. This ‘deepened the division between the Hill people and the Bengalis; now
religion as well as culture were being used as tools of domination’ of the Hill people (Mohsin,
2013, p.333).
There are a number of features that need serious consideration in explaining the growing
influence of Islam in Bangladesh. The most important of these has been the growth of Islamic
national education, locally known as madrasa education. In 1994, there were 5,762 madrasas
in Bangladesh, with a student population of 1.7 million. Compared to 4.8 million secondary
school students in the same year, the figure may not be as overwhelming as it looks; still, it is a
number to be reckoned with.
The Islamic Party won more than 12 percent of the vote in the election of 1991. In 1996, they
won only 3 percent of the vote. This is not an indication of their declining popularity, however.
In the latest election of October 2001, the share of the vote won by the Islamic parties is hard to
ascertain because as an electoral strategy they formed an alliance with the BNP, which assured
the BNP a resounding electoral victory. Rather, one can see in it an acceptance of Islamic trap-
pings in the political establishment. Clearly, a desecularization process has been taking place in
Bangladesh. For example, it has become routine for newly elected prime ministers to perform

36
 Nationalism and the ‘politics of national identity’

a Hajj before taking over the new government. The process toward desecularization, or, for that
matter, secularization, is not irreversible. The process is very much linked to the politics of the
day. One political scientist who conducted a content analysis of the speeches of Khaleda Zia, the
then prime minister (2003) and leader of the BNP, reported that she began every speech with
‘Bismillah-Ar-Rahman-Ar-Rahim’ (‘In the name of Allah, the Beneficent and the Merciful’). In
most of her speeches, Khaleda Zia upheld the Islamic provisions incorporated in the constitu-
tion during the rule of Ziaur Rahman, namely by insertion of ‘Bismillah-Ar-Rahman-Ar-Rahim’,
dispensing with secularism and substituting instead ‘absolute trust and faith in Almighty Allah’
(Maniruzzaman, 1992, p.209). Sheikh Hasina, the leader of the Awami League, in her speeches
accused both Zia and Ershad of rigging the elections and using Islam to increase their appeal
to the people. Sheikh Hasina, in contrast, promised a living, secular democracy (Maniruzzaman,
1992, p.210). Jamaat-e-Islami promised to build an Islamic state strictly on the basis of the Quran
and Sunnah. Its stance was anti-Indian and it attacked the Awami League for the latter’s secular-
ism. ‘The secularists and the leftists were badly defeated by parties who espoused various levels of
Islamic orientation’ (Maniruzzaman, 1992, p.211).
The turn to religion in Bangladesh should be seen as a progressive erosion of traditional ‘adat’
religion, as it is called in Indonesia, toward a more puritan Islam (Khondker, 2006). The rise
of modernist forms of Islam had a ‘dramatic impact on these traditional locally based religious
forms’ (Rozario and Samuel, 2010, p.356). Both the major parties in Bangladesh, the Awami
League and the BNP, have made ‘concessions towards the Islamists, but the population as a
whole shows little willingness to move dramatically in its direction, either in the villages or the
cities’ (Rozario and Samuel, 2010, p.356). It is easy to agree with the first part of the sentence
and recognize the irony. It is understandable when the Islamist-leaning BNP joins hands with
Islamic political parties or social movements, but the tilt – albeit symbolic – on the part of the
Awami League, a putative secularist party, to the religious right can be explained either as part
of the overall swing toward Islamicization of the society or as an extreme Machiavellian ploy by
the Awami League leadership.
Even to a casual observer, the telltale signs of public piety in the urban centers of Bangladesh
are impossible to overlook. There are several indicators of the growth of public piety in
Bangladesh, a trend that is present in other Muslim-majority societies such as Pakistan and
Egypt (Mahmood, 2004). The number of Quran reading groups has also risen as an urban phe-
nomenon, with a number of educated women joining these groups in Bangladesh (Huq and
Rashid, 2008). Meanwhile, during the same period, women have also gained substantially in
terms of role transformation. The presence of women in the civil service, police and military
indicate their growing public visibility and empowerment. Both processes work side by side in
Bangladesh.

Concluding reflections
Secularism was once believed to be a process of desacralization that emerged pari passu with
modernization. The standard – and historically flawed – view of secularization since Bryan
Wilson is now defunct. A whole new literature since the sociological critique of Robert
Bellah, Roland Robertson, Peter Berger, Bryan Turner and the recent philosophical reflections
of Charles Taylor, Talal Asad and Jose Casanova et al., force us to view secularism in a more
nuanced way. This is in addition to the variety of political meanings of secularism – from the
French laïcité to the US model of religion-friendly secularism. The mainstream Bangladesh
society has now accepted a more US-style secularism – contrary to Turkish or French models
of secularism.

37
 H. H. Khondker

The chances of the spread of fundamentalism in Bangladesh may be remote, as are the possi-
bilities of a return to a secular society as it existed in the late 1960s and early 1970s.The poverty
and backwardness in Bangladesh, measured in conventional socio-economic indicators, should
not be used as an excuse to deny its rich cultural tradition of secularism, which was more the
product of local traditions, a combination of religious syncretism and cultural mysticism, than
an imposition from outside. One of the errors in the perception of the Western media is to look
for a particular brand of (Western) secularism in every corner of the world without any regard
for cultural and historical diversities. If we take the issue of specificity of Bangladeshi culture
seriously, the emergence of either an Iran under Khomeini or Afghanistan under Taliban-style
Islamic revolution or a West European secularizing trend are equally unlikely.
When a religion is viewed more in terms of religious practices than of some invariable
and fixed doctrines, it becomes complicated; it ceases to be a nominal category and becomes
an ordinal variable. Religion may be universal but religiosity varies across cultures around the
world. Religiosity is often a personal choice – then juxtaposition of personal, private religion
and public piety, on the one hand, and the symbolic use of religion in the public sphere, on the
other, are factors that complicate and complexify simple-minded categorizations of religious
versus non-religious with profound implications for the discussion of politics, especially the
subject of national identity in Bangladesh.

References
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Ahmed, R. (ed.). (1990) Religion, Nationalism and Politics in Bangladesh. New Delhi: South Asian Publisher.
Anderson, B. (2006) Imagined Communities. London: Verso.
Anisuzzaman. (1993) Creativity, Reality and Identity. Dhaka: International Centre for Bengal Studies.
Appiah, K. A. (2005) The Ethics of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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Gutman, A. (2003) Identity and Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Huq, S. and Rashid, S. F. (2008) Refashioning Islam: Elite Women and Piety in Bangladesh. Contemporary
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Neoliberalism in Asia. Abingdon: Routledge.
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Schendel, W. and Zurcher, E. J. (eds.). Identity Politics in Central Asia and the Muslim World: Nationalism,
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Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

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 3
SECULARISM AND
ANTI-SECULARISM1
Shantanu Majumder

Bangladesh started its journey as an independent state in December 1971, severing ties with
Pakistan after 24 years of struggle that ended in the nine-month-long War of Independence.
The then third largest Muslim-majority state in the world enshrined secularism (the Bengali
word Dharmanirapekshata conveys the sense of ‘secularism’ in English) in its constitution in
December 1972 as one of the state principles. One basic prerequisite of a modern liberal state
order, i.e., the separation of politics and religion in order to guarantee ‘neutrality’ between dif-
ferent religions (Kosmin, 2006; Bhargava, 2007, pp.20–24), was officially fulfilled through the
acceptance of secularism as a state principle at that time. The constitution also prohibited the
formation and membership of all kinds of politically motivated religious organizations. As a
continuation of the politics of the pre-independence phase, the mainstream left provided sup-
port to the main liberal party in a state-level acceptance of secularism.
The project of secularism at the official level was short-lived. The first civil regime
(1971–1975) was ousted from power in a military coup in mid-1975. The ensuing military
regime (1975–1981) removed secularism from the constitution and the second military regime
followed the same track, declaring Islam the state religion.The state-level anti-secular initiatives
by the military dictators and anti-secular civil regimes had the support of the anti-secular pol-
itical, intellectual and social forces from the very beginning.
Although the first civil regime suffered from some contradiction in applying the ideals of
secularism (O’Donnell, 1984, pp.155–157), the most deadly blow to the aspiration of a mean-
ingful liberal democracy was the continuous state-level patronization of anti-secular forces and
their religion-based politics by all the regimes between mid-1975 and 1996. Reintroduction
of secularism at the state level in 2011 has not resolved tension between the pro-seculars and
the anti-seculars, i.e., Islamists. Instead, politics in 2013, which apparently revolved around the
trial of the war criminals, unleashed an unprecedented level of rift between the two camps that,
in essence, demonstrated a huge deficiency in national integration and functioning of liberal
democracy.
In this context, this chapter aims to shed light on Bangladeshi politics since independence on
the basis of the relentless disagreement between the pro-secular liberals and leftists on one side,
and the Islam-using anti-seculars, consisting of conservative, orthodox and extremist groups, on
the other.

40
 Secularism and anti-secularism

Acceptance, abandonment, reintroduction and compromise

Acceptance of secularism
The Awami League (AL), the main liberal political party and currently the party in power,
formed the first government in independent Bangladesh. Upholding modern-vernacular
pro-secular Bengali nationalism as its guiding principle against religion-based Pakistani nation-
alism, this party led the Bengalis toward independence (Ahmed, 1995, pp.58–59). After inde-
pendence, unlike most of the Muslim-majority states, it included secularism in the constitution
in December 1972 as one of the four state principles.
The regime explained the aims of the constitution before it was placed before the Constituent
Assembly. In November 1972 the regime announced that the draft constitution would abolish
all types of religious communalism, and the state would not glorify any religion nor tolerate
abuse of religion for political purposes. It was also made clear that there would be no place for
communal or religion-based political institutions in Bangladesh. In this context, the dreadful
experience of communalism and abuse of religion in the past were mentioned.2 In order to
make the ideals of secularism real, Article 12 of the constitution prohibited all kinds of com-
munalism, exploitation of religion for political purposes and the persecution of any individual
following a particular religion. Paragraph 2 of Article 38 stated that

no person shall have the right to form or be a member or otherwise take part in the
activities of, any communal or other association or union which in the name of or on
the basis of any religion has for its object, or pursues, a political purpose.

Article 41 allowed every citizen to profess, practice or propagate any religion. Every religious
community was allowed to establish, maintain and manage its religious institutions. The same
article also stated that

no person attending any educational institution shall be required to receive religious

instruction, or to take part in or to attend any religious ceremony or worship, if that
instruction, ceremony or worship relates to a religion other than his own.

The regime claimed that the Pakistani ruling elite’s practices of using religion as a shield to
protect themselves and justify their misdeeds had encouraged it to adopt secularism as a state
principle.The infamous role of many of the religion-based political parties and religious groups
during the Pakistan era was one of many issues that encouraged the regime to reconsider
the De Tocquevillian straightforward democratic right of every individual to free association
(Tocqueville, 2000, p.216). It was apparently convinced that there was the further possibility of
an anti-democratic uprising if the right to form associations by anti-secular forces was sustained.
From the statements of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the architect of independence, it was clear
that the regime wanted to cripple those forces that demonstrated their capability of establish-
ing ‘an uncivil society which will be violent and confrontational’ (Booth and Richard, 1998,
pp.780–781).

Abandonment of secularism
The first experiment with secularism was short-lived. Sheikh Mujib, along with his family, was
assassinated and the first democratic regime ousted from power in August 1975 in a military

41
 S. Majumder

coup. The first junta Ziaur Rahman removed the ideal of secularism from the constitution and
pursued a series of initiatives to erode its impact on state and society. The word ‘secularism’
was deleted from the preamble and Article 8 of the constitution, and the line ‘absolute trust
and faith in Almighty Allah’ was inserted through the Second Proclamation Order No. 1 on
April 23, 1977. A new clause (1A) in the constitution stated that ‘absolute trust and faith in
Almighty Allah’ should be ‘the basis of all actions’.The proclamation inserted the Quranic verse,
‘Bismillah-Ar-Rahman-Ar-Rahim’ (‘in the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful’), at the
beginning of the preamble and omitted Article 12, which defined secularism. It also deleted
Article 38, which prohibited formation of any organization that disrupts religious, social and
communal harmony. The deletion of Article 38 in essence paved the way for the Islam-using
anti-seculars, who had opposed the independence of Bangladesh and collaborated with the
Pakistani occupation forces, to be rehabilitated in politics.
The Fifth Amendment of the constitution in 1979 replaced the ideal of secularism as a state
principle by the notion of ‘absolute trust and faith in the Almighty Allah’. In addition, a new
clause in Article 25 pronounced that ‘the State shall endeavour to consolidate, preserve and
strengthen fraternal relations among Muslim countries based on Islamic solidarity’. Using the
Political Parties Regulation of 1976 and new constitutional safeguards, anti-secular political
parties, for example, Jamaat-e-Islami (Jamaat) and the Muslim League (ML), were reinstated in
Bangladeshi politics (Awami League, 2005).
The first military ruler was assassinated in 1981 and General H. M. Ershad initiated the
second military regime (1982–1990). He followed the track of his predecessor and used Islam
extensively. Through the Eighth Amendment of the constitution, in 1988 he declared Islam
the state religion. Alongside the constitutional measures, the military dictators took numerous
steps to disassociate the state machinery from the ideal of secularism and propagate anti-secular
ideologies in the society with an intention to confront secular forces and defeat secular values.
Enormous growth in allocation of funds for madrasa (Islamic religious school) education, dis-
proportionate emphasis on religious education in general schools, unremitting use of Islam in
the state-controlled media (Jahangir, 1998; Riaz, 2007) – all of these measures were practiced in
contrast to the practices of secularism after independence.
The anti-secular initiatives of the military rulers were predictable. The political landscape
of the fledgling state was fully occupied by the pro-secular forces. Not only the AL, the rul-
ing party, but also all other major political parties, for example, Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal (JSD),
the Communist Party and Ganotantri Dal, were pro-secular. In that scenario, categorically,
the first military dictator had no alternative but to use Islam and Islam-using political and
social forces in order to oust the main political organization and rival, i.e., the AL, from the
political realm. Use of Islam also earned political mileage for the dictators as it helped them
to reach the Islam-using anti-liberation forces and the masses for whom religion is a matter
of faith. After the collapse of military rule in 1990, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP),
established by the first military ruler in 1977, won the parliamentary election (140 out of
300 seats) and formed a government in 1991. The party continued the Islam-using politics
similar to the military era and did not address the issue of secularism. The AL won the 1996
election and formed a government after a gap of 21 years. Perhaps due to having a very slim
majority (146 out of 300 seats) in the parliament, the party did not unfold any plan regarding
secularism.
A four-party alliance of anti-secular political parties led by the anti-secular BNP (193
out of 300 seats) and the main religious fundamentalist party Jamaat secured a landslide
electoral victory in the 2001 parliamentary election and was in power until 2006. This
phase saw, similar to several other states in the post-9/11 era, the rapid growth of religious

42
 Secularism and anti-secularism

fundamentalist forces in Bangladesh, in terms of organizational strength, institution building,

mass mobilization, professional profiles and diversity (Gole, 2000, pp.93–95). The ongoing
resurgence of religious extremism when an anti-secular alliance was in power provoked one
analyst to ask, ‘is Bangladesh becoming a Taliban State?’ (Riaz, 2004, pp.9–15). That question
puts things too strongly, but there is evidence that religious fundamentalists in Bangladesh
have created ‘an economy within the economy’, and it is also claimed that they have ‘a state
within the state’ (Barakat, 2005). Along with allegations of atrocities committed against reli-
gious minorities after the electoral victory of the BNP–Jamaat alliance in 2001,3 it was also
claimed that religious extremists were hosting ‘international terrorists escaping the conflict
in Afghanistan’ (Lintner, 2003).

Secularism relaunched
Anti-secular politics did not help the BNP–Jamaat alliance to secure success in the 2008 elec-
tion. Capitalizing on the resurgence of pro-secular social movements in the form of opposing
the anti-liberation forces and demanding the trial of war criminals, the AL secured an unpre-
cedented victory in that election (230 out of 300 seats). After the electoral triumph, the party
started to express its desire to reintroduce the 1972 constitution, which would reinstate secular-
ism at the official level. Immediately after the election victory, the AL high command disclosed
their willingness to take necessary constitutional steps in order to reintroduce secularism in
Bangladesh. The AL government even refused to identify Bangladesh as a moderate Muslim
state, and stated that Bangladesh obtained its ‘independence through an armed revolution with
a dream to establish a non-communal country’ (Moni, 2009). It is well to bear in mind that
despite regular criticism from the other pro-secular political parties and social organizations, the
AL had followed a policy of silence regarding the issue of secularism from the defeat in the 1991
election until the victory in 2008.The party carefully avoided the term ‘secularism’ in this phase
and emphasis was placed on non-communalism. The term non-communalism indicates peace-
ful coexistence of different religious communities, safeguarding the religious minorities and an
absence of religious bigotry, but does not necessarily ensure ‘neutrality’ of the state regarding all
religions, which is considered to be the primary requirement of secularism.
On February 2, 2010, the Bangladesh Supreme Court declared illegal the Fifteenth
Amendment of the constitution in 1979 and the martial law regulations issued between August
15, 1975 and April 1979 by the first military dictator (New Age, 2010). The regime claimed that
the Supreme Court verdict ‘in fact restored the spirit of the 1972 constitution’.4 This claim
hints at a desire of the AL government to return to secularism in the Bangladesh constitution.
The verdict (that ultimately went in favor of the ideal of secularism), and the enthusiasm of
the pro-secular camp about it did not go unchallenged. Prior to the verdict, representing the
voice of the anti-secular forces, the then Amir (president) of Jamaat, Matiur Rahman Nizami,
claimed that ‘the verdict was a conspiracy against religion based politics through using the
Supreme Court’ (Nizami, 2010). It was also argued that a return to secularism via the annulment
of the Fifth Amendment would create a serious negative impact upon the Bangladeshi econ-
omy. According to Abdul Kader Molla, the then Assistant General Secretary of Jamaat, Saudi
Arabia would send back 2.8 million laborers as a response to the decision of the Bangladeshi
government regarding secularism (Molla, 2010). Besides, identifying the phase as ‘transitional’,
the Islamist political parties started to discuss the urgency of ‘ideological unity’ and a ‘united
movement’ against the government’s ‘conspiracy to stop Islamic politics, initiatives to introduce
a secular education system and return to the 1972 constitution. Unity of all of the Islamic par-
ties work for achieving same target’ was emphasized (Haq, 2010). Despite ongoing Islam-using

43
 S. Majumder

opposition from the anti-secular camps, the AL government, after two-and-a-half years in
power, reintroduced secularism as one of the state principles through the Fifteenth Amendment
of the constitution on July 3, 2011.

Compromise on the basics

Official acceptance of and compromise on the ideals of secularism go almost hand in hand
in Bangladesh. For example, the first civil regime’s enthusiasm for secularism was squared
by its interest in populist pro-Islamic activities. Initiatives like attending a conference of the
Organisation of Islamic Countries in 1973, the establishment of the Islamic Foundation
in 1974 and emphasis upon developing relationships with the Islamic world went against
the core values of secularism. Notably, the AL has gradually shifted from its earlier pos-
ition regarding secularism since the mid-1980s. It worked unofficially with anti-secular
political parties in the second phase of the movement against the second military regime.
It befriended the religious fundamentalist parties in order to unseat its arch-rival the BNP
from power in the post-1991 years.
As mentioned earlier, the BNP–Jamaat-led four-party alliance won a two-thirds majority in
the 2001 election and formed a government. The growth of religious extremism and violence
against religious minorities reached new heights during its tenure, which created severe concern
among international organizations and human rights groups (Custers, 2007, pp.48–55). In this
phase, once again, in a desperate bid to win the scheduled election, the AL signed a five-point
Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with an infamous religious fundamentalist political
party, namely Bangladesh Khelafat Majlish (BKM) on December 23, 2006. The MoU declared
that if the AL-led grand alliance won the election, the certified Alems (Islamic clerics) would
be given the right to issue fatwas (Islamic religious edicts). It was also stated that no law shall
be repugnant to the holy Quran, the Sunnah (the way of the Prophet Muhammad) and the
sharia (Islamic law). There was a promise to enact a law declaring Hazrat Muhammad as the
last prophet and the best prophet.5 Despite severe criticisms from the other pro-secular political
parties of the ‘grand alliance’, social and cultural, the AL refused to concede that the MoU was
anti-secular in essence. It rescinded the MoU with BKM (on February 12, 2007) after the dec-
laration of a state of emergency and ensuing cancelation of parliamentary elections scheduled
to be held on January 22, 2007 by an army-controlled caretaker government, when the entire
political landscape had completely changed.
Compromise on the ideal is also evident in the Fifteenth Amendment of the constitution.
The anti-seculars branded the amendment as a blatant attack on Islam, whereas the pro-secular
social and political forces considered the step as a glaring example of compromise on the ide-
als of secularism. Article 8 of the constitution declared secularism as one of ‘the fundamental
principles of state policy’, which, according to Article 12, shall be realized by the elimination
of (a) communalism, which in the subcontinent denotes an antagonistic relationship among
the religious communities, categorically between the Hindus and the Muslims, in all its forms;
(b) granting of political status by the state in favor of any religion; (c) the abuse of religion for
political purposes; (d) any discrimination against, or persecution of, persons practicing a particu-
lar religion. In contrast to these pronouncements, Article 2 declared Islam to be the state reli-
gion of the republic, although the state will ‘ensure equal status and equal right in the practice
of the Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and other religions’. Similar to the state religion provision,
the amendment avoids dropping the Quranic verse ‘Bismillah-Ar-Rahman-Ar-Rahim’ from the
preamble of the constitution.

44
 Secularism and anti-secularism

Arguments for and against secularism

Arguments against secularism
The inclusion of secularism in the constitution has been subject to serious criticism by
anti-secular forces in Bangladesh. Allegations of ‘conspiracy’, ‘overstepping’, ‘imposition’ and
ignoring socio-historical realities have been raised in this context. Some allege that Indian policy
makers were instrumental in imposing the ideals of secularism on the nascent Bangladeshi state.
The insertion of secularism in the first constitution has been branded a conspiracy against
Islam and a project to promote communism, atheism and promiscuousness (Rahman, 1978,
pp.71–72). Though socialism, similarly to secularism, was inserted in the first constitution by
the AL, the party never showed any enthusiasm for socialism, let alone communism, before or
after independence. The Soviet Union, leader of the socialist bloc, provided historic support in
the Liberation War, whereas the United States and the Muslim world in general vehemently
opposed the independence of Bangladesh. However, after independence the regime had no
alternative but to desperately look for material support from the outside world in order to
rebuild the war-ravaged country. Ideological and/or political affinity took a back seat. Neither
the Soviet Union nor India, the biggest ally in 1971 and neighbor, was in a position to extend
that support. It seems that, taking advantage of the situation, the anti-secular forces initially
intermingled secularism and socialism/communalism intentionally, in order to simultaneously
benefit from both. They thought that branding the AL as a party favorable to socialism/com-
munism would widen its distance from the United States and Muslim states and create tre-
mendous pressure on the regime.The anti-secular forces also rightly pointed out that branding
secularism as communism could earn some political mileage for them in domestic politics as
well, since communism in this part of the world until today has been considered as identical
to atheism. Being atheist in a heavily religion-centric society like Bangladesh is considered to
be anathema.
Along with condemning the AL for promoting communism, allegations of allowing ‘promis-
cuousness among the sexes’ under the guise of secularism have been made. It was alleged that the
AL’s secularism permits promiscuousness as a regular feature in the form of extra-marital rela-
tions among youth and the lifting of social restrictions on free sex (Rahman, 1978, pp.73–77). It
can be assumed that discrediting secularism was the prime idea behind this kind of unsubstan-
tiated but politically lethal propaganda.
The above-mentioned allegations were reiterated once more in 2013 when the entire nation
was in fact divided between the pro-secular and anti-secular camps, centering on the trial of war
criminals. The pro-seculars had become successful in creating unprecedented pressure on the
anti-secular rightist parties whose prominent leaders were accused of being war criminals. In
order to save their leaders from trial, the anti-seculars used religion and the religious sentiments
of the masses at length and attempted wholeheartedly to tag all the activities of the pro-seculars
as atheistic, which in fact convinced or confused a vast majority in the society. Similar to the
early years, the anti-seculars in current times have persistently attempted to portray secularism
as a practice closely affiliated with social ills and immoral behaviors such as promiscuousness,
unrestrained sex and immorality. For example, with the intention to trigger public sentiment
against the Gonojagoron Mancha (a social movement in 2013 demanding the trial of war crimi-
nals, which subsequently became a rallying point of the pro-secular forces), the anti-seculars
relentlessly portrayed the platform as a gathering of admirers of ‘free mixing’ and ‘reckless sex
life’ (Islam, 2013). The Manch has also been branded as a platform of the atheist working against
Islam (Arsalan, 2013).

45
 S. Majumder

Questions have been raised in regard to the authority of the 1972 government to incorp-
orate secularism as state principle and declare the state as a people’s republic, because most
of the inhabitants were Muslim and religion played a central role in the everyday life of the
masses.Those who oppose secularism describe these initiatives as the AL’s imposition of its own
concept of state principles without the mandate of the populace (Osmany, 1992, pp.108–145;
Mazhar, 2013). The decision to include secularism at the state level has also been criticized for
ignoring the socio-cultural spirit and history of Bangladesh (Maniruzzaman, 1985, pp.42–77).
Besides, it has been claimed that India, the main ally during the Liberation War and large
Hindu-majority neighbor, had played a dominant role in the imposition of secularism (Ahmed,
1983, pp.258–259). Secularism has also been discredited as ‘an ideology imported from the
Western decaying social system’, which is in essence ‘a slogan to misguide people’ (Mazhar,
2008; Majumder, 2012). Anti-secular arguments have reached such a peak that sometimes
the insertion of secularism in the constitution is characterized as ‘waging war against Allah’.6
Furthermore, without any explanation, the former Amir of the Jamaat, Golam Azam, once
branded secularism as the most unscientific and anti-rational ideology (Azam, 2003, p.11).

Arguments in favor of secularism

In contrast to the anti-seculars, the pro-seculars persistently argue that there was nothing unusual
in the official acceptance of secularism as one of the state principles. They explain the birth of
Bangladesh through a war as not only a military victory but also a triumph of pro-secular
Bengali nationalistic movements over religion-centric Pakistani nationalism (Anwar, 1973;
Mamoon, 2006, pp.17–19). The pro-seculars view the Liberation War and birth of Bangladesh
as the final outcome of a pro-secular anti-Pakistani movement between 1947 and 1971. Both
radical and moderate views regarding secularism in Bangladesh are briefly described below.7
Radical seculars. For the radicals, the peaceful coexistence of religion and secularism cannot
guarantee secularism as a state principle (Kabir, 1995, p.35). For this reason, ‘liberation’ from
‘religious thoughts’ had been identified as a prerequisite. Importance was placed, in the same
vein, on the economic basis of religion and secularism and in this connection demand for
secularism in Bangladesh had been identified as economic.Vigilance against the ‘conspiracy of
international finance capital and imperialism’ in order to safeguard democracy and secularism in
Bangladesh was suggested. The issue of secularism has been also examined vis-à-vis class strug-
gle. Proponents of this line of argument hold that ‘privileged sections’ in the society use religion
to undermine the class consciousness of the masses. From this judgment, movements in favor of
secularism are, in real sense, an acceptance of ongoing class struggle in the society.
Radical pro-seculars also view secularism as a part of public welfare. However, some obser-
vers, in the context of Bangladesh, have suggested a combination of a sense of secular public
welfare and the ‘glorious’ aspects of religion. In 1972, the radical pro-seculars suggested guarded
initiatives from the AL government and the use of the public education system, print media and
radio in order to strengthen opinion in favor of secularism. Despite completely agreeing with an
individual’s right to observe religion and the state’s obligation to preserve that right, there was
a rejection of the state’s inclination toward any specific religion. In this connection, the state’s
‘apathy’ to religion was described as something desirable. More importantly, it was argued that
agnosticism, atheism or a lack of interest in religion must be considered as part of individual
rights, and the state should not interfere in these affairs. Radical seculars in Bangladesh some-
times argue for secularism as a means to attain social equality (Chowdhury, 2011, p.307).
Moderate seculars. In contrast to the radical views, there were ample moderate interpretations
of secularism after independence. Moderates held the view that secularism was not atheism,

46
 Secularism and anti-secularism

rather indifference of the state to all religions. They condemned ‘the reactionary forces’ for
plotting against secular ideology and disseminating religious hatred in Bangladesh. They argued
that secularism does not permit anyone to interfere in others’ religious beliefs and rituals. In
mid-1972, prior to the framing of the first constitution, the moderate seculars emphasized pro-
active efforts in order to reach these standards of secularism in the ‘age of complex and rapidly
changing societies’. Hence, learning about all religions and religious communities at school
was suggested. Besides, there was a suggestion to the regime to guarantee the freedom of all
religions, and avoid declaring any religion as the ‘government religion’.
The moderate seculars cautioned about ‘hurting the religious sentiments of the people by
seeking to implement secularism overnight’, which might backfire and jeopardize the whole
project. They anticipated that secularism in Bangladesh would never attempt to eradicate reli-
gion, and at the same time hoped for a tolerant society where religious people, and agnostics
and atheists, would be treated with the same respect. The backers of secularism accused ‘one
section of religious clerics and some others’ of provoking the ‘uneducated and less educated’
masses against all types of social, political and religious reforms with the intention to expand
their power and influence in Bangladesh society and establish a theocratic state.There was a sug-
gestion to the AL government to avoid Islamic words and gestures and a call for considering the
arrangement of public prayers that could accommodate people from all religions. Pro-seculars
in Bangladesh in 1972 also argued that in order to exercise the ideals of secularism appropri-
ately, the regime needed to stay away from practicing ‘old Muslim styles’ in state procedures,
ceremonies and activities of politicians. At the same time, it was also believed that plenty of time
was required to make the ideals of secularism real in a society, and the roles of individuals were
no less important than the government in that connection.
Over the course of time, categorically since the 1990s, the views of the moderate have
started to dominate the discourse of secularism in Bangladesh.

The unavoidable realities

Some realities need to be taken into account in understanding the rivalries between the
pro-seculars and the anti-seculars in Bangladesh. First, religion plays an enormously significant
role in the lives of the people. Second, despite being very religious, in voting behavior they
alternate their preferences for pro-secular and anti-secular politics. Third, despite more than a
few electoral successes the pro-seculars are always on the back foot. Finally, the pro-seculars have
failed to confront the propaganda that secularism is atheistic and anti-Islamic.
Four Gallup polls between 2006 and 2009 found that between 96 and 100 percent of
Bangladeshi adults consider religion an important part of their everyday life. In the same poll,
the respondents exhibit a high level of passion (between 81 and 86 percent) for visiting places
of worship or religious services, and show great confidence (between 92 and 98 percent) in
religious organizations (Naurath, 2009). Despite showing very high levels of longing for reli-
gion in their personal lives, Bengalis, categorically Bengali Muslims, shifted their choice almost
regularly between the pro-seculars and anti-seculars in elections in the non-military eras. This
peculiarity in the mindset of Bengali Muslims (Chafa, 1981) has been almost perfectly reflected
in the elections under civil regimes since the Bengal assembly elections in 1946. However, in
spite of regular electoral success in the democratic eras, due to the failure in combating politi-
cized religion in the face of pressure from anti-secular political and social forces, the pro-secular
forces have always been on the back foot in Bangladesh, except during the tenure of the first
civil regime (1971–1975) when the ruling party and all the other relevant political parties were
in favor of secularism.

47
 S. Majumder

As a result, the AL, the pro-secular party, whenever it comes to power, struggles to fulfill the
most important prerequisite of political secularism, i.e., equal treatment or equal importance
or an equally neutral position to all religions. When in power, it is often driven by the fear of
losing political ground and/or the desire to earn some political dividends, and ends up placing
disproportionate importance on Islam. Besides, in order to cope with the realities it is used
to relying upon several coping techniques, such as: (a) an effort to project an Islam-friendly
image; (b) from time to time befriending one section of the anti-seculars with the intention to
weaken the comparatively strong section of the anti-secular forces; and (c) an attempt to play
down the anti-secular campaign by keeping silent regarding the ideal of secularism, although
it has reintroduced secularism as a state principle. For example, as part of the projection of an
Islam-friendly image, the current prime minister Sheikh Hasina often mentions that she says
her prayers and recites the Quran regularly. She also, on a periodic basis, vows that Bangladesh
will be governed on the basis of the Madina Charter and the last sermon and directives of the
Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), and assures that no laws contrary to the Holy Quran and Sunnah
will ever be enacted (Daily Star, 2014). Most of the AL leaders speak in the same vein and care-
fully avoid the issue of secularism for fear of being branded as anti-Islamic.
Besides, the AL befriends anti-secular forces in order to earn political dividends; these actions
have included acceptance of the Jamaat, the leading Islamist party, in the anti-BNP government
movement in the early 1990s; signing an MoU with the staunchly Islamist BKM prior to the
scheduled national elections in 2006. The AL also adopts a ‘play it down’ approach in tackling
propaganda portraying secularism as atheism and part of a grand conspiracy against Islam, which
sometimes turns into defenseless submission to the anti-seculars.
In the enduring political competition between the pro-seculars and anti-seculars, the former has
struggled to convince the populace that secularism is not atheistic and anti-Islamic. Since the era of
military rule, the anti-secular forces have relentlessly propagated anti-secular thought through reli-
gious congregations, and have used the religious sentiment of the people.These have vastly affected
the public psyche.A certain section of media, using the shield of freedom of religion and freedom of
expression, have also been active in strengthening the ‘Islam versus secularism’ mindset. Apparently,
for fear of being branded as anti-Islamic, pro-secular forces have not been able to effectively counter
these activities. Along with the huge advantage of using Islam as a weapon, the anti-seculars also
benefit from lack of appropriate communication between the secular elites and the masses. Taking
advantage of the communication gap, the anti-seculars successfully portray this section as negligent
and disrespectful to Islam, which ultimately creates a wall of separation between the pro-seculars
and the masses, for whom in most cases religion is a faith, not an ideology.

Conclusion
Though reintroduced at the state level, it cannot be said that the ideal of secularism has gained
ground at the social level in Bangladesh. Instead, similar to many other Muslim-majority states,
secularism has become a stigmatized term that connotes atheism, anti-religiosity and, categorically,
anti-Islamism.This unavoidable reality in the social arena and sporadic political expediency of the
main pro-secular force ultimately preclude fulfillment of a core prerequisite of secularism, which
is equal treatment for all religions (Kuru, 2009), even at a time when the state is officially secular.
Officially secular since 2011, instead of guaranteeing equal treatment, the Bangladeshi state has
continued the previous trend of showing extraordinary attention to one religion, i.e., Islam, which
makes the politics of secularism questionable. It also seems that landslide victories in national elec-
tions in recent years have not brought a major shift in the policy of the AL, the pro-secular party
in power. The AL’s conduct gives the impression that it has given priority to winning elections,

48
 Secularism and anti-secularism

rather than attempting any social engineering or a social transformation project in favor of secu-
larism. It takes no risks with the most sensitive issue, i.e., religion, in the lives of the people.
Moreover, pro-secular civil society has failed to put effective pressure on the AL to revise
its long-term trend of political expediency in the name of pragmatism. Instead of being crit-
ical of the AL, the pro-secular social organizations and intellectuals offer the main pro-secular
party a free ride to exercise political opportunism at the expense of the ideal of secularism
that is essential for citizenship in a liberal polity and peaceful coexistence in a multi-religious
society. This is not to say that civil society is not critical at all of the main pro-secular party,
rather to argue that critical evaluation of the main pro-secular party by pro-secular social
forces is fragmented and intermittent, and they rarely take an organized form and in most
cases overlook the AL’s lack of attention to the basics of secularism. The pro-secular social
forces concentrate on fighting the religious extremists, trials of the religious fundamentalists
allegedly involved in war crimes in 1971 and the safeguarding of religious minorities. Recent
experiences suggest that the mainstream liberal pro-secular social forces consider the trial of
the alleged war criminals, who mostly belong to the anti-secular Islamist camp, as the more
important requisite for a secular Bangladesh. As a result, the Jamaat, the main religious funda-
mentalist party and collaborator with the Pakistani occupation army in 1971, has become the
main target of their opposition in the struggle for secularism, which coincides with the AL’s
position. Overwhelming emphasis on the Jamaat, the most organized religion-based party in
the country, leaves other non-/anti-Jamaat anti-secular parties below the radar, whereas these
parties and organizations continue to contribute to the socialization of politics of Islamism.
Finally, it can be said that performance failure of the pro-seculars in the political and social
realms and success of the anti-seculars in using Islam has posed a threat to the functioning of
state-level secularism in Bangladesh.

Notes
1 This chapter is partly drawn from my unpublished PhD dissertation (2012), entitled Secularism and
the Awami League: A Study of the Main Liberal Political Party in Bangladesh, Institute of Commonwealth
Studies (ICS), University of London.
2 Speech of Dr. Kamal Hossain, the then Law Minister and Chair of the constitution drafting committee,
on the introduction of the Constitution Bill. Source: Government of Bangladesh (1972, p.25).
3 Amnesty International reported a wave of serious crimes against religious minorities, categorically the
Hindus, after the 2001 elections (Amnesty International, 2001).
4 Comments of the then Law Minister, Shafique Ahmed (Daily Star, 2010).
5 Bangladesh Awamil League o Bangladesh Khelafat Majlisher Moddhe Samjhota Smarok (MoU between the AL
and the BKM), December 23, 2006, Dhaka: AL.
6 Comments of the discussants in a seminar arranged by an Islamist party, Bangladesh Khilafat Andolan,
on May 14, 2013. [Online] Available from: www.bdtodaynews.com [Accessed: April 11, 2014].
7 Between the first and second session of the Constitution Committee of the National Assembly, in
mid-August 1972, a three-day seminar on secularism was held in Rajshahi University, Bangladesh.
Reputed scholars participated in the seminar. Altogether five papers on secularism were presented,
and there were 50 discussants on the papers. The next year, a book compiling the papers and discus-
sions, entitled Dharmoniropakkotha (Secularism), was published. Discussion on the views of radicals
and moderates on secularism at the time of the framing of the first constitution mostly relies on
Anwar (1973).

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 4
THE GENOCIDE OF 1971 AND
THE POLITICS OF JUSTICE
Navine Murshid

It has been 43 years since Bangladesh emerged from a bloody War of Independence. Yet, the
wounds of war are raw, the trauma fresh, thanks to a post-independence justice system that for-
got about war crimes committed by Pakistani soldiers and their local allies, members of Al-Badr,
Al-Shams, and other rajakars. The years following the war saw the rise of military dictatorships
that periodically thwarted efforts to bring even known war criminals to justice. By the time
democracy was reinstituted, there appeared to be a ‘historical amnesia’, using Bina D’Costa’s
(2010) term, regarding the brutalities of war. Whether it was amnesia, a suppression of trauma,
or simply resignation, the Shahbag movement opened the floodgates and revealed once again,
on a mass scale and with all its contradictions, what the nation as a whole had repressed for four
decades. While the Shahbag movement created a space for people whose voices had been shut
out, its secular orientation also provoked radical Islamists who turned to violence to express
their opposition. Shahbag exposed the dilemma of seeking justice for war crimes decades after
the war ended, in a context where retributive justice became the primary demand because of
decades of repressed trauma and denied justice.

The birth of Bangladesh

Bangladesh gained independence in 1971 from Pakistan after a nine-month war that pitted
Bengali civilians and guerilla forces against the Pakistani military junta that began a military
crackdown on March 25, 1971. When Yahya Khan nullified the results of the 1970 elections –
which would have brought the Bengalis of East Pakistan led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to
political power – he triggered a mass uprising of the Bengalis who saw in this ‘betrayal’ the
final proof of West Pakistan’s continued oppression, discrimination, and denial of rights. Amidst
failed negotiations between Sheikh Mujib and Yahya Khan, the uprising developed into a
struggle for an independent state. In response, the West Pakistani Army launched ‘Operation
Searchlight’, a genocidal campaign that involved mass murders, mass rapes, and torture aimed
to wipe out Bengali Muslims who were seen as lesser Muslims.The Pakistani Army found will-
ing collaborators among the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), who set up fascistic counter-revolutionary
groups such as the rajakars, Al Shams, and Al Badr, a killing force that carried out planned
murders. While the number of people killed is disputed, as is often the case in such instances,
it is estimated that between 300,000 and three million people were killed by the rampaging

52
 The genocide of 1971 and the politics of justice

Pakistani forces and these collaborationist militias. According to feminist author and activ-
ist Susan Brownmiller (1975), 200,000 to 400,000 Bengali women were raped in these few
months.
The Indian military intervened eight months into the conflict with the stated aim of sup-
porting Bangladeshis’ national aspirations. On December 16, 1971, the Pakistani forces sur-
rendered, and an independent Bangladesh stepped onto the world stage with Sheikh Mujib
as its first president. Although the Pakistani Army was defeated, the Indian state did little to
bring their generals to court for war crimes. Instead, Pakistani prisoners of war, despite having
committed the most heinous war crimes, were sent back to Pakistan never to be tried. It later
emerged that Indian officials had effectively bartered away ordinary Bangladeshis’ rights to
justice by brokering a deal with Pakistani officials that would entail surrender by the Pakistani
forces in exchange for repatriation and immunity. In fact, a recent interview with Lt. Gen.
J. F. R. Jacob, who was party to the surrender, categorically said that the Indian Army, and he in
particular, was able to negotiate a surrender by offering the Pakistani prisoners of war safety and
safe passage (Channel ANI, 2012).
Although the war can be seen as the direct consequence of the military crackdown on
March 25, 1971, it was also the culmination of years of oppression and racism that sought to
deny Bengali Muslims in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) the right to their language, their
cultural practices, education, and share of income. Bangladesh’s birth came at the cost of huge
human sacrifice. Along with joy and relief, the end of the war brought home the realization that
there was a martyr in almost every household.

Post-war denial of justice

In newly independent Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujib banned the JI and three other groups that had
collaborated with the Pakistani forces, and passed ordinances – the Collaborators Order and the
International Crimes (Tribunals) Act1 – to bring war criminals to trial. However, he was unable
to foresee or control the factionalism within the newly formed Bangladesh Armed Forces. In
1975, Mujib and the members of his extended family were assassinated in a military coup. The
military government rescinded the Collaborators Order, allowed the banned groups to recon-
solidate, and permitted leading (local) perpetrators of war crimes to return to the country. The
message was loud and clear: no calls for justice would be heard. Both the Pakistani military and
their local collaborators had complete immunity at this point.
The military coup saw a period of military-led authoritarianism that created an envir-
onment of silence and fear. Even before the narrative of Bangladesh’s war could take hold,
counter-narratives appeared, downplaying the role of the Pakistani military and eventually turn-
ing it into a nameless, headless enemy – the hanadar bahini (the attacking forces) – introducing
new war heroes, and eliminating others. In this period, men responsible for rape, torture, and
murder had free rein to operate as legitimate political actors, and many of them have since
climbed political ladders to wealth and power, courted by mainstream political parties, particu-
larly the center-right Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) of Begum Khaleda Zia, which now
sits in opposition. As Jalal Alamgir wrote in 2010:

The biggest sin in our post-1971 politics was not the dictatorial decisions made by
the earlier leaders, but the choice by all major parties to politically collaborate with
alleged genocide collaborators when convenient.These partnerships, after the country
had become a democracy, gave war criminals the kind of political legitimacy that no
military dictator could have offered.

53
 N. Murshid

Not only did the Pakistan-based war criminals enjoy immunity, so did local war criminals who
could have been brought to court. The revising of history and the alterations in school text-
books would become a trend in the coming decades.
The year 1990 was a momentous one for Bangladesh. Months of protests, hartals, and other
acts of civil disobedience targeted to end military rule gave way to multi-party democracy in
Bangladesh. It was a time of renewed hope. Finally, it was to form a representative government
accountable to the people and fashion a country based on justice and freedom. As political par-
ties consolidated themselves, Golam Azam, a well-known war criminal responsible for hundreds
of deaths, took the helm of JI.
While the JI fashioned itself as a religious party, it was more than that: it explicitly became
the party of war criminals. In this climate, a group of concerned citizens consisting of intellectu-
als and academic scholars formed the Ghatak Dalal Nirmul Committee (GDNC) in 1992. The
stated goal of the GDNC was to demand justice for those who were victims of the war crimes.
It is no coincidence that it is in democratic Bangladesh that such demands gained popularity;
it is the ushering in of democratic politics that provided the opening for a dialogue on war
crimes. Finally, many thought, repressive political structures could be lifted to make way for an
accurate rendition of history. The group, led by Jahanara Imam, a literary scholar who lost both
her husband and her son to the war, sought to pressurise the newly elected BNP government
to begin trials for war crimes. The BNP government, however, was unwilling to address these
issues, having been the party under which the ban on JI was lifted in the first place in 1978.
It was, perhaps, to counter the continued silence surrounding 1971 even in democratic
Bangladesh that the GDNC resorted to demanding the phanshi (death sentence) of Golam
Azam, in addition to organizing mass protests and demonstrations. It revealed the lack of faith
in Bangladesh’s justice system and the fear that the new generation would never learn the
correct history of 1971. The GDNC provided the only platform in post-war Bangladesh for
muktijodhhas and their allies to voice their demands for justice. It was the GDNC that inspired
other groups to form: Projonmo Ekattor with those born in 1971, and the Sector Commanders’
Forum with those who served during the war in a military capacity.
Groups such as the GDNC drew the attention of millions of men and women who had
participated in the war, who lost loved ones. However, the politicization of history and war con-
tinued. In newly democratic Bangladesh, party politics and coalition politics took root. Even the
Awami League (AL), which led the struggle for independence in the years leading to 1971 and
in post-war Bangladesh presented itself as a pro-1971, pro-independence, and nationalistic party,
joined hands with the JI in order to coordinate political activities and win votes, for example
during the 1996 election campaign. At the same time, the AL used its unique position – of
being the party that led the liberation movement in 1971 – to rally support among those who
wanted justice for war crimes. The AL’s supporters justified its dalliances with JI as an electoral
strategy that, if effective, would bring the AL to power, which, in turn, would allow it to pursue
war crimes. The AL did come to power in 1996, but failed to move beyond rhetoric in terms
of seeking justice. The BNP won the elections in 2001 and the issue of war crimes, once again,
left the political arena. It was the AL’s electoral victory in 2008 on a rhetoric of change – much
like Barack Obama’s ‘Yes, We Can’ campaign in the US – that saw the resurfacing of justice for
war crimes as a political issue.

The (re)emergence of the International Crimes Tribunal

The stalled quest for justice was restarted in March 2010, when the current International
Crimes Tribunal (ICT) was formed based on an amended version of the International Crimes

54
 The genocide of 1971 and the politics of justice

(Tribunals) Act of 1973 to try those accused of crimes from the 1971 war. Now that the AL held
office, there were high hopes and expectations.
Right from the beginning, however, the ICT was mired in controversy over procedures
and whether ‘international standards’ were being met. The critique regarding maintenance of
international standards was somewhat arbitrary because (1) the tribunal excluded the main
perpetrators of war crimes – the Pakistani military and its commanders – and only aimed
to try Bangladeshi citizens who committed war crimes who fell under national jurisdiction;
and (2) war crimes from 1971 were ineligible to be brought under the jurisdiction of the
International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court because too much time
had elapsed since the war crimes had been committed. Nevertheless, critics such as David
Bergman2 and Nurul Kabir identified a series of problems – leaked documents, judges discuss-
ing the case prior to the trial over Skype, abduction and killing of prosecution witnesses – that
raised questions as to the credibility of the trials. However, such criticisms were perceived by
the Bangladeshi government as being anti-state; Bergman was charged with contempt of court
on multiple occasions for reports on the ICT proceedings. Bergman’s reporting was used by the
JI to claim that the government was pursuing a witch-hunt and that the war criminals on trial
were in fact innocent. As Nadine S. Murshid (2013) argues,

[JI] wants the ICT dismissed based on the notorious notion that their leaders who
have been charged with war crimes are innocent. Bergman’s criticism of the ICT
stems from a demand for an accountable legal process that would ensure that war
criminals are brought to justice so that once they are found guilty, they are not able
to overturn the ruling when another government is formed with a different political
party in power. This is an important difference, one that is often overlooked.

Supporters of the ICT maintain the need for justice, whatever the form may be, so that people
can find closure and move on. Even among supporters, however, there is reason for frustration
because much of the criticisms that had been raised (by Bergman and others) had to do with
competency at best and political maneuvering at worst, both of which can and have under-
mined the judicial process in a way that favored war criminals (Bergman 2012). A few among
the Shahbag protestors I interviewed, for example, expressed their fears that the AL was collud-
ing with JI, all the while putting up a facade of opposition. In effect, they argued, JI supporters
on the streets were being intimidated with force while JI leaders enjoyed state protection. Some
questioned why the prosecution lawyers seemed incompetent in contrast to the defense, while
others wondered whether the government was using the people and the ICT as pawns simply
for political purposes. As Zeitlyn (2014) pointed out, ‘What was supposed to be a national pro-
cess has become a party political issue.’

Shahbag rises in anger

Abdul Quader Mollah was the second person to be convicted and sentenced by the tribunal (in
2013), but the first to be convicted while in custody in Bangladesh. He had been convicted of
the targeted and predetermined murder of nine individuals, including women and children, the
rape of an 11-year-old, and the mass killing of 344 people in Albudi village in Mirpur, which
earned him the nickname ‘Butcher of Mirpur’.
After 40 years of justice denied, it was one small incident that was the spark for the explosion
in Shahbag: Quader Mollah flashed a victory sign after receiving a life sentence for his crimes,
indicating what everyone already knew – he would go scot-free once the regime changed.

55
 N. Murshid

That victory sign unleashed decades of repressed anger. Thus, when activist-bloggers of the
Bangladesh Online Activist Network (BOAN) called for a protest at Shahbag Chattar (Circle),
many progressives joined the chorus of voices calling for the death penalty, for they had little
faith that subsequent governments would uphold a life sentence. Part of the slogans invoked the
slogans that Jahanara Imam and the GDNC had put forth in the early 1990s. Murshid (2013)
wrote soon after the Shahbag protests emerged:

[T]he issue at hand is the unresolved trauma of the violence that Bangladesh was
willingly or unwillingly a part of. The victory sign was a trigger that recreated that
trauma. And, in a way, Shahbag is a response to that trauma, as well as the third-party
(un)forgiveness effect, which is ‘the tendency to be more forgiving for transgressions
committed against the self than a close other’. On behalf of parents and grandparents,
the Bangladeshi youth have been unable to forgive Quader Mollah and his ilk, and
the reactions we see on the streets are a response to that (un)forgiveness. All of these
emotional processes intersect with the notions that the narrative of the war is pri-
marily about being victimized, and the history of Bangladesh has not been accurately
documented amidst politically co-opted, and conflicted narratives, including constant
revisions in textbooks by the party in power. These notions lead to angst associated
with not having an accurate sense of one’s history. Ergo, the trauma of war remains
(with the angst), and has been intergenerationally transmitted, along with its unre-
solved component.

The four-decade stalling of justice paved the way for frustration, cumulative angst, and a desire
for results irrespective of the means because many of the war criminals had openly committed
murders in 1971 and, technically, entire villages could serve as witnesses. As a Shahbagi noted,

Of course we understand that there may be problems, but we also understand that
these war criminals will be found guilty even if the highest standards are met. Many
of the war criminals are self-proclaimed killers.There is really no question of guilt.We
want justice, and we want it now. These procedural problems are just delaying tactics.

Another said,

Do you think we don’t realize that there is no need for trials if all we are asking for is
the death penalty? The state has failed us for the last forty years. The only way we can
hold the state accountable is through the demand for the death penalty because it can be
executed, and once executed there is no room for changing tactics for political reasons.

Shahbag Square looked less like a mass lynch mob, and more like a ‘festival of the oppressed’
on February 5, 2013 when people began to gather in their hundreds and thousands, however.The
protests had taken on an artistic expression whose parallels could be found in earlier Bengali pro-
test movements. The walls and streets had been turned into 3D canvases: massive caricatures and
cartoons of war criminals, alponas (street art) everywhere one looked, and beautiful installations
with candles and flowers. Occupiers enjoyed impromptu concerts with popular rock bands such
as Miles, Cryptic Fate, and Artcell. This blogger-initiated movement enabled a huge online pres-
ence with people posting Twitter and Facebook updates every second, communicating what was
happening at the chattar.The ‘spirit of Shahbag’ expressed something that went beyond the execu-
tion of a few men, a hope for justice that would lead to a renewal of Bangladesh’s political culture.

56
 The genocide of 1971 and the politics of justice

Implications of Shahbag
Hundreds of thousands of people in Bangladesh relived the experience of mass struggle since
the mass protests erupted on February 5, 2013. The scale of the protests was inspiring, as was
the endurance of the protestors, particularly the youth. The present generation will no doubt
remember it as a life-changing experience.The sense of togetherness, of collective will, of com-
munity that one learns through participation in mass protests is like nothing one encounters
in school and college classrooms. Figure 4.1 shows the ‘popularity’ of the Shahbag movement
(compared to the popularity of the Gonojagoron Mancha and Hefazat-e-Islam) by looking at
the tally of news items on these issues on a monthly basis during 2013.
The Shahbag movement was seen by many participants as a movement that gave voice to
Bangladesh’s silent majority – those who, until then, felt they had no space to voice their con-
demnation of a justice system that had failed them for years. It brought together war veterans
and their family members who felt they were sidelined and were thus forced to lead a life of
alienation as they saw war criminals rise up the political ladder to positions of prominence and
power with complete impunity. A muktijodhha said s/he never thought the day would come
when the generation that did not experience the war would stand by them and demand just-
ice. There was a lot of hope attached to Shahbag as it was the first spontaneous protest with
no political party involved in recent years. Finally, people felt they could move beyond the
AL–BNP divide to speak for justice.
Many progressive voices participated in shaping the debates and discussions online and in the
media. These, together with the core activists on the ground, made up the amorphous leader-
ship of Shahbag. This leadership neither sought to assert itself as leadership nor was it formally
acknowledged; as such, it remained for the most part unidentified and unaccountable. Although
the demonstrations had been hailed as ‘leaderless’ and ‘non-political’, when mobilizations turned

200

150
Number of news items

100

50

0
0 5 10
Months (February 2013–December 2013)

Shahbag Hefazat
Gonojagoron

Figure 4.1 Number of news reports from February to December 2013 from United News Bangladesh
(UNB) on the Shahbag movement and on Hefazat-e-Islam (source: compiled by author)

57
 N. Murshid

into round-the-clock occupations of public spaces, it was clear that BOAN members formed
the core of activists (Imran Sarkar, Arif Jebtik, and others). Despite the presence of organizers
and activists with various political (partisan and non-partisan) affiliations, a tacit agreement
seemed to guide their actions: ‘I won’t bring up my politics, if you don’t.’ As a result, Chhatro
League members refrained from talking about ‘Bangabandhu’s dreams’ (the common refrain of
the AL and its allies) and Bashod members refrained from talking about class politics and work-
ers’ struggles.
In the name of unity, political differences were glossed over. Certainly, this served to unite
progressives despite their political differences. On the other hand, without an open and hon-
est discussion of politics and political perspectives, the movement remained trapped within the
least common denominator: a simplistic and uni-dimensional demand for executing accused
war criminals. The renunciation of ‘politics’ at an intensely political moment was self-defeating,
as it allowed the most politically organized activists, the AL, to eventually co-opt the movement.
A series of short-run game-changers allowed it to happen: (1) the killing of Rajib Haider, one
of the bloggers of BOAN, purportedly by the JI, which fueled calls for the banning of JI pol-
itics, cyber-policing, and changes in prosecution laws to allow for appealing of verdicts; (2) a
six-point list of demands (harkening back to Sheikh Mujib’s Six Point Demands of 1969),3
three of which were in effect demands for strengthening the state apparatus – banning JI–Shibir,
strengthening law enforcement, reducing press freedom; (3) the rise of Hefazat-e-Islam, a radi-
cal JI-backed group based in Chittagong, demanding justice against ‘atheists and blasphemous
bloggers’ of the Shahbag’s Gonojagoron Mancha and the crackdown on Islamists belonging to
Hefazat-e-Islam.

Elections and state power

The AL ‘won’ the elections that were boycotted by most opposition parties, which may well
testify to the consolidation of political power within the governing party. During the period
February to December 2013, we witnessed not only the strengthening of the state but the rise
of the radical right that had shown its capacity to organize, often through forced participation
of quomi-madrasa students, and its ability to wreak havoc very quickly, targeting bus lines, rail-
ways, schools, hospitals, and religious minority groups strategically. Shahbagis and other activists
rallied for the protection of minority groups, organizing programs such as the Long March to
areas where Hindu minorities had been attacked, but remained silent on other atrocities of the
right-wing political activists, such as burning down public buses, makeshift shops, and small
petty-cash stores (BDNews24, 2013).
The desire to remain ‘apolitical’ and non-partisan quickly morphed into the desire to appear
equally distant from the two main political parties. Bangladeshi civil society could only rally
around the protection of minority groups because minorities have been marginalized by both
parties; but remaining ‘outside politics’ meant watching ‘helplessly’ as buses were burnt on a
daily basis during blockades and hartals, injuring about 11,000 people according to a report by
Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK, 2014).Thus, ‘apolitical’ ideals posed a problem for everyone who saw
in Shahbag the potential for a secular, democratic, and progressive future for Bangladesh. Many
who would otherwise oppose capital punishment had embraced the movement uncritically in
the name of creating a ‘progressive Bangladesh’. However, as the days passed, the question that
kept coming back was whether, in the name of empowering the people, the people would end
up empowering the state.
The contradictions in empowering the state in the name of progress were wrapped up in
the contradictions of the unfinished revolution of 1971. The desire to reclaim and remake the

58
 The genocide of 1971 and the politics of justice

‘nation’ and to revive the spirit of 1971 may not have been a negative thing in and of itself, but it
cloaked Bengali chauvinism that turned a blind eye to the democratic demands of Bangladesh’s
many minority groups and the working classes, not to mention the appropriation of such rhet-
oric to serve the AL’s political agenda.
Then there was the question of the trials themselves. Could Shahbag engage with the idea
of examining what would be required to hold a fair trial, and build toward that? What sort of
evidence was needed, and how had the process fallen short? Why were the lawyers so weak, the
process so slap-dash, the evidence presented so haphazard? Why were there government func-
tionaries at every level of this process, instead of the best lawyers in the country (in fact, many
of the best lawyers were frozen out because they were not ‘loyal enough’ to any party). A trans-
formative movement would not have made demands only from the existing playbook, it would
have sought to change the rules of the game.

Restorative justice
Shahbagis failed to recognize the pitfalls of legitimizing the state’s repressive machine (until it
was used against them). The reliance on the state effectively paved the way first for co-option
and then disempowerment of the movement by the very same state. As of April 2014, the
Gonojagoron Mancha has come under severe attack from the government, with multiple alter-
cations with the police and charges of corruption against Imran Sarkar. As some Shahbagis have
claimed, this might be part of a strategy for disabling what is left of the Shahbag movement.
What this chapter narrates is a story of how the fervor with which people demanded justice
for war crimes was not only lost because of the intrusion of party politics and state co-option,
but also resulted in a year-long engagement with political violence. In the process, the notion
of restorative justice was lost.
What needs to be done to begin the process of restorative justice? The truth needs to be told,
no matter how difficult, or how traumatic. The actual horrors of 1971 have to become public
knowledge so that no one can hide behind religious dogma to justify the murder and rape of
thousands.
The school curricula need to reflect this history to end the historical amnesia surrounding
1971. Bangladeshi history in school textbooks cannot be reduced to two-page biographies of
beer sreshthos replete with claims of courage and glory but presented without context. The hana-
dar bahini has to be named specifically.
There have to be reparations. JI and its convicted leaders’ assets should be seized and liqui-
dated in order to establish a trust to compensate survivors and their families. There is no glory
in saying, ‘We do not want the rajakars’ wealth’; the killers owe their wealth to those they killed
and their families. This would be a start to the justice process, the death penalty would not. In
the same vein, reactionaries need to be neutralized financially to prevent them from re-enacting
the war, as it were.
The judiciary needs to be independent and allow for more credible courts with the authority
to hold the state responsible for carrying out sentences. It is worth reiterating that the only reason
why people have been clamoring for the death penalty is because people do not trust the justice
system. The trust needs to be established by ensuring separation of powers.
In the final analysis, meaningful justice would be achieved with the realization of the
promises of national liberation that have proven to be elusive for most Bangladeshis: an equit-
able and just distribution of wealth, the eradication of poverty and illiteracy, access to food,
health care and meaningful employment, and a state and judiciary that are accountable to the
people.

59
 N. Murshid

The window of opportunity for the emergence of a new Bangladeshi left, independ-
ent of the mainstream political parties and relying on the energy of protest and solidarity,
seems to have closed. Shahbagis found themselves caught between the state and JI, but the
movement was not a failure. For the first time, ordinary people felt empowered, they had a
public space they could call their own – people who had never taken to the streets before
or even imagined being part of a mass movement. A new political culture of protest and
mass participation has emerged, as could be seen in the mass support and voluntarism soon
after the Rana Plaza factory building collapsed, killing close to 1,200 workers on April 23,
2013; as can be seen in the current protests over the fencing off of the parliament building.
People are no longer afraid or shy to take to the streets. But the lessons of Shahbag need
to be learned.
It is worth pausing for a moment to recognize that the left has had a tricky past in the
context of Bangladesh’s Liberation War. The Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s resulted in
a split in the only left-leaning political party in Pakistan, the National Awami Party (NAP),
creating a pro-Moscow NAP of Stalinists (led by Professor Muzaffar Ahmed) and pro-Peking
NAP of Maoists and Islamists seeking Islamic socialism (led by Maulana Bhashani). In East
Pakistan, Maoists were more popular than Stalinists, who had support only among a few.
Bangladesh’s war posed a theoretical dilemma that splintered the groups further and resulted
in many of the groups opposing Bangladesh’s Liberation War because of one or more of the
following reasons: (1) some felt supporting Bangladesh would mean supporting India and
thereby supporting the Soviet Union; (2) some felt that Bangladesh’s national struggle was
a bourgeois struggle and hence not worth supporting; (3) some felt workers’ (Stalinists) or
peasants’ (Maoists) struggle required support instead; (4) some felt that Maoism entailed a
support of Mao’s China, which was a Pakistani ally and thus, through the logic of transi-
tivity, they directly supported the Pakistani military; (5) some felt the AL had fallen short
by not taking up an anti-imperialist stance – be it American, Soviet, or Indian imperialism
(Rashiduzzaman, 1970).
The ‘betrayal’ of the left explains why it could never (re)emerge in a real way in independent
Bangladesh. This is precisely why the emergence of leftist politics has to evolve in a deliberative
fashion, allowing for all kinds of progressive voices. At the same time, the left in Bangladesh
needs to address the issue of Maoist and Stalinist ideologies that have had a disastrous history, at
least in the South Asian context, and allowed for regressive politics such as support for the death
penalty and state empowerment to be couched as progressive politics. Those taking the lead
will have to consider and answer difficult questions: How does one address war crimes without
empowering the state? How can ordinary citizens take on the right – JI and its allies? How does
one build a strong left? The path toward restorative justice and a culture of progressive politics
is strewn with challenges.

Notes
1 See:   www.internationallawbureau.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/The-International-Crimes-
Tribunals-Act-1973.pdf.
2 See David Bergman’s blog: bangladeshwarcrimes.org.
3 (1) Arrest, within seven days, those among JI – Shibir responsible for the 1971 war crimes; (2) initiate the
legal process to ban JI–Shibir; (3) create an independent investigative committee to identify JI–Shibir’s
funding organizations and subject them to the legal process; (4) make the International War Crimes
Tribunal a permanent body; (5) strengthen law enforcement to arrest terrorists and root out their hide-
outs; (6) take action against media outlets protecting war criminals and instigating fundamentalism.

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 The genocide of 1971 and the politics of justice

References
Alamgir, J. (2010) Truth, Not Punishment. Daily Star Forum. [Online] Available from: http://archive
.thedailystar.net/forum/2010/june/truth.htm [Accessed: August 15, 2014].
ASK. (2014) Political Violence: January–31st December 2013. Ain o Salish Kendra Report. [Online] Available
from:  www.askbd.org/ask/2014/01/11/political-violence-january-31st-december-2013  [Accessed:
August 10, 2014].
BDNews24.(2013) BNP Backs Hifazat Long March.[Online]Available from: http://bdnews24.com/politics/
2013/04/02/bnp-backs-hifazat-long-march [Accessed: August 13, 2014].
Bergman, D. (2012) Bangladesh War Crimes Tribunal: Further Bias Is No Answer. Open Democracy. [Online]
Available from: www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/david-bergman/bangladesh-war-crimes-tribunal-
further-bias-is-no-answer [Accessed: August 17, 2014].
Brownmiller, S. (1975) Against Our Will: Men,Women and Rape. London: Martin Secker & Warburg.
Channel ANI. (2012) Interview with Lieutenant General JFR Jacob. Bangladesh Today. October 18.
D’Costa, B. (2010) Rape and Its Consequences. BDNews24. [Online] Available from: http://opinion.
bdnews24.com/2010/12/15/1971-rape-and-its-consequences [Accessed: August 24, 2014].
Murshid, N. (2011) Evaluation of India’s Role in Bangladesh’s War of Independence, 1971: Humanitarianism
or Self-Interest? Economic & Political Weekly. 46 (52). pp.53–60.
Murshid, N. (2013) The Shahbag Uprising: War Crimes and Forgiveness. Economic & Political Weekly. 48
(10). p.13.
Murshid, N. (2014) Political Violence in Bangladesh, 2007–2013. Dataset [work in progress].
Murshid, N. and Alamgir, J. (2011) Students, Islam, and Political Violence in Bangladesh, 2001–2006.
Presentation at the Annual South Asia Conference. October 2011.
Rao, N. and Murshid, N. (2013) New Struggles in South Asia. Socialist Worker. [Online] Available
from: http://socialistworker.org/print/2013/02/14/new-struggles-in-south-asia [Accessed: August
28, 2014].
Rashiduzzaman, M. (1970) The National Awami Party of Pakistan: Leftist Politics in Crisis. Pacific Affairs.
43 (3). pp.394–409.
Zeitlyn, B. (2014) Watching the International Crimes Tribunal from London. South Asia Multidisciplinary
Academic Journal. 9. pp.1–16.

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 PART II

Politics and institutions

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 5
POLITICAL PARTIES,
ELECTIONS,
AND THE PARTY SYSTEM
Ali Riaz

Political parties, in the words of Max Weber, are ‘the children of democracy’ (Weber, 2008,
pp.155–208). Despite a checkered history of democracy and faltering democratization, there
has been no dearth of political parties in Bangladesh since its independence in 1971.There have
been repeated attempts to create a dominant party system. Besides, the re-emergence of Islamist
parties, fragmentation of parties, and building alliances characterize the past four decades of the
party political landscape. Notwithstanding these changes, political parties across ideological dif-
ferences demonstrate some similarities in regard to ethos and practices.

Parties: numbers and categories

Election Commission (EC) records show that the number of political parties contesting elec-
tions has grown significantly since 1973 when only 14 parties participated. In 1979, 29 par-
ties participated in the election; the number reached 75 in 1991. Five years later the number
had reached 81. In 2008, under the caretaker government, the EC again made registration
a requirement for participation in the elections. A total of 117 parties submitted applica-
tions for registration, of which 39 received the commission’s approval. In August 2013, the
EC further approved the application of nine parties from a pool of 43 applicants (Bangladesh
Chronicle, 2013). As of October 2015, 40 parties were registered with the EC (Bangladesh.
Election Commission, n.d.).1 These numbers only represent parties that have fielded at least
one candidate in the parliamentary elections and/or sought the approval of the EC. It is worth
mentioning that there are a host of parties that did not take part in the election and operate
without formal approval. Therefore, the total number of parties in Bangladesh is much higher
than these records show.
These political parties can be categorized into two groups based on their organizational
strengths, efficacy, and relevance. The parties with well-developed electioneering organizations
and well-articulated and long-standing grassroots affiliates belong to the first group (Bertocci,
1982, p.993). By this standard, and based on the results of the four elections held between 1991
and 2008, there are only a handful of political parties in Bangladesh. But, in a country where
money and muscle power play a pivotal role in elections, caution must be exercised in judging

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 A. Riaz

Table 5.1 Ideological orientations of political parties

Name of the party Ideological orientation

Awami League (AL) Centrist, believes in role of government in economy, considers limited role
of religion in politics, espouses liberal social values, proponent of Bengali
nationalism
Bangladesh Nationalist Center-right, proponent of open market economy, views Islam as a
Party (BNP) central element of social and political life, espouses liberal social values,
proponent of Bangladeshi nationalism

Jatiya Party (JP) Center-right, proponent of open market economy, believes in significant
role of Islam in politics, espouses liberal social values, advocates
Bangladeshi nationalism

Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) Islamist, right-wing, supporter of open market economy with certain
restrictions due to religious factors, espouses conservative social values,
supports Muslim nationalism

Communist Party of Socialist, secularist, believes in command economy, highly liberal on social
Bangladesh issues

Islami Oikya Jote Orthodox Islamist, supporter of restricted market economy, espouses highly
conservative social values, supports Bangladeshi nationalism

Bangladesh Islami Orthodox Islamist, supporter of restricted market economy, espouses highly
Andolon conservative social values, supports Bangladeshi nationalism

Jatiya Samajtantrik Center-left, secularist, believes in role of government in economy, espouses

Dal (JSD) liberal social values, supports Bengali nationalism

Socialist Party of Socialist, secularist, believes in command economy, highly liberal on social
Bangladesh issues

Note: Three parties listed here have various factions; they are the JSD, the JP, and the IOJ. However,
ideologically there are few variations among these factions.

the relevance of parties based solely on electioneering capabilities. The strengths of some par-
ties may lie in their ability to articulate popular aspirations and their capacity to mobilize sup-
porters and sympathizers at critical moments of political events, even if they do not do well in
electoral politics. Therefore, the list of this group is bound to be different than the list of parties
represented in the parliament.
The second group comprises parties with little or no support among the populace. These
parties are often referred to as ‘name-only’ political parties (IDEA and Center for Alternatives,
2004, p.8). ‘A president, a general secretary, a tiny office, and a telephone seem to be all the
requirements for forming a party’ (Baxter et al., 2002, p.295). Some cannot even boast this basic
set-up – their existence is limited to their own letterheads.
Notwithstanding the variations in size, organization, and influence, these parties represent
a broad spectrum of ideologies: from radical left to radical right; from staunch secularists to
hardcore Islamists; and all shades of political thought in between. Based on the party consti-
tutions and election manifestos, Table 5.1 outlines the ideological orientations of the major
parties.

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 Political parties, elections, and the party system

Elections and party systems

The results of the elections held between 1973 and 2008 demonstrate the strength and appeal
of parties to the larger population and their impact on politics. In this context we can divide the
elections into three broad time frames: 1973, 1979–1986, 1991–2008. Elections in the second
time frame were conducted under military regimes, and two parties were created under the dir-
ect patronage of the government. Although there are marked differences in political environment
between the first two periods, from the party-system perspective there is a strong resemblance.
The third period was a time when elections (except the February 1996 election) were conducted
fairly under non-partisan caretaker regimes. The 2014 election is discussed as a separate issue.
The first election held under the newly framed constitution in 1973, less than 15 months
after independence, provided a landslide victory to the Awami League (AL). The AL received
73 percent of the popular vote and 293 out of 300 seats. Despite the growing resentment against
the government, and the emerging viable opposition (e.g., the Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal – JSD),
the ruling AL was organizationally stronger than its opponents. Many have argued that the 1973
election results do not represent the extent of the popularity of the ruling party; however, for
the sake of understanding the relative strength of the parties that participated in the election, it
is necessary to underscore that the ruling AL was ahead of the others.
The constitutional stipulation of an election allowing participation of various parties implies the
presence of a multi-party system. But election results, especially an allegation of manipulation by the
ruling AL (Barua, 1978, p.168), revealed the proclivity for the creation of a dominant-party system.
The crucial features of the dominant-party system are that it ensures the unbridled control of one
party over state and politics, and turns the election into a formality to anoint the same party. In the
words of   Ware, in the dominant-party system one major party has the ability to obtain ‘enough
parliamentary seats to control a government on its own’ (Ware, 1996, p.159). Suttner argues that
in this system, the ‘future defeat [of the dominant party] cannot be envisaged or is unlikely for the
foreseeable future’ (Suttner, 2006, pp.277–297). The effort to create a dominant-party system in
1973 in Bangladesh provided the momentum to create a one-party system in January 1975.
The military coup d’état in August 1975 and subsequent military rule between 1975 and 1990
brought back the multi-party system; but the desire to create a dominant-party system was palp-
able. Introduction of a ‘Kings’ Party (that is, launching parties by the military rulers using the
state machinery) and manipulation of election results are testament to this tendency. Results of
elections held between 1979 and 1988 show that the parties in power have secured decisive vic-
tories. The BNP secured 207 seats (41.2 percent of the vote) in 1979; the JP secured 153 seats
(42.3 percent of the vote) in 1986 and 251 seats (68.4 percent of the vote) in 1988. While in
power, both the BNP (Bangladesh Nationalist Party, established in 1978) and the JP (Jatiya Party,
established in 1986) sought to create a system that would ensure their victory in subsequent
elections. In the dominant-party system, the ruling party not only tries to manipulate elections
and control the parliament, but also seeks to establish a monopoly over political agendas and
public policy (Pempel, 1990, pp.3–4). The introduction of the concept of Bangladeshi national-
ism vis-à-vis Bengali nationalism and religion vis-à-vis secularism as state principles by the BNP,
and the institution of Islam as the state religion by the JP, have shaped the public discourse and
were intended to provide them with a much-needed monopoly over the discourse in order to
erect the edifice of the dominant-party system. Evidently, however, these efforts did not succeed.
The collapse of the General Ershad-led military government in 1990 marked the transition
point. However, by then the party system had experienced three changes: intensification of division
of parties or factionalism (especially after 1976); building alliances (particularly after 1982); and the
re-emergence of Islamist parties (after 1976). Interestingly, despite the fragmentation of the major

67
 A. Riaz

parties and the creation of various alliances, the 1991 election demonstrated that the country was
entering into a de facto two-party system. Almost 60 percent of the popular vote was secured by two
parties, the AL and the BNP; the former received 30.1 percent while the latter received 30.8 percent.
But the election also brought to the fore the fact that about one-third of the electorate had
yet to lend support to either of these two parties.The question was whether a single party could
capture these votes and pose a challenge to the emerging party system. Both the Jatiya Party of
General Ershad and the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) hoped that it would be able to cap-
ture these votes unilaterally. But, ‘the 1996 election confirmed a voting pattern that emerged
in 1991’ (Choudhury, 2001). The vote share of the AL was 37.4 percent, while that of the BNP
was 33.6 percent. The 1996 results also revealed that ‘while the BNP and AL have a vote base
throughout the country, the JP and JI have particular areas of strength and are less broadly rep-
resented in other areas’ (Choudhury, 2001).
The 2001 election delivered a decisive victory to the BNP and its allies, yet the share of the
popular vote of the AL and the BNP was closer than what the number of parliamentary seats
won by respective parties revealed. A distinctive change was noticed in the 2008 election: the
AL made significant headway in terms of share of the vote (49 percent). But the BNP’s position
as the second major political party remained unaffected (33.2 percent).
Notwithstanding the two-party system, two other parties – the JP and the JI – became vis-
ible and relevant in the electoral equation.Thus, from a party-system point of view, by 2008 the
Bangladeshi political system witnessed a two-party system with two smaller significant parties –
the JP (Ershad) and the JI – with a combined total share of at least 12 percent of the popular
vote (7 percent and 4.6 percent, respectively).
Unfortunately, these developments did not persuade the major political parties, particularly
the ruling AL between 2009 and 2013, to abandon the ‘dominant-party system’ mindset. The
experience of alteration of power in the previous 22 years and the possibility of losing the forth-
coming election, in conjunction with the dominant-party mindset, led to the annulment of the
caretaker government proviso in 2010. It was evident that the AL was reluctant to have formid-
able opponents in the election; the BNP, on the other hand, made several strategic mistakes,
leading to its boycott of the election held on January 5, 2014. The violence perpetrated by the
opposition activists prior to the election that lessened the opposition’s popular appeal, and the
war crimes trials that had significant popular support, helped the regime to move ahead with
the election. The election was contested by only 12 out of 40 registered parties and had about
a 22 percent voter turnout (Barry, 2014, p.A14). The result was a foregone conclusion, particu-
larly when 154 seats were uncontested. The AL’s share was 79.14 percent, while the JP secured
11.31 percent of the popular vote. The AL, before and after the election, enticed and coerced
the JP (Ershad) to act as the official opposition party for constitutional requirements and moral
legitimacy. The recognition of the JP (Ershad) as the opposition party also stems from the fact
that a dominant-party system requires an opposition, but one that does not pose an imminent
threat to the ruling party; to reiterate Suttner, it is a system where ‘future defeat [of the dominant
party] cannot be envisaged or is unlikely for the foreseeable future’ (Suttner, 2006, pp.277–297).
Therefore, as of late 2015, the central question regarding the party system is whether the
effort to create a dominant-party system will succeed this time around or will it eventually
return to the de facto two-party system?

Ethos and practices: similarities within parties

Notwithstanding the differences in ideological orientation and origin, and an acrimonious
relationship between the two major parties, most of the political parties in Bangladesh share

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some common characteristics and ethos. These features include the lack of internal democ-
racy, concentration of power in the hands of the party chief, and predominance of ‘dynastic
succession’.
Evidence of the lack of accountability of the party leadership includes the absence of regu-
lar party conventions/conferences, and the continuation of the same leaders in party leadership
for more than three decades.The constitutions of the BNP and the AL call for holding national
councils every two and three years, respectively. But throughout the 1990s, none of these
parties held their councils. The national council of the AL was not held between 2002 and
2009. The national council of the BNP, held in December 2009, was the first for 16 years. The
National Executive Committee of the BNP, supposed to sit every three months, did not meet
between 1996 and 2006. The National Standing Committee, the highest decision-making
body of the party, is required to meet once a month, according to the party constitution. But
no meeting was convened between 2002 and 2006, when the party was ruling the country. In
the absence of functioning committees the decisions are made under the constitutional and
extra-constitutional powers of the party chief. Party members, even those who hold mem-
berships of the decision-making forums, do not have the freedom to express their opinions,
because dissenting views are regarded as disobedience and disobedient members are ‘disci-
plined’ without judging the merit of their opinion (IDEA and Center for Alternatives, 2004,
p.6). As for the continuation of leadership, except for a handful of parties (e.g., the Communist
Party of Bangladesh (CPB), the JI), leaderships have been in the hands of the same individ-
uals for the past three decades. Sheikh Hasina assumed the AL leadership in 1981, Khaleda
Zia became the BNP chief in 1984, and General Ershad has been the chair of the JP since its
founding in 1986. Besides, in 2009 General Ershad declared his intention to be the lifelong
president (Saha, 2009).
The party secretary general positions of the AL and the BNP have also been in the hands of
a small number of individuals. The AL had five individuals who held this position in either an
acting or a full-time capacity between 1982 and 2014. As for the BNP, since 1979, six leaders
have occupied this position (Jahan, 2014, pp.30–31). However, this phenomenon is not limited
only to these large parties: Rashed Khan Menon has led the left-wing Workers Party since 1980,
the year the party came into being. Hasanul Huq Inu of the JSD (Inu) became the party secre-
tary general in 1986, and party president in 2002. Both are still in their positions as of late 2015,
with very little prospect of stepping down.The familiar faces for more than three decades in the
party leadership of almost all parties in Bangladesh provide the impression that leadership is a
matter of perpetuity and that the party structures are only there to provide a stamp of validation
to the decisions of these leaders.
The party constitutions provide enormous powers to the leaders. The constitutions of three
parties, the BNP, the AL and the JP, are cases in point.
The party constitution of the BNP provides the following authority to the chairperson:

(1) The chairman as the chief executive of party will control, monitor and coordin-
ate all activities of the party and for this will have full authority over national council,
national standing committee, national executive committee, subject committees and
other committees nominated by the chairman and will control, monitor and coord-
inate their activities; (2) The chairman, if necessary, can take punitive measures against
the members of above committees; (3) The chairman as the president of the national
executive committee will determine responsibilities, power and duties of officials of
the committee; (4) The chairman, if necessary, can cancel national executive commit-
tee, national standing committee, subject committees and other committees nominated

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 A. Riaz

by the chairman; (5) The chairman will preside over the meetings of national council,
national standing committee, national executive committee but if necessary he or she
can hand over the responsibility to another member; (6) The chairman can fill up the
vacancies in national standing committee and national executive committee.
(Bangladesh Nationalist Party, n.d.)

The chairperson can appoint up to 10 percent of the members of the National Council and
10 percent of the 351-member National Executive Committee.
Similarly, the AL constitution provides the party president the power to appoint 21 members
in the 166-member National Committee (NC), and 26 members in the 73-member Executive
Committee (EC). Interestingly, all EC members are ex officio members of the NC; therefore,
essentially 47 members of the NC are handpicked by the president of the party. Granting mem-
bership to the 41-member advisory committee is entirely at the discretion of the party president
(Bangladesh Awami League, n.d.).
However, these provisions pale in comparison to the power enjoyed by the president of the
Jatiya Party (JP) headed by former military leader H. M. Ershad. The party constitution stipulates
that the chairperson can suspend and/or dissolve any committees including the presidium and the
central working committee elected at the party council by the council members.The 11-member
parliamentary nomination board, which selects the nominee for elections, has two ex officio mem-
bers: the president and the secretary general; the remainder are appointed by the chairperson. If
the board fails to reach a consensus regarding any nominee, the chairperson’s unilateral decision
is to be considered final according to the constitution. If any dispute arises regarding the inter-
pretation of the party constitution, the final authority rests with the party chairperson. As for the
advisory committee, it is the sole discretion of the chair (Jatiya Party, n.d.).2
Succession to leadership positions is generally arranged to ensure it will remain within the
family. In short, heredity is the only means of accession to power. The appointment of Tareq
Rahman as the joint secretary general in 2002 and senior vice president in 2009 of the BNP
sent a clear signal that he is the heir apparent. In the case of the AL, ‘there is no clear dynastic
successor to Sheikh Hasina, but speculation has centered around several family members includ-
ing her sister Sheikh Rehana and son [Sajib] Wajed Joy’ (Jahan, 2014, p.31). The latter has been
introduced as an advisor to the prime minister. Two factions within the JP vying to succeed
General Ershad are led by his wife Rawshan Ershad and his brother G. M. Qauder.
These characteristics together reflect and reproduce the culture of patrimonialism. Kochanek
(2000, pp.530–550) and Bertocci (1982, p.993) view this as the key element in understanding
the behavior of Bangladeshi elites. In their view, the relationship between the party loyalists and
the leaders is unmistakably a patron–client relationship. Kochanek insists, ‘leadership is highly
personalized, based on patrimonial authority and loyalty, and maintained through a complex,
informal network of patron–client relations’ (Kochanek, 2000, p.530). Ahmed shares this opinion
and explains, ‘Party leaders tend to attract members, supporters and voters through patronage,
rather than by developing a group of supporters genuinely dedicated to the party goals’ (Ahmed,
2003, p. 72). The patron–client relationship legitimizes hierarchy and the right or obligation of
the superior to be superior and protect the lesser. Kochanek highlights this aspect: ‘leaders are
expected to be authoritarian and authority becomes highly personalized’ (Kochanek, 2000, p.548).

Islamist parties: variations and influences

At independence, religion-based parties were proscribed in Bangladesh. This was due to their
opposition to the Liberation War in 1971. Four political parties, including the Jamaat-e-Islami

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(JI), and the Nezam-i-Islami (NI), were banned in December 1971 as they, particularly the
JI leaders and activists, actively supported the Pakistani Army during the war. Many of the
leaders of the JI committed war crimes at that time (see Chapter 4). The 1972 constitution
adopted secularism as one of the state principles and banned the formation of any party
based on religion. The ban was removed in 1976 as secularism was replaced with ‘absolute
faith in Allah’. The lack of clarity on the issue of secularism, and the active encouragement
of the regime to bring religion into the political discourse, facilitated the re-emergence of
Islamist parties. The JI initially re-emerged under the guise of the Islamic Democratic League
in 1978. Islamist parties, in this context, are understood as the political parties that ‘draw
on Islamic referents – terms, symbols, and events taken from Islamic tradition – in order to
articulate a distinct political agenda’ (Denoeux, 2002, pp.56–81) and whose overall political
agenda includes Islamization of society or transformation of the Bangladeshi state into an
Islamic state.
Based on the principal traits, Islamist political parties can be divided into five categor-
ies: pragmatists, idealists, pir (preachers of Islam) and mazar (shrines)-centric, urban elite-centric,
and ‘jihadists’. Of the five categories of Islamist parties, those which fall within the first four
operate within mainstream politics, while those in the fifth category are clandestine and some
have been proscribed since 2005.Table 5.2 also looks at the support bases of the political parties
included in each category.
It is also necessary to note that the results of four elections participated in by the Islamist
parties show that support for JI dwindled over time – from 12.13 percent in 1991 to 8.61 per-
cent in 1996 to 4.29 percent in 2001, and stagnated at that level as it secured 4.48 percent in
2008. The Islami Oikya Jote (IOJ) won one seat in both 1991 and 1996, but the percentage of
the vote it received in both elections was 0.79 and 1.09 percent, respectively – a negligible rise
of 0.33 percent. In 2008 the share of the popular vote slumped to 0.16 percent. The statistics
compiled from the documents of the Election Commission reveal that the total share of the
vote won by Islamist parties declined by 4 percent between the 1991 and 1996 elections. In the
1991 election 17 Islamist parties secured 14.87 percent of the vote, compared to 10 percent in
June 1996. This took place against a 20 percent rise in voter turnout (Riaz and Ar-Raji, 2010,
pp.60–63). In 2008, nine parties together garnered 6.27 percent of the popular vote (Daily Star,
2009) (Table 5.3).

Fragmentation of parties
One of the key characteristics of the party system in Bangladesh is the fragility of the parties;
that is, the parties tend to fragment. Almost all parties – big and small, parties with little popular
support and those with grassroots organization – have faced some kind of split in the past four
decades. The tendency became significant from 1976, initially at the prodding of the military
regime as it embarked on founding a political party, but the record has not been significantly
different during the civilian regime, particularly after 1991. However, not all splits follow the
same pattern, neither are they equally damaging to the party. The split faced by the two major
parties, the AL and the BNP, are illustrative of this tendency.
The AL has experienced seven splits since independence. In some instances, leaders have left the
party with a small number of followers and founded their own parties.The founding of the JSD in
1973 had a significant bearing on the party’s organization.The most significant split took place in
1978 when the AL leaders Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury and Abdul Malek headed two separate
factions bearing the same name.The factions continued to exist for quite some time and both par-
ticipated in the 1979 election as the AL.This crisis was addressed by electing Sheikh Hasina, exiled

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 A. Riaz

Table 5.2 Taxonomy of Islamist political parties

Distinguishable traits Support base Name(s) of the organization(s)

Pragmatist/opportunist
Want to establish Islamic order Support within various strata Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami (JI)
in society through the state; of the society; organizational
participate in elections; structures are geographically
believe in ‘Islamic revolution’; spread around the country;
committed to implementation growing support within
of sharia; primacy of political educated middle class with very
goals and propagate politicized active front organizations for
interpretation of Islam students, youth, and women;
have socio-cultural organizations
Idealist and orthodox
Want a ‘pure’ sharia-based Islamic Closely tied to quomi madrasas as Jamaat-i-Ulema-e-Islam,
state; view Islam as primarily ‘a leaders of the organizations come Bangladesh Khilafat Andolon
way of life’; despise the ‘secular’ from quomi madrasas, support (Bangladesh Khilafat
nature of the constitution and base is largely within quomi Movement), Bangladesh Khilafat
the social life; view militancy madrasas and in rural areas; each Majlish, Nizam-e-Islam
as a justifiable means to capture organization has small pockets of
state power a support base in various parts of
the country; support bases and
organizations are weak
Pir (preacher of Islam) centric and
mazar (shrine) based
Aim to establish a state based on Support is spread throughout the Zaker Party, Bangladesh Islami
traditional Islam and sharia; country as followers of the pir Andolon, Bangladesh Tariqat
critical of the JI or mazar, lacks organizational Federation
structure; party is organized
around individuals
Urban elite-centric
Emphasize ideological struggle Highly educated middle-class Hizb ut-Tahrir Bangladesh
against the secular polity leadership, young educated
and system; want to establish support base, particularly among
Khilafat; internationally higher learning institutions (e.g.,
connected; underscore the university); proficient in usage of
global struggle technology to spread the message
‘Jihadists’
Militant Islamists who aim to Support base is small; sparsely Harkat-ul-Jihad al Islami
establish an Islamic state in spread around the country, Bangladesh (HuJIB),
Bangladesh through ‘jihad’ especially in rural areas; Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen
leadership and activists are Bangladesh (JMB), Hijbut
primarily from quomi madrasa Tawheed, Shahadat-e-Al Hikma.
backgrounds

Source: Riaz and Ar-Raji (2010, p.48).

daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, in 1981. One of the factions led by Mizan Chowdhury
dissipated in 1984 when he joined the party founded by then military ruler H. M. Ershad. Two
further major splits of the party took place after Hasina assumed the leadership: in 1983 under

72
 newgenrtpdf
Table 5.3 Islamists’ share of the vote, 1991–2008

1991 1996 2001 2008

Party Seats won Number of votes % Seats won Number of votes % Seats won Number of votes % Seats won Number of votes %
Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) 18 4.13 million 12.13 3 3.64 million 8.61 17 2.38 million 4.29 3.16 million 4.48
Islami Oikya Jote (IOJ) 1 0.26 million 0.79 1 0.46 million 1.09 2 0.37 million 0.68 0.10 million 0.16
Khilafat Andolan 0 93,049 0.27 - - - - 13,759 0.02
Zaker Party 0 417,737 1.22 - - - - 129,289 0.19
Islami Andolan Bangladesh 0.73 million 1.05
(Bangladesh Islamic
Movement Bangladesh,
BIM)
Jamaat-i-Ulema-e-Islam 173,633 0.25
Bangladesh
Bangladesh Islami Front 31,450 0.05
Bangladesh Khilafat Majlish 28,546 0.04
Bangladesh Tarikat 19,750 0.03
Federation

Source: Compiled from BEC data. For 2008 results, see Daily Star (2009).
 A. Riaz

1955 AL

1957 AL
NAP

1970 AL
JL (Ataur Rahman)
1972 AL

BKSAL
1975 JSD

1976 AL JJP GAL BDL

1979 AL AL (Mizan)

1981 AL (Farid) AL (Mizan)

Joined Janadal
1983 AL in 1984

1983 AL BKSAL

1991 AL BKSAL

1993 AL GF

Figure 5.1 Bangladesh Awami League fragmentation

the leadership of Abdur Razzaq, who revived the BKSAL (Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami
League), and then in 1993 under the leadership of Kamal Hossain, who founded the Gono Forum
(Figure 5.1).The party was on the brink of formal division in mid-2007 when four party stalwarts,
Abdur Razzaq,Tofail Ahmed, Suranjit Sengupta, and Amir Hossain Amu, proposed reforms to the
structure of the party governance with the active encouragement of the military-backed caretaker
government. The effort was rebuffed by Hasina and the reforms did not come to pass.
The BNP has faced several splits since its founding in 1978. In 1983, soon after the party was
dislodged from power and the incumbent military ruler Ershad started the process of founding
the JP, a number of senior leaders split from the party under the leadership of Shamsul Huda
Chowdhury. The faction later joined the JP. The split was largely engineered by the intelli-
gence agencies; interestingly, this was akin to what these agencies did during the formation
of the BNP in 1978. Khaleda Zia assumed the party leadership in 1984. Since then, several
small-scale splits have taken place. But a serious blow came after the military-backed caretaker
government came to power in 2007. In June 2007, the BNP Secretary General Abdul Mannan
Bhuyian announced a package of reform measures to ‘democratize’ the party. Ostensibly these
measures were intended to oust Khaleda Zia from the party leadership. This led to the expul-
sion of the secretary general by Khaleda Zia who appointed Delwar Hossain as the acting sec-
retary general immediately before her arrest. By October the division was formalized – Saifur

74
 Political parties, elections, and the party system

JGD
1978
(Jatiya Ganatantrik Dal)

1978 BNP JGD

1983 BNP (Sattar) BNP (Huda) BNP (Dudu-Nilu)

BNP (Huda) Jandal (Ershad) PNP

1984 BNP (Khaleda)

1985 BNP (Khaleda) BNP (Shah Aziz)

1988 BNP (Khaleda) BNP (Obaid)

1996 BNP (Khaleda) BNP (Obaid)

2007 BNP (Khaleda) BNP (Saifur) NPP

2008 BNP (Khaleda) BNP (Saifur)

2014 BNP (Khaleda)

Figure 5.2 Bangladesh Nationalist Party fragmentation

Rahman, the former finance minister, claimed that he had assumed the party leadership and
replaced Khaleda Zia’s appointed secretary general with another leader. BNP leaders loyal to
Khaleda Zia claimed that a ‘shady force’ was responsible for the split (BDNews24, 2007).3 While
the party did split at that time, by mid-2008, as the caretaker government began its negotiation
for the election, the two factions came together with some trepidation (Figure 5.2).
The JP’s journey, in this regard, is not different from the AL and the BNP. It faced splits in
1997, in 1998, in 2000, and in 2013. The latest split came on the issue of participating in the
2014 election. Angered by the party’s decision to participate in the January 5, 2014 election,
Kazi Zafar Ahmed split from Ershad in late 2013 and later joined the BNP-led alliance. Thus,
as of December 2014, four different parties are in existence as JP, of which three are registered
with the Election Commission.
These three parties serve as examples of the continuous disintegration of parties. Among the
smaller left parties, the trend is far more pronounced. But there are striking exceptions to this
trend; the CPB has faced a division only once since independence: in 1993, as a result of the
demise of the Soviet Union and the changes in the policies of the Soviet Communist Party.The
reformist group led by Saifuddin Ahmed Manik and Nurul Islam Nahid parted with the party,
but their faction ceased to exist within a year as Manik joined the Gono Forum led by Kamal
Hossain and Nahid joined the AL.
The other party that stands out as an exception to this pattern is the Jamaat-e-Islami. The
JI came close to a split in 1983–1984 as a group of young activists raised concerns about party
policies. Maulana Abdul Jabbar tried to launch a separate JI, and his supporters within the youth
wing (Islami Jubo Shibir), led by Ahmed Abdul Kader (known as Abdul Kader Bachhu), formed

75
 A. Riaz

a new youth organization. However, within a short time they abandoned the effort and joined
a new Islamist organization. This is not to say that Islamists are not prone to internal strife and
division; instead closer observation of smaller Islamist parties show that they tread the same path
as their secularist counterparts.
These disintegrations and subsequent trajectories of the breakaway factions reveal a few
common features: first, the divisions originate in personality clashes rather than ideological
differences within the party. Barring a few exceptions (e.g., the emergence of BKSAL in 1983
in the case of the AL, and the split of the CPB in 1993), these divisions are intended to assume
party leadership. This is borne out by the fact that after several years party leaders return to the
party, under the same leadership that they once criticized. This is true of all parties. Second,
often these divisions are prompted by external factors, such as the machinations of the ruling
party to split the opposition. The ruling party has both resources at its disposal to entice oppos-
ition leaders and the power to coerce them, if need be. Third, intelligence agencies seem to act
as the instrument for division of the parties, either to lure leaders to the new party or to serve
the interests of the regime. Although this phenomenon emerged during military rule post-1975,
civilian regimes have not been reluctant to adopt this tactic. Fourth, major parties tend to
withstand splits. They tend to maintain a grip over their support base. Whether this is due to
grassroots organization or because parties are associated with individual leaders and families is
an open question. But our observations suggest that to date, breakaway factions have failed to
make a serious dent on the mainstream of the party.

Forging alliances
Despite the dominance of two political parties in Bangladeshi politics in recent decades and
the extant fragmentation tendency, forging alliances has remained a significant feature of the
party system of the country. In the past two decades we have witnessed a flurry of alliances.
Alliances have taken two distinct forms: alliances of smaller parties and alliances centering on
a large party. The former is often predicated on the necessity to gain strength and increase bar-
gaining power, while the latter is mostly to dissuade parties from joining the rival camp. These
alliances are not always based on ideological affinities; however, alliances of smaller parties are
often ideology-driven. In addition to the issue-based alliances, which emerged and disappeared
within a short span of time, we have also witnessed the emergence of demand-based broader
alliances, and electoral alliances turning into ruling coalitions.
In post-independence Bangladesh, the first alliance was put together by octogenarian leader
Maulana Bhasani in late 1972. Seven parties, including the Bangladesh Jatiya League (BJL) led
by Ataur Rahman Khan, formed an alliance ahead of the first parliamentary election. The alli-
ance faced the wrath of the government yet did not succeed in competing in the election as
an alliance. In 1973, an unusual move in regard to forging alliances came from the ruling AL.
In June, Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman called for the unity of all ‘patriotic forces’.
The call was immediately reciprocated by the CPB and the National Awami Party (NAP, led
by Muzaffar Ahmed). Although these three parties had ideological affinity for a long time, the
call for an alliance came at a time of strained relations: the CPB and the NAP had launched
an anti-government movement earlier that year and faced significant persecution at the hands
of the government and the ruling party. By October, a three-party alliance emerged. This was
the first instance where the ruling party took the initiative to forge an alliance, especially soon
after an election that had delivered a thumping victory. Within less than two years, the alli-
ance turned out to be the foundation of the only national party called the BKSAL and the
one-party state.

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 Political parties, elections, and the party system

The military regime of General Ziaur Rahman (1975–1981) went one step further when
it set up the edifice of a new party called the Jagodal (Jatyitabadi Gonotantrik Dal, Nationalist
Democratic Party) under the leadership of Vice President Abdus Sattar and then forged an
alliance with five other parties in the wake of the presidential election in 1978. The 19-point
program announced by Zia in 1977 became the basis of the six-party Nationalist Front (NF),
which comprised Jagodal, the Muslim League (ML), the United People’s Party (UPP), the
Bhasani faction of the NAP, the Bangladesh Labor Party (BLP), and the Bangladesh Scheduled
Caste Federation (BSCF). Leaders and activists of various parties were enticed to join the party,
primarily through dispensation of patronage, bribes, and handouts. The NF was a mishmash of
parties from the left and the right. It included a party that was banned until 1976 for its oppos-
ition to the Independence War and its leaders’ collaboration with the Pakistani regime during
the war. Protagonists argued that this configuration is a reflection of the politics of consensus,
and an attempt to transcend the ideological boundaries that divide the nation. Within five
months of launching the front, in October 1978 the constituent parties merged into a new
party – the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).
The 1978 presidential election also engendered an opposition alliance: the Gono Oikyo
Jote (GOJ, People’s Unity Alliance). Five political parties, namely the AL, the Jatiya Janata Party
(JJP), the NAP (Muzaffar), the Bangladesh People’s League and the Gono Azadi League (GAL),
founded the alliance and nominated retired General M. A. G. Osmani, the commander-in-chief
of the freedom fighters in 1971, as its candidate. The constituents of the alliance were ideo-
logically closer compared to their counterparts. Thus, it is not inaccurate to say that these two
alliances represented two poles of the political spectrum: pro- and anti-AL. This provided the
first indication of an emerging two-party system in the country, and to date, this dichotomous
polarization continues to be a defining feature of the Bangladeshi political landscape.
While various efforts to bring opposition parties together to launch a popular movement
against the Zia regime had little success, a movement against the Ershad regime (1982–1990)
created alliances from the outset. Under intense pressure from student organizations of vari-
ous political persuasions, who formed an alliance of their own by late 1982, 15 political parties
came together in April 1983.The alliance, popularly known as ‘the 15-party’ alliance comprised
the AL (Hasina), the JSD, the CPB, the Workers Party (WP), the Sramik Krishak Samajbadi
Dal (SKSD), the AL (Mizan), the BSD, the AL (Farid), the Samyobadi Dal (SD, Toaha), the SD
(Nagen), the NAP (Muzaffar), the NAP (Harun), the Ekata Party, the GAL, and the Majdoor
Party. In August 1983, the BNP formed an alliance of seven like-minded parties: the UPP, the
Jatiya League, the Jatiya Gonotantraik Mukti Union, the National Awami Party, the Communist
League, and the Krishak Sramik Party (KSP). Among these alliances the 15-party combination
was the most diverse in terms of ideological persuasions, while the two other alliances were
more cohesive. The only major party that remained outside any alliance was the JI, but it soon
began to liaise with both seven-party and 15-party alliances in regard to agitation programs.
The formation of the Jatiya Party (JP) by General Ershad followed the path trod by Ziaur
Rahman: formulation of an alliance and then merger of the constituent parties into a single
party. The Janadal, founded in November 1983 with defectors from various parties, followed by
the formation of an alliance – Jatiya Front (National Front) – in August 1985.The UPP and the
Gantantrik Party (led by Anwar Zahid and Serajul Hossain Khan), and splinter groups from the
BNP, the Muslim League, the BKSAL, the JSD, and the Jatiya League, joined the alliance that
was then turned into the Jatiya Party on January 1, 1986.
The 15-party alliance experienced a split in 1986 when the AL and seven of the parties within
the alliance decided to join the parliamentary election held in May, reneging on their prom-
ise to boycott any election under the Ershad regime; the JI followed suit. But five left-leaning

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 A. Riaz

parties of the alliance (the JSD led by Hasanul Huq Inu, two factions of the BSD, the WP, and
the SKSD) formed a separate alliance and continued the movement along with the BNP-led
seven-party alliance.Two years later, as another election approached due to the untimely demise
of the third parliament (1996–1998), both alliances (and the JI) decided to boycott it, but a
faction of the JSD led by A. S. M. Rob stitched together an alliance of 76 parties called the
Combined Opposition Parties (COP). Evidently the COP was created with the help of the
ruling party, and most of its constituents were ‘name-only parties’. The fleeting existence of the
COP demonstrated that it is not the number of parties that makes an alliance effective but the
organizational strength of these parties, and the raison d’être that makes an alliance appealing to
the citizens. It also reaffirmed that the Bangladeshi political scene was becoming bi-partisan.
The urge to build alliances among the political parties subsided in the early years of the
new democratic era (1991–2006). The election was seen by the major parties, namely the AL
and the BNP, as their opportunity to return to state power; they seem to have concluded that
in the electoral equation these smaller parties, with whom they had aligned for almost eight
years, could contribute little. Thus, although the AL shared a few seats with its time-tested allies
(the NAP, the CPB, and the BKSAL), the BNP decided to participate alone. Within three years,
some of the parliamentary opposition parties came together to demand the inclusion of the
caretaker government proviso in the constitution. A four-month process culminated in a press
conference on June 27, 1994 which marked the emergence of an alliance of the five parlia-
mentary opposition parties, i.e., the AL, the JI, the JP, the National Democratic Party (led by
Salahuddin Quader Chowdhury), and the Gonotontri Party. Other parties, i.e., the WP, the JSD
(Siraj), the Gono Forum and the IOJ members, did not join the press conference and the alli-
ance (Dainik Bangla, 1994, p.1). In subsequent months, these parties continued street agitations
separately but maintained close contacts.
As the parliamentary opposition parties assembled under the leadership of the AL, left-wing
parties outside the parliament rallied to form their own alliance. In 1994, nine left-wing parties,
including the BSD, formed an alliance called the Left Democratic Front. The alliance expanded
and adopted a political platform in 1996 when it became ‘the 11-party alliance’.The parties that
joined the alliance were the CPB, two factions of the BSD, the Gono Forum, the Gonotontri
Party, the Samyobadi Dal (Marxist-Leninist), the SKSD, the Communist Center, the GAL, and
the Gonotantrik Majdoor Party. The alliance vowed to break the stranglehold of the two par-
ties and create a ‘third force’ in politics. The alliance participated in two elections as an alliance
(1996 and 2001), but failed to secure any seats in the parliament. However, it managed to act as
a pressure group.
After its defeat in the 1996 election, the BNP strove to mount street agitations against the
AL regime. To strengthen its capacity to rattle the government it reached out to its allies and by
1998 it also created a schism within the regime. Accordingly, it lured a larger faction of the JP
led by Ershad from the ruling coalition. In late 1998, a four-party alliance, comprising the BNP,
the JI, the JP (Ershad) and the IOJ, emerged. The alliance secured victory in the 2001 election.
As for the left-leaning parties, they remained united as an alliance until 2005. The AL,
on the other hand, with an eye on the scheduled election in 2006, began crafting a new
alliance. Some of the left-leaning 11-party alliance responded to the AL’s call for a larger
grouping, and a new alliance called the ‘14-party alliance’ emerged. The name, however, does
not truly represent the number of parties included in the alliance. Three parties, the CPB,
two factions of the BSD and the SKSD, remained outside the alliance. It was further broad-
ened in late 2006 as the street agitation gained momentum against the BNP regime ahead
of the scheduled election. The JP (Ershad) left the BNP-led ruling coalition alliance, while
one faction remained. Soon the AL put together what it described as the ‘Grand Alliance’.

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 Political parties, elections, and the party system

It was a combination of ‘the 14 parties’, the Bikalpa Dhara (BD) led by former President
Badruddoza Chowdhury, the JP led by former President Ershad, and the newly founded
Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) led by Oli Ahmed (who defected from the BNP in 2006).
Other smaller parties joined the bandwagon, and the AL was not hesitant in embracing an
Islamist party with a checkered past. Opposition to the BNP regime was the sole criter-
ion for joining the alliance. Only a handful of parties such as the CPB and two factions of
the BSD remained outside these alliances, and the Gono Forum left the alliance as it was
opposed to the inclusion of the JP (Ershad).
During the two years of political hiatus between 2007 and 2008, the Grand Alliance meta-
morphosed: some parties exited, some were silently shown the door. When the 2008 election
approached, although the AL-led alliance still called itself the Grand Alliance, it was no longer as
grand as in early 2007. In fact, it turned out to be an alliance of only nine parties, some of which
were parties in name only. In the subsequent five years only two parties were represented in the
Cabinet. Ahead of the election in early 2014, after the elimination of the caretaker government
proviso, the AL formed on November 19, 2013 what it described as an ‘all-party government’
with only five other parties. It was, according to an analyst, ‘all but an all-party government’
(Mondal, 2013). In 2012, the BNP, on the other hand, expanded its alliance to a bloc of 18 par-
ties that include the LDP (which was by then back in the BNP fold), the ML and a number of
other smaller parties. The alliance picked up two more parties, one of which was a breakaway
faction of the JP (Ershad), by mid-2014.
Alliance-making is not the exclusive preserve of the mainstream parties; smaller radical
Islamist and left-leaning parties too have been engaged in this endeavor. The JI appeared on the
political scene in 1976 through an alliance with the ML. But the party since then has created
strategic alliances with the AL and the BNP, until it finally joined the four-party alliance in 1999.
Smaller Islamist parties attempted to emulate the JI, but with a limited appeal and support base
they had to come together first to secure a seat at the table of alliances. The first effort to build
an alliance of the Islamist parties without the JI was initiated in 1984. Maulana Muhammadullah
Hafezzi Huzur brought 11 parties to establish the Sommilita Sangram Parishad (Combined
Action Committee). In the early 1990s, a group of smaller Islamist parties, under the auspices
of the Khelafat-i-Majlish, formed the IOJ. The composition of the alliance changed over time
and the alliance faced breakup as some parties of the alliance moved to create their own alli-
ance with the same name. There has been a number of instances where the Islamists founded
issue-based alliances: for example, to protest the Supreme Court verdict banning fatwa (reli-
gious edict) in 2001, to oppose the women’s development policy in 2008 (Daily Star, 2008,
p.1), and to oppose the education policy in 2010. In similar vein, a front named ‘Islamic and
like-minded 12 parties’ came into being in early 2011. It is worth noting that, despite variations
of the names, these Islamist alliances tend to include the same parties. Radical left-wing parties
too founded coalitions in the past decade. One of these alliances, the Democratic Revolutionary
Front, comprised four parties: Jatiya Mukti Council, Jatiya Gono Front, Naya Gonotantraik
Gono Morcha, and Gonotantrik Gono Moncha.
This narrative shows that in the past four decades alliance-building has become an integral
part of the party system of Bangladesh. This neither indicates the organizational weakening of
major parties, nor does it imply the diminishing appeal of the major parties; instead it shows
that both the AL and the BNP have felt that alliance offers an impression of consensual politics,
i.e., these parties are trying to incorporate voices outside their traditional support base.Whether
they are intended to mask the intra-party practices of consolidation of power is an open ques-
tion, but what is beyond doubt is that the alliance-building trend does not represent a qualitative
change in politics. In large measure, they serve utilitarian purposes.

79
 A. Riaz

For the two larger parties, alliance-building is beneficial on two counts: first, it weakens rivals.
The incessant efforts of the AL and the BNP to bring the JP (Ershad) within its fold since 1991,
and the JI until 1999, are testimonies to this intent. Second, it boosts the share of the popular vote.
Three elections conducted between 1991 and 2001 revealed that the AL and the BNP each com-
mands about 32 percent of the popular vote. Thus each would like to ensure that even the small-
est share of the popular vote is drawn to their side (or at least taken away from the rival). The JP
and the JI – combined – have about 12 percent of popular support, which has accorded them the
king-maker role. Smaller left-leaning parties’ efforts to build alliances have been predicated by their
desire to break the bi-partisan control of politics – ideologically and organizationally. It is imperative
for them in order to carve out a space. As the political landscape shifted rightward and left-leaning
parties have faced fragmentation, alliance formation has become both an existential and strategic
necessity. Notwithstanding the cleavages, smaller Islamist parties outside the JI’s sphere intend to
influence the public sphere and political discourse, and shrink the liberal space. Despite fragmenta-
tion and realignment, they regroup based on issues, and consequently influence policies.

Conclusion
Discussion on various trends and tendencies pertaining to political parties in Bangladesh, their
strengths reflected in the elections, and changes in the party system demonstrates that although
the presence of a large number of parties makes the political landscape vibrant, it cannot mask
the fact that parties lack democracy and leadership is highly skewed toward familial connections,
both of which are inimical to a healthy democratic system and should raise serious concerns
among citizens. Voting patterns show that the Bangladeshi electorate favors a competitive elec-
tion, although their choices have created a de facto two-party system. The presence of a large
number of political parties of different ideological persuasions is a positive element of the system.
This reveals Bangladeshis’ aspiration for a pluralistic political culture. However, ruling elites have
acted to the contrary at various junctures of the history of the nation by attempting to fashion a
dominant party system. Since the flawed election in January 2014 one such moment has arrived,
and the country stands at the crossroads as to what the future party system will look like.

Notes
1 The number of parties does not include the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, which lost its registration due
to a court verdict on August 31, 2014.
2 While I have highlighted these practices within the three main political parties, they are not limited to
these parties only. The familiar faces for almost three decades in the party leadership of almost all parties
in Bangladesh provide the impression that the leadership is a matter of perpetuity and that the party
structures are only to provide a stamp of validation to the decisions of these leaders.
3 Although the party leaders did not mention it, it later became evident that the intelligence agencies,
especially the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence, were instrumental in this regard. See US
Embassy cable, 08Dhaka721, July 3, 2007, http://wikileaks.org/cable/2008/07/08DHAKA721.
html; also see US Embassy cable, 07Dhaka1061, June 28, 2007, http://wikileaks.org/cable/2007/
06/07DHAKA1061.html.

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 6
THE PARLIAMENT
Nizam Ahmed

The parliament of Bangladesh owes its origin to the British parliament. Its precursor, the
Legislative Council of Bengal, was established in 1861, more than a century after the British first
colonized India. However, for nearly six decades after its inauguration, the Legislative Council
lacked any representative character. Nor, however, did it really have much scope to be proactive
when it was democratized in the 1920s. Several factors – structural, procedural and political –
hindered the working of the Council during British rule as well as the legislatures elected in
the early years of Pakistani rule (1947–1958). Between 1958 and 1971, Pakistan essentially
remained a ‘garrison state’. Whatever representative institutions existed during that time were
intended more to legitimize the rule of the military than to provide a framework for public
participation in governance. Following independence in 1971 after nine months of war with
the Pakistani Army, Bangladesh began with what Ahmed (1983, p.127) calls a ‘perfect’ system of
multi-party parliamentary government. The system was patterned on the Westminster model.
The constitution, which came into effect on 16 December 1972, recognized the supremacy of
the parliament, at least in lawmaking, and provided for making the Cabinet collectively respon-
sible to the parliament. Members of the Cabinet including the prime minster were required to
be Members of Parliament (MPs).
However, before the parliamentary system could have a fair trial, it was replaced by a
one-party presidential system. Following the Fourth Amendment to the constitution made in
January 1975, the president, who until then was a ceremonial head, was made the executive
head of the government. All other institutions including the judiciary were made subordinate to
him.The president could withhold assent to bills passed by the parliament and remove judges at
will. Following the introduction of the constitutional change described as a ‘constitutional coup’
by Maniruzzaman (1976, p.119), the president was entrusted with executive, legislative and judi-
cial powers to such an extent that he could easily claim himself to be ‘the state’. The one-party
system, however, did not last long. Before it could have a real beginning, the government was
overthrown in a military coup in August 1975. The first parliament, elected in March 1973, was
dissolved by the military in November 1975. Between 1975 and 1990, the country remained
under absolute military rule for a total of eight years. The two army generals who dominated
Bangladesh politics during the period – Ziaur Rahman from 1975 to 1981 and Hossain Ershad
from 1982 to 1990 – made attempts to civilianize their rule by, among other things, holding
elections to the parliament. However, none of the three parliaments elected between 1979

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 The parliament

Table 6.1 Composition and tenure of parliament, 1973–2014

Parliament Year elected Ruling Main % of ruling Number of members Total number Tenure (in
party opposition party MPs of MPs months)
Directly Reserved
elected women seats
First 1973 AL - 97.0 300 15 315 32
Second 1979 BNP AL 69.0 300 30 330 36
Third 1986 JP AL 51.0 300 30 330 17
Fourth 1988 JP COP* 83.7 300 - 300 31
Fifth 1991 BNP AL 46.7 300 30 330 56
Sixth 1996 BNP – 96.3 289** 30 319** 10 days
Seventh 1996 AL BNP 48.7 300 30 330 60
Eighth 2001 BNP AL 64.1 300 45 345 60
Ninth 2008 AL BNP 76.6 300 50 350 60
Tenth 2014 AL JP–Ershad 78.0 300 50 350 Current

Source: Ahmed (2012).

Notes:
*
Combined Opposition Parties.
**
Elections could not be held in 11 constituencies because of violence.

and 1988 survived a full term; each was dissolved prematurely either by the military or under
popular pressure. Moreover, rarely did these parliaments have any real scope to assert themselves
while in existence. Most of these parliaments also lacked legitimacy to a great extent, mostly
because of the way(s) in which they were elected.
There has been a new beginning in parliamentary politics since the beginning of the 1990s.
Most of the parliaments elected since 1991 have survived longer than their predecessors; these
also have enjoyed greater legitimacy and public support (Table 6.1). More importantly, the
‘recent’ parliaments have undertaken a number of structural and procedural reforms that have
the potential to redefine their relations with other sources of power, particularly the executive.
Noteworthy among those measures are: the restoration of the parliamentary system of govern-
ment in 1991; the enactment of the Parliament Secretariat Bill in 1994, thereby making the
Parliament Secretariat independent of outside control; the replacement of the minister as the
chairman of the Standing Committee on the Ministry (SCM) by a backbencher; the introduc-
tion of Prime Minister’s Question Time (PMQT); and adoption of the system of broadcasting/
telecasting live proceedings of the parliament. Most of these reforms are intended to help the
institutionalization of parliament. In fact, the parliament has theoretically a better scope now to
assert itself and to emerge as an important actor in the process of governance.

The parliament in constitutional framework

Bangladesh has a 350-member unicameral parliament. Of the total members, 300 are elected
directly; the remaining 50 places are reserved for women. Those elected by the popular vote
elect the women members. The constitution originally provided for reserving 5 per cent of
total seats for women; the percentage was increased to 10 per cent in 1979, 15 per cent in 2005
and 16.7 per cent in 2011. At present, seats reserved for women are distributed among different
parliamentary parties in proportion to their strength in the House. Previously, those winning a
plurality of seats in an election were automatically assured of the ‘reserved women seats’. The

83
 N. Ahmed

proportional system of representation for women, introduced in 2005, can thus be seen as an
improvement over the previous ‘winner-takes-all’ system. The constitution, however, does not
impose any restriction on women to contest general seats. In fact, the number of women elected
on the popular vote has also increased over the years – from 4 in 1991 to 19 in 2008.
The constitution provides for a five-year term for parliament. The duration may, however,
be extended by an Act of parliament by not more than one year at a time when the republic is
engaged in a war.The parliament formally enjoys an important status. It has been granted various
high-status symbols such as immunity, procedural independence, freedom of meeting and inviol-
ability, which are often considered to be necessary to ensure the superior position of the legislature
(Blondel, 1973). The constitution provides for the supremacy of the parliament, at least in law-
making. It empowers the parliament to frame its own rules of procedure, which are not subjected
to approval by any outside body.The constitution also requires that the interregnum between two
sessions of parliament should not exceed 60 days and thus ensures that the parliament meets regu-
larly. The validity of the proceedings in parliament cannot be questioned in any court.
The parliament does not, however, enjoy unfettered authority. The constitution sets some
limits on its permissive powers. It provides for judicial review of legislative actions, thereby
imposing some checks on the arbitrary exercise of power by the parliament. In fact, the Supreme
Court has, in recent years, declared a number of (constitutional amendment) laws unconstitu-
tional; hence void. Some of the verdicts, however, have caused serious political controversy. In
particular, the verdict declaring unconstitutional the Thirteenth Amendment – which provides
for a non-party caretaker government (NPCG) to run the routine administration during the
interim between the dissolution of parliament and the assumption of power by a new prime
minister – increased enmity between the Awami League (AL) and the Bangladesh Nationalist
Party (BNP), the two successive ruling parties. However, the court lacks any authority to review
money bills passed by the parliament.These cannot be challenged in any court.The constitution
also restricts floor-crossing, and prescribes a ‘delegate’ role for the MPs. An MP, who is elected
as a nominee of a particular party, cannot vote against his/her own party in the parliament; nor
can (s)he abstain from voting in defiance of party directives. Those who fail to comply with
party decisions risk losing membership of parliament. This in effect reduces the capacity of the
parliament to play an autonomous role vis-à-vis the executive.

Parliament and legislation

Formally, the parliament is considered to be the supreme lawmaking authority in Bangladesh.
Article 65 (1) of the constitution provides: ‘There shall be a Parliament for Bangladesh in
which subject to the provisions of this Constitution, shall be vested the legislative powers of
the Republic’ (Bangladesh. Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs, 2011, p.46). The
parliament can, however, delegate to any person or authority power to make orders, rules, regu-
lations, by-laws and other instruments having legislative effect. Every proposal in parliament for
making a law is made in the form of a bill. Different types of bills are passed by the parliament;
these are categorized as ordinary bills, money bills, constitutional amendment bills and private
members’ bills. An absolute majority of bills passed by the parliament are ordinary bills. These
become law when a majority of members present in a sitting agree to their passage. However,
in case of passage of bills returned by the president for reconsideration, there was a requirement
for their approval by a majority of the total number of members of the House until 2011, when
the provision was repealed by the Constitution (Fifteenth Amendment) Act. Ordinary bills can
be initiated either by the government or by any private member. But the ‘budget bills’ (appro-
priation and finance bills) are moved only by the government.

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 The parliament

Money bills and those bills that involve expenditure from public monies require the prior
approval of the president before being introduced in the House. The two are not the same,
however. Money bills have broad connotations. Article 81 of the constitution defines a money
bill as containing only

provisions dealing with all or any of the matters relating to the imposition, regula-
tion, alteration, remission or repeal of any tax; borrowing of money or the giving
of any guarantee by the government, or the amendment of any law relating to the
financial obligations of the government … and receipt of moneys on account of the
Consolidated Fund or the Public Account of the Republic, or the custody or issue of
such moneys, or the audit of the accounts of the government.
(Bangladesh. Ministry of Law, Justice and
Parliamentary Affairs, 2011, pp.29–30)

On the other hand, the scope of bills involving expenditure from public funds is not as broad
as money bills. Another significant difference is that the president can return a bill involving
expenditure to parliament for reconsideration, but he cannot do it in the case of money bills.
Constitution amendment bills differ from other bills in one major respect: these have to be
approved by at least two-thirds of the members. Private members – those who are not minis-
ters – have the opportunity to move bills. But since such bills are rarely passed by the House as
the government has a tendency to oppose any private initiative in the legislative field, most of
the members do not show any interest in this type of activity. In fact, of the 1,152 bills passed
between 1973 and 2012, only seven were initiated by private members (Ahmed, 2013).

The legislative process in parliament

The legislative process in Bangladesh, as in other countries, comprises three stages: deliberative,
parliamentary and administrative. The parliamentary stages of the legislative process are often
referred to as readings: first, second and third readings, meaning introduction, consideration
and passing, respectively (Haque, 1994, p.146). The first reading is purely a formal process in
which the title of the bill is announced.The minister-in-charge (or a private member) seeks the
permission of the House, through the Speaker, to introduce a bill. Any member can object to
its introduction. In such a case, the Speaker may allow the member/minister seeking permis-
sion and the member opposing it to make short explanatory statements. Thereafter, the bill is
published in the gazette (as introduced). The second reading has two stages: discussion on the
principles and general provisions of the bill, and a clause-wise discussion of the bill. The first
stage of the second reading starts with the minister-in-charge/member making one of the fol-
lowing four proposals: that the bill be taken into consideration by the House at once or some
future day to be specified in the motion, or that it be referred to a standing committee, or that
it be referred to a select committee, or that it be circulated for the purpose of eliciting opinion
(Bangladesh Parliament, 2007, p.34).
Until 1996, bills were rarely sent to committees. A minister in charge of a bill used to pro-
pose after the first reading that it (the bill) be immediately taken up for consideration. But now
bills are routinely sent to the concerned standing committees on ministries for scrutiny, except
the ‘budget bills’ that cannot be referred to any committee. According to one estimate, of the
total bills introduced in the seventh, eighth and ninth parliaments, 65.8, 60.8 and 79.6 per cent
respectively were sent to committees (Ahmed, 2013).The number of amendments moved per bill
increased from 5.6 per cent in the seventh parliament to 6.2 per cent in the eighth parliament and

85
 N. Ahmed

13.7 per cent in the ninth parliament (Ahmed, 2013). The decision to have a committee-stage
scrutiny of bills represented a major improvement over the past, when bills were passed in haste.
What is particularly important to note is that the ministers and government officials, who did not
have a positive attitude to parliamentary scrutiny of bills in the past, now readily agree to amend-
ments made by committees. The parliament also mostly accepts amendments moved by com-
mittees. After the report on a bill is debated in the House and amendments are put to the vote, it
(the bill) becomes ready for the third reading. At the third reading stage, the minister-in-charge
moves the motion for the passage of the bill either the way the concerned standing committee
has recommended it or the way it has been decided in the House. There is no scope for discus-
sion/amendment at this stage. After the passage of a bill, it is referred to the president for assent.
Following the presidential assent, the bill becomes law and is published in the official gazette.

President–parliament relations
The president, unlike his counterparts in most other Westminster-style democracies, is not part
of the parliament. But he has close links with it. In particular, he performs several legislative
functions. For example, no bill can become an Act without the assent of the president. He can
assent to a bill within 15 days of its presentation to him, or return it to the parliament with
a message requesting that the bill or any particular provision be reconsidered. But, as stated
earlier, he cannot return a money bill. If the president fails to assent to a money bill within
seven days of its presentation and in 15 days in case of other bills, he shall be deemed to have
assented to such bills. Since most presidents have a party political background, they usually
acquiesce to what their parties want. One exception was President Justice Shahabuddin Ahmed,
who, during Sheikh Hasina’s first tenure in government, returned the Code of Civil Procedure
(Amendment) Bill 1997 to the parliament for reconsideration. He also initially refused to assent
to the Public Safety Bill 2000, which provided, among other things, denial of bail to an accused
person for 75 days. The bill, which had strong ‘political’ overtones, was introduced as a money
bill, mostly to restrict the choice of the president and the court. When Prime Minister Sheikh
Hasina realized that the president would not sign the bill, she promised to amend the bill the
way he wanted. Thereafter, the president assented to the bill. The amendment that the president
wanted was made through the promulgation of an ordinance immediately after the Act was
published in the official gazette.
The constitution also empowers the president to promulgate ordinances that have legally the
same effect as laws made by the parliament. The presidential lawmaking authority has, however,
certain limits.The president can promulgate ordinances when the parliament is not in session or
it stands dissolved. Perhaps more importantly, the constitution requires that all ordinances made
by the president be laid before the parliament at its first meeting held immediately after their
promulgation. These can become permanent laws only after the parliament has passed them.
Otherwise, these lose validity on the expiry of one month following their tabling in the parlia-
ment. Another limitation is that no ordinance can make any provision that cannot be lawfully
made by an Act of parliament. Nor can an ordinance provide for altering or repealing any article
of the constitution. The president also performs a number of other constitutional functions in
respect of parliament, such as summoning or proroguing the parliament, administering the oath
to the Speaker, addressing the parliament at the beginning of each calendar year and dissolving
the House. In practice, he cannot perform any of these functions independently of the advice
of the prime minister, the executive head of government. Article 48(3) of the constitution pro-
vides that in the exercise of all his functions, save only that of appointing the prime minister
and the chief justice, the president shall act in accordance with the written advice of the prime

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minister (Bangladesh. Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs, 2011, p.15). He thus
has to rubber stamp what is being proposed by the prime minister. The president cannot refuse
consent to a proposal made by the prime minister. This contrasts with the Indian system where
the president can exercise at least some discretion.

Parliament–executive relations
The government in Bangladesh, as in other Westminster-based systems, owes its origin and
remains accountable to the parliament. Theoretically, it remains in power as long as it can
retain the confidence of the parliament. The constitution requires that the prime minister –
the chief executive – and most of the members of his/her Cabinet (90 per cent) become
members of the parliament. The Cabinet collectively and ministers individually remain
responsible to the parliament. The notion of ministerial responsibility, which lies at the heart
of the parliamentary system of government, requires that a minister resign if anything goes
wrong in his department. This convention, however, does not appear to be as effective and as
appreciated now as in the past. Rarely can a parliament in a majoritarian democracy force a
minister to resign for any wrongdoing taking place in his/her department now. Nowhere is
this problem more evident than in Bangladesh where the constitutional restriction on ‘free’
voting has made MPs virtually an appendage of the party. More important than constitutional
restriction is the way the party system is organized in Bangladesh. Most parties, especially
those that matter in governing, lack internal democracy. All power is centralized in the party
president in each party. (S)he decides who will get what and does not owe accountability to
anyone. Kernaghan observes that individual ministerial responsibility has two components – a
resignation component and an answerability one – and argues that although the resignation
component is increasingly becoming very difficult to enforce, the other component is still
important. This component requires that each minister answers to parliament, in the form of
explanation or defence, for all the actions of his or her department (Kernaghan, 2010, p.2). In
other words, the answerability component remains as valid today as it was centuries ago when
the convention first evolved.
The Rules of Procedure of Parliament (Rules) in Bangladesh allow an MP to use a number of
techniques to require the executive government to account for its actions. These include: ques-
tions, adjournment motions, motions for half-an-hour discussion, motions for discussion on
matters of urgent public importance for short duration and call-attention motions. According
to Rules, the first hour of every sitting is available for the asking and answering of questions. An
MP has the opportunity to ask questions that require an oral answer or written answer. There
are also provisions for PMQT, short-notice questions and supplementary questions. MPs can
also table motions demanding the adjournment of the business of the House for the purpose of
discussing a matter of recent and urgent public importance. They can also call the attention of
a minister to any matter of urgent public importance, and ask for a half-an-hour discussion on
a matter of public importance that has been the subject of a recent question, and the answer to
which needs clarification on a matter of fact. Provisions also exist for short discussion on issues
requiring immediate action. MPs can also move private members’ resolutions demanding gov-
ernment actions and/or support. Besides, the formal debates on the president’s speech made at
the beginning of each calendar year and, in particular, the debate on the budget speech by the
finance minister in the middle of the year also provide some scope for the MPs to scrutinize the
activities of the government.
Available evidence shows that the scope of parliamentary assertiveness has increased over
the years. The number of questions answered per sitting day increased from 22 in the fifth

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parliament to 30 in the eighth parliament and 57 in the ninth parliament. Similarly, the
number of questions answered by the prime minister in an average session increased from
13 in the seventh parliament to 41 in the ninth parliament. Not much difference can be
noticed in respect of the use of other techniques. An inquiry into the demand nature of dif-
ferent motions shows that these are used more for promoting constituency interests and/or
other purposes than for making the government accountable. Only 4.3 per cent of the oral
questions and 12.4 per cent of supplementary questions asked of ministers in the successive
parliaments actually focused on accountability (Ahmed, 2013). Only a few questions were
directed at seeking clarification on administrative lapses or asking explanations for policy
failure and/or non-implementation of policy. On the other hand, nearly 40 per cent of the
questions asked were intended to promote the interests of constituents. Nearly 12 per cent
of questions sought information on different policies, while 10 per cent of questions were
related to public service (Ahmed, 2013). Partisanship is not very evident during the question
hour, although questions raised during the PMQT has greater partisan overtones than those
asked during the regular question hour.
Reference has already been made to the positive attitude of the government to the scrutiny of
legislation by members. A similar conclusion can be made in respect of other techniques. Different
ministries now adopt a ‘cooperative’ approach to dealing with parliamentary questions. Refusal to
answer questions is more an exception than the rule, although some ministers often want to adopt
a ‘go slow’ tactic to avoid parliamentary questioning. In case of one-fifth of questions, information
has been provided as required in the question, while in nearly one-third of cases, matters have
been clarified (Ahmed, 2013). Ministers usually give more assurances to members in response to
‘supplementary’ than ‘original’ questions. Questions to the prime minister more often elicit posi-
tive responses than those asked of ministers. Overall, gradual improvement in the use of different
techniques and in the attitude of the government has been noticed over the last two decades.

Committees in parliament
The parliament of Bangladesh is mostly a chamber-orientated legislature. In recent years, how-
ever, committees have emerged as an important site of parliamentary activity. Reference has
already been made to the change in composition of committees and their role in the scrutiny
of legislation. Formally, parliamentary committees enjoy an important status. Article 76 of the
constitution requires that the parliament appoint a Committee on Privileges, and a Public
Accounts Committee (PAC). It also requires the parliament to set up other standing committees
to undertake functions ranging from review of draft bills and enforcement of laws to investigate
or inquire into the activities or administration of a ministry. The constitution authorizes the
parliament to confer on committees the power to enforce the attendance of witnesses, examin-
ing them on oath, and to compel the production of documents (Bangladesh. Ministry of Law,
Justice and Parliamentary Affairs, 2011, p.28). Only a few parliaments allow their committees to
exercise this type of power. The Rules specify the type and number of committees to be set up
and prescribe their composition and functions.
The successive parliaments have set up three types of committees: standing, select and special.
Standing committees are permanent; these have a longer lease of life than the other committees,
which are ad hoc in nature. Several categories of standing committees are noticed – financial,
ministerial, investigative, scrutinizing, service and house. The nature of composition of differ-
ent committees, as a natural rule, varies. However, while the number of members of different
standing committees is fixed by the Rules, the House decides on the number of members to be
appointed to a select committee or a special committee. Most standing committees (87 per cent)

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have ten members. Two committees have 15 members each, while another two have 12 mem-
bers each. The Rules do not, however, specify the proportion of committee members to be
drawn from different party groups in parliament, as in some countries.
Experience shows that the membership of committees in Bangladesh is generally distrib-
uted among different parties in proportion to their strength in the parliament. Bangladesh has
followed a majoritarian policy in distributing the chairs of different committees. The ruling
party has traditionally claimed the chairmanship of different committees. In fact, most of the
parliaments patterned after the Westminster model conventionally follow this principle. The
major exceptions within the majoritarian category are the United Kingdom, New Zealand and
India, where committee chairs are allocated to different parties on the basis of their strength
in parliament. Most of the parliaments in consensual democracies have also followed the pro-
portional principle in allocating committee chairs to different parties. In the ninth parliament
in Bangladesh (2009–2013), two committee chairs were allocated to the main opposition; this
policy was expected to herald a new tradition in parliamentary politics in Bangladesh.
Only a few, however, can be regarded as backbench committees.There is no legal restriction,
as in the United Kingdom and some other Western democracies, on ministers and other front-
benchers such as whips becoming members of different committees. Ministers even headed
different ministerial committees until 1996 when provisions were made for their replacement
by backbenchers. But ministers are still made members of these committees.They cannot, how-
ever, claim ex officio membership of several committees (Bangladesh Parliament, 2007). The
Bangladeshi practice bears little resemblance to other parliamentary democracies.
Each set of committees is important in its own right. For example, ministerial commit-
tees play a prominent role in scrutinizing legislation and exercising administrative oversight.
A ministerial committee can inquire into any activity or irregularity and serious complaint in
respect of the ministry and examine any matter that may fall within its jurisdiction (Bangladesh
Parliament, 2007, p.72). Among the financial committees, the PAC is crucially important. The
PAC in the ninth parliament had a major success in settling audit objections that had stockpiled
over decades. The Committee on Government Assurances (CGA), which has the lowest num-
ber of members (eight), has a crucial role to play in ensuring the accountability of the govern-
ment to parliament. It main job is to scrutinize the assurances, promises and undertakings given
by a minister from time to time on the floor of the House and to report on the extent to which
such assurances have been implemented.
The different sets of committees also are apparently more active, meeting and reporting
more frequently now than before. Some of the ministerial committees have used their deterrent
power, although not on a regular basis, inquiring into irregularities in the working of the con-
cerned ministries. Their meetings are also held more regularly than before, and members attend
committee meetings in good numbers. Committees thus matter.

Privileges, facilities and petitions

As in other democracies, MPs in Bangladesh enjoy certain privileges. Privileges give rise to
certain powers, immunities and exemptions; these are necessary to allow the lawmakers to dis-
charge their functions without fear or favour. Some of the privileges and immunities granted to
the parliament and its members are as follows:

• freedom of speech in parliament;

• freedom from arrest in civil cases during the continuance of the session of the House and
14 days before its commencement and 14 days after its conclusion;

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• prohibition on the courts inquiring into proceedings of parliament;

• immunity from proceedings in any court in respect of anything said or any vote cast in par-
liament or any committee;
• right of the House to receive immediate information on the arrest, detention, conviction or
imprisonment and release of a member;
• prohibition of arrest within the precincts of the House.

Freedom of speech and debate is considered the single most important parliamentary privilege.
Without this freedom and protection, MPs would be unable to perform their duties without
fear of any consequences arising from what is said in debates. Griffith et al. (1989) note that
‘This freedom includes freedom to make mistakes since there would be no freedom of speech if
everything had to be proved to be true before it was uttered.’This freedom is, however, qualified,
not absolute. Freedom of speech places a corresponding duty on the MPs to use the freedom
responsibly. The Rules impose some restrictions on the MPs. For example, they cannot refer to
any matter that is sub judice in a court of law in any part of Bangladesh. Nor can they make a
personal charge against a member, minister or holder of public office except insofar as it may be
strictly necessary in regard to the subject-matter before the House. They are also not expected
to use any offensive, abusive and vulgar expressions. Nor should they use their right of speak-
ing for the purpose of wilfully obstructing the business of the House (Bangladesh Parliament,
2007, pp.75–76).
Members of Parliament often have a tendency to move motions alleging breach of privi-
leges. Such motions are referred to the Committee on Privileges. The Rules also provide that a
question of privilege shall have precedence over other motions (Bangladesh Parliament, 2007,
p.55). However, until now, no initiative has been taken to enact any measure to give effect to
Article 78(3) of the constitution, which provides that: ‘the privileges of Parliament and of its
committees and member[s]‌may be determined by an Act of Parliament’ (Bangladesh. Ministry
of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs, 2011, p.28). In the absence of any such law, as Haque
(2009, pp.234–235) observes, cases of breach of privilege are dealt with in accordance with the
provisions of two laws passed during the Pakistan days and some provisions of the Rules. What
constitutes a breach remains mostly undefined. Taking an example from the Indian Lok Sabha,
it can be observed that anything that hinders, hampers or obstructs the House, Committees or
MPs from discharging their duties and functions effectively and efficiently and without fear or
favour will be treated as a breach of parliamentary privilege.
The Rules not only provide for safeguarding the privileges of the MPs, however; they also
seek to ensure that citizens have the scope to redress their grievances and/or make their views
heard on issues that come before the House for deliberation. Petitioning the parliament repre-
sents an important bottom-up approach to encouraging greater interaction between parliament
and the public. Rule 100 of the Rules provides that petitions may be presented or submitted
to the House, with the consent of the Speaker, on a bill that has been published in the gazette
or introduced in parliament, or on any important matter connected with the business pending
before the House, or on any other matter of public importance (Bangladesh Parliament, 2007,
p.35). However, no citizen can directly submit a petition to the House; it must be counter-
signed by an MP. Nor can an MP make a petition on his/her behalf. The Rules provide for a
high-powered Petition Committee (PC) to scrutinize petitions referred to it by the House and
to report to parliament suggesting remedial solutions. The number of petitions made to the
Bangladeshi parliament is exceedingly low. More importantly, petitions that are moved rarely
receive any response from the government or parliament. Moreover, most of the petitions are
personal in nature. There is no example of anyone petitioning on bills or other important issues

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that are under consideration by parliament.What is worrying is that most of the MPs still do not
appear to be aware of the existence of the provision in the Rules for petitioning the parliament.
But they are well aware of their privileges and facilities.

Parliamentary leadership
The Speaker is the head of the parliament. He is assisted by a Deputy Speaker. Under the consti-
tution, both are elected by the House at the first sitting of a new parliament. Theoretically, they
are expected to perform their functions in a neutral manner. In practice, it is difficult for them to
be party political neutral. Part of the reason is that, unlike the United Kingdom, the Speaker in
Bangladesh does not have a ‘safe’/‘secured’ constituency. (S)he has to compete with others to get
elected to parliament. Any attempt to play a non-partisan role in a highly polarized party system
is fraught with serious risks. Moreover, the Speaker (and the Deputy Speaker) can be removed
by a resolution of parliament supported by an absolute majority of members, exactly the same
majority needed to form a government.This simple procedure of removing a Speaker can also be
seen as an important factor discouraging a Speaker from deviating from the party line.
The Speaker presides over sittings of the parliament. He sets the agenda for parliament sit-
tings and distributes time between the government and the private members. The business
transacted in the House is classified into two categories: government business and private mem-
bers’ business. Government business, according to the Rules, consists of bills, budget, resolutions,
amendments and other motions introduced or initiated by a minister, while private members’
business consists of bills, budget, resolutions, amendments and other motions introduced or
initiated by private members (Bangladesh Parliament, 2007, 10). Generally, government busi-
ness has precedence every day except Thursday, when private members’ business has priority.
However, the Speaker, may, if necessary, allot any day other than Thursday for the transaction
of private members’ business. The government business is arranged in consultation with the
Leader of the House, while the relative precedence of notices of bills given by private members
is determined by ballot (Bangladesh Parliament, 2007, p.10).
The Speaker has the authority to ensure discipline in the chamber. Rule 15 of the Rules
empowers the Speaker to direct any member whose conduct is grossly disorderly to withdraw
immediately from the House and any member so directed shall have to absent himself for such a
period of the day’s sitting as may be decided by the Speaker (Bangladesh Parliament, 2007, p.7).
Disregarding the authority of the Speaker amounts to committing a breach of privilege, hence
a punishable offence. If necessary, the Speaker can ask the Serjeant-at-Arms to enforce his order,
although rarely does he resort to this strategy. The Speaker normally tries to cajole and per-
suade MPs not to violate the Rules. The Speaker is also the head of the Parliament Secretariat.
He assigns tasks to different people in the Secretariat. He also heads the Parliament Secretariat
Commission – the main policy-making body.
In short, the Speaker is armed with appropriate authority to ensure that the business of the
House as well as the Secretariat is carried out in an efficient and effective manner. In practice,
running the House is perhaps more difficult than getting the business of the Secretariat done. All
power in the Secretariat is centralized in the office of the Speaker. Nothing moves without his
consent. On the other hand, the MPs, in a strict sense, are not his subordinates. Regulating the
behaviour of the lawmakers is thus more difficult than exercising administrative control over the
Secretariat and its officials.To influence the behaviour of the MPs, the Speaker has to depend on
the party leaders, particularly the chief whip of the government and his opposition counterpart.
The leader of the largest parliamentary party is recognized as the Leader of the House, who is
also the prime minister. Unlike many other democracies, the two positions are not separate; the

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Table 6.2 Parliament walkouts and boycotts

Fifth Seventh Eighth Ninth

Total sitting days 400 382 373 418

Opposition walkouts   76 61 n.a. n.a.
Opposition boycott of sittings 135 (34%) 163 (43%) 223 (60%) 342 (82%)
Boycott by Leader of the Opposition 265 (66%) 354 (93%) 328 (88%) 408 (98%)

Source: Ahmed (2013), Parliament Secretariat.

same person wears two hats. The leader of the largest opposition party is given the status of the
Leader of the Opposition. Government whips enjoy the status of state ministers; but opposition
whips do not enjoy any such status.

Conclusion
The parliament of Bangladesh formally enjoys an important status. It derives its authority from
the constitution. The constitution grants it freedom to frame Rules to arrange and dispose of
business in an orderly and effective manner. Since the election of the fifth parliament in 1991,
several measures have been taken to strengthen the parliament. Reference has been made to
many of these reforms in earlier sections. Potentially the parliament has a better capacity now
to influence policy outcomes than before. In its structural manifestation the Bangladeshi par-
liament now compares favourably with some other legislatures in the Asian region. But it lags
behind even many new legislatures in terms of its behavioural manifestation. Probably the most
important reason is the dominant tendency of the two successive ruling parties to behave in a
deviant manner.The two have a tendency to define politics in a zero-sum way. Although parlia-
ments elected since 1991 have survived longer than their predecessors, the House has remained
half-empty for most of the time. Those who lose elections try to take revenge by boycotting
proceedings of the House. In none of the parliaments elected between 1991 and 2008 did the
opposition agree to attend sittings, alleging the ‘biased’ behaviour of the Speaker and lack of
adequate time to speak in the House. But none of the opposition members ever surrendered
any privileges and facilities to which they were entitled.
Holding the title of MP is now considered to be an important asset that no lawmaker is
ready to lose; every MP is thus keen to retain the title at any cost. This reveals the extent of
the importance politicians now attach to the institution of parliament, probably more for
self-preservation than for its institutionalization. In fact, the tradition of boycotting par-
liament risks affecting its institutionalization in several ways: first, it is likely to lower the
public image of parliament and parliamentarians; second, it is likely to make parliamentary
deliberation less exciting and negatively affect the nature of activism of government back-
benchers; and third, decisions taken in a half-empty House are unlikely to be taken very
seriously by those responsible for their implementation. The situation is likely to worsen in
the tenth parliament elected in January 2014 amidst an opposition boycott. The AL used its
majority in the ninth parliament to amend the constitution providing for the abolition of
the NPCG and reintroducing the provision for allowing the outgoing government to exer-
cise state power during elections. The BNP-led opposition demanded the restoration of the
NPCG and in the context of the AL government’s determination to hold elections under
the new arrangement, the BNP and its allies boycotted the tenth elections. The AL, however,

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persuaded the Ershad-led Jatiya Party to take part in the elections and made it part of the
government after the elections, and the Speaker granted it the status of ‘official opposition’
in the tenth parliament. This situation rarely exists in any parliamentary democracy. No
one can expect a party forming part of the government to be able to play its due role of an
opposition. In the context of the absence of any real opposition, the parliament is unlikely
to play any effective role; it will work something like an extended arm of the government,
legitimizing whatever the government will propose. The risk is that a parliament constituted
through an election that, as Riaz (2014) has observed, was non-inclusive and wracked by
controversy not only lacks the legitimacy needed to become effective, it may, in the long run,
create a legitimacy crisis for the government and even endanger democracy, among other
things, through its uncritical approval of whatever the government proposes.

References
Ahmed, M. (1983) Bangladesh: The Era of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Dhaka: University Press Limited.
Ahmed, N. (2002) The Parliament of Bangladesh. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Ahmed, N. (2012) Aiding the Parliament of Bangladesh. Dhaka: University Press Limited.
Ahmed, N. (2013) The Bangladesh Parliament: A Data Handbook. Dhaka: Institute of Governance Studies.
Bangladesh. Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs. (2011) The Constitution of the People’s Republic
of Bangladesh (Printed With Latest Amendment). Dhaka: Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary
Affairs.
Bangladesh Parliament. (2007) Rules of Procedure of Parliament of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh (As
Modified up to 11 January 2007). Dhaka: Bangladesh Parliament Secretariat.
Blondel, J. (1973) Comparative Legislatures. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Griffith, J. A.G., Ryle, M. and Wheeler-Booth, M. (1989) Parliament: Functions, Practice and Procedures.
London: Sweet & Maxwell.
Haque, K. A. (1994) Bangladesh Parliament Secretariat. In: Reyes, S. and Brillantes, M. (eds.). Legislative
Support Services in Asia: An Introductory Survey. Quzen, the Philippines: Congressional Research and
Training Services. pp.141–153.
Haque, K. A. (2009) Sangsadiya Riti and Paddati [Parliamentary Convention and Practices]. Dhaka: BIPS.
Kernaghan, K. (2010) Ministerial Responsibility: Interpretations, Implications and Information Access. [Online]
Available from: www.atirtf-geai.gc.ca/paper-ministerial-e.html [Accessed: 20 December 2014].
Maniruzzaman, T. (1976) Bangladesh in 1975: The Fall of the Mujib Regime and Its Aftermath. Asian
Survey. 16 (2). pp.111–129.
Riaz, A. (2014) Bangladesh’s Failed Election. Journal of Democracy. 25 (2). pp.119–130.

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 7
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
AND BUREAUCRACY
Habib Zafarullah

In contemporary Bangladesh, the need for change in its administrative-bureaucratic system

in order to unreservedly serve citizens has long been perceived in social and political cir-
cles and demanded by concerned citizens and civil society organizations. Four decades and
more is obviously an extended spell in a country’s political history for engendering meaningful
changes, but regrettably political obligation has generally been lukewarm, substantive reform
elusive and implementation perfunctory. Thus, the near-obsolete precepts of public administra-
tion and the orthodox character of the bureaucracy have remained virtually unaffected and the
structural–functional–behavioral parameters of an antediluvian arrangement, regardless of some
superficial alterations, persist. In many ways, the public administration system remains ossified by
default and thereby highly bureaucratized, overly politicized and ethically amiss.

The post-colonial and pre-independence legacy

The governmental system in Bangladesh has its roots in the colonial administration of British
India that began in the late 1850s and continued for nearly 90 years until 1947. The initial
dominant administrative roles were exclusively reserved for the servants of the crown commis-
sioned from London. The vast dominion was centrally administered through the office of the
viceroy (governor-general), the premier representative of the British monarch, enjoying virtu-
ally total control over all matters colonial. Provincial governments under the superintendence
of governors or lieutenant governors, also appointed by the crown, served under the direction
of the viceroy in maintaining law and order, collecting revenue and dispensing justice.The cen-
ter administered the more important ‘reserved subjects’; its formidable powers made provincial
governments obsequious. The Indian Civil Service (ICS) that gradually developed between
the late 1880s and the early 1940s became the ‘steel frame’ of colonial administration, support-
ing and helping maintain imperial dominance. It displayed almost all the traits of a Weberian
bureaucracy as it was strictly subjected to rational rules in recruitment, training, control and
compensation. Patronage increasingly gave way to merit; only the best and the brightest made
a career in the civil service at both the center and in the provinces (see Blunt, 1937; O’Malley,
1965; Spangenberg, 1976; Misra, 1977, for comprehensive accounts).Yet, there remained a wide
hiatus between this elitist group and the common people, a typical feature that has endured over
the years in the countries once part of British India.

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 Public administration and bureaucracy

In post-colonial Pakistan (1947–1971), the basic format of public administration under-

went sporadic insignificant changes. The colonial traditions remained embedded in the
social-administrative fabric. The successor of the ICS, the Civil Service of Pakistan (CSP), and
all other associated services of the central bureaucracy maintained their highly elitist outlook
and career-oriented approach and, with the support of the political leadership, took control
over the destiny of the nation. They were enmeshed in politics, even if behind a facade of
being apolitical.Vital positions in both the central and provincial administrations were reserved
for them as they provided critical inputs to policy making, implementation and evaluation.
Staffing regulations were ingeniously devised in protecting their coterie interests and attempts
at administrative reform were insidiously foiled (Ahamed, 1980; Khan 1980; Rahman, 1980).
The bureaucracy consolidated its position during two stints of military-authoritarian rule and
reinforced its role as a powerful player in politics and public administration and consequently,
and perhaps unavoidably, became an instrument of social control.
Thus, Bangladesh, at independence, was bequeathed a public administrative system that was
highly centralized, bureaucratized, overbearing, economically monopolistic and distanced from
the people. These bore the hallmarks of colonialism and neo-patrimonialism. Some of these are
still discernible in contemporary Bangladesh.

The state, politics and administration

In December 1972, exactly a year after seceding from Pakistan, Bangladesh was constitutionally
inaugurated as a democratic state based on Bengali nationalism and secularism and seeking to
pursue economic and social justice (Government of Bangladesh, 1972). The Bangladesh state
since then has somewhat moved away from these maxims and has taken different complex-
ions at different times. Multi-party democracy was first unilaterally mutated into a one-party
authoritarian presidential system in 1975 by the ruling party, subsequently obliterated by a coup
d’état that installed a military regime in power. Later civilianized with a multi-party democratic
set-up, the state once again became the casualty of a military takeover. During these three peri-
ods, the original constitution that had reflected people’s social and political aspirations envisaged
during the War of Independence was desecrated by governing cliques in order to promote their
narrow partisan interests. While people power helped reinstate multi-party democracy in 1991,
elected ‘democratic’ governments continued with the game of unilaterally amending the already
disfigured constitution.
The indispensable requirement of democratic consolidation lost its way as political institu-
tionalization stagnated. What has remained unrealized is ‘the fabrication of a widely acceptable
and tangible set of ideological beliefs’ designed to ‘dilute social discord, aggregate various inter-
ests and craft a more stable state’ (Zafarullah, 2003, p.287; see also Alam, 1993; Sobhan, 2000).
No serious attempts have been made to forge national consensus on the fundamental maxims
of state policy and enforcing the rules of democratic conduct. The political behavior of key
participants, mainly politicians and parties, has been governed by cultural values that are less
adaptive to the democratic ethos and generally oblivious to the public interest. Political parties
have been ridden with overly centralized structures, capricious leadership, personality-centered
factional politics, indiscipline in branches and affiliates, absence of inclusive deliberative for-
ums for thrashing out national issues and in resolving party problems, undemocratic selection
of party officials and candidates, and parochial allegiances (Lewis, 2011; see also the chapter on
Bangladesh in Oberst et al., 2013).
Bangladesh’s political culture remains fragmented and has been the principal source of
disordered governance, intermittent political chaos and fundamental differences between

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the major parties. The foremost political stakeholders in the post-authoritarian milieu
failed in the task devolved upon them of building effective political institutions, enforcing
the rule of law, providing and valuing judicial autonomy, depoliticizing and rationalizing
the administrative system, affording people’s participation in governance, creating condi-
tions for a free media, establishing governmental integrity, and, most importantly, acknow-
ledging the legitimacy of an elected government (Blair, 2013). On the contrary, both major
parties – the Awami League (AL) and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) – utilized
their respective stints in government to deepen neo-patrimonialism and promote crony
capitalism. All these have had system-wide repercussions on governmental effectiveness and
integrity.
The administrative arm of the state is implicitly referred to in the constitution, which was
originally based on the Westminster paradigm but unilaterally modified by governing parties in
the 1970s and 1980s to present different variants. Each variant advanced a different approach
in dealing with administrative matters. To be specific, during the first few years, the relationship
between the political executive and the bureaucracy was determined by an ethos that under-
scored the supremacy of the political over the administrative. This changed with the Fourth
Constitutional Amendment that formally politicized the bureaucracy after being incorporated
into the only ‘lawful’ political party. During the ‘democratic’ era, the political-administrative
nexus underwent another shift. Now the relationship between the two domains became one
of mutuality between the ruling party and a select group of highly partisan bureaucrats. The
non-loyalists were sidelined, either posted to insignificant positions, made sinecures, or their
career advancement stalled, only to return to the middle of proceedings with the change of
government. This has become a consistent occurrence, the result of the penetrating politiciza-
tion of the bureaucracy.
Despite the emergence of non-state enterprises and private initiatives across all sectors, the
state has remained the prime mover in development. State power has remained concentrated
on politically bureaucratized command structures regulating economic activities and develop-
ing and implementing policies. In reality, the relativity of state autonomy has been influenced
by political regime changes and determined by externally driven neoliberal courses of action
(Sobhan, 2000). Thus, public administration as a state phenomenon has not been immune to
either domestic political prescripts or international governance compulsions.
The constitution does not specify the structure and functions of the government, nor does it
say much about the conduct of official business. The latter is enshrined in the Rules of Business
(ROB), while the interactive arrangements between ministries and other administrative juris-
dictions are outlined in the Secretariat Instructions. A few short sentences in the constitution
mention public officials and their service conditions, the role of the central personnel agency
and tribunals dealing with administrative matters (Government of Bangladesh, 1972: Art. 117,
pp.133–140). The civil service is not managed by any parliamentary statute. Over the years,
it has been controlled by ad hoc rules, regulations and ordinances. Contrarily, the ROB are
more or less clear about the prime minister having the last word in creating and rearranging
ministries (and divisions within them) and specifying their tasks. Legislative approval is not
required for administrative reorganization. Indeed, Bangladesh has significantly departed from
the Westminster system. The prime minister is more than ‘first among equals’ as her office has
arrogated all powers, while ministers and other functionaries have been reduced to ciphers
(Khan, 2013). Such despotism within a ‘democratic’ set-up has administration-wide ramifica-
tions and lessens governmental effectiveness. It is a reflection of ‘illiberal democracy’, an antith-
esis of the liberal kind, the latter distinguished ‘by the rule of law, a separation of powers, and the
protection of basic liberties’ (Zakaria, 1997, p.22). Interestingly, while the public administrative

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systems in other illiberal democracies, such as Singapore and Malaysia, are functionally more
efficient and productive, this is not the case in Bangladesh.
The Bangladeshi state manifests a mix of three distinctive but overlapping forms – integral or
hegemonic, patrimonial and custodial (Morgan, 1996). It is integral because economic perform-
ance has been low to moderate, central planning has had its pitfalls, development plan imple-
mentation is still mainly undertaken by public agencies, the policy process is heavily influenced
by the bureaucracy, and civil society is permitted to play only a restrictive role in public affairs.
Clientelism and social obligations of the bureaucracy, both diametric to professionalism, signify
state patrimonialism, whereas the insignificance of political institutions in governance and the
overriding imperious prime ministerial handling of public issues highlight the custodial dispos-
ition of the state (Zafarullah et al., 2001).These have implications for the way the administrative
system is organized.

The structural-functional contours of public administration

Bangladesh has a unitary state structure and is based on a two-tier arrangement in which the
national government plays the principal role in governing, complemented by a ‘representative’
local government system that is virtually subservient to central control. The former extends its
reach through six administrative divisions, whose main task is to superintend and coordinate
the operations of line ministries and public agencies around the country. Its other important
role is overseeing the functions of district administration, which, in turn, keeps an eye on the
performance of elected sub-district and municipal bodies and, below them, the union councils.
Down to the sub-district (upazila) level, officials belonging to different civil service cadres are
deployed to perform routine administrative and developmental functions there. Thus, there is a
dichotomy in the role played by civil servants – one as national government officials, the other
as sub-national-level functionaries.
The national government structure itself is classified into ministries/divisions, executive
agencies and autonomous bodies. Over the years, the amplitude of this structure has expanded
with the addition of new areas of administration, such as environmental protection, sustain-
able development, disaster management, gender and youth affairs, overseas employment and
public–private enterprises. The national secretariat is at the hub of national administration,
conceiving, initiating and framing policies for implementation by executive agencies, statutory
bodies and local government councils. The relationship between the secretariat and agencies
is formal and direct, the latter always on a subordinate footing, while statutory bodies are, on
paper, at arm’s length but in reality always under the influence of the relevant ministry.
Constituents of the Bangladesh Civil Service (BCS) represent the higher corps of the bur-
eaucracy and are the principal protagonists of governmental action. They actively contribute to
policy making, planning, executing, supervising and monitoring a variety of tasks undertaken at
the behest of the political executive or based on roles officially assigned to them.
Horizontally, the BCS is classified into 28 functional cadres, each with its own jurisdic-
tion and specialization in particular spheres of governmental activity – some of a general
nature (e.g., administrative, financial, taxation) and some more professional (e.g., health, educa-
tion, telecommunications). This separation according to the degree of specialism often incites
generalist–specialist rifts that affect performance and integrity and thereby the delivery of pub-
lic services. The bulk of BCS personnel are assigned positions in ministries, some are posted to
executive agencies (departments, directorates), while a few are seconded to autonomous bodies.
During their ‘lifelong’ career, they remain part of the cadre they were initially assigned to, but
may be given positions in a ministry that is not quite relevant to their cadre’s mission. Political

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machinations render useless any stipulated guidelines in placements and transfers; all that matters
is the degree of influence one can muster over ministers or someone closely connected to them.
Add to that the scramble for contractual appointments by retired officials or those from outside
the bureaucracy supportive of the governing party. During military rule, the beneficiaries were
mainly retired military personnel; in the so-called ‘democratic’ era the long queue for contracts
has included both retired civil and military officers and the political factor has always been the
key to these appointments. Bureaucratization can also be linked to the two party governments’
tampering with the retirement age for civil servants to continue employing their favored offic-
ers (Karim, 2014).
The internal organization of ministries and divisions therein follows a pyramidal structural
pattern that appears orthodox and simple, but is functionally complex to the extent of distorting
the uniformity of the configuration. Often a lack of coordination between divisions in the same
ministry can happen with contrary outcomes, although rules of interaction and communica-
tion between decision-making points within the secretariat structure are, more or less, plainly
defined in the Secretariat Instructions.
An observation of the late 1980s on the application of rules in government administration
is still valid today. Procedural interruptions and procrastination in decision making are the out-
come of ‘disparate sets of rules and regulations’ while having ‘minute rules for every occasion is
inconsistent with a dynamic administration’ (USAID, 1989, p.ii). Existing rules deter lower-level
officials from applying their discretion, even for cases that are not so complicated. Conversely,
junior officers have revealed a proclivity to obviate decisions lest they go against their superiors’
stance. This has also been due to the want of self-confidence among these officers or the latter’s
lack of faith in their ability to decide (Huda and Rahman, 1989).
Entrusted with the task of implementing policies formulated at the secretariat, the executive
agencies are expected to have the wherewithal (specialization, technical ability, experience and
financial resources) to provide useful inputs to policy development. However, complexities of
the administrative kind often hinder this process. Information – the most critical element in
policy making – has until now been difficult to acquire, store and retrieve. With digitization,
some improvements have occurred, but relevance, reliability and validity of information are
often twisted to show policy outcomes in a positive light simply to serve the political interests of
the governing party. Thus, soundness or rationality of decisions is invariably compromised and
society is denied appropriate action by the government. The ROB are clear about exchanging
relevant data and information between ministries and agencies so that the merit of each case can
be assessed. Prescribed periodic reporting by ministries (Government of Bangladesh, 1996) can
be a potent tool in assessing policy performance, but they generally lack enough information
on programs undertaken and services provided; the data more often than not is ‘incomplete,
contradictory and inadequately explained’ (Zafarullah, 2006, p.85).

Politicization and divided loyalties

Ambivalence surrounded the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats right after inde-
pendence. The newly installed political leadership was suspicious of the inherited bureaucracy
for its close association with pre-independence authoritarian regimes. It firmly believed that
members of the erstwhile CSP had supported anti-people policies and actions of those regimes,
persecuted the opposition and demeaned people’s aspirations, and therefore it was imperative to
place them under strict political control. Apparently, this section of the bureaucracy – the central
superior services in pre-1971 Pakistan – was estranged from the center of power despite their
administrative expertise and long experience at the higher levels of government. The regime’s

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disfavor of this group for another more loyal to its political agenda affected administrative per-
formance, lowered quality of service delivery and morale, caused pervasive insubordination and
heightened bureaucratic tension, distrust and hostility. Eventually, this attitude of the political
leadership backfired and had to be reversed when the government encountered a daunting task
in tackling worsening social, political and economic conditions. It was then forced to solicit the
bureaucracy’s support for advice and direction (Zafarullah and Khan, 2001). But politicization
of the Bangladesh bureaucracy has been more than this.
The Weberian maxims of neutrality, meritocracy and institutional loyalty as being quintes-
sential in a public bureaucracy (see Gerth and Mills, 1946) seem to have gone out of fashion
in contemporary Bangladesh. Far from being instrumental in policy implementation only, the
bureaucracy has more to do with policy making, which is also not uncommon even in advanced
democracies, but the extent of involvement of certain favored groups within it is inordinate.
Often, hierarchical relationships, the mechanisms of coordination and control, and impersonal
rules are compromised to accommodate the politics–bureaucracy nexus. The bureaucracy has
been overwhelmed by party politicization, inter-cadre rivalry and inter-organizational discord.
Civil servants’ career mobility has been affected as the governing party’s favored ones are pit-
ted against others loyal to the opposition, regardless of the latter’s credentials or performance.
Factionalism based on political allegiance has had disastrous effect on esprit de corps and has
demeaned the public’s image of the bureaucracy (Zafarullah, 1994, 2007, 2013; Huque and
Rahman, 2003).
We can understand the nature and extent of politicization in the bureaucracy by consid-
ering three forms: institutional, operative and behavioral politicization (Almendares, 2011).
Institutionally, the bureaucracy has been politicized through the staffing process that has prac-
tically taken away any semblance of neutrality. While the reforms of the mid-1970s did serve
to streamline the recruitment and promotion processes, the post-1990 ‘democratically elected’
regimes have brazenly misused them to dispense patronage among ruling party loyalists. Key
positions in the administrative hierarchy are generally reserved for party loyalists as reciprocity
for their explicit support of regime agendas and political acts. Executive–bureaucracy relations,
for all practical purposes, mirror the old feudalistic patron–client exchanges.
Operative politicization has occurred at several levels. At the national level, policies are con-
ceived by party higher-ups but almost always designed by partisan bureaucrats. These reflect
the preferences and options of the ruling party and are supported by the latter in exchange for
better career opportunities. At the local level, development programs are managed by agencies
that are overwhelmingly fortified by staunch party adherents or by line managers who belong
to the favored group. When the AL dislodged the BNP from power in 1996, it went for thor-
ough policy shifts and achieved these by across-the-board replacements in administrative posi-
tions. When returned to the helm five years later, the BNP repeated the process, as has the AL
again since 2008. Today, patronage in form and substance is ubiquitous in public administration
(Zafarullah, 2003).
Nevertheless, the bureaucracy as a collective unit cannot be reproached for being overly
erratic and irresponsible in pursuing its shared task of working for the country’s progress.
Much has been achieved through the public administrative system, such as attaining the
Millennium Development Goals to some extent. Arguably, the bureaucracy does not seem
to represent any entrenched interest insofar as their roles dictate them to support and work
for nation-building and development. Some ministries or their associated agencies may take
a committed and often firm stance in pursuing certain objectives relevant to the mission or
policies they are supposed to execute. Discord or disputes with other ministries/agencies
may emerge, but these are not because of politicization, but zealous obligation on their part

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to uphold organizational rights and undertakings. On the other hand, individual civil serv-
ants or cliques may covertly work for special interests, either political or business-related
(Kochanek, 1993).
The perennial cold war between generalists and specialists has been another reason for hos-
tilities in the bureaucracy and the premise for bureaucratic politics. Over the years, these two
groups of civil servants have disputed over matters relating to their comparable standings in
the bureaucracy vis-à-vis key positions held, benefits obtained, secondment to international
organizations and even opportunities for overseas training. They have their own organized pro-
fessional bodies that work to further their parochial group interests striving to either maintain
or promote their positions in the hierarchy and lobby politicians to that purpose, but not always
in a professional manner.
However, politicization or bureaucratic politics does have adverse behavioral consequences.
It leads to organizational inefficiency, inequity in task allocation and aversion toward reform.
Divided loyalty among the majority of civil servants linked to either the AL or the BNP is a
matter of fact in the Bangladesh bureaucracy. By a similar token, incumbent political function-
aries at the highest levels of government have often gone overboard in misusing their positions
of authority by blatantly manipulating outcomes of national and local elections to their party’s
advantage. Intelligence agencies and their personnel have been at work for the ruling party
in the form of organizing party nominations, pressurizing opposition contestants to withdraw
their candidature and intimidating political opponents. After the abolition of the caretaker
system in 2011, the AL government transferred officers to influence the electoral process in
its favor. The bottom line suggests that the ruling party relies on the administrative system to
further its political interests (Mazumdar, 2014). Such bureaucratization of politics has been
embedded in the nation’s political culture and all parties in power since independence have
contributed to its surge. Obviously, it serves as an impediment to democratic consolidation,
but for the country’s partisan public officials this is a boon as it helps boost their own stand-
ing, power and influence, and enables them to obtain pecuniary benefits at the cost of redu-
cing their worth in organizational matters and thereby affecting administrative performance.
Bureaucratic politics has had the effect of reducing the organizational cohesion required for an
integrated approach to resolving problems in society and polity (Ahmed, 1996).
While generally bureaucratic influence in governmental decision making has always been
acknowledged and considered legitimate and therefore unavoidable, in Bangladesh the presence
of large numbers of partisan bureaucrats at key levels raises questions about the objectivity and
efficacy of the process. Stakeholder participation in policy making is hamstrung by bureaucratic
dominance.

Transparency, accountability and integrity

Axiology has an important place in public administration as bureaucratic standards are meas-
ured by its indicators.Values and ethical standards in today’s world are considered essential both
in judging bureaucratic personality and assessing administrative performance. The declining
image of the Bangladesh bureaucracy has been disconcerting and this has been mainly due to
public officials’ relapse into undesirable behavior. Integrity has been compromised to such an
extent that the bureaucracy is hardly trusted to do what it is expected to (Askvik and Jamil,
2013). Because of the continued opacity of government functions and unenforced accountabil-
ity measures, the scope for indulging in unscrupulous activities has widened. However, reform
campaigners’ unremitting appeals for addressing the problem by enhancing the transparency of
governmental operations and compelling compliance with rules of good conduct have failed to

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have any positive sway. Effective governance still remains elusive and needs to be on the list of
priorities of the government (World Bank, 2002).
An important factor that has contributed to civil servants’ aberrant behavior is the lack of
emphasis on the legal aspects of administration. Administrative law is almost absent from the
national regulatory scheme and thus, for all practical purposes, activities of public agencies or
the decisions they make and enforce go unchallenged if found to be working against the public
interest and inconsiderate of citizen needs. Administrative law in Bangladesh is mainly to do
with ‘administrative tribunals’ that deal exclusively with civil service matters and have no rele-
vance whatsoever to the implications of administrative action for the people. The office of the
Ombudsman, originally enshrined in the constitution of 1972 and later legislated in 1980, is yet
to be institutionalized (Government of Bangladesh, 1980; PARC, 2000; Iftekharuzzaman, 2007).
Interestingly, this pro-citizen legislation enacted by the parliament during military rule was not
found appropriate by subsequent ‘democratic’ governments and thus remains a dead-letter. The
incorrect interpretation of administrative law and the non-existence of the ombudsman there-
fore mean that citizens are not protected from inappropriate administrative acts and there is
hardly any way for them to counter those. Of course, they can take officials or public agencies
to court, but such a move would be inconvenient and costly.
That administrative law or the mechanism for investigating people’s grievances can help
yield better results for governance has only been highlighted by reform-prescribing bodies and
civil society but not seriously mooted at the highest levels of government. Their absence in
Bangladesh has encouraged public officials to be insensitive to moral norms. Unquestionably,
this has had a telling effect on bureaucratic ethics and has widened the scope for unethical prac-
tices – corruption, to be precise. Secrecy regulations, framed and enforced during colonial times,
drive bureaucrats to withhold information from ‘outsiders’, such as the media, unless author-
ized by certain ‘designated’ persons like ministers or officers toeing the governing party line.
Moreover, rules regulating civil service conduct restrict the free flow of information between
ministries and agencies (Government of Bangladesh, 1979). Indeed, a ‘shroud of secrecy and
confidentiality procreates distrust among officials, causes misinterpretation and misapplication
of rules, undermines efficiency, and provides dishonest bureaucrats more liberty to engage in
unethical practices’ (Zafarullah, 2003, p.280).
The problem in Bangladeshi public administration is not only malfeasance, i.e., acting
illegally, but what Finer labeled ‘overfeasance’ or excessive power abuse – ‘where duty is under-
taken beyond what law and custom oblige or empower’ (Finer, 1940, p.338). Arrogation of dis-
cretionary authority and overuse of arbitrary powers is seemingly ingrained in the bureaucratic
psyche and is at variance with the tenets of democratic governance and a hazard for develop-
ment initiatives.1
The incursion of politics into and intense politicking and bureaucratization within the
state apparatus generate spin-offs affecting administrative integrity and performance. These
include corrupt practices such as graft and extortion, power abuse, dereliction of duties
and responsibilities, personalization of rule application, embezzlement of public funds, etc.,
mainly for individual or group gain. Bangladesh has been branded one of the most corrupt
countries in the world and exposed to international derision over the years, and the bureau-
cracy has been the principal contributor to this malaise.2 The capture of democratic institu-
tions by ruling political elites and a highly regulatory environment without effective con-
trol structures have had their influence in widening the corruption net. The advent of the
market economy giving way to ‘greater interaction between entrepreneurs and regulators’
(Biru, 2010, p.258) has intensified the incidence of corruption across the public sector and
beyond. At all levels of administration and in most sectors, the high prevalence of corruption

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is noted (Zafarullah and Siddiquee, 2001). The highly bureaucratized application of rules is
just a facade behind which unscrupulous officials seek refuge and ride roughshod over citi-
zens seeking services from public agencies. Bribery, extortion and the like are common in
the police department, customs and taxation services, public utilities, the justice system and
the education sector, to name a few (TIB, 1997).
The almost opaque work environment has induced a large proportion of public personnel to
resort to dishonest practices and power abuse. The national integrity system is weak and unable
to enforce the principles of morality. The powers of the Anti-Corruption Commission have
been reduced to a point where it has become an appendage to the executive, while the Office
of the Comptroller and Auditor General is at best an exalted government department (Parnini,
2011; Daily Star, 2013a; Iftekharuzzaman, 2013). Neither are able to perform their statutorily
defined functions with alacrity or without political influence.

Representativeness and staffing matters

The centralized administrative structure of the colonial kind still persists despite some spor-
adic attempts at decentralization. This is accompanied by the old-fashioned rank-in-corps
system in the bureaucracy that enables inductees to make a lifelong vocational career with-
out having to worry about anything. This approximates the Weberian prototype, which is
characterized by tenure, protection from arbitrary dismissal, opportunities for rapid advance-
ment, periodical training, on-salary increments based on rank rather than on performance,
and retirement payouts. As tenure is guaranteed, civil servants do not lose their jobs except
for gross malfeasance. Due to occasional restructuring, they may lose their positions but will
nevertheless remain in the service and entitled to all the benefits. Such career advantages
are not available in the private sector and, hence, young university graduates are lured into
applying for jobs in the civil service in large numbers.
The normal demand–supply equation of the external labor market (ELM) does not
apply in the case of civil service recruitment. The state has taken on the responsibility of
creating employment for university graduates, a significant number of whom would prob-
ably remain jobless if they were to depend on the forces that influence the ELM (Zafarullah
et al., 2001). Thus, almost every year the Public Service Commission (PSC) organizes open
competitive recruitment examinations to induct new cohorts of junior-level officers. At the
entry level, graduates compete for a small number of positions in the several civil service
cadres. For instance, in the 33rd examination in 2013, only 4.42 percent of the candidates
were successful and recommended for various positions.3 Not enough, though, for the
growing number of graduates every year from nearly 60 public and private universities in
the country.4
Is the civil service socially representative of the country’s population? Not really. Public
employment is a constitutional right for all citizens; faith, ethnicity, caste, place of origin and,
more importantly, gender should not be factors in the recruitment process and none can be
discriminated against for representing a certain social group (Government of Bangladesh, 1972,
Art. 29, Clauses 1 and 2).Yet, even after over four decades of nationhood, social underrepresen-
tation has been a stain on the social fabric and an impediment to social inclusion in govern-
mental administration. This is despite affirmative action attempts to usher in notions of equality
of opportunity and equity in bureaucratic recruitment. Unofficial statistics suggest that in 2010,
the percentage of female officers in the BCS was only a little over 15 (Islam, 2013). This may
have improved a little in 2014, but not significantly, despite women continuing to perform
better academically at tertiary levels if we consider university results as an objective indicator.

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Women experience difficulty not only in gaining entry into the civil service but also in break-
ing through the glass ceiling. In general, gaining promotion has not been an easy proposition for
them, being victims of systemic and subjective discrimination (Zafarullah, 2000).
Merit is not the primary criterion in recruitment as less than half (45 percent) of the posi-
tions are filled in the BCS based on performance in competitive examinations. The other
55 percent is filled through a quota principle. This is done to fulfill a constitutional obligation
of making the bureaucracy more socially inclusive (Government of Bangladesh, 1972, Art. 29,
Clause 3). Accordingly, the district quota of 55 percent is distributed among freedom fight-
ers’ children (30 percent), women (10 percent), indigenous people (5 percent) and ‘general’
(10 percent) (BPSC, n.d.). This, to some extent, may improve access to public employment for
disadvantaged and marginalized people, minorities and women and meets the requirements of
democratic governance, especially the principles of social justice (see Kranz, 1976; Hero and
Wolbrecht, 2005), but is certainly not close enough in making the bureaucracy representative.
What exactly is included in the ‘general’ quota is ambiguous as there is no explanation in any
policy. The religious minorities have not been given a quota, yet they represent nearly 10 per-
cent of the population. Furthermore, the women’s quota is absurd as it does not even come close
to the country’s total female populace.
The quota system has been mired in confusion and controversy since it was first initiated in
the late 1970s, but in recent times exception has been taken to its continuation in its present
form. One report argues that the non-merit quota is ‘inconsistent with the guarantee of equal
opportunity’ that the constitution envisages. Also, ‘exceptions should not be larger than the gen-
eral rule’ (Khan and Ahmad, 2008, p.13).The continuation of the quota for the children of free-
dom fighters has raised eyebrows as they constitute a very small segment of the population and
thus do not warrant more than half a percent in the quota distribution. It has also been abused
for political purposes. The population-weighted district quota has been irrationally applied
as smaller districts are unduly disadvantaged (for a thorough analysis of the quota system, see
Zafarullah, 2010). Public administration experts and practitioners also are critical of its rationale
and call for its overhaul as the system is being despoiled by partisan politics and bureaucratic
engineering. The recent spate of unrest and violence is a clear signal from the people (univer-
sity students, to be precise) of their antipathy toward the quota system and the way it has been
manipulated for political gains (Daily Star, 2013b). Myriad issues relating to irregularities and
corruption in the PSC’s administration of the recruitment process have been highlighted and
need to be corrected (Karim, 2007).
Career planning hardly conforms to acknowledged personnel management paradigms.
It is in disorder and the managers within government have been reticent in devising a
proper scheme that would serve both the interests of civil servants and the preconditions
of efficiency. Thus, ad hoc measures regulate promotions and position rotations within the
administrative structure. While on paper merit and seniority are the prime criteria, these
are often unheeded during promotion rounds. Career planning is not integrated; rather it
is fragmented along cadre lines and controlled by supervising ministries. Executive caprice
decides promotions, which again do not follow any regular pattern. Here also, political influ-
ence plays a dominating role; those regarded as sympathetic to the ruling party are deemed
more deserving of a higher place in the hierarchy, while those suspected of being ‘loyal’ to
the opposition party have to suffer and patiently wait their turn until the latter is returned
to power. In recent times, the sudden surge in promotions has severely jolted the adminis-
trative system. It has ‘not only seriously damaged the ideal pyramid structure of the adminis-
tration, but … also put in place a politically blessed group of people. Politicization seems to
have been taken to a ridiculous level’ (Feroze, 2014). Partisan politics has led to large-scale

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deployment/demarcation of personnel as ‘officer on special duty’ for being ‘non-loyal’ to the

governing party. Most remain in that absurd position during the tenure of the government
and there has emerged a perennial strife between loyalists and others ‘owing allegiance’ to
the opposition (Karim and Islam, 2013).5

Reforms: marking time or moving forward?

To all intents and purposes, basic administrative reform occurred during two stints of mili-
tary rule. Before and after, reform attempts were piecemeal. No coherent reform philosophy
or approach was adopted and politicians failed to utilize the internal expertise within the
bureaucracy and bring about meaningful changes. The bureaucracy itself has been undemon-
strative and lacks a professional approach in terms of style and attitude in tidying up the exist-
ing malaise and embracing innovative managerial techniques. At the political level, serious
discourse on administrative problems and finding ways to improve has been inconspicuous.
Demands for substantial modifications to the existing system have stemmed only from civil
society and external funding agencies, but these have largely been ignored by successive
governments.
Nonetheless, small changes did come about but limited to specific agencies or tasks. For
instance, some reforms have helped liberalize and deregulate the financial system and intro-
duce sounder accounting and auditing procedures, budgeting techniques and a management
information system. Structural reforms led to the privatization of state-owned enterprises,
while the domain of private or non-governmental initiatives has been widened. The decen-
tralization scheme of the 1980s has been reconfigured, but mainly to serve political interests,
and until the beginning of 2014 local bodies remained in bureaucratic control and virtually
non-representative. Information and communication technology has found a prominent place
in governmental operations and the so-called ‘Digital Bangladesh’ policy of the current gov-
ernment strives to close the digital divide and achieve e-governance (Alam and Ahmed, 2008;
Bhuiyan, 2011; Islam and Tsuji, 2011).
Relational reforms have been hard to come by because of attitudinal and perceptive fac-
tors among both politicians and bureaucrats. The relationship between them is complex and
unstructured and the question of political control and accountability has not been fully resolved.
In the current epoch of economic rationalism and neoliberal approach to governance, the
traditional politics–administration nexus is taken for granted and this has been the crux of the
problem and the reason for partisan attitudes infiltrating the administrative system (Zafarullah
et al., 2001).
International best practices in administrative reform are yet to be fully adopted in
Bangladesh. Many developing countries, following in the footsteps of the advanced liberal
democracies, have moved from public administration to public management by embracing
New Public Management (NPM), which seeks to incorporate private-sector principles and
practices in governmental administration. Several reform planning bodies since 1993 have
prescribed changes along the NPM model and the ‘good governance’ paradigm, but these
have been very marginally applied. The structural-functional dimensions have been main-
tained with peripheral modifications and thus have proven counter-productive considering
efficiency, effectiveness and equity matters. Overall, the notion of inclusive governance that
focuses on citizen participation in public affairs will need to be addressed to make public
policy making and implementation more meaningful (see Huque and Zafarullah, 2014;
Sarker, 2006; Kim and Monem, n.d.).

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Concluding remarks
The above narrative may have provided a dismal representation of the administrative system and
the bureaucracy that runs it. However, this is not to suggest that the bureaucracy has not been
a positive stakeholder in the country’s development process. Despite intensive politicization,
some public policies implemented and administered by public servants have been effective in
attaining defined developmental goals. However, isolated cases of success do not represent the
totality. Thus, the administrative system in Bangladesh has to shed its bureaucratized and politi-
cized guise if it is to be more functionally accomplished and active in realizing the aspirations of
a progressive nation. The structural impediments toward the efficient delivery of public services
have to be removed and democratic governance principles need to be correctly applied so that
citizens are not left out of the development equation. Their engagement and participation are
essential constituents in the twin processes of development and democratic consolidation. None
should be marginalized and excluded from either process, especially women, as gender equality
and non-discrimination are both important for development to be inclusive and empower-
ing. Also important is the creation and operation of a decentralized administrative framework.
Localized arrangements can always be more sensitive to local needs and can provide citizens
easy access to state services and activities.
The bureaucracy, as the most vital instrument of the state, will need to be transformed from
structural, functional and behavioral standpoints and this is the crux of the problem. Historically
and by nature, the bureaucracy has been conservative, reform-averse and disdainful of political
control, even though segments within it have forged a partisan relationship with the party in
power. The specifics of governance – transparency of government operations, accountability of
officials, predictability of cause and effects based on comprehensible maxims, orientation toward
probity, and stakeholder participation in all public activities managed by the state – should
regulate inter-agency, bureaucrat–politician and citizen–bureaucracy relationships. The statu-
tory regulation of the civil service has become central to the proper running of the adminis-
trative system; past governments marked time in enacting civil service legislation for decades.
No longer can this be ignored. Public officials are expected to contribute toward the common
good by following a set of values that order their individual and collective behavior. They need
to overcome all constraints and challenges to work for the betterment of society.
If the past is any indicator, any wide-ranging reform effort will continue to be resisted
from within the bureaucracy regardless of political, civil society and even external demands.
Therefore, only a committed selfless political leadership can impose its will upon the servants of
the republic. There cannot be any compromise on this, for the interests of the people and what
they get from the public administrators should always be at the top of the government’s agenda.

Notes
1 The order is (from highest to lowest): secretary (including additional secretary), joint secretary, deputy
secretary, senior assistant secretary and assistant secretary.
2 In 2013, Bangladesh ranked 136th among 177 countries in the Amnesty International Corruption
Perception Index; between 2002 and 2006, it was at the bottom of the rankings. [Online] Available
from: http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2013/results [Accessed: April 14, 2014].
3 There were a total of 193,059 candidates, of whom 18,693 passed the preliminary and written
examination. Finally, 8,529 were selected after the oral interviews. [Online] Available from: http://
bangladeshresult.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/33-bcs_result_20149285823_2.pdf [Accessed: April
14, 2014].
4 Of course, the PSC does not recognize the degrees students obtain from most of the private universities
and hence they are deemed ineligible to apply.

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5 These officers do not have any job descriptions and as such do not have any specific duties. This reposi-
tioning is, in fact, a punishment for the supporters of the other major party, which has followed the same
pattern when in power.

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 8
CIVIL–MILITARY RELATIONS
Al Masud Hasanuzzaman

The pre-election political conflict in Bangladesh during 2013 renewed speculation over the
return of the 2007 ‘soft coup’ or some form of military intervention in the country. However,
the conjecture was proved wrong as overall affairs had been under the management and coer-
cive control of the civilian administration. The military was also called out to assist the gov-
ernment to keep order throughout the tenth national elections, which took place on January
5, 2014 amid a boycott by the major opposition political alliance, erratic violence and a low
voter turnout. Although the polls have been criticized as a setback for democracy, the foregone
results brought the ruling Awami League to power with an absolute majority implying civil-
ian pre-eminence and indicating a continuation of the post-2009 state of civil–military rela-
tions. Earlier, 2009 marked a new chapter in the country’s political history as, after two years
of political uncertainty under a military-backed caretaker government, Bangladesh returned
to democracy following the ninth parliamentary elections held in December 2008. It signi-
fied a fresh start of building democracy and institutionalizing civilian control over all state
institutions/apparatuses, including the armed forces. Indeed, the parameters of civilian con-
trol of the military are spelt out in the country’s constitution, wherein the supremacy of the
former is enshrined allowing no room for involvement of the latter in the process of politics
or state governance. The practicality of functioning of the armed forces under the Ministry of
Defense headed by the prime minister, control over the Armed Forces Division, security and
intelligence agencies as well as parliamentary oversight are the significant institutional mecha-
nisms in this regard. The recent Fifteenth Amendment to the constitution incorporated further
restrictive measures in Article 7A aimed at the military, and thus any attempt to abrogate or
suspend the constitution would be regarded as an act of sedition punishable by death. Despite
these safeguards for civilian supremacy the nature of political governance over the last five years
portrays a dismal scenario characterizing improper functioning of vital state organs and political
institutions, intense politicization, lack of agreement on peaceful transfer of power, abolition of
a non-partisan caretaker system through the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment and conse-
quential violent political confrontations. The legacies of military interventions, militarization
of the polity, civilianization processes, the 2007 ‘soft coup’, as well as the military’s ascendancy
as a dominant institutional pressure with its cosseted corporate interests – all have a colossal
bearing on the existing civil–military relations. As observed, all through the democratic phases,

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institutionalizing civilian control could not be accomplished owing to lack of proper state- and
nation-building, weak political institution-building, partisan decision process and politicization
of the major formal and informal segments of the society together with the country’s armed
forces. The current phase that began in 2009 resembles the post-1990 processes with a policy
of appeasement toward the armed forces in supporting their corporate interests under a semb-
lance of civilian control. Any active or circuitous military involvement in the future depends on
extreme cases of political ambiguity, multifarious insurmountable crises, rise of Islamic extremist
forces hampering national and international security and miserable malfunctioning of the pol-
itical sector to steer the wheel of the state. This chapter furnishes an overview of civil–military
relations in different phases of political developments in Bangladesh since independence in
1971, with a focus on the post-2009 state of affairs highlighting the strategies of the govern-
ment, state decisions, related processes and practices affecting those relations.

Analytical issues
Civil–military relations in the context of developing countries have special connotations owing
to direct and indirect army interventions in politics or state affairs, as well as new dimensions of
interactions since the post-Cold War globalization phase.Various scholarly inquiries have been
made to explore the nature of military involvement in politics, extent of civilian control and
the civil–military interface in the process of state management. Civil–military relations entail
the relationship between the politico-societal sectors and the armed forces in matters of dis-
tribution of power, accomplishment of respective stakes and pledges, state decision process and
security issues involving both internal and external dimensions. Although academic interests in
such relations are age-old, renewed attention on the same had developed among scholars in the
post-war period. Accordingly, various theoretical propositions that portrayed the primacy of the
political sector or civilian control of the military, and the latter’s remaining neutral, to a great
extent matched with the consolidated democracies characterized by apposite functioning of
their democratic institutions. Emphasis here is therefore on pre-eminence of the political sector
in the process of formal governance where the military as a professionalized body along with
its technical know-how and other essential inputs contributes constructively to security issues,
defense-related matters or policies.
Unlike the matured democracies, the experiences of many of the developing societies have
been quite dissimilar where, in the post-colonial period, the military, being the major modern-
izing force, took over state power on various grounds and introduced either direct military rule,
militarism and a military-dominated political process or a facade of democratic order of different
sorts. For further elucidation regarding civil–military relations, scholarly inquisitions continued to
emphasize good governance, democratic control of the military and reasonably well-integrated
civil–military interactions in the perspective of exigent security concerns. With the passage of
time in the post-Cold War period there have been waves of democratization and forces of glo-
balization that have swept the developing countries. As observed, in many such countries includ-
ing Bangladesh the military has gone back to barracks but its subordination to political control
remains vague against the backdrop of a lack of institutionalization of civil–military relations.

Post-liberation scenario up to the ‘soft coup’ of 2007

Unlike those in other new nations, the armed forces of Bangladesh are a product of the country’s
Liberation War through their participation in the fighting led by a civilian government-in-exile
that portrayed a unique exemplar of civil–military relations. However, their very contribution

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made them concerned regarding the subsequent role of the state and reorganization of the
military in the post-liberation period. The military that participated in the nine-month-long
Liberation War of 1971 had included ‘rebel officers, privates and civil militiamen recruited by
nationalist and Marxist parties – and divided into multiple revolutionary cells and political fac-
tions’ (Codron, 2007, p.2). This force as such was not cohesive and was characterized by ideo-
logically divided, incoherent groups and was soon subject to further division, factionalism and
internal schism, most notably by the concurrent existence of the conflicting interests of the
freedom fighter groups and the fellow repatriates from Pakistan within its structures. The strat-
egies and policies pursued by the then government of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman were weighted
in favor of the freedom fighter groups with patronization and promotions, thereby resulting
in a sense of despair among the repatriates. The civilian government subordinated the military
to state authority and expected them to be apolitical, retain organizational conservatism and
remain committed to professional responsibilities.
At the outset, the military’s support for the newly constructed democratic framework was
total, abiding by civilian directions under the charismatic leadership of Sheikh Mujib. However,
converting the armed forces into a resourceful state instrument through practical policy meas-
ures was not prioritized by the civilian regime owing to the exhilarating triumph of liberation,
convivial bilateral ties with India, the ‘friend-in-need’ during the Liberation War, and the con-
sequent non-appearance of any outside security threat, as well as a long-drawn negative attitude
toward the military and the civil bureaucracy as agents of colonialism. Such perceptions along
with policies regarding the gradual lessening of army budgets, and formation of a paramilitary
force called the Jatiya Rakkhi Bahini as a parallel and allegedly personalized force of the regime,
generated frustration within the ranks of the armed forces. Nevertheless, in the midst of the rising
multifarious socio-economic and political crises, and in order to deal with the worsening situ-
ation, military assistance was eventually called for by the state. This contributed to reviving the
organizational potency of the military, but this was detrimentally exploited later on by a couple
of estranged junior military officers who overthrew the civilian government through a bloody
coup on August 15, 1975, brutally killing Sheikh Mujib and several of his family members. From
then until the end of 1990 the military emerged as a significant political force under two military
rulers, General Ziaur Rahman and General H. M. Ershad.The generals exercised state power ini-
tially directly and later indirectly through a well-designed strategy of militarizing the polity and
instituting a democratic facade by a process of civilianization. Ahamed (1988, p.123) noted that

Though a process of civilianization was on, it was done with the primacy of the mili-
tary elite. Once entrenched in power, both political and economic, the military elite,
as expected, became intolerant of any other organized groups, especially the political
forces which President Zia began nurturing since 1979.

The two generals, in the process of consolidating praetorian rules, inflicted their desired
adjustments on the structure of the constitution, state and governance system. The process in
consequence involved emphasis on an Islamic tenor, new international alignments, thoroughly
bureaucratized structures, ‘rural incorporation’ and recruitment of local support in the name of
decentralization, use of a carrot-and-stick policy and encouragement of factionalism in parties,
enabling the state-sponsored political party to win national polls and produce an all-powerful
chief executive under a multi-party presidential framework. However, ‘these regimes faced simi-
lar crises, and adopted similar policies to earn legitimacy and sustain themselves in power’
(Riaz, 2012, p.6). To keep their major support base in the armed forces, both the army regimes
remained vulnerable and acted accordingly. The initiatives included refurbishing the armed

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forces through their proliferation; enhancing salaries, budgetary allocations and service facil-
ities; appointing them to the apex of civilian policy-making positions; bringing the intelligence
agencies, including the National Security Intelligence (NSI) and Directorate General of Forces
Intelligence (DGFI), under military control; and building up professional standards by founding
academies, training institutions and defense staff colleges. All these efforts made the military the
chief beneficiary of the political system erected under these two regimes.
Both the regimes of Zia and Ershad, considering the logic of politics, were forced to make
space for civilian politics, offering and sharing power with a section of civil-political groups
under a facade of democratic order, but the means of control remained in their hands. Although
Zia managed to accomplish his political objectives to a large extent, crisis occurred within his
own military constituency several times in the form of abortive coups, and eventually led to his
brutal killing on May 30, 1981. He was succeeded by Justice Sattar, later elected as the country’s
president, who soon faced conflicting relations with the military, which aspired to participation
in the system, and he was compelled to hand over power to General Ershad through a bloodless
coup on March 24, 1982. Unlike Zia, Ershad’s quest for political legitimacy encountered relent-
less opposition and ultimately the mass upsurge of 1990 led to his downfall. His demand for a
constitutional role for the military in the state decision-making process and its representation
in the local government councils could not be materialized because of the sharp criticism from
the political front and civil society groups and he also met parliamentary resistance. Mohsin
(2001, p.218) states that although no constitutional alteration with regard to civilian control of
the military had been brought about by either Zia or Ershad, the perversions in the political
sphere allowed the military to remain a force in politics to wield weight and shield their cor-
porate interests.
In the wake of the collapse of Ershad, the army’s non-interference in politics was the result
of their participation in UN peacekeeping operations since 1988, which had brought reputa-
tional and monetary benefits, their cautious reading of the public mood and, most conspicu-
ously, the negative stance of the post-Cold War international community in the event of such
intrusion. Subsequently, in the post-1991 general polls parliamentary democracy was restored in
Bangladesh on the basis of political consensus through the Twelfth Constitutional Amendment
initiating a new phase in civil–military relations.
After the reinstatement of democratic rule the successive governments from 1991 through
2006 – alternately led by Begum Khaleda Zia of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP),
Sheikh Hasina of the Awami League, and again Khaleda Zia – maintained balanced work-
ing relations with the military while trying to bring the latter under political control. They
adopted a ‘hands-on-role in the management of military affairs’, kept the Defense Ministry
and the Armed Forces Division under their practical supervision (Mohsin, 2001, p.219) and
continued with budgetary benefits, UN peacekeeping jobs and other facilities the armed
forces had enjoyed during the rule of the generals. The appointments in the apex positions
of the armed forces and intelligence agencies were vigilantly made so that the senior offic-
ers remained trustworthy to the civilian regimes headed by an all-powerful prime minister.
On the part of the military, it was seen to be away from the political crisis that arose out
of the opposition’s sustained demand for formalizing the caretaker government, dissolution
of the fifth parliament, resignation of the BNP government and holding of the controver-
sial ‘one-party’ general polls on February 15, 1996. Soon after taking over power from the
first constitutionally approved caretaker government, the president’s sacking of the chief of
army staff, General Abu Saleh Mohammad Nasim, for a coup attempt during May 18–20,
1996 was an example of managing the crisis by instantaneous but pragmatic political deci-
sion. Subsequently the military was also employed by the civilian government to deal with

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internal security and criminals, named ‘operation clean heart’, and a joint forces operation
during 2002–2003. In the post-1991 phase, despite the legacy of military influence, the facet
of demilitarization was the outcome of a refined political consciousness of the civilians,
opposition to military domination and also international pressure (Chakma, 2012, pp.45–46).
However, the politicized decisions of the civilian governments in matters of appointment,
re-appointment, transfer, termination, promotion, deputation and retirement of the military
top strata, as well as military assistance in law and order and during election time, contrib-
uted to politicization within the ranks and different quarters of the armed forces. On the
political front, the rapaciousness for power of the two major parties, the BNP and Awami
League, continued unabated where the military support for either side had been considered
crucial. Codron noted that ‘the return of civilians to power in 1991, triggering permanent
confrontational politics between the two main parties, has reintroduced partisan cleavages
into the army and threatened the stability of civil-military relations’ (Codron, 2007, p.103).
The ever-acerbic enmity between the two major parties and their immense disagreement
on the formation of caretakers to oversee the scheduled ninth general polls became more
pronounced, and the consequent spate of violence led to a total anarchic situation in the
country that tempted the military to reassert itself once again and stage a ‘soft coup’ on
January 11, 2007 (commonly known as the ‘one-eleven’ incident). In the Bangladeshi press
and political discourse it is often referred to as 1/11 as the emergency was declared on the
evening of January 11, 2007 and the caretaker government was refurbished the next day with
the prodding of the military. It therefore enthroned an army-backed caretaker government
headed by a former governor of the Bangladesh Bank, Dr. Fakhruddin Ahmed, acting as the
marionette of the military for the next two years. As Husain (2010, p.15) explains:

The role of the army in effecting this episode may appear to have approximated a
‘guardian’ or ‘breakthrough’ coup, albeit with two qualifiers. First, the process was in
camera between the president and the three service chiefs. Second, the army did not
take political power, but backed the improvised and extraordinarily prolonged care-
taker government which oversaw a free and fair general election by the end of 2008.

The ‘one-eleven’ event became a turning point in the country’s political history that
began with a state of emergency under a civilian facade where the military remained decisive
behind the scenes, controlling the crucial state institutions. This regime embarked upon an
anti-corruption drive and initiated a host of politico-administrative reforms following a road
map to recommence democracy in due course. The major efforts in the area of the elect-
oral process including reorganizing the election commission, voter registration, issuance of
nationality certificate, compulsory registration of political parties and democratization in party
structures, judicial separation, formation of constitutional commissions, and anti-corruption
measures, which were all accepted by the people at large. Certain steps that were adversely
affected include incarcerating the two top leaders, Sheikh Hasina and Khaled Zia, and decon-
taminating politics in the name of the ‘minus-two formula’, clearing hawkers and slums, and
dealing with student unrest on university campuses, violation of human rights, deteriorat-
ing macroeconomic indicators and the dismal performance of the country’s economic sector.
Later, in the face of steady public disenchantment and owing to the stranglehold of the top
political leaders over their respective parties, Hasina and Zia were released and, in order to
return to democracy, the necessary arrangements for the ninth parliamentary election, as per
the directives of the High Court, were undertaken that ultimately paved the way for the safe
exit of the army-backed regime.

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Civil–military relations under democracy since 2009

In the election the center-left alliance led by the Awami League with Sheikh Hasina’s unique
electoral slogan of ‘charter of change’ secured a massive victory, defeating the BNP–Jamaat-led
Islamic nationalist alliance (Alamgir, 2009) and winning 229 out of 300 seats in the parliament.
The country hence obtained yet another opening toward building democracy and keeping
up pragmatic civil–military relations. Nevertheless, during the five-year tenure, as observed,
the government’s strategies of ‘appeasement, appreciation, ascriptive selection and acquiescence’
(Wolf, 2013, p.34) to establish civilian control and gain army support did not reveal any striking
departure from the post-1991 situation. As such, modernizing the armed forces through pro-
curement of military equipment and budgetary facilities, appointment of officers according to
their allegiance to the government and premature retirements and sanctioning of untrustworthy
officers continued as before. The civilian regime’s managing the country’s affairs and handling
the complexities indeed revealed its control over a fidgety military.

The BDR carnage

On February 25–26, 2009, several hundred jawans of the border force of the Bangladesh Rifles
(BDR) at Pilkhana, Dhaka, staged a rebellion over pay, perks and promotion prospects that
spread to other outposts. The brutal paramilitary mutiny, killing several dozen commanding
officers deputed at the BDR headquarters along with sexually assaulting the female members
of their families, posed a severe challenge to the newly formed government. Dealing with the
rebellious border guards by political means exhibited the supervisory capacity of the civilian
authority and the compliance of the military, despite their leaning toward the option of an
all-out military offensive that could have saved lives as well as prevent irreparable losses. The
chief of army staff resisted the option for a military solution and conformed to the instructions
given by the prime minister. The BDR carnage was indeed an acid test for the AL-led 14-party
alliance government during its honeymoon period, and managing the incident had been a case
in point of civilian control (Quddusi 2009, p.150). The control was also manifested in the trial
of the accused along with sentences of 723 jawans of the erstwhile BDR (later renamed Border
Guard Bangladesh or BGB) to varying rigorous terms of imprisonment and fines. Trials of the
BDR members accused of killing, arson and looting were conducted in a special civil court
that sentenced 152 people to death and 161 people to life in prison; 256 people received prison
terms between three and ten years and 277 people were released (International Federation for
Human Rights (FIDH), 2013). A number of human rights organizations like Odhikar, however,
raised objections to the trial process as it allegedly did not conform to international standards.

The attempted putsch

At the beginning of 2012 an announcement by the Inter Service Public Relation (ISPR) of
the military drew attention when the spokesman, Brigadier General Razzaq, disclosed that on
January 19 the army had thwarted a coup attempt to overthrow the elected government that had
been plotted by some mid-ranking current and retired army officers, in conjunction with the
banned Islamic group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, and a civilian expatriate in Hong Kong. Observers opine
that the failed coup revealed the disenchantment within the ranks of the military caused by the
modus operandi of the civilian government in dealing with the BDR mutineers in February
2009, and that had prompted the alleged plotters to reach out ‘to several officers, insisting the
army must take revenge for the BDR mutiny’ (International Crisis Group, 2012, p.14). The

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unsuccessful coup attempt therefore revealed the exasperation of the mid-ranking officers ‘and
the effects of not being able to vent their frustration’. Other major issues that had caused frus-
tration within the ranks of the armed forces were the high level of politicization of the upper
stratum through recruiting chosen ones in key positions, sanctioning suspected recalcitrant offic-
ers and absence of proper governance in the country (International Crisis Group, 2012, p.15).

Pacification policy and rejuvenation of the military

In order to lessen differences, the government of Sheikh Hasina adopted several placatory
steps including escalating the defense budget and procuring sophisticated weapons. Her gov-
ernment approved an incremental increase in defense-related budget allocation, which during
2013–2014 reached US$1.87 billion (Choudhury, 2013); a 12 percent increase on the spending
allocation compared to the previous year. The budget represented 6.5 percent of total govern-
ment expenditure and about 1.3 percent of national GDP (Grevatt, 2013). The prime minister
was also seen exploiting ‘almost every opportunity to speak favorably about the armed forces
and appreciate their contribution to safeguard democracy, the welfare of the people, and inde-
pendence and sovereignty of the country’ (Wolf, 2013, p.34).The government’s plan has been to
rearrange the army into separate Eastern and Western commands to modernize and strengthen
the force. This would also include additional manpower with skill in information technology
and equipment at the organizational structure of every sector headquarters and units. As part of
the modernization program, the army, navy and air force are to be armored under ‘Forces Goal
2030’, a plan to enhance their capability and take up their role in UN peacekeeping missions.
To this end a US$1 billion deal has been signed to procure military equipment and arms from
Russia. In line with the plan for defense purchases, between 2009 and 2013 military hardware
worth Bangladeshi Taka (Tk) 15,104 crore (US$2 billion) was procured by the government, and
Tk 10,000 crore remain in the pipeline. As such the army obtained arms worth Tk 5,407 crore,
the navy Tk 4,975 crore and the air force Tk 4,722 crore. Under the procurement during the
Awami League government, the navy obtained 16 ships, 2 maritime helicopters and missiles;
the army received 2,600 armored vehicles, 44 third-generation tanks and 15 APCs; and the air
force obtained short-range air-defense systems and 16 fourth-generation fighter planes. China is
the biggest supplier of arms; other major sources include Russia, Belarus, the United Kingdom,
Japan, Italy, Serbia, France and Germany (Daily Star, 2013). The prime minister on a number of
occasions confirmed that her government is procuring massive quantities of hardware for the
defense forces to act during natural disasters and in the event of external attack. She stressed
the increased application of up-to-date information and communication technology (ICT)
know-how and novel ideas to build a professionally sound armed force in the country. Soon
after the formation of the new government in January 2014 the prime minister announced her
government’s plan to establish a full-fledged cantonment for the army in the southern part of
Bangladesh and strengthen the military’s internal structures through materializing the Forces
Goal 2030.

Parliamentary oversight
Under democratic regimes one mechanism of civilian control of the armed forces has been
legislative supervision, most notably through the Ministerial Standing Committee on Defense.
In Bangladesh, the activities of this committee became known for the first time in the post-1991
parliaments when the issue of defense procurement was discussed in the committee and a
demand for accountability of military was made in earnest. One important instance in this

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respect was the committee’s dealing with the questionable purchase of a frigate for the navy
from a Korean bank port company in the seventh parliament in 1999. The chief of the navy
and the defense secretary were accordingly asked to furnish the committee with the relevant
documents.The alleged irregularity in the matter of the air force’s purchase from Russia of sev-
eral MIG-29s was another affair that came under the defense committee investigation (Ahmed,
2002, p.149). Additional issues addressed during the eighth parliament included reviewing the
progress of preparing the defense policy, activities of the Army Welfare Organization, the pro-
duction capability of the Bangladesh Ordnance Factory, service rule and structure, activities
of the Bangladesh Armed Forces Medical College Hospital and the financial benefits for gal-
lantry award holders and their families, etc. During the tenure of the ninth parliament from
2009 through 2014, the defense committee submitted three reports that included, among other
things, proposed visits to different units of the armed forces working in the UN peacekeeping
missions, modernizing the rules and regulations of the three services of the armed forces and
reviewing the military diplomacy and draft defense policy for the country (Bangladesh. Jatiya
Sangsad (Parliament), 2010, 2011, 2013). The above legislative scrutiny and investigatory moves
aroused public attention from time to time, mostly through media reports, but the committee
decisions were rarely implemented.
Although the government has started the process of developing a defense policy, it remains to
be finalized.The details of the defense budget are never made public and ‘information on secret
items relating to national security is not disclosed to the legislature, nor is there evidence that
audit reports of the annual accounts of the security sector are subject to debate’ (Transparency
International UK, 2013, p.1). Transparency International UK as such observed that the defense
sector of the country faces a ‘very high risk’ of corruption because of a lack of parliamentary
oversight or scrutiny in the budgetary process, auditing and purchase.The military in the mean-
time has turned into a huge corporate body with enormous business ventures, such as a five-star
exclusive hotel, construction in defense housing societies, involvement in the banking sector
and the fast food, shoe, cement and travel industries, as well as textiles and electronics. ‘While
these business activities are government-approved, the decisions and practices of such busi-
nesses are not transparent. Nevertheless, there is no evidence of off-budget military expenditure’
(Transparency International UK, 2013, p.1).
During democratic rule, achievements regarding civilian control of the military have been
mixed. It has been viewed as an elementary stage of institutionalization characterized by lack
of formal control. ‘Significantly, the increase of civilian control in the last two decades has not
necessarily derived from the use of civilian strategies directed to institutionalize control. Instead,
civilians preferred to establish mechanisms of personal control over the military’ (Wolf, 2013,
p.38). Until now, non-institutional oversight of the military through civil society organizations
or societal rendezvous for the purpose has been non-existent in Bangladesh (Cottey et al., in
Hoogenboezem, 2004, pp.9–10).

Crisis in the political sector

As observed, post-‘one-eleven’ democratic restoration in Bangladesh did not bring about
noticeable changes in matters of politics and governance that represented a reverse of past
practices and undemocratic behavior of the elected political leaders. Most importantly, hos-
tility between the two top leaders, Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia, characterized the polit-
ical panorama and produced extreme partisanship, concentration of power, arbitrariness in the
decision-making process, lack of accountability and checks and balances, functioning of the
national legislature without the main opposition, and the deadly legacy of violent clashes and

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confrontations. From June 2012 through the end of 2013, the nucleus of discord stemmed from
the ruling party’s passage of the Fifteenth Amendment eliminating the constitutional condition
for a neutral caretaker government to oversee national elections, and the major opposition’s
vehement demand for recommencing the same and their remaining adamant to boycott the
ensuing polls. Moreover, objection to the operation of the war crimes tribunal and the verdict
of death sentences handed down to a number of Jamaat and BNP leaders added fuel to violent
anti-government protests, mostly participated in by Jamaat activists and its student wing, Islami
Chatra Shibir. The failure of the mainstream political parties to resolve their mutual conflicts
meanwhile contributed to enhance the strength of some Islamic extremist forces. Nurturing
such forces, including Jamaat-e-Islami, Shibir and Hefazat-e-Islam (a recently formed quomi
madrasa-based organization) and the like, helped intensify violence, terrorism and anarchy in
recent political movements, posing significant security threats. The political conflict between
the two major parties produced scope for such forces to enhance their influence in society as
well as in certain quarters of the military, as revealed by their alleged ideological connections
with the plotters of the failed coup of 2012. The two contending parties’ endeavors to garner
the support of the military for their respective political goals and secure support in their struggle
to gain or retain state power indeed created roadblocks to instituting democratic control over
military. It has been suggested that ‘as civilian leaders (Hasina and Zia) have sought to instru-
mentalize the military for their partisan interests, they have avoided institutionalizing civilian
control in favor of an informal, personalized style of instructing and monitoring the armed
forces’ (BTI, 2014, p.7).
On the part of the military, as observed, while carrying out the directives of the govern-
ment in keeping law and order it exercised self-restraint and was not seen visibly interfering in
civilian matters or engaging in political imbroglio. Even during the January 5, 2014 national
polls its role was predictably mystifying. ‘Not a shot was fired by the military in anger, and vis-à-
vis the populace its reputation remained impeccably untarnished’ (Chowdhury, 2014, pp.2–3).
Nonetheless, ostensibly there is hardly any popular or international support for military rule
or any form of undemocratic governance in the country. The military meanwhile has turned
out to be a leading provider and major participant in the UN peacekeeping missions, and such
profitable and rewarding responsibility, as observers opine (Islam, 2010, p.80), has discouraged its
meddling in the country’s politics or craving for state power.

Conclusion
Bangladesh is one of those less-developed countries that has experienced both overt and covert
military involvement in politics, and such legacies have played instrumental roles in shaping its
civil–military relations. Although restoration of democracy in the country has established civil-
ian supremacy, factors like the growth of the military as a potent force and its corresponding
power to shield its organizational and economic interests are to be reckoned with in the process
of state governance. For civilian leaders, resolving the ongoing problematic of politics through
consensus and formalizing civilian direct control over the military under the existing power
equation therefore remain as intricate challenges.

References
Ahamed, E. (1988) Military Rule and the Myth of Democracy. Dhaka: University Press Limited.
Ahmed, N. (2002) The Parliament of Bangladesh. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Alamgir, J. (2009) Bangladesh’s Fresh Start. Journal of Democracy. 20 (3). pp.41–55.

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Bangladesh. Jatiya Sangsad (Parliament). (2010) Report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defense.
Dhaka: Government of Bangladesh.
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Dhaka: Government of Bangladesh.
BTI. (2014) Bangladesh Country Report. [Online] Available from: www.btiproject.de/uploads/tx_jpdown-
loads/BTI_2014_Bangladesh.pdf [Accessed: January 2, 2014].
Chakma, B. (2012) Demilitarization: The Bangladesh Experience. In: Basrur, R. and Bommakanti, K.
(eds.). Demilitarising the State: The South and Southeast Asian Experience. RSIS Monograph No. 25.
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monographs25. pdf [Accessed: November 23, 2013].
Choudhury, I. I. (2013) Defence Budget 2013–14: Trends and Imperatives. Daily Star. June 14.
Chowdhury, I. A. (2014) Painful Polls and Dhaka’s Dilemmas. ISAS Brief, No. 311. National University of
Singapore. January 10.
Codron, J. (2007) Putting Factions ‘Back in’ the Civil–Military Relations Equation: Genesis, Maturation
and Distortion of the Bangladeshi Army. South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal. [Online] Available
from: http://samaj.revues.org/230 [Accessed: January 11, 2014].
Daily Star. (2013) Defence Purchase Govt’s Priority: Focus on Modernising Armed Forces. August 31.
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defence-budget-by-12 [Accessed: January 11, 2014].
Hoogenboezem, J. (2004) Civil Society and Control of the Military. Presented at the ERGOMAS IXth
Biennial Conference, Ecole Militaire, Paris. December 9–11.
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Relations in Bangladesh. Paper presented at the workshop on Civil–Military Relations: Trust Building,
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Governance: The Declining Political Role of the Military in Asia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Quddusi, K. S. M. K. A. (2009) Criminalization, Militarization and Democratic Restoration in Bangladesh.
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Wolf, S. O. (2013) Civil–Military Relations and Democracy in Bangladesh. APSA, Spotlight South Asia.
Special Issue. October.

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 9
NON-GOVERNMENTAL
ORGANIZATIONS AND
CIVIL SOCIETY
David Lewis

Like many so-called developing countries, Bangladesh has attracted a wide range of inter-
national non-governmental organizations (NGOs), mainly from Western countries, that have
worked on disaster relief, welfare and development issues. But what is perhaps unusual has
been the scale and influence of the country’s home-grown or indigenous NGO sector. This
phenomenon is the result of a complex set of factors, including Bengal’s long and varied tradi-
tions of community organization, religious charity and political resistance. This wider sphere of
organized citizen action, which to some extent underpins the country’s modern NGO sector,
came during the 1990s to be characterized as civil society. As we shall see, both the NGO sec-
tor and the idea of civil society have been controversial subjects during the past 40 years of the
country’s history.
In the field of international development, two organizations in particular have come to
loom large in both the local and the international public imaginations – BRAC and Grameen
Bank. Now one of the world’s largest NGOs, and having expanded in the past decade into
an international relief and development agency, BRAC symbolizes the potential of the
multi-dimensional NGO with its steady growth, comprehensive coverage, careful management,
diverse impacts and international influence. Grameen, also very large and influential, is a com-
pletely different type of organization. With its pioneering work on group-based credit services
provided to rural women, it has evolved over the years into a pioneering social business seeking
to propagate the idea of enterprises that aim to meet social rather than for-profit needs. It has
generated widespread interest within the development industry and among the Western (and
particularly the US) public, and has helped to consolidate Bangladesh’s position as the home
of microfinance. These two organizations are, however, far from typical, with the vast major-
ity of the country’s NGOs small and local. By 2014, the government’s NGO Affairs Bureau
(NGOAB) website was listing a total of 2,203 registered NGOs.1
Despite the numbers, and the high level of attention NGOs have received, the sector in
Bangladesh has not been particularly thoroughly researched or well understood. In this chap-
ter we briefly trace the evolution of the NGO sector in Bangladesh, consider what has been
achieved and also offer some grounded speculation on where the sector may be going.

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Historical evolution of NGOs

Approached historically, the NGO sector can be understood as having two main types of roots.
The first, as we have seen, is in local forms of voluntary organization and action.Villagers have
long carried out public works to establish schools or maintain mosques, and undertaken relief
work in times of natural disaster, to which Bangladesh has always been vulnerable. Each of the
country’s different religious communities has also engaged in forms of charitable work such
as the Islamic duty of zakat, in which one-fortieth of one’s income is given to the poor, or
the Hindu tradition of giving food to sadhus and faqeers (Zaidi, 1970). Village-based self-help
groups, such as the Palli Mangal Samitis (Village Welfare Societies) became common from the
1930s onwards, and were encouraged by local administrators to promote local good works
and to build patronage relationships. Some of these over time took on more formal structures
and grew into organizations that today would be termed NGOs. Christian missionaries too
brought charitable education and health initiatives to some areas of the country, along with
early forms of community development work that were later to characterize the work of many
local development NGOs.
The second set of roots can be found in Bangladesh’s relationship with the international aid
system. While some NGO founders – or social entrepreneurs in today’s parlance – were locally
resourced, many others built productive relationships with foreign organizations with similar
aims and values. Sometimes these were primarily resource-driven relationships where NGOs
were established as vehicles for foreign assistance so that it could be utilized locally in effective,
flexible and timely ways. But in most cases these relationships went further to include forms of
international solidarity and the exchange of ideas and values. In the 1970s, for example, the ideas
of Brazilian educator Paolo Freire became influential among a sub-group of Bangladeshi NGO
leaders who favored working directly with disadvantaged people using alternative grass-roots
political mobilization approaches to development. In these early years NGOs could access fund-
ing from international NGOs and foundations that were largely independent from the main-
stream development establishment – including Canadian University Services Overseas, Oxfam,
Ford Foundation and Diakonia (Kabeer et al., 2010).
The need for humanitarian response was crucial in shaping the NGO sector, just as it has
been in many other countries. The War of Liberation and the subsequent humanitarian dis-
aster caused by a devastating cyclone were formative events in the evolution of the modern
NGO sector. The year 1971 was the culmination of political struggles that had begun with
Bengali mobilization against British colonial rule, and then after 1947 the growing oppos-
ition to West Pakistani rule. It reflected a long history of state/society struggles in the country.
At the center of these struggles had been traditional forms of civil society organizations and
movements that took the form of associations of students, lawyers, journalists and cultural
activists united by the idea of Bengali nationalism, democracy and secularism (Hashemi and
Hasan, 1999).
In the new country the large-scale nation-building effort that soon got under way did not
just attract foreign aid organizations and funders but also mobilized Bangladeshi activists and
social entrepreneurs locally and internationally. This trend toward local ingenuity and organ-
izational innovation was also accelerated by the fact that the new government’s development
work, while committed and energetic, was limited in resources and imagination and by the
scale of the problems it faced. There was an emphasis on the clientelistic extension of local
government structures through which to funnel development resources into local commu-
nities, a reliance on trickle-down economics to improve rural livelihoods and innovative but
ultimately half-hearted attempts to build village-level cooperatives for farmers. In practice the

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state remained weak in terms of its capacities to provide social welfare, maintain an independent
judiciary or collect taxes.
As a result, there was considerable space for NGO efforts to emerge alongside those of gov-
ernment. Nevertheless, relations between NGOs and government have been characterized by
periods of turbulence as well as cooperation. They have perhaps tended to work better during
the military era when government lacked legitimacy and sometimes sought out opportunities
to send out a pro-people message (the khas land and essential drugs examples discussed below
both date from the Ershad period) or when partnership has taken place in the context of
donor-funded projects, as Alam (2011) has analyzed in the case of the Urban Primary Health
Care Project. At other times, government has taken repressive action against NGOs, such as
the case of the Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity that lost its registration in June 2010
(eventually regaining it after three years of legal action) after government unfairly accused it of
inciting unrest among the workers of the country’s highly lucrative export garment industry.2
NGOs were also attractive to activists who were inspired by progressive political or develop-
mental agendas, but who did not wish to enter formal political institutions, especially as these
gradually grew more bureaucratic and authoritarian during the 1970s. Political influence could
also be achieved in other ways, such as challenging mainstream development models through
grass-roots organizing and empowerment approaches, which began to attract some people from
the country’s fragmenting leftist political groups. For example, BRAC’s influential research
study The Net (1983) was a political economy analysis of rural power relations that focused
on the persistence of semi-feudal village-level structures that, it argued, held back mainstream
approaches to local development. It upheld a radical structural analysis of poverty that chal-
lenged political clientelism and trickle-down, and highlighted the predatory activities of local
landowning elites who captured development resources at the expense of the poor.
NGOs were also the preferred vehicles for other types of activist: those with a less polit-
ical and a more welfare-oriented approach who instead favored the prioritization of meeting
people’s needs by filling gaps in public services. As a result many NGOs took on the manage-
ment of service delivery work as their main business.These organizations aimed to complement
rudimentary provision or substitute for absent or inadequate government provision in health,
family planning, education and agricultural services. Many NGOs did not see the idea of their
services substituting for the services that government was expected by people to provide as a
sustainable option, but instead viewed it as meeting a short-term need. They aimed to simul-
taneously build better government services through demonstrating possible approaches and
stimulating public demand. In this way service delivery and policy influence and advocacy were
often linked activities rather than separate spheres.
In the health sector, the work of Dr. Zafarullah Chowdhury in establishing GK as a people’s
health movement was particularly significant. This NGO promoted a cooperative approach to
sustainable health services based on setting up village health centers staffed by paramedics. The
organization also campaigned for an essential drugs policy, which brought it into conflict with
the multinational pharmaceutical companies and with the Bangladesh Medical Association, a
professional civil society organization funded in part by the companies. However, many of the
mainstream service delivery NGOs were open to the criticism that rather than contributing to
sustainable improvements they merely ‘let the government off the hook’.

Civil society
The discourse of civil society provided a new rationale for NGOs. During the 1990s the con-
cept of civil society, revived from its relative dormancy within political theory, began gaining

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currency in the context of the NGO sector. This was in part linked to trends in development
policy, where a new policy agenda began combining ideas about privatization of the state and a
stronger role for private actors such as NGOs, and an interest in NGOs as agents of democra-
tization with the potential to provide voter education and human rights training.The interest in
civil society had connections with wider global democratic debates. For example, in the context
of popular struggles against authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe and Latin America there
had been renewed interest in radical ideas about civil society influenced by Antonio Gramsci.
By contrast, in the United States the work of political scientist Robert Putnam (1993) on the
idea of ‘social capital’ emphasized its role in democratic functioning as well as reflecting anx-
ieties about a perceived loss of community-level trust in communities in the United States. All
this fed into the re-emerging idea that civil society was an associational space between market
and state that was essential for building and sustaining liberal democracy (echoing Alexis de
Tocqueville’s classic Democracy in America), since it provided a countervailing force against state
and corporate power, individual self-interest and primordial ties of patronage and kinship.
As indicated earlier, the history of civil society in Bangladesh requires us to distinguish
between older and newer traditions of civil society in the form of longer histories of social
movements and the newer modern NGOs (Lewis, 2004). At the same time, the actual and
perceived boundaries between state and civil society have constantly shifted and blurred. For
example, such blurring is apparent in the ways in which elements of ‘old’ civil society were
absorbed into the post-1971 state, and in the ways in which many modern NGOs may remain
linked to government and other institutions through family ties, contracting relationships and
an often overlapping dependence on foreign donors (Lewis, 2011a).
In the development industry, agencies also began pushing the idea of civil society as part of
‘good governance’ agendas. These were also linked to the rise of neoliberal restructuring pro-
cesses of developing country institutions that emphasized the private sector and the third sector
as a balancing force against the state. The ‘civil’ in civil society also for a while took on meaning
in the context of Bangladesh’s post-military government era after 1990, when General Ershad
had been removed from power, in part by a popular movement. The term ‘civil society’, some-
times translated into Bengali as shushil shamaj, which literally means ‘gentle society’, also gained
some traction within public debates among NGOs and activists in Bangladesh, even though
its meanings and emphases were continually debated and disputed. The term meant different
things to different people, and this was no doubt also part of its attraction. Many within the
NGO community embraced the idea of civil society as part of their own quest for credibil-
ity, because it offered a concept that embedded the idea of NGOs within established political
theory and provided theoretical justification for their role, and further localized the NGO dis-
course by giving non-state actors legitimacy in relation to the state and downplaying their links
with the international aid industry.The term also sat well with the more radical political agendas
of certain NGO leaders, some of whom set about seeking to construct alliances between civil
society groups in order to mobilize citizens around political or social objectives.

Organizations, activities and achievements

As we have seen, the NGO sector in Bangladesh is normally characterized as diverse. It encom-
passes both large and small entities, and contains organizations that undertake both service
delivery and those working on social mobilization, policy advocacy or campaigning work. It is
sometimes argued that this broad diversity makes it difficult to make general characterizations of
the sector, but in this section we try to provide some of the broad brushstrokes of Bangladesh’s
NGO narrative. At the same time, many would also acknowledge that this diversity has declined

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over the years. Although service delivery NGOs still remain active in health and family plan-
ning, primary education and agriculture, the majority have over time come to be involved in
some form of credit provision.There are still NGOs that are involved in community-level social
mobilization and wider advocacy and campaigning work. But there is widespread agreement
among observers of the NGO sector that its diversity has significantly narrowed with the result
that service delivery mainly dominates the sector, and that within service delivery the core busi-
ness of most NGOs is now some form of microfinance provision.
Thumbnail sketches of the some of the key organizations that have stood out offer a sense of
the dimensions and activities of the NGO sector in Bangladesh. As we have already seen, BRAC
has become one of the world’s best-known development organizations. It was established in
1972 by international oil company executive Sir F. H. Abed, an expatriate Bangladeshi eager to
play a role in addressing the difficult challenges faced by the new country. BRAC was initially
an organization that aimed to provide short-term disaster relief and rehabilitation responses
to communities. Over time, it grew and evolved into a community development organization
that provided a range of services. BRAC undertook innovative large-scale work in relation
to immunization, oral rehydration, maternal health and non-formal education that has made
a significant contribution to key areas of Bangladesh’s human and social development. It also
provided credit services, and it developed a strong emphasis on providing small loans to female
borrowers (Smillie, 2009).
Muhammad Yunus’s Grameen Bank began as an action research project in 1976 and lent
small sums to rural people organized into joint liability groups, gradually focusing primarily
on women as its main borrowers. It was transformed by government legislation into an inde-
pendent not-for-profit bank in 1983. Like BRAC, it has grown steadily and over the years has
changed and expanded its approach. It now offers a wide range of financial products to its six
million borrowers, though it has these days abandoned its joint liability approach and compul-
sory savings (Yunus, 2010). Professor Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
In contrast to these internationally known organizations, another section of the NGO com-
munity placed a stronger emphasis on political and social mobilization at the center of their
organizational identity and work. Proshika dates from 1976 when a group of student activists
who had been working on building community-level social change among landless groups
formalized it as a registered NGO, its name based on an amalgam of the Bengali words for train-
ing, education and action. At the height of its power and influence during the mid-2000s, the
organization had around 2.8 million borrowers within a borrower-managed savings and loan
program, combined with skills development and ‘conscientization’ efforts. However, in 2001 the
NGO began encountering political problems with a newly elected government that alleged it
had provided political support to the opposition and it has subsequently declined. Nijera Kori
(NK) – which means ‘by ourselves’ – began life in the 1970s and was initially a small relief
organization among many others at the time. It became more distinctive when it was revital-
ized in 1980 and given a new direction by dissident BRAC staff who were exploring ways to
challenge what they saw as the creation of dependency by service delivery approaches. With a
more radical agenda, the organizations eschewed the idea of microcredit altogether and focused
instead on training and mobilization. In line with ideas about civil society and democratization,
NK also emphasized democratic relationships with members of the community and within its
own organizational structures. It established a system in which members elect representatives
to make decisions at each level of the organization (Kabeer et al., 2010). Another radical NGO,
Samata, was first established as a youth organization in 1976 that aimed to organize landless
people to claim ownership rights over unoccupied khas land.This is unowned but highly fertile
farmland that becomes available due to changing river systems and coastlines and is immensely

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valuable in a land-scarce environment. Khas land was seen as providing a potentially important
asset for the country’s large numbers of rural landless households.
The more progressive or alternative sources of international funding that had been available
to NGOs began to decline by the end of the 1980s. In their place was a new neoliberal develop-
ment agenda that quickly gained ground among mainstream bilateral and multilateral funders.
This ideology supported the role of NGOs in development, but placed most of its emphasis on
the priority of official donors providing funding to NGOs as private service delivery providers
and alternatives to the state. The basic trajectory of the sector at this time is perhaps best epito-
mized by the Association for Social Advancement’s (ASA) organizational journey, although this
particular NGO was probably driven more by its own organizational imperatives rather than
those of donors. ASA had been set up in 1978 as a social activist organization that was based
on a structural analysis of poverty and an empowerment agenda. But when results proved slow
to achieve, the organization moved away from the mobilization approach to a service delivery
approach with credit at the center, adapted from the Grameen Bank model (Rutherford, 2010).
The availability of large-scale funding from bilateral donors did not altogether bypass the
more radical NGOs. Agencies such as Proshika, Samata and Gono Shahajjo Sangstha (GSS)
were each heavily funded by Britain’s Department for International Development, for example.
However, the shift toward an NGO contracting culture contributed to a proliferation of NGOs,
many of which were inexperienced, small and opportunistic. There were 395 NGOs registered
with the government’s NGOAB in 1990, and 1,223 by 1999. By the end of the 1990s, almost
three-quarters of all donor funds were going to just three NGOs: BRAC, Proshika and ASA
(Devine, 2003). Today, Bangladesh’s overall economic position has changed, with relatively high
levels of economic growth and international remittances that have displaced the earlier cen-
trality of aid to the economy. For NGOs to achieve sustainability, the most viable options have
arguably become microfinance provision with its built-in management fees or the hybridization
of NGOs into social businesses able to generate revenue from market-based activity and cor-
porate philanthropy.
The contribution of NGOs to Bangladeshi society and the economy are difficult to assess
but they are significant. As Amartya Sen has argued, women-focused service delivery, micro-
credit services and social mobilization work by both large and small NGOs in Bangladesh has
made an important contribution – alongside major efforts by the government – to the coun-
try’s achievements in reducing poverty and moving forward social indicators (Sen, 2013).This is
one of the reasons why Bangladesh, considered a ‘basket case’ by some international observers
during the 1970s, today boasts social indicators that are superior to Pakistan and some Indian
states (Lewis, 2011b).
Beyond service delivery, NGOs have also played a role in influencing policy in some key
areas. NGOs, alongside a range of national and international policy actors, played an important
role in helping to ensure that the 2009 Right To Information Act was passed and implemented
(such as Transparency International Bangladesh), in challenging the top-down approaches to
climate change adaptation that has at times been pushed by some areas of government and
donors (Action Aid Bangladesh), and supporting labor rights for garment workers (Bangladesh
Center for Workers Solidarity) and laborers in the ship-breaking industry (Young Power in
Social Action).
One of the best-known historical cases of shaping policy is in relation to land rights. NGOs
have been instrumental in shaping a land reform policy that enshrined the right of landless
households to khas land. As a result of a concerted NGO campaign in the latter stages of the
military regime of General H. M. Ershad, a new land reform law was passed that required new
khas land to be redistributed to landless households (Devine, 2002). Landless people need to be

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able to formalize their rights over this land and begin cultivation, since local landowners often
occupy it illegally and achieve de facto ownership in defiance of the reform. In 2008, a research
report indicated that the total amount of khas land is around 1.3 million acres, of which about
three-quarters of a million acres have been redistributed to poor households.
By the end of the 1990s, some organizations within Bangladesh’s NGO community embraced
the concept of civil society as part of social mobilization and policy influence agendas, as well
as their own quests for identity and legitimacy. A few NGO leaders began trying to construct
alliances between more diverse sections of civil society in order to mobilize citizens in support
of political or social objectives. For example, another large NGO at this time, GSS, promoted
some of its rural landless group members as candidates in local union parishad (sub-district)
elections (Hashemi, 1995). In 2001, with the Oikabaddo Nagorik Andolan (United Civil Society
Movement), Proshika and other civil society groups including trade unions mobilized more
than half-a-million people with a comprehensive set of demands to government on democra-
tization, poverty and human rights.
While international linkages and relationships have always helped to shape the NGO sec-
tor, more recent forms of globalization have arguably contributed to an intensification of local
grass-roots action.The concept of ‘global civil society’, made possible by the growth of commu-
nications technology, has helped to facilitate international activist networks around the world.
An environmental movement barely existed in the 1980s in Bangladesh, but gained momentum
during the 1990s, partly through building alliances internationally and locally in relation to
the popular opposition to the controversial Flood Action Plan (FAP), a donor-backed infra-
structural megaproject that proposed a top-down solution to water control management (see
Lewis, 2010).
The rise of NGOs has not been popular among all sections of the population. Critical voices
have been raised in relation to many aspects of NGOs and their work. First, some see NGOs
implicated in the rolling back of the state. Between 20 and 35 percent of the country’s popu-
lation is believed to receive some services, usually credit, health or education, from an NGO
(World Bank, 2006). In line with the growth of neoliberalism, the state is seen by critics such
as Wood (1997) as discarding its responsibilities for service provision and citizen accountability,
then ‘franchising out’ key state functions to NGOs and private agencies. When the govern-
ment outsources its responsibilities to non-state actors that have unclear lines of accountability
to service users (and may often also be mainly foreign-funded), this weakens the state–society
relationship.
Second, NGOs have been criticized by interest groups and members of local communities.
For example, NGO work in rural areas has occasionally generated violent resistance, such as
between local religious leaders and followers and NGO field staff. For example, BRAC field
workers and schools have sometimes been attacked (Rahman, 1999). Some suggest that this is
a sign that NGO programs that challenge local gender norms such as female literacy and edu-
cation are gaining traction. For others, this is evidence of clashes between the forces of local
religious conservatism and NGOs as purveyors of Western modernity. Such incidents may also
relate to disputes over patron–client relations or land-related conflicts. NGOs are convenient
targets, perhaps by threatening established interests or by positioning themselves as ‘new patrons’
(Devine, 1998). Some critics on the left also attacked NGOs engaging in social mobilization
during the 1990s for weakening the efforts of political party-led forms of rural protest.
Third, the narrowing of NGO work to service delivery and to microfinance in particular –
arguably the neoliberal development approach par excellence – has attracted criticism from
those within and beyond the world of development who call for broader conceptions of pov-
erty and disadvantage, and recognition of the need for forms of structural change.The reduction

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of development from a complex set of structural problems around poverty and inequality to
ones that simply required the provision of financial services serves as an example of what
Schwittay (2011) has called the ‘financialization of poverty’ and has helped to create an NGO
monoculture. Broader critics of neoliberal governmentality such as Karim (2014) also point to
the role of microfinance in coercing households and particularly women into market relations
of indebtedness.
There have also been those who criticize the idea of civil society, some because NGOs
became equated with civil society and crowded out the wider range of other actors, and others
because the concept itself lacks precision or contextual appropriateness. In particular, the lib-
eral view of a ‘good’ civil society has often been contested, since relationships in contemporary
civil society may reflect wider ‘uncivil’ social tensions. It is also generally unwise to assume – as
liberal accounts of civil society tend to do – a simple dichotomy between civil society and the
state, between kinship communities and civil society, or between vertical and horizontal ties
(Chandhoke, 2002).
Wood (2009) has suggested that there was also an ‘unstated secular consensus’ in relation to
civil society that began to change in the 1990s with the emergence of a new urban middle class.
This new middle class (mainly in Dhaka, but also in other regional cities) has been influenced
both by the growing economic and cultural influence of the Gulf states on Bangladesh and by
the Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s traditional leaning toward more Islamic definitions of what it
means to be a Bangladeshi. The result has been a subtle shift in the secular–religious–nationalist
composite that underpinned Bangladesh’s cultural and political fabric. This new middle class is
increasingly an oppositional formation that is distinct from more established, secular elites that
originally underpinned key sections of the intelligentsia, civil service and NGO sector during
the 1980s and the 1990s.

Conclusion
Looking back, we can highlight three distinct stages of evolution of the NGO sector. The first
is the period of emergence and early formalization during the 1970s and much of the 1980s, which
saw the crystallization of the modern NGO sector in the form of a wide range of organizations
from service delivery to advocacy, run by both activists and individual social entrepreneurs. The
second is the period of opportunistic growth during the 1990s that coincided with the discovery of
NGOs by the wider development industry and the growth of funding availability. Many NGOs
expanded their operations, hired more staff and built smart offices. This reflected a new-found
confidence and importance, including in some cases closer links with government, but it also
contributed to the organizational collapse of some key NGOs, revealing an overall lack of sus-
tainability and vulnerability to institutionalization capture and patron–client structures. Finally,
there has been in the twenty-first century a marketization and hybridization of the NGO sector.
The dominance of credit-based approaches to development and government subcontracting
reflect a financialization of development and an increased reliance on private-sector ideas and
approaches.
As we have discussed in this brief overview, NGOs have been dynamic actors with important
achievements in both service delivery and policy influence. However, despite the large num-
bers of NGOs that still operate today, the creative heyday of Bangladesh’s development NGO
movement has probably passed. The majority of organizations operating around the country
are small contracting organizations. While many do important and useful work, these NGOs
are variable in quality and sustainability, and most lack the dramatic organizational histories
that characterized many of the large and influential NGO players that were active in the 1990s.

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Radical organizations do still exist of course, but they are smaller and less powerful, even though
many of them too achieve useful things. BRAC of course remains, but has these days evolved
into a social business across many fields – including banking, tertiary education and retailing.
Its leadership generally prefers to distance itself from – rather than embrace – the term NGO.
The reduced profile of the sector has also been hastened by the declining relative importance
of foreign aid, a public loss of confidence in the organizational accountability and governance
of NGOs after too many corruption scandals, and the increasing levels of organizational hybrid-
ity (which is symbolized by the example of BRAC) that characterizes the diverse emerging
relationships between markets, the state and organized citizens in the early twenty-first century.
NGOs, broadly defined and with all their strengths and weaknesses, remain important actors
within any society. They reflect both the aspirations of citizens and the effects of global power
structures as these intersect with national and international policies and ideologies.

Notes
1 See NGO Affairs Bureau. [Online] Available from: www.ngoab.gov.bd [Accessed: June 2, 2014].
2 See Clean Clothes Campaign. [Online] Available from: www.cleanclothes.org [Accessed: June 2, 2014].

References
Alam, S. M. N. (2011) Health Service Delivery: The State of Government Non-governmental Organization
Relations in Bangladesh. Public Administration and Development. 31. pp.273–281.
Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC). (1983) The Net: Power Structure in Ten Villages. Rural
Study Series 2. Dhaka: BRAC.
Chandhoke, N. (2002) The Limits of Global Civil Society. In: Glasius, M., Kaldor, M. and Anheier, H. K.
(eds.). Global Civil Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp.35–54.
cleanclothes.org. (2013) BCWS Wins Fight for Registration. Bangladesh Center for Workers
Solidarity. September 2, 2013. [Online] Available from: www.cleanclothes.org/news/2013/09/02/
bcws-wins-fight-for-registration [Accessed: June 2, 2014].
Devine, J. (1998) Empowerment and the Spiritual Economy of NGOs in Bangladesh. Paper presented to
the European Network of Bangladesh Studies. University of Bath, Fifth Workshop. April 16–18.
Devine, J. (2002) Ethnography of a Policy Process: A Case Study of Land Redistribution in Bangladesh.
Public Administration and Development. 22. pp.403–414.
Devine, J. (2003) The Paradox of Sustainability: Reflections on NGOs in Bangladesh. Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science. 590. pp.227–242.
Hashemi, S. M. (1995) NGO Accountability in Bangladesh: NGOs, State and Donors. In: Edwards, M. and
Hulme, D. (eds.). NGO Performance and Accountability: Beyond the Magic Bullet. London: Earthscan. pp.103–110.
Hashemi, S. M. and Hasan, M. (1999) Building NGO Legitimacy in Bangladesh: The Contested
Domain. In: Lewis, D. (ed.). International Perspectives on Voluntary Action: Reshaping the Third Sector.
London: Earthscan. pp.124–131.
Kabeer, N., Mahmud, S. and Castro, J. G. I. (2010) NGOs’ Strategies and the Challenge of Development and
Democracy. IDS Working Paper 343. Brighton: Institute for Development Studies.
Karim, L. (2014) Demystifying Microcredit: The Grameen Bank, NGOs, and Neoliberalism in Bangladesh.
In: Bernal, V. and Grewal, I. (eds.). Theorizing NGOs: States, Feminisms and Neoliberalism. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Lewis, D. (2004) On the Difficulty of Studying ‘Civil Society’: NGOs, State and Democracy in Bangladesh.
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Bangladesh. Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis. 11. pp. 113–129.
Lewis, D. (2011a) Exchanges of Professionals between the Public and Non-Governmental Sectors: Life–Work
Histories from Bangladesh. Modern Asian Studies. 45 (3). pp. 735–757.
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Rahman, A. (1999) NGOs and Civil Society in Bangladesh. Journal of Social Studies. 84. pp.23–45.
Rutherford, S. (2010) The Pledge: ASA, Peasant Politics and Microfinance in the Development of Bangladesh.
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Schwittay, A. F. (2011) The Financial Inclusion Assemblage: Subjects, Technics, Rationalities. Critique of
Anthropology. 31. pp.381–401.
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Smillie, I. (2009) Freedom from Want: The Remarkable Success Story of BRAC, the Global Grassroots Organization
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Wood, G. D. (1997) States without Citizens: The Problem of the Franchise State. In: Hulme, D. and
Edwards, M. (eds.). Too Close for Comfort: NGOs, States and Donors. London: Macmillan. pp.79–92.
Wood, G. D. (2009) Clashing Values in Bangladesh: NGOs Secularism and the Umma. In: Khan, F. C.,
Ahmad, A. and Quddus, M. (eds.). Recreating the Commons? NGOs in Bangladesh. Dhaka: University
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Yunus, M. (2010) Building Social Business: The New Kind of Capitalism That Serves Humanity’s Most Pressing
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East West Centre Press.

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 PART III

Economy and development

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 10
DEVELOPMENT POLICIES
SINCE INDEPENDENCE
Fahmida Khatun

Having embarked on independence in 1971 with a war-affected economy, Bangladesh began

its journey with the objectives to achieve higher growth and fight poverty from the very begin-
ning. The challenge, however, was to materialize such goals with limited resource and oppor-
tunities. The situation was termed a ‘test case for development’, fraught with abject poverty and
a large population.1 However, Bangladesh has been acclaimed for its achievements on economic
and social fronts during the past few decades. The economy has been growing at around 6 per
cent annually since the 2000s, which is higher than the average growth rate of all least developed
countries together (UNCTAD, 2014).2
Impressive economic growth has been complemented by remarkable progress in a set of
social indicators such as reduction of poverty, child and maternal mortality and school enrol-
ment (Bangladesh Government, 2014). Contrary to the achievements in several areas, there are
weaknesses that appear as formidable challenges for the country.These include large population
size, vulnerability to the impact of climate change, lack of governance and political uncertainty.
Both the achievements and the challenges of Bangladesh’s economic development can be
attributed to policies that the government of the day has pursued since independence. Such
policies have often been guided by the broad political philosophy of whichever party was ruling
the state at any one time.

Development policy shifts: from a closed to a liberal economy

Historically, the people of Bangladesh (the then East Pakistan) were deprived of economic and
political opportunities by West Pakistan for many years. Their demand for a larger share in eco-
nomic opportunities, resource distribution and participation in the political decision-making
process was given an organized footing through the ‘Six Points Program of Autonomy’. This
eventually was reflected in the subsequent independence movement and election manifesto
of the Awami League, the political party that played a leading role during the Liberation War
in 1971. Hence the post-liberation development policies of the ruling Awami League made a
conscious attempt to accommodate the aspirations of the people of the country.The underlying
objective of development policies of the new government was to emancipate the people of
Bangladesh from economic exploitation by the then West Pakistan and eliminate poverty. Such

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 F. Khatun

objectives were to be pursued under a socialist model of development that promoted nation-
alization of industries and financial institutions. Inspired by this philosophy and following the
footsteps of India and Russia, close friends and supporters during the Independence War, the
country prepared its First Five Year Plan in 1973 for the period FY1973–FY1978 that aimed to
achieve a ‘planned economic growth’ (Bangladesh. Planning Commission, 1973).
The political landscape of Bangladesh radically changed following the assassination of the
then Prime Minister Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who led the Liberation War of
Bangladesh. Due to the move from a left-leaning political ideology to a right-wing political
regime post-1975, there was a shift from ‘socialist transformation’ towards a ‘market-oriented’
one. However, objectives such as higher growth, equitable distribution of growth and pov-
erty alleviation continued to be pursued. On the completion of the First Five Year Plan, a
Two Year Plan during FY1978–FY1980 and subsequently three more Five Year Plans over the
period from FY1980 to FY1995 spelt out similar goals such as accelerating economic growth,
ensuring equitable growth, reaching self-sufficiency and reducing poverty. Development of the
private sector through deregulation and denationalization was the major thrust of economic
policies during this period. In doing so, reforms were undertaken in the areas of industry, trade,
exchange rate, fiscal, monetary and budgetary policies. Market-orientated policies were further
consolidated afterwards as privatization of the state-owned enterprises took place. Investment
by the private sector was allowed in areas where traditionally the state would be responsible for
providing services. These areas included power generation and distribution, telecommunica-
tions, airlines, railways, health care and education (Bangladesh. Planning Commission, 1980,
1985, 1990).
The ideological shift from a controlled economy to a market-orientated one took place pre-
dominantly while being advised by key donors such as the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), also known as the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs).The introduction
of the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) in Bangladesh in the 1980s by the BWIs aimed at
stabilizing the macroeconomic situation in the country through enforcing fiscal and monetary
discipline and by opening up the economy. Bangladesh received support under IMF-initiated
programmes such as the Structural Adjustment Facility (SAF) and the Enhanced Structural
Adjustment Facility (ESAF) in 1986 and 1987 respectively. The country also had to follow the
guidelines of the Policy Framework Paper (PFP) prepared by the BWIs and achieve the targets
set in the PFP. Till the mid-1990s, donors were satisfied with the reform initiatives and the
macroeconomic performance of the country. However, concerns were raised by the donors in
the mid-1990s as macroeconomic indicators deteriorated. Despite the flow of foreign aid none
of the Five Year Plans could achieve the targeted growth. Even after the privatization momen-
tum, gross domestic product (GDP) growth during the Third Five Year Plan (FY1985–FY1990)
was 3.8 per cent, against the target of 5.4 per cent. GDP growth was 4.2 per cent as opposed
to the target of 5 per cent during the Fourth Five Year Plan (FY1990–FY1995) (BBS, various
issues). Donors blamed the slow reform process for the slow growth, and emphasized reviving
momentum in reform measures. Attention was drawn to the issue of governance in areas such
as decentralization of the public administration and reform of the judiciary.
Some donors such as the BWIs also recognized that without any commitment of the domes-
tic constituencies the reform process would not be successful. This realization originated from
the shortcomings of the SAP in reducing poverty and achieving a long-term sustainable devel-
opment of the aid-recipient poor countries (SAPRIN, 2004). Several countries remained in
poverty and fell into the category of Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) following the
adoption of the SAP in their countries. They were unable to repay their debt to the creditors
and needed a new modality for coming out of their indebtedness and poverty. Thus the BWIs

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devised an alternative for nationally owned, participatory poverty reduction strategies that would
be the basis of giving concessional loans. This was also considered for determining the eligibil-
ity for debt relief under the HIPC initiative. Bangladesh had been a better performer in terms
of debt servicing compared to many African countries. The debt–GDP ratio and external debt
servicing ratio as a percentage of GDP has been declining over the years in Bangladesh (BBS,
various issues), which protected Bangladesh from dropping into the HIPC category. However,
Bangladesh had to accept the conditionality of preparing a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper
(PRSP) to access the Poverty Reduction Grant Facility (PRGF) of the IMF.
The influence of donors on the development policies of the country continued to prevail,
though the share of foreign aid in GDP has reduced over time. Development priorities were
largely set in view of the availability of donors’ funds. Additionally, the inadequacy of the pol-
icy makers of the country to spell out their own development agenda conspicuously was also a
serious constraint. Liberalization policies consolidated in the 2000s as the country settled for a
reorientation of the policy regime towards a market-based economy after the political change
in the mid-1970s. Irrespective of political distance, the major political parties adopted economic
policies almost on a similar ideological footing, which was to develop an open market and
private-sector-led economy.

Sectoral policies

National Agricultural Policy

The government pursued an agriculture policy that promoted agriculture sector activities
under state control after independence in 1971. The Bangladesh Agricultural Development
Corporation (BADC) was the apex body that played a dominant role in the import, sale and
distribution of agricultural inputs such as fertilizer, seeds and irrigation. Towards the end of the
1970s, the government adopted a policy of deregulation that opened up both input and out-
put markets for the private sector to be involved in the distribution of irrigation equipment.
The privatization policy enabled the government to phase out subsidies on irrigation equip-
ment and fertilizer. The involvement of the private sector in fertilizer distribution curtailed the
monopoly of BADC. Attempts were made to provide good prices to farmers for their produce
and stabilize consumer prices through rationalization of domestic food grain procurement and
distribution policies. The reforms also abolished the food rationing policy and the monopoly
in food grains trade.
The agriculture sector benefited from technological innovation in the 1970s due to a
breakthrough in rice production through the adoption of high-yielding varieties (HYVs).
Technological innovation combined with reforms led to the popularization of HYVs that
increased rice production (Hossain, 2012; Hossain et al., 2007). It is claimed that one of the
objectives of the market-orientated agriculture policy was to help farmers gain from techno-
logical innovation (Ahmed, 2004). In 1999, Bangladesh released its first National Agricultural
Policy. This was followed up with the second National Agricultural Policy in 2013.
During the era of the SAP (1980s–1990s) the privatization of fertilizer businesses and distri-
bution services was one of the major policies implemented. Except for urea, all other fertilizers
were imported by the private sector. All fertilizers were distributed through the network of
private-sector dealers. In 1995, the government issued the revised Fertilizer Control Ordinance
for quality control and regulation of fertilizer prices. During this period production, processing,
distribution and import of seeds and agri-machines, including power tillers, were liberalized.
Measures such as Open Market Sale (OMS), procurement of food grains from farmers at market

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prices and abolition of the rural rationing system were in place and import of food grains by the
private sector was allowed. Procurement and distribution of minor irrigation equipment were
taken out of the hands of the BADC in order to encourage the private sector to take over the
supply of these items in the country.
Along with the privatization of the fertilizer industry, the government also liberalized trade
in minor irrigation that had a tangible effect on increasing the demand for irrigation equip-
ment, and consequently the expansion of area coverage under minor irrigation. Other note-
worthy policies in the SAP era include the removal of trade restrictions on small diesel engines
in FY1987 and the withdrawal of import duty on such imports in FY1989. In 1992, the gov-
ernment also removed its subsidy on deep tube wells.
The National Agricultural Policy of 1999 put emphasis on crop diversification and the
growth of more wheat, maize and other crops, such as potato, pulses, oilseeds, vegetables,
fruits and spices. The use of HYV seeds was encouraged in the policy. The policy also aimed
to reduce imports of agricultural commodities and increase agro-exports. The private sector
was allowed to produce, import and sell seeds along with the public sector. The most recent
National Agricultural Policy 2013 has set its objectives as establishing a self-reliant and sus-
tainable agriculture that can adapt to climate change. It encourages generation and promo-
tion of eco-friendly technology and sustainable land and water management for different
agro-ecological zones and regions. The policy also aims to rationalize import duties on raw
materials of agricultural machinery to encourage local manufacturers, and to keep the price of
local machinery competitive with imports.

Industrial policy
Bangladesh followed a public-sector-led industrial development plan from 1971 to 1975.
This was largely attributed to the existence of a number of industrial units abandoned by
non-Bangladeshis after independence. Industrial units with fixed assets exceeding taka (Tk)
15 million were, therefore, brought under state control. Small and cottage industries and foreign
enterprises were kept outside the public sector.
The basic feature of industrial policies during the post-independence period was to pro-
mote inward-looking import substitution and discourage exports. Thus, a number of discrim-
inatory measures such as an overvalued exchange rate and high tariff and non-tariff barriers
were put in place. Such policies did not, however, bring any positive outcome.The performance
of the public sector was dismal and there was no private investment. This led to measures that
included: (1) enhancement of investment ceiling from Tk 2.5 million to Tk 30 million initially,
and later to Tk 100 million; (2) provision for additional fiscal and monetary incentives to the
private sector; (3) enhancement of a moratorium for nationalization for up to 15 years; (4) pro-
visions for tax holidays for less-developed areas; (5) huge devaluation of currency.
Revised Industrial Policies of 1974 and 1975 announced fair and equitable compensation for
industries that were nationalized after the moratoriaum period. The revised Industrial Policy of
1975 also allowed both foreign and local private investors to set up industries in collaboration
with public-sector corporations so that public enterprises would keep the major share.
Following a change in government in 1975, a process of denationalization was implemented,
using measures such as: (1) eliminating the ceiling on private investment; (2) relaxing invest-
ment sanctioning procedures; (3) amending the constitution to allow denationalization; (4) reviv-
ing the stock market; (5) replacing the fixed exchange rate with a floating exchange rate sys-
tem. The major objective of the Industrial Policy during this period was the development of
private-sector-led growth. So private investment was encouraged through liberal credit policies.

134
 Development policies since independence

The Foreign Private Investment Act of 1980 assured foreign private investors that their invest-
ments would not be expropriated or nationalized.
The Industrial Policy of 1978 allowed the public sector to participate in joint investment
with the private sector as a minor shareholder. Moreover, the private sector could be bestowed
with the responsibility of managing investments in cases where the public-sector corporations
had the major share in such investments.
The denationalization of industries gained further momentum in the following decades
under the SAP policies. The New Industrial Policy of 1982 and the Revised Industrial Policy
of 1986, as well as Industrial Policies during the trade liberalization phase from 1991 onwards,
were crafted on the philosophy of a market-based competitive economy that emphasized
export-orientated growth (Bangladesh. Ministry of Industries, 1982, 1986, 1991). The role of
the public sector was downsized significantly, except for keeping its existence in a limited num-
ber of restricted areas.
The Industrial Policies of 1999, 2005 and 2010 devised action programs for stimulating the
involvement of the private sector, both domestic and international (Bangladesh. Ministry of
Industries, 1999, 2005, 2010). In addition, export orientation of the industrial sector, improved
competitiveness of industries and effective utilization of resources for industrial development
were emphasized so that the contribution of the manufacturing sector to overall GDP could be
raised substantially. For example, the Industrial Policy of 2005 aimed to raise the contribution
to GDP of the manufacturing sector from 30 to 35 per cent (Bangladesh. Ministry of Industries,
2005). The Industrial Policy of 2010 aimed to increase the share of the industries sector in
GDP from 28 per cent in 2010 to 40 per cent by 2021. It also sought to employ 25 per cent of
the total labour force by 2021, an increase of 9 per cent from the existing 16 per cent in 2010
(Bangladesh. Ministry of Industries, 2010).
Hence industrial policies in the 1990s and 2000s introduced a set of action programs to raise
the productivity of the industrial sector. The list of the thrust sectors that would be promoted
through policy measures and foreign investment were subsequently expanded. These sectors, in
turn, were encouraged through special incentives. The agro-based and agro-processing indus-
tries, the small and medium enterprises and cottage industries received attention. Even the
ready-made garments (RMG) sector, which contributes the highest share to the country’s
export income, was listed as a thrust sector in the Industrial Policy of 2005. Export processing
zones were set up across Bangladesh, in response to the need to improve global production
standards, market industrial goods at competitive prices and improve productivity in the indus-
trial sector as dictated by the Industrial Policies of the 2000s. As a continuation of earlier pol-
icies, the Industrial Policy of 2010 also aimed to establish import-substitution industries to cater
to local demand and promote export-orientated industries.

Trade policy
During 1972–1980, Bangladesh pursued an import-substituting industrialization strategy that
aimed to safeguard the country’s infant industries, reduce the balance-of-payments deficit and
use scarce foreign exchange efficiently. The second regime of trade policy during 1980–1990
can be characterized by moderate reforms in all major aspects of economic policies. Restrictions
on trade were relaxed, and various industrial policies were implemented to transform the
inward-looking economy to an outward-looking one (Rahman et al., 2008). Currently, thanks
to the liberalization policy of the last few decades, 59 per cent of the economy of Bangladesh is
integrated with the global economy through export, import, remittances, official development
assistance (ODA) and foreign direct investment (FDI) (Table 10.1).

135
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Table 10.1 Openness of economy, FY1981–FY2014

Indicator (million US$) FY1981 FY1991 FY2001 FY2011 FY2012 FY2013 FY2014

1 Export (X) 725 1,718 6,467 22,928 24,302 27,027 30,177

2 Import (M) 1,954 3,472 9,335 33,658 35,516 37,290 40,616
3 Remittance (R) 379 764 1,882 11,650 12,843 14,461 14,228
4 ODA 1,146 1,733 1,369 1,777 2,033 2,786 3,000
5 FDI (net) 0 24 550 775 1,191 1,726 1,550
Total (1–5) 4,204 7,711 19,603 70,788 75,886 83,291 89,571
GDP (current price) 19,812 30,975 47,306 111,944 116,074 128,766 151,897
Degree of openness (export + import as % of GDP) 13.5 16.8 33.4 50.5 51.5 49.9 46.6
Extent of global integration (%) 21.2 24.9 41.4 63.2 65.4 64.7 59.0
X as % of M 37.1 49.5 69.3 68.1 68.4 72.5 74.3
(X + R) as % of M 56.5 71.5 89.4 102.7 104.6 111.3 109.3
ODA as % of GDP 5.8 5.6 2.9 1.6 1.8 2.2 2.0
ODA as % of export of goods 158.1 100.9 21.2 7.8 8.4 10.3 9.9
ODA as % of export of goods and services 103.8 69.8 16.4 5.1 5.5 6.7 6.8

Source: Bangladesh Ministry of Finance, Bangladesh Economic Review (various issues); websites of Export Processing Zone of Bangladesh
(EPZ) and Bangladesh Bank.
 Development policies since independence

Since 1985 several export policy reforms were implemented that included trade, exchange
rate, monetary and fiscal policy incentives. Export promotion measures were designed to diver-
sify the export market, improving the quality of exports, stimulating higher value-added exports
and developing industries for backward linkages in the country (Raihan, 2007). Such reforms
were beneficial to a number of sectors, including the RMG sector. These reforms provided
exporters with unrestricted and duty-free access to imported inputs, financial incentives in the
form of easy access to credit and credit subsidies and various forms of fiscal incentives such as
rebates on income taxes and concessionary duties on imported capital machinery.
The speed of Trade Policy reforms intensified from 1991 onwards. More open than ever
before, quantitative restrictions were removed and tariffs were reduced. Some of the spe-
cific measures of trade liberalization in the 1990s and afterwards can be mentioned here. The
unweighted average protection rate declined from 36 per cent in FY1994 to 12.51 per cent in
FY2006. The weighted average rate of protection also reduced from 24.1 per cent in FY1994
to 8.09 per cent in FY2006. The number of commodities (at four-digit level) that were subject
to quantitative restrictions was reduced from 550 in 1987 to 63 under the Import Policy Order
of 2003–2006. Similarly, the maximum tariff rate went down from 350 per cent in FY1991 to
37.5 per cent in FY2000. The number of tariff bands was decreased to five in FY2005 (0 per
cent, 7.5 per cent, 15 per cent, 22.5 per cent and 30 per cent) from 15 in FY1993.
Bangladesh followed a fixed exchange rate after independence. In 1979, the fixed exchange
rate system was replaced by a semi-flexible exchange rate system by pegging the value of the
taka to a basket of currencies of Bangladesh’s major trading partners. A dual market for foreign
exchange existed in the country through the 1980s that included an official foreign exchange
market and a secondary exchange market. Since 1985, with the aim of preventing the over-
valuation of the exchange rate, the government has followed a policy of frequent adjustment
of the nominal exchange rate to reflect changes in the currencies of the major trading partners
relative to the US dollar.The government agreed to go for convertibility in the current account
in 1994 as dictated by IMF Article VIII, with the expectation that this would create confidence
in the local currency, improve the management of the economy, facilitate international trade
and support the process of trade liberalization. The government introduced a floating exchange
rate system in May 2003.

Financial sector policy

The financial sector in Bangladesh is dominated by banks. Commercial and specialized banks
were under the control of the government until the 1980s. The government initiated liberal-
ization of nationalized commercial banks (NCBs) through opening up the banking sector with
the objective of creating competition. The initial reform process included denationalization of
two of the six NCBs and providing licences to the private sector to establish banks. Under the
auspices of the World Bank and the IMF, the reform process accelerated at the end of the 1980s
and the beginning of the 1990s.
In the 1990s two initiatives, namely the Financial Sector Reform Program (FSRP) and
Financial Sector Adjustment Credit (FSAC), implemented various reform measures in the
financial sector.The objectives included liberalization of interest rates, improvement of the cap-
acity of loan classification and provisioning, restructuring capital and risk analysis, strengthening
the central bank and improving the legal system and developing a framework for loan recovery
(Khatun, 2013). Reform measures in the financial sector continued even after the phase-out
of the FSRP in 1996. The national parliament adopted a bill in 2003 to bring more reforms in
the banking sector. Bangladesh Bank was given the autonomy to formulate monetary policy

137
 F. Khatun

through the Bangladesh Bank Amendment Bill 2003. A reform initiative called the Central
Bank Strengthening Project (CBSP) was undertaken in 2003 by the World Bank and the gov-
ernment of Bangladesh in order to put in place a strong and effective regulatory and super-
visory system for the banking sector. The focus of this project was on three broad areas such
as (1) strengthening the legal framework; (2) reorganization and modernization of Bangladesh
Bank; and (3) capacity building of Bangladesh Bank.
In 2007, three state-owned commercial banks (SCBs) were converted into limited compan-
ies with support from the World Bank. The reform initiative, monitored by Bangladesh Bank,
included measures such as selection of the chief executive officer, deputy managing director and
four general managers of the SCBs through a competitive process. Additionally, monitorable goals
were set for cash recovery of non-performing loans (NPLs), limits on new NPLs, operations, com-
puterization, income and profitability, increased net worth and disclosure in the reform package.

Human development policy

The relative success of human development in terms of access to education and health is the
result of initiatives taken by both the government and non-governmental organizations. The
objective is to provide universal access to education and health.The first Education Commission
of the newly independent Bangladesh came into existence in 1972, headed by Dr Qudrat-e-
Khuda.The commission emphasized secular education at all levels and uniform secondary edu-
cation. The Compulsory Primary Education Act 1990 was passed to make it compulsory for all
children between the ages of six and ten to receive free primary education. A comprehensive
Education Policy was adopted in 2010 that had the following salient features: (1) a unified cur-
riculum for general, madrasa (Islamic seminaries) and vocational education up to the secondary
level; (2) pre-primary education for children older than five years of age; (3) compulsory pri-
mary education from Class I to VIII by 2018; (4) religious and ethics education for all faiths up
to secondary level; (5) technical education institutions in every upazila (sub-district); (6) con-
version of all three-year degree courses to four years; (7) formation of a permanent Education
Commission; and (8) formulation of an integrated education law and making the secondary
level from Class IX to XII (Bangladesh. Ministry of Education, 2010).
A population policy was in place as early as 1976 that incorporated population and family
planning programmes as integral components of overall national development. National Drug
Policies adopted in 1982 and 2005 aimed to provide access to essential drugs at affordable
prices. The government also adopted a National Health Policy in 2011 to achieve sustainable
improvement in health, nutrition and family welfare status of the people, particularly of poor
and vulnerable groups, including women, children and the elderly.3

Development performance of Bangladesh

The present growth performance is the continuation of the growth momentum that has
been created since the 1980s. The GDP of Bangladesh has risen by one percentage point on
average; that is, from 2.8 per cent in the 1970s to 3.7 per cent in the 1980s, to 4.8 per cent
a year in the 1990s, and to about 6 per cent per year in the 2000s and 2010s (BBS, various
issues). Consistent high growth has contributed to the reduction of the country’s income
poverty. Thus the share of the population below the poverty line has been reduced from
more than 80 per cent in the early 1970s to 31.5 per cent in 2010 (BBS, 2010). Population
growth has declined from 2.7 per cent a year in the 1970s to 1.2 per cent in 2011 (BBS,
2011a). Due to the reduction in population growth, increased economic growth has resulted

138
 Development policies since independence

in higher per capita income that reached US$1,115 in 2015 from a mere US$90 in 1973
(Table 10.2). The growth of the economy during the 1980s and the 1990s was a result of
higher agricultural productivity and increased exports due to the opportunities provided by
the major economies of the world such as the European Union through market access. Since
the 2000s, remittances by the Bangladeshi labour force working abroad have contributed to
the growth of the economy through bringing foreign exchange to the country. Higher remit-
tances increased the national savings rate at a faster rate than the domestic savings rate. Higher
exports and remittances have helped to boost investible resources of the country. Thus the
investment–GDP ratio increased from a mere 10 per cent in the 1970s to 17 per cent in the
1980s, to 20 per cent in the 1990s, and 24 per cent in the 2000s (BBS, various issues). The
investment–GDP ratio stagnated in the 2010s at around 26 per cent (BBS, various issues).
The economy has been increasingly integrating into the global economy with higher exports,
imports and remittances. At the same time, Bangladesh has reduced its dependence on foreign
aid, indicating the ability of the country to pursue a more self-reliant growth through mobil-
ization of resources from within the country. The share of foreign aid in GDP of the country
has declined remarkably from 3.8 per cent in 1973 to 2 per cent in 2014 (Table 10.2).
One of the remarkable aspects of Bangladesh’s growth is its resilience to various shocks.
From very low economic growth in the 1970s and a fluctuating rate in the 1980s, the growth
rate accelerated in the 1990s and continued afterwards. From 1980 to 2007 the per capita real
GDP of Bangladesh was ahead of the average of all developing countries (Mahmud et al., 2011).
Higher economic growth resulted in higher per capita income. The slowdown in population
growth contributed to higher per capita income that increased from an average of 1.7 per cent
in the 1980s to 4.4 per cent in the 2000s. The growth has also been less volatile in Bangladesh.
The stability of economic growth has helped the country to reduce poverty – Bangladesh has
been able to bring 16 million people out of poverty in the last decade (Andrés et al., 2013).
The economy has undergone structural change due to higher economic growth since the
early 1990s. Bangladesh has made the transition from an agricultural country to an industrial-
ized one, and industry began to make a higher contribution to GDP than agriculture during
the 2000s. However, agriculture continues to absorb almost half (47.3 per cent in 2010) of the
labour force (BBS, 2011b). A further structural change was observed in the 1990s when the
share of services in GDP surpassed that of industry (BBS, various issues).
Improved economic performance led to significant changes in a number of non-economic
aspects of development. Thus similar strides have been observed in social development. Along
with reduced poverty, gender parity in both primary and secondary education has been achieved.
Life expectancy at birth has increased with higher life expectancy for females. Improvements in
primary school enrolment rates, immunization against early childhood diseases and reduction in
infant mortality rates are commendable (BBS, various issues; Mahmud, 2008).

Development challenges and the way forward

Bangladesh has come a long way through hard work of its people backed by a number of enab-
ling policies. While the country is now aiming to achieve middle-income status (Bangladesh.
Planning Commission, 2012) through expediting its growth momentum, it is also struggling
to deal with a number of challenges. The journey towards a higher growth path will need to
address the following challenges.

1 Maintaining growth momentum: After a steady growth rate during the past two decades, GDP
has now taken a downturn, primarily due to lower investment. The investment–GDP ratio

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Table 10.2 Changes in economic and social indicators, 1973–2014

Macroeconomic indicators 1973 1980 1990 2000 2010 2013 2014

Real GDP growth (%) 3.3 3.8 5.9 5.9 6.1 6.0a 6.1a
(1981)
Per capita GDP (at current prices, in US$) 90 207 280 368 687 976a 1,115a
Sectoral share (%) in GDP
Agriculture - 32.3 28.7 24.6 19.6 16.1a 15.7a
Industry - 16.6 20.2 24.7 28.9 27.8a 28.4a
Services - 48.4 48.3 46.9 48.1 52.0a 51.9a
Export - 4.1 5.0 12.2 16.1 20.8 19.9
Import - 13.0 12.3 17.8 23.7 28.7 26.7
Remittances - 1.3 2.5 4.1 10.9 11.1 9.4
Official development assistance (ODA) 3.8 6.7 5.9 3.4 2.2 2.1 2.0
Social indicators
Life expectancy at birth (in years) 46.2 54.8 56.1 63.6 67.7 70.7 n.a.
(1974) (1981)
Literacy rate (15 years and over) - 29.2 35.3 52.8 58.6 57.7 n.a.
(1981) (1991) (2012)
Maternal mortality ratio (per 100,000 live birth) - 648 478 340 200 170 n.a.
(1986)
Probability of dying by age of 5 (per 1,000 live - 212 151 87.7 47.2 40.9 n.a.
birth) (1982) (2012)
Poverty headcount ratio at US$1.25 a day (PPP) - 60.6 66.7 58.6 43.3 NA n.a.
(% of population) (1984) (1989)
Poverty headcount ratio at national poverty lines - - 56.6 48.9 31.5 26.2 24.3
(% of population) (1992)

Source: BBS (various issues); Bangladesh Economic Review (various issues); World Development Indicators.
Note: aBase year 2005–2006; in all other cases base year is 1995–1996; different years are in parenthesis.
 Development policies since independence

was 26.8 per cent in FY2013, far short of the target of the Sixth Five Year Plan which stipu-
lated that investment–GDP ratio should be increased to 37.5 per cent to achieve an eco-
nomic growth of 7 to 8 per cent.
2 Improving the quality of growth: Despite improvements of several economic and social indica-
tors, income inequality is a growing concern for the country. Income inequality, measured
in terms of the Gini Coefficient4 for the distribution of income was 0.36 in 1973–1974 and
in 1983–1984 (BBS, various issues of Statistical Pocketbook). Income inequality continued
to rise afterwards. There was a sharp increase between 1991–1992 and 2000 when income
inequality increased from 0.39 in 1991–1992 to 0.45 in 2000. It went up further to 0.47 in
2005 before declining slightly to 0.46 in 2010 (BBS, 2005, 2010). More glaring is the income
distribution pattern. In 2010 the top 5 per cent of the population possessed almost 27 per
cent of total household income while the bottom 5 per cent received only 0.78 per cent of
total household income of the country (BBS, 2010).
3 Creation of gainful employment: Lack of opportunities for employment and income-generating
activities and the resultant erosion in purchasing power has contributed to low success in
reducing poverty and inequality. The labour force faces an unemployment rate of 4.55
per cent in 2011 (BBS, 2011b). Since major sources of employment are agriculture and
informal-sector activities, a large number of people remain underemployed due to the sea-
sonality of agricultural production and low income in the informal sector.Therefore, gainful
employment with higher productivity is a major development challenge in Bangladesh.
4 Sustainability of growth: Bangladesh is vulnerable to the impact of climate change. The mani-
festation of climate change is apprehended to be observed through higher frequency of
natural disasters such as drought, flood, cyclones, tidal surges and sea-level rise, which will
severely impact the lives and livelihoods of a large number of people (IPCC, 2007; Khatun
and Islam, 2010). Since the country is an insignificant contributor to greenhouse gas emis-
sions, most of its efforts towards dealing with the impact of climate change are to be focused
on adapting to such impacts. Hence higher investment is required for innovation of tech-
nologies for adaptation.
5 Improving governance: Improved quality of services requires transparency and accountability
in the allocation of resources, implementation of development programmes and distribution
of development outcomes. Bangladesh has so far achieved economic growth despite poor
governance. This has been coined ‘development surprise’.5 However, the future progress of
Bangladesh will largely be determined by the quality of governance. The objective of good
governance should of course be to give the most deprived sections of society access to eco-
nomic and political opportunities (Sobhan, 2010).
6 Institutional reform: The improvement in governance is contingent upon the functions of
the institutions in charge of delivering services. Ironically, institutional performance has not
been in tandem with the rapid economic growth of the country.This has led to lower imple-
mentation of development plans, poor quality of public investment and misuse of public
resources. Institutional reforms towards establishing a strong public administration, efficient
judiciary and law-enforcing agencies are necessary to untangle the unholy alliance in mis-
appropriation of public resources.

Notes
1 Economists Just Faaland and J. R. Parkinson in their famous book termed Bangladesh a ‘test case for
development’ (Faaland and Parkinson, 1976).

141
 F. Khatun

2 LDCs’ average growth was 5.7 per cent in 2013 (UNCTAD, 2014).
3 The first draft National Health Policy was placed before the parliament in 1990, but did not see the
light of the day. Later, in 2000, the parliament also approved the Health Policy, but the government
in 2001 discarded this and started to reformulate it. It was almost finalized in 2006, but time did
not allow the government to approve it. The non-party caretaker government constituted a panel
of experts to formulate a National Health Policy to ensure ‘health for all’. However, due to time
constraints, the government could not finalize the same. When the Bangladesh Awami League came
to power, it firmly expressed its commitments to finalize the policy within three months, but it came
after three years (Nath, 2012).
4 The Gini Coefficient is a number between zero and one that measures the degree of inequality in the
distribution of income in a given society. In the Gini Coefficient a value of zero expresses total equality
and a value of one indicates maximum inequality.
5 Mahmud et al. (2011) has elaborated on the achievement of Bangladesh despite various challenges,
including poor governance.

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A Post-2015 Development Agenda. New York: United Nations Conference on Trade and Development
(UNCTAD).
World Bank. (n.d.) World Development Indicators. [Online] Available from: http://data.worldbank.org/
country/bangladesh [Accessed on: 7 February 2015].

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 11
AGRICULTURE AND FOOD
SECURITY
Uttam Kumar Deb

Bangladesh has made remarkable progress in agriculture and the overall economy over the
last four decades. Gross domestic product (GDP) has increased by about 20 times and agricul-
tural GDP by five times. The number of persons engaged in agriculture, forestry and fisheries
has increased from 16.4 million in 1983/84 to 25.7 million in 2010. Although the absolute
value of agriculture has been increasing over time, its share is declining with the expansion of
non-agriculture sectors (manufacturing and services) in both urban and rural areas. The share
of agriculture in GDP declined to 15.1 percent in 2013/14 from 58.4 percent in 1973/74. The
share of employment in agriculture declined to 47.3 percent of total employment in the coun-
try in 2010 from 51.7 percent in 2002/03.The labor-absorption capacity of the agriculture sec-
tor has weakened with the decline in per capita land availability. In spite of these new realities,
agriculture is still very important in Bangladesh.With continued increase in population and rise
in per capita income, demand for food and other agricultural commodities has been growing.

Performance of the agriculture sector

Bangladesh has long been aware of the renewed importance of agriculture for ensuring food and
nutrition security, promoting economic growth and poverty reduction. Between 1973/74 and
2013/14, the Bangladesh economy grew by 20 times. Total GDP has increased from US$8.92
billion to US$173.82 billion (Table 11.1). All sub-sectors of agriculture (crop, livestock, fish-
eries and forestry) have increased substantially over time. The value of agricultural GDP has
increased from US$5.21 billion in 1973/74 to US$26.30 billion in 2013/14. During the same
period, crop GDP has increased by 4.4 times, livestock GDP has increased by 5.8 times and
forestry GDP has increased by eight times. In addition, fisheries GDP has increased by more
than six times.
In terms of growth, Bangladesh agriculture has performed remarkably well both in the
long term (FY1973/74 to FY2007/08) and in the short term or in recent years (FY2008/09
to 2013/14). Total GDP of Bangladesh grew at the rate of 6 percent in recent years, against
4.19 percent per annum in the long term (Table 11.1). In recent years, growth in agriculture
was 4.08 percent while long-term growth was 2.39 percent. Long-term annual growth in
crop, livestock, fisheries and forestry was 2.03, 3.26, 3.30 and 3.55 percent respectively. On the
other hand, short-term annual growth in crop and livestock GDP was 3.58 and 2.58 percent,

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 Agriculture and food security

Table 11.1 Annual compound rate of growth of real GDP (2005–2006 constant prices) of different
sub-sectors of Bangladesh agriculture, 1973/74 to 2013/14 (% per annum)

Sectors 1973/74–2013/14 1973/74–2007/08 2008/09–2013/14

Agriculture 2.71 2.39 4.08

Crops and horticulture 2.33 2.03 3.58
Animal farming 3.37 3.26 2.58
Forest and related services 3.81 3.55 5.52
Fishing 3.73 3.30 5.57
Total GDP 4.49 4.19 6.00

Source: Author’s calculations based on data collected from the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics.

while it was 5.57 percent for fish farming and 5.58 percent for forestry. A comparison of
long-term and short-term growth rates of different sub-sectors of agriculture reveals that
overall agricultural growth and growth of the crop, livestock and fisheries sub-sectors were
higher in recent years.

Production of cereal crops

Production of food grains and other agricultural commodities have increased by many times.
Though there have been ups and downs, production of food grains have generally experienced
an upward trend. Increase in production of food grains has been substantial during the last four
decades.Total production of food grains (rice and wheat) has increased by 3.2 times and average
annual production increased from 10.96 million tons in the early 1970s to 34.83 million tons in
the early 2010s ( Table 11.2). During the same period, total rice production has increased by 3.1
times (from 10.85 to 33.76 million metric tons).Traditionally, aman rice was the major source of
rice in Bangladesh but the share of boro rice in total rice production has surpassed that of aman
rice since 1998/99. Thus, Bangladesh has experienced a structural shift in its rice production
from a largely weather-influenced crop to an irrigated crop, which is much more sensitive to
the quality of public policy and governance than the vagaries of nature (Deb, 2002). Now, boro
rice contributes about 54 percent to the total food grain production against only 18 percent
in the 1970/72 period; aman rice’s contribution has reduced from 56 to 36 percent and aus
now contributes 6.3 percent as opposed to 24.8 percent during this period. Wheat production
increased from a low base (109,000 metric tons) until 2000 (1,706,000 metric tons), and then
declined to 1,074,000 metric tons in 2010s.
Despite inter-year fluctuations, production of food grains experienced sustained growth both
in the long term (FY1969/70 to FY2007/08) and in recent years (FY2008/09 to FY2012/13).
Long-term annual growth in production of food grains was 2.77 percent, while it has been
2.36 percent in recent years (Table 11.2). The long-term annual compound rate of growth
in total rice production was 2.67 percent against 2.15 percent in recent years. In the case of
aman and boro rice, annual growth in production in recent years was 2.60 and 1.45 percent
respectively. On the other hand, production of aus rice registered an annual growth of 5.87 per-
cent in recent years, although it has declined annually at the rate of 1.92 percent in the long
term. Wheat production has registered an annual growth of 9.21 percent in recent years. Thus,
increased food production in recent years was possible through increased production of rice in
all seasons (aus, aman and boro) and wheat.

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Table 11.2 Trends in the average annual production of major crops, 1969/70–2012/13

Period Production (in ‘000 tons) Growth rate (%)

1969/70–1971/72 1989/90–1991/92 1999/00–2001/02 2010/11–2012/13 1969/70–2012/13 1969/70–2007/08 2008/09–2012/13

Cereal crops
Total food grains 10,961 18,979 25,857 34,829 2.87 2.77 2.36
(rice and wheat)
Total rice 10,852 17,993 24,151 33,755 2.83 2.67 2.15
Aus rice 2,722 2,338 1,819 2,208 −1.52 −1.92 5.87
Aman rice 6,186 9,213 10,760 12,829 1.67 1.57 2.60
Boro rice 1,944 6,443 11,571 18,718 6.36 6.48 1.45
Wheat 109 986 1,706 1,074 4.96 6.47 9.21
Maize 3 3 26 1,158 17.53 14.30 20.49
Non-cereal crops
Sugarcane 6,901 7,517 6,718 4,569 −0.54 −0.06 −3.02
Potato 827 1,227 3,048 8,378 5.90 5.11 10.36
Vegetables 803 1,078 1,560 2,295 3.30 3.26 2.53
Jute 6,193 916 797 1,441 −5.65 −6.90 15.33
Cotton 10 10 29 17 1.81 2.53 8.31
Tobacco 38 35 37 81 0.35 −0.47 19.68
Total pulses 265 518 364 246 0.41 1.41 7.10
Moong 14 32 35 23 2.80 3.72 9.63
Masur 54 153 123 84 2.23 3.55 10.11
Total oilseeds 257 449 328 413 1.02 1.18 5.98
Rape and mustard 125 229 240 267 2.13 2.35 6.97
Spices 338 321 407 1,650 3.80 2.59 13.16
Tea 24 43 50 62 2.21 2.36 0.38

Source: Author’s calculations, based on data collected from Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics.
 Agriculture and food security

Maize was not an important crop until the 1990s. Maize production increased from about
3,000 metric tons in the 1970s and 1980s to 26,000 metric tons in the early 2000s.Average maize
production has increased to 1,158,000 tons in recent years.The increase in production was pos-
sible due to increased demand for maize for poultry feed and other multiple uses of the grain.
The new maize hybrids, marketed mainly through private companies and non-governmental
organizations (NGOs), provide higher profits and scope for growing throughout the year.

Production of non-cereal crops

Production of non-cereal crops has also increased substantially except for jute, sugarcane, pulses
and oilseeds. Between the early 1970s and early 2010s, potato production increased by more
than ten times (from 827,000 metric tons to 8,378,000 metric tons) while vegetable production
increased by 2.9 times (from 803,000 metric tons to 2,295,000 metric tons). Spices produc-
tion has increased by about five times. Tea production has increased by 2.6 times. Total oilseed
production in the early 1970s was about 274,000 metric tons, which gradually increased to
483,000 in the mid-1980s and then declined with a fluctuating trend to 328,000 tons in the
early 2000s. In recent years, oilseed production has increased to 413,000 metric tons. Jute pro-
duction declined from 6.19 million tons to 797,000 tons in the early 2000s. In recent years, jute
production has concentrated in some areas and increased to 1.44 million tons in the early 2010s.
Sugarcane production in recent years was about two-thirds of the production in the early 1970s,
declining from 6.9 million metric tons to 4.57 million metric tons. Average annual production
of pulses was about 265,000 metric tons in the early 1970s, which increased until the mid-1990s
but then started to decline. Lowest production (196,000 metric tons) was in 2008/09, but then
gradually increased to 413,000 metric tons in 2012/13. Tobacco production has increased in
recent years.
The annual compound rate of growth in production of non-crops is also reported in
Table 11.2. Potato production increased by 5.11 percent per annum in the long term
(FY1969/70–FY2007/08) and experienced high annual growth (10.36 percent) in recent years
(FY2004–FY2013).Vegetable production in recent years registered 2.53 percent annual growth
against 3.26 percent in the long term. Even though total production declined in the long term,
pulses production has increased annually at the rate of 7.1 percent in recent years. Production
of oilseeds increased at the rate of 5.98 percent in recent years. Tea production has increased
annually at the rate of 2.4 percent in the long term and 0.4 percent in recent years. Bangladesh
has experienced consistent decline in the area under those crops (sugarcane) and thereby in
production of sugarcane. Sugarcane production declined annually at the rate of 0.06 percent in
the long term and 3 percent in recent years.

Production of fish, milk, meat and eggs

At independence in 1971, fish cultivation was limited and most of the fish were caught from
the sweet water. Fish production has registered a substantial increase during the last two decades.
Total fish production increased by 3.6 times, from 952,000 metric tons in 1991/92 to 3,410,000
metric tons in 2012/13. Production hit the 2,000 metric tons mark in 2003/04 and 3,000
metric tons in 2010/12. During this period, production of milk, meat and eggs also increased
substantially. Prior to independence livestock was an integral part of the farming system but
commercial farming for dairy, meat and egg production was limited. Between 1991/92 and
2012/13, milk production increased by 3.7 times (from 1,352,000 tons to 5,067,000 tons); it
took almost two decades to double production (2,365,000 metric tons in 2009/10) while the

147
 U. K. Deb

remainder of the growth occurred in the subsequent four years. Meat production increased by
7.9 times (from 460,000 tons to 3,620,000 tons) between 1991/92 and 2012/13. Meanwhile,
egg production has also experienced staggering growth, increasing by five times (from 1.517
billion eggs to 7.617 billion eggs).

Drivers of change
Major drivers of increased agricultural production in the country have been the development
and diffusion of improved crop varieties, expansion and better management of irrigation, effect-
ive input (seed and fertilizer) delivery, policy reform and investment in agriculture. Access to
input and output markets through better road networks in the country and to the international
market through trade policy reform (reduction of tariff rates for inputs and cash incentives
for export of vegetables and fisheries products) also contributed to the increase in domestic
production.
Adoption of improved crop varieties, hybrids and crop production technologies: More than 500 mod-
ern varieties of different crops have been developed and released by the National Agricultural
Research Systems. Adoption of these improved varieties, replacing low-yielding traditional var-
ieties, has contributed to an increase in yield, reduction in per-unit cost of production and
increased profitability in farming.Thus, the real price of agricultural products declined over time
without hampering production incentives for the farmers. Bangladesh cultivated more than 50
modern varieties of rice and more than 20 varieties of wheat. In addition to the high yielding
varieties (HYVs), Bangladesh has also approved 52 hybrids for cultivation during the boro season.
Currently, more than 95 percent of the potato area is under HYVs, all of the maize area is under
hybrids, almost all the area under vegetables is under hybrids and HYVs, more than 95 percent
of the area under boro rice is under HYVs and hybrids, while two-thirds of the area under
aman rice is under HYVs. Improved cultivars were complemented with better crop husbandry
practices, efficient utilization of fertilizer and irrigation, and better pest management methods.
Modern varieties and other inputs, production technologies and knowledge were disseminated
to the farmers’ fields through extension services and other public and private agencies. Fish pro-
duction has also benefited from the supply of quality fingerlings and improved varieties of tilapia
and other fish species. New methods of rearing better-quality poultry birds and improved breeds
of cattle for both milk and meat production have expanded throughout the country. Livestock
production was also supported by the NGOs and private-sector companies.
Expansion of irrigation facilities: The technological progress has been supported by both pub-
lic and private investment for irrigation, flood control and drainage. The irrigated area has
expanded rapidly since the late 1980s, especially with private investment by numerous farmers
in the minor irrigation system (diesel-operated low-lift pumps and shallow tube wells), which
now accounts for over 70 percent of the total irrigated area. Expansion of irrigation facilities
were complemented by the emergence of a water market that provides an irrigation service to
adjoining plots in the command area, as a result of which the small and marginal farmers who
cannot afford to invest in irrigation equipment can now have access to irrigation for cultivation
of irrigated boro rice in the dry season (Hossain and Deb, 2010). However, the government
retains control over the management of deep tube wells, which it found difficult to transfer to
the private sector. Some subsidy for irrigation is provided through the provision of electricity
and diesel, as power for irrigation has become a major input in dry-season rice cultivation.
Better delivery of agricultural inputs: Fertilizer, irrigation and improved seeds are three essen-
tial inputs whose procurement and distribution had once been under the sole control of the
Bangladesh Agricultural Development Corporation (BADC), a semi-government organization.

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 Agriculture and food security

From the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, government interventions as well as subsidies were
gradually reduced with the aim to completely transform the market for these inputs (Hossain,
1996). Changes in privatizing the marketing system of fertilizer began in 1978 and were pur-
sued vigorously in the early 1980s. Beginning in July 1987, private dealers were allowed to pro-
cure fertilizer in bulk at a higher discount rate from factories as well as from the large BADC
supply centers known as Transport Discount Points. By 1992, BADC withdrew from wholesale
trade, allowing the private sector to procure, import (except urea) and distribute fertilizer in
domestic markets. Subsidies on potash and phosphate (which were mostly imported) were also
eliminated in 1992. Availability of fertilizer was a problem in the early 1990s and agricultural
production for many crops was negatively affected because of lack of fertilizer availability on
time. Fertilizer subsidies were reintroduced in 1996, following an acute fertilizer crisis in the
domestic market during the 1995 boro season. The government virtually took over the whole-
sale distribution from the private sector and started operating a buffer stock in order to stabilize
fertilizer prices. More recently (from 2009 onwards), the government has introduced heavy
subsidies on non-urea fertilizers such as TSP and MP to ensure more balanced use of chemical
fertilizers, vitally needed to maintain soil fertility (Hossain and Deb, 2010). Currently, the pri-
vate sector is buoyant in supply of HYV and hybrid seeds.
Trade policy reform: The government had also implemented trade policy reforms in case
of other inputs such as seed, import of fertilizers and irrigation equipment. The seed mar-
ket in Bangladesh has a dual structure in which major crops such as rice, wheat, jute, potato
and sugarcane are classified as notified crops. For these crops, variety development, evaluation,
maintenance, multiplication, quality control and distribution are carried out by different pub-
lic agencies. The private sector’s role in the seed business has been restricted to the distribution
of non-notified crops, mainly brand-name hybrid vegetable seed. In 1999, the government
allowed the private sector to import seeds of hybrid rice. During the last one-and-a-half dec-
ades, some leading NGOs have been obtaining breeder seeds directly from the Bangladesh Rice
Research Institute so that they can produce and certify seeds of rice for distribution. As a result,
the marketing of seeds of high-yielding varieties of rice has substantially increased. The private
sector has been allowed to import fertilizer from the international market since the mid-1980s.
In the case of import of diesel engines, import duties were reduced and procedures were simpli-
fied. These were accompanied by withdrawal of restrictions on standardization of minor irriga-
tion equipment, especially for shallow tube wells and low-lift pumps. These policy changes led
to huge imports of diesel engines from China, Taiwan and other low-cost exporting countries,
and massive private investment in minor irrigation systems, which now account for over 70 per-
cent of total irrigated area in the country.
Public, private and international investment in agriculture: Public investment in agriculture was
substantial, which has also stimulated private investment in the country. Public investment also
facilitated the harnessing of the potential from investments made by the international commu-
nity through the international agricultural research institutes.
The above policies and initiatives by the government contributed substantially to the expan-
sion of the market for agricultural inputs, stabilization of input prices and adoption of improved
technologies, and thereby increased agricultural production in Bangladesh (Ahmed, 1995; Deb,
2005; Hossain and Deb, 2010; Shahabuddin and Deb, 2011).

Food security situation

According to the 1996 World Food Summit, ‘Food security exists when all people, at all times,
have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary

149
 U. K. Deb

needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life’ (FAO, 1996). Based on this definition,
four food security dimensions can be identified: food availability, economic and physical access
to food, food utilization and stability over time (FAO, 2008).
Attaining food security at the national level depends on the availability of food from domes-
tic production and imports from the international markets. On the other hand, food security
at the household level depends not only on availability of food but also on the ability to pur-
chase food by the household. Households with adequate income can buy food from the mar-
ket if it is available but low-income households face problems buying food when food prices
are high. For such low-income groups, the government distributes food through priced (such
as Open Market Sale) and non-priced channels (Vulnerable Group Development, Vulnerable
Group Feeding, Food for Works, etc.). Increase in the price of agricultural commodities pro-
vides incentives to farmers while reducing the purchasing power of low-income consumers.
Therefore, a major challenge for the government is to balance the interest of producers and
consumers through government procurement and the Public Food Distribution System.

Import of food items

Bangladesh is a net importer of both rice and wheat even in normal years. It is also a net
importer of pulses, edible oils, spices, fruits, sugar, milk and milk products. Prior to 1993, the
private sector was not allowed to import food grains. Only government agencies used to import
rice and wheat. Since 1993, the government has allowed the private sector to import food
grains. Most of the imports of rice and wheat have been carried out by the private sector in
recent years (Figure 11.1). The import of rice has declined in normal years but increases sub-
stantially in years of floods and cyclones. Import of wheat has increased in recent years due to
(1) decrease in domestic production, (2) substantial reduction in food aid and (3) increase in
demand for products made from wheat flour in urban areas. During the last two decades, import
of pulses, edible oils, spices and sugar have been on the rise at a rapid rate to meet the growing
demand–supply gap. Import of all food items in 2013/14 was about 13 times that of 1993/94
(Figure 11.1). Total import of food items increased from US$408 million to US$5.203 billion.
Compared to 1993/94, the value of the total import of food grains (rice and wheat) in 2013/14
was more than nine times higher, while it was 6.9 times higher for milk and dairy products, 8.2
times for spices and 15.2 times for pulses. In the case of oilseeds, the import value was more than
12 times and for edible oil about 14 times that of 1993/94. On the other hand, the total value
of sugar imports has increased from US$13 million to US$822 million in 2013/14. Increase in
the import of sugar is also linked with the rise in the number of companies in agro-processing
sectors; some of the companies also export processed food items. Liberalized import of food
grains helped the country to meet the shortfall in domestic production, particularly after the
floods in 1998 and 2004.

Food consumption and nutrition

Increased domestic production and liberalized import of foods has increased per capita avail-
ability as well as consumption of food items. Household Income and Expenditure Surveys
(HIES) conducted by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics in various years indicate that per cap-
ita daily intake of food grains decreased from 509 grams in 1991–1992 to 442 grams in 2010
(Table 11.3). During the same period, per capita daily consumption of vegetables increased by
19 grams. Meat consumption doubled (from 12.8 to 25.8 grams). Milk consumption increased
by 75 percent (from 19.1 to 33.7 grams), and fish consumption increased by 15 grams (from

150
 Agriculture and food security

Food aid GoB commercial Private commercial

6,000

5,000

4,000
‘000 tons

3,000

2,000

1,000

0
1990/91
1991/92
1992/93
1993/94
1994/95
1995/96
1996/97
1997/98
1998/99
1999/00
2000/01
2001/02
2002/03
2003/04
2004/05
2005/06
2006/07
2007/08
2008/09
2009/10
2010/11
2011/12
2012/13
2013/14
Figure 11.1 Trends in import of food grains, 1981–1982 to 2013–2014 (1,000 metric tons)
(source: prepared by the author, based on data collected from the Directorate of Food)

34.5 to 49.5 grams). In 2010, fruit consumption was about 2.5 times that of the early 1990s
(from 16.9 to 44.7 grams). Consumption of edible oils doubled (from 10.1 to 20.5 grams). Per
capita consumption by both the poor and well-off increased in rural and urban areas, although
significant differences in food consumption between wealthy and less well-off households per-
sist. According to the Poverty Monitoring Surveys, poor households consumed about 25 per-
cent less food in terms of quantity and about 20 percent less in terms of calories compared to
well-off households at the national level. Hence, economic access to food by all, particularly for
the poor people of the country, remains a major concern. Another pertinent concern is stability
in food consumption, particularly during rapid increases in prices and during times of natural
disaster.

Trends in the Hunger Index

The Global Hunger Index (GHI) is a comprehensive measure to track hunger globally and by
country and region. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) calculates the
GHI each year. It reflects the multi-dimensional nature of hunger. The GHI combines three
equally weighted indicators (undernourishment, child underweight and child mortality) in one
index number. Undernourishment indicates the proportion of undernourished as a percentage of
the population (reflecting the share of the population with insufficient calorie intake). Child
underweight indicates the proportion of children younger than the age of five who are under-
weight (low weight for age reflecting wasting, stunted growth or both), which is one indicator
of child undernutrition. Child mortality indicates the mortality rate of children younger than
the age of five (partially reflecting the fatal synergy of inadequate dietary intake and unhealthy
environments). The GHI ranks countries on a 100-point scale. Zero is the best score (no hun-
ger) and 100 is the worst, although neither of these extremes is reached in practice.
The Hunger Index in Bangladesh has consistently declined between 1990 and 2014. It was
36.6 in 1990, 34.4 in 1995, 24 in 2000 and 19.1 in 2014. It implies that in the early 1990s one
out of three persons was in a ‘hunger’ condition. On the other hand, one out of five persons

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Table 11.3 Average per capita daily intake of major food items, 1991/92 to 2010 (grams)

Food item 1991–92 2000 2005 2010

National Rural Urban National Rural Urban National Rural Urban National Rural Urban
Rice 472.8 481.6 416.0 458.5 478.8 372.7 439.6 459.7 378.5 416.0 441.6 344.2
Wheat 36.3 34.6 47.1 17.2 14.0 30.1 12.1 8.0 24.5 26.0 23.3 33.6
Potato 43.7 41.4 58.3 55.5 54.7 58.4 63.1 61.9 67.5 70.3 71.5 66.7
Pulses 17.9 17.3 21.7 15.8 15.0 19.0 14.2 12.7 18.6 14.3 13.2 17.2
Vegetables 137.4 135.3 150.9 140.5 141.1 137.9 157.0 156.5 158.7 166.1 170.0 155.0
Edible oil 10.1 9.0 16.4 12.8 11.2 19.1 16.5 14.3 22.9 20.5 18.3 26.6
Onion 11.9 11.2 17.0 15.4 14.1 20.7 18.4 16.1 25.3 22.0 20.2 27.8
Beef 5.2 4.5 9.9 8.3 6.9 14.0 7.8 6.4 12.0 6.8 4.7 12.5
Mutton 0.9 0.8 1.3 0.5 0.4 0.7 0.6 0.6 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.9
Chicken/duck 2.0 1.9 3.1 4.5 3.5 8.4 6.8 5.8 10.1 11.2 9.0 17.4
Eggs 4.7 4.6 5.8 5.3 4.6 7.9 5.2 4.4 7.4 7.2 5.8 10.9
Fish 34.5 32.5 47.8 38.5 37.8 40.9 42.1 39.7 49.6 49.5 45.8 59.9
Milk 19.1 18.5 23.2 29.7 29.0 32.6 32.4 31.0 36.6 33.7 31.8 39.2
Fruits 16.9 15.9 23.4 28.4 26.5 35.6 32.5 32.4 32.9 44.7 42.6 50.4
Sugar/gur 8.8 8.5 10.8 6.9 6.4 8.8 8.1 7.5 9.7 8.4 7.4 11.3
Miscellaneous 64.0 60.5 85.7 55.4 54.6 54.9 38.2 36.9 42.5 36.5 33.6 44.9
Total 886.2 878.1 938.4 893.1 898.7 870.7 947.7 946.3 952.1 933.8 939.3 918.5
Source: Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES), Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS).
 Agriculture and food security

was in a ‘hunger’ condition in 2014. This is a significant achievement. However, we have a lot
more to do to eradicate hunger from the country and ensure food security for all at all times.

Factors affecting food security

National and household-level food security in Bangladesh is affected by a number of factors,
including the performance of the agriculture sector, especially the incidence of natural disasters
such as floods, droughts and cyclones, flow of remittances and trade policies pursued by trading
partner countries.
Natural disasters and food security: Both availability and consumption of food items increases
during normal and good production years. On the other hand, natural disasters directly affect
households’ food security status by undermining their asset base and, indirectly, through a loss of
employment opportunities, an increase in health expenditure and also an increase in necessary
food expenditure (WFP, 2009).
Remittances and food security: Remittance incomes from migrant workers have contrib-
uted toward ensuring food security in the country. Migration in Bangladesh occurs in three
forms: seasonal, rural–urban and off-country (overseas) (Ali, 2005). Rural–urban migration has
increased after independence. About one-third of the migrants migrate to Dhaka city, followed
by Chittagong city and the Comilla urban area (Hossain, 2001). Remittances sent by seasonal
migrants contribute to the food security of the migrants’ families (CPD, 2006). Empirical
studies have shown that internal migration was higher among the food-insecure households
of Mymensingh and Netrakona as compared to the food-secure households (Rahman et al.,
2009). Studies also observed that migrants remit a large portion of their income, and remit-
tances contribute toward an increase in household income, food security and poverty reduc-
tion of the recipient households (Mahmud and Osmani, 1980; Siddiqui and Abrar, 2001; Afsar
et al., 2002; Siddiqui, 2004; Khatun, 2009). Consumption with remittances prevented the
migrants’ families from falling into poverty, particularly during years of natural disasters such
as the flood of 2004 (Mahmood, 1991). International remittances received by Bangladesh have
reduced the incidence and severity of poverty in the country by six percentage points (Adams
and Page, 2005).
Prices, inflation and food security: Bangladesh enjoyed inflation rates of below 6 percent during
the early years of the 2000s. The rice market in Bangladesh followed the same trend as in the
world market, with prices remaining higher by an average of 40 percent in the 1980s, and by
20 percent during the early 1990s. In the late 1990s, the domestic price was at the same level
as in the world market. Another notable feature of the price trend was that the fluctuation of
prices around the trend was less pronounced in Bangladesh than in the world market. During
January 2006 to April 2010, rice prices in Bangladesh were lower than in Thailand (5 percent
broken rice). However, inflation was high between 2004 and 2009. An analysis of trends in
inflation (moving average) from January 2006 to October 2009 shows that food inflation was
higher in this period than non-food inflation at the national level (Hossain and Deb, 2010).
A rapid increase in the rice price has major implications for food security. The problem is
more acute for low-income and poverty-stricken households. Poor people spend 45.6 per-
cent of their total expenditure on rice (BBS, 2007). A joint study conducted by the Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Food Programme (FAO and
WFP, 2008) has quantified the impact of price hikes on food security in Bangladesh. According
to this study, as a result of rising food prices and general inflation, the food-insecure population
increased by 7.5 million and the total food-insecure (< 2122 kcals/person/day) population
reached 65.3 million.

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 U. K. Deb

Social safety net programs and food security: Social safety net (SSN) programs in Bangladesh
have also contributed toward food security at the household level. Initially, subsidized public
food distribution programs were broad. Over time more targeted programs toward the poor
and vulnerable groups were developed and implemented by subsequent governments. Based on
a nationwide representative household survey for 2009/10 (mid-2009 to mid-2010), Osmani
(2014) studied 24 major programs, which accounted for more than 80 percent of the alloca-
tions on social protection. The study classified the SSN programs into three groups: (1) transfer
programs, (2) employment programs and (3) education programs. Transfer programs constitute
by far the largest component, and include targeted programs such as Vulnerable Group Feeding,
Vulnerable Group Development for women, old age pension, and allowances for widows, disa-
bled persons, freedom fighters, disaster-stricken households and so on. Examples of employment
programs include the Hundred Days Employment Scheme, Test Relief and Food for Works.
The education component offers stipends for primary and secondary education. Osmani (2014)
concluded that the existing system is reasonably progressive in the incidence of benefits but
its coverage is limited. The study showed that the amount of benefits received as a percentage
of average household consumption – for rural households as a whole and also for beneficiary
households alone – is not even 1 percent of the consumption expenditure of an average rural
household. Even for the extremely poor households among the beneficiaries, the contribution
of the safety net to household consumption was only about 4 percent, and for the moderate
poor just 3.4 percent. Taking the rural population as a whole, the extremely poor households
received only 2.2 percent of their household consumption from safety net programs and mod-
erately poor households received only 1.5 percent. The study argued that the system has failed
to achieve the major objectives of serving the interest of disadvantaged groups by shoring up
their living standards, by enabling them to cope better with periodic crises and by preventing
them from falling down the asset ladder. The proximate reasons for this failure are twofold.
First, the aggregate amount of benefits is abysmally small in relation to the need; and second,
even the small amount that is available is distributed heavily in favor of better-off households.
The study found that the non-poor groups, comprising the well-off and marginally non-poor
households, accounted for roughly 60 percent of both beneficiaries and money offered by the
social protection programs. It added that the well-off group alone accounted for 46 percent of
all beneficiaries and 43 percent of funds.
NGO programs and food security: NGOs in Bangladesh have contributed toward achieving
household food security through increasing food availability, providing economic access
to food, enhancing food utilization and stability over time. Many NGO programs have
contributed to increased agricultural production in Bangladesh. For example, BRAC has
supplied good-quality seed of improved crop varieties, and fish fingerlings to the farmers.
Poultry raising, dairy cattle and cattle fattening programs developed and implemented by
leading NGOs have increased production of milk, meat and eggs. Microcredit provided by
Grameen Bank, BRAC, ASA, Proshika and many other NGOs helped in self-employment
creation and income generation among poor households and, thus, providing economic
access to food. Food security depends not only on the food consumption level but also the
way foods are prepared, and the sanitary and hygienic condition of the household. Many
NGOs have worked on awareness building about the nutritive value of different food items
and the importance of hygiene, deworming, prevention and cure of diarrhea, establishing
facilities for safe drinking water, toilets and other facilities essential for a healthy life. Thus,
many NGOs have contributed toward food security of marginalized households through
enhancing food utilization. Vulnerability of the poor households particularly during dis-
asters such as floods and cyclones increases. Many NGOs have contributed to relief and

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rehabilitation of households that were the victims of natural calamities. In other words,
NGOs have also contributed toward enhancing stability in food consumption of poor
households in Bangladesh.
Trade policy and food security: Bangladesh mostly depends on domestically produced rice for
their consumption, but most of the edible oils (soybean oil and palm oil), sugar and milk pow-
der consumed in Bangladesh are imported. About two-thirds of total consumption of pulses,
onions and wheat are imported. The share of potato imports fluctuates across years. There is a
high correlation between domestic and international prices of food commodities in Bangladesh.
Liberalization of imports and the involvement of the private sector, which plays a dominant
role in commercial imports, have helped Bangladesh to meet the shortfall in domestic pro-
duction particularly in the years of natural disasters. India has been the major source of rice
imports for Bangladesh. After the floods of 1998 and 2004, Bangladesh was able to import
adequate amounts of rice from India to offset the production loss caused by floods. Rice prices
in Bangladesh were at par with the import parity price even after the flood in 1998 (Dorosh
et al., 2003). Bangladesh experienced dumping of rice from India in 2001/02 and 2002/03
when the Indian government implemented a high subsidy on rice exports (Hossain and Deb,
2003). India then implemented various types of restrictions on export of food grains (includ-
ing export bans) from late 2007 onwards. India banned wheat exports and imposed minimum
export prices (MEP) for non-basmati and basmati rice. Other countries, including Vietnam,
Cambodia and Egypt, followed India in banning rice exports. The domestic price of rice in
Bangladesh increased sharply with the announcement of MEP by India (Deb et al., 2009). High
prices and limited availability in the international market had an impact on poverty and food
security in Bangladesh.
Liberal export policies along with low prices in the international markets have helped to
enhance Bangladesh’s food security situation particularly during the time of floods. However,
high and volatile prices in the international market accompanied by restrictive and unpredict-
able export policies of the major exporting countries in the late 2000s had an adverse impact
on the food security situation in Bangladesh.

Challenges and opportunities for agriculture and food security

Emerging challenges
Despite impressive gains in increasing domestic food grain production, per capita consump-
tion and enhancement in the food security situation, problems of food and nutrition security
remain a continuing challenge. Bangladesh has been facing a number of challenges in ensuring
food security for all and containing price increases in the country (Hossain and Deb, 2010).
These are: (1) meeting the demand for food, which is gradually increasing due to increases in
population and income; (2) increasing production from a shrinking resource base, particularly
the declining per capita availability of land and reduction in water availability for irrigation
accompanied by declining soil fertility due to overexploitation of soil nutrients and imbal-
anced and inadequate use of fertilizers; (3) achieving a breakthrough in yield frontiers through
research on hybrids, biotechnology, genetic engineering and so on; (4) facing the challenges
of climate change where agricultural production, including rice production, with existing
technologies in Bangladesh is likely to be reduced annually by 12.2 lakh metric tons by 2030,
as a result of climate change; (5) increased need for domestic investment in the event of a
decline in international support for agriculture; (6) facing the challenges of volatility in the
international food market and the export restrictions often used by major exporting countries;

155
 U. K. Deb

(7) complying with sanitary and phyto-sanitary (SPS) rules and facing the technical barriers
to trade (TBT) for export promotion of some agricultural commodities like vegetables and
fruits, and frozen foods for which Bangladesh has a comparative advantage; (8) minimizing risk
in agricultural production through the introduction of effective measures such as insurance
in case of any loss due to factors that are beyond their control, such as floods and cyclones;
(9) ensuring the food security of low-income groups, especially the very poor, by keeping
agricultural prices at affordable levels and providing adequate incentives for the numerous
small agri-producers.

Opportunities
There are multiple opportunities for increasing agricultural production, enhancing the food
security situation and eradicating hunger from our beloved Bangladesh. These include:
Use of quality seeds for increase in agricultural production: Rice production may be increased by
two million tons by providing quality seeds of existing varieties cultivated by farmers (Hussain
et al., 2002). Adequate supply and use of quality seeds can increase agricultural production
substantially.
Fertilizer use: Promotion of adequate and balanced fertilizer use can contribute toward
achieving high yield goals and substantially increase production (Karim, 2008).
Water management and improved crop husbandry practices: Efficiency of water used for irriga-
tion is low in Bangladesh. Scientists have already proved that adoption of alternate wet and dry
(AWD) irrigation technology for boro rice cultivation can save 25 percent of irrigation water
and also save energy (electricity, diesel) without reducing the yield level. Therefore, special
efforts should be made to promote AWD instead of the current practice of constant irrigation
with standing water in the field.
Introduction of the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) also has the potential to reduce costs and
increase yields. Special efforts should be made to promote SRI technology.
Agricultural research and extension service: Adequate support for the agricultural research and
extension service would be required to achieve higher production. To this end, training and
research support for frontier rice science, particularly for biotechnology and hybrid production,
should be prioritized. Training of extension workers, particularly for agricultural officers and
assistant officers working at the upazila and block level, are essential. Use of ICT and electronic
media for dissemination of agricultural technologies should be promoted.
Designing social safety net programs: Increased production alone would not be sufficient to
ensure food security for the lower-income group. Therefore, expansion of safety net programs
for poor and vulnerable groups would be necessary. Effective implementation of employment
generation schemes during the lean season will be beneficial.
Collaboration with SAARC countries: Ensuring food security is also a challenge for other
South Asian countries. Strengthened collaboration for agricultural development among
South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) will benefit Bangladesh. Areas
for such cooperation include agricultural research and technology development; technology
exchange including exchange of germplasm, variety and breed, crop and animal husbandry
practices; capacity building through development of human resources and development of
regional facilities to ensure food quality and food safety; regional programs to control trans-
boundary pests and animal diseases; harmonization of policies and acts (such as protection of
plant variety, bio-safety protocols, biodiversity and indigenous knowledge); establishment and
functioning of the SAARC Food Bank and participation in WTO negotiations in agriculture
(Deb, 2006a).

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Actions required
To meet the challenges an integrated strategy is required, encompassing major aspects of com-
prehensive food security, namely: (1) adequacy of food supply through increased domestic
production and imports, (2) access to food through public distribution and expanded safety net
programs and (3) improved food utilization and nutrition. To this end, Bangladesh must take
advantage of the above-mentioned opportunities.

Concluding remarks
Ensuring food security (physical availability and economic access to food) would continue to be
a major challenge for Bangladesh in the coming years. To meet this challenge, Bangladesh must
increase its domestic production so that availability of food increases substantially. Future growth
in production of agricultural commodities (such as crops, livestock and fish) in Bangladesh
will depend on agricultural productivity growth. To achieve this, we must have a technological
breakthrough in agriculture.To safeguard the food security of poor and low-income households,
the scope and extent of safety net programs should be increased including effective implemen-
tation of employment generation schemes. In addition, collaboration with other South Asian
countries for effective functioning of the SAARC Food Bank and for increased agricultural
production would be beneficial to reduce the food security risks in times of natural disaster.
Bangladesh in the past has been able to increase food production and consumption of all seg-
ments, and hopefully will also be able to meet the emerging challenges in future.

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 12
INDUSTRIALIZATION
Rashed Al Mahmud Titumir

The process of industrialization has been taking place in Bangladesh with a dawdling rate of
transition from agriculture to a sustainable manufacturing base. This level of performance of
the industrial sector can be attributed to structural features of the economy such as an initial
high dependence on agriculture, low labor absorption in industry, inadequate innovation and
technological advancement, and insufficient capital deepening.
The process of industrialization generally takes place in an economy through the transform-
ation of a traditional agrarian society into an industrial one that fosters the growth of a manu-
facturing sector (Sullivan and Sheffrin, 2003).The factors that facilitate industrial modernization
are mainly accumulation of capital and investment, application of new technologies, large-scale
value-adding production and formal employment of skilled labor (Lewis, 2003). Taking these
determining factors of industrialization into account, this chapter attempts to understand the
dynamic process by investigating a number of structural as well as functional challenges.
The chapter is mindful of the decades of debates along ideological lines on the industrial
policy, particularly on the role of the state, with recent convergence toward pragmatic discus-
sions on the design and implementation of industrial policy strategies.1 Such convergence
can be categorized into four areas. First, there are many types of market failures, beyond the
mere conventional problem of ‘externalities’, like economies of agglomeration and coord-
ination failures (Lin and Chang, 2009; Lin and Monga, 2012), which need to be addressed
through industrial policy (Khan and Blankenburg, 2009). Second, the infant industry argu-
ment has been recently recast in new forms (Chang, 2002; Shaffaedin, 2005; Greenwald and
Stiglitz, 2006; Dosi et al., 2009), belying the erstwhile perspective that markets work well
enough to render industrial policy unnecessary. Third, the evidence accumulating over the
years also suggests that industrial policy is not an idiosyncratic practice found only in East
Asian ‘miracle’ economies, but most of today’s industrialized countries used at least some form
of industrial policy, especially trade protectionism (Bairoch, 1993; Chang, 2002, 2007; Reinert,
2007). Fourth, successful design and enforcement of industrial policy strategies depend on the
organization and structure of political power in that society, and that may or may not allow
the effective opportunities and compulsions for rapid and effective technology acquisition and
learning (Khan, 2013a).2

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 R. A. M. Titumir

Understanding industrialization
A number of theoretical frameworks have been developed in order to comprehend and char-
acterize the scope, determinants and process of industrial development, including factoring in
the experiences of industrial development in the world. A brief account of the major theoret-
ical understandings is sketched in order to construct a framework for explaining the process of
industrial development in Bangladesh.
The concept of industrialization can be understood with regard to such ideas of classical
political economy as the division of labor, which renders both organization and intellectual aid
in the production process (Slichter, 1961).
Neoclassical growth theory postulates that output is a function of the stock of capital per
capita (Solow, 1956). Increase in productivity, therefore, requires accumulation of capital at a
pace faster than population growth (Swan, 1956). A natural and inexorable convergence of
growth and productivity across countries has been assumed by taking the diminishing returns to
capital into account. When the stage of zero growth by capital accumulation is reached, further
development is determined by a rate of technical change that causes industry to expand and
the economy to grow (Romer, 1996;Veloso and Soto, 2001). The postulate, however, attracted
criticism since the expected paths of capital accumulation as well as anticipated convergence of
growth across countries have not been observed (see Baumol et al., 1994;Veloso and Soto, 2001).
In response to the consideration of technological change as an exogenous factor gener-
ated outside the economic process, the endogenous growth theory contends that technological
change is a result of the allocative choices of economic agents, thereby affecting productivity
and growth patterns from the inside (Romer, 1996; Aghion and Howitt, 1998). Emphasizing
the significance of innovation and knowledge creation, the theory advocates the emergence of
research and development as a new sector in the economy and the introduction of human cap-
ital as a factor of production (Lucas, 1998).While raw labor and physical capital are reckoned to
be the critical inputs for production, skills and knowledge arise as the key factors that have to
be accumulated to accelerate long-term growth and innovation (Veloso and Soto, 2001). The
theory is, however, questioned since it lacks empirical verification (see Krugman, 2013).
As a part of a wider modernization process, industrialization is conceptualized in connection
with social change and economic development, and has been related to technological innov-
ation and the large-scale production base of manufacturing, beginning with the development of
large-scale energy and metallurgy production (Sullivan and Sheffrin, 2003).
Against the backdrop of the emergence of modernization thought in development discourse,
Rostow (1960), rendering a theory on the stages of growth, argues that development of more
productive and commercial agriculture and cash crops not consumed by producers and/or
largely exported together with enhanced investment in changes to the physical environment
to expand production will lead to industrialization. Rostow’s postulate is, however, challenged
on the grounds of de-emphasizing the differences between sectors, i.e., capitalistic versus com-
munistic societies and perceiving automatic growth by the time of maturity (e.g., Todaro and
Smith, 2009).
Categorizing an economy into two sectors – the traditional sector characterized by an
agricultural-based, overpopulated and subsistence sector with zero marginal productivity of
labor, and the modern sector, which is highly productive, industrialized and capitalized – Lewis
(1954) offered an exposition of how industrialization occurs in the underdeveloped countries.
As land fertility is limited and productivity is low in underdeveloped regions, there exists sur-
plus labor and a transformation of labor gradually occurs into the industrial sector. Production
in the industrial sector thus increases, leading to higher profits made and reinvested by the

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capitalist, causing the expansion of industry until the whole surplus labor in the subsistence
sector is absorbed. However, the propositions of the two-sector model are challenged, among
other things, on the grounds of reinvestment in labor-saving capital equipment rather than labor
(see Todaro and Smith, 2009).
Import-substituting industrialization, which encourages the local production of industrial
products, was advocated with a view to expanding infant industry and fostering industrializa-
tion at the national level (Salvator, 1976; Chang, 2002; Shaffaedin, 2005; Greenwald and Stiglitz,
2006; Dosi et al., 2009). The infant industry argument was buttressed through tariff protection
against the imported commodity in order to allow domestic producers enough time to learn
the industry, to achieve economies of scale in production and external economies of learning,
and by so doing lower the cost and prices, resulting in increased profit for domestic producers,
which motivates the establishment of more industries. The postulates of import-substituting
industrialization, however, draws several criticisms on the grounds of high economic and social
costs, small and isolated domestic market, concentration of power in the hands of a few busi-
nesses, and insufficient internal demand for the import-substituting products (see Franko, 2007;
Todaro and Smith, 2009).
Export promotion considered as an outward-looking concept of industrialization was billed
as an alternative to import-substituting industrialization, and several countries, namely Hong
Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Korea, were offered as examples (Chacholiades, 1990). Export
promotion, emphasizing the development of industries whose main market is overseas, is
underpinned by the notion that industrialization depends on the availability of several factors
that enable production and distribution to take place at comparatively low cost (Salvator, 1976;
Belloc and Maio, 2011). The monolithic view that portrays the East Asian countries’ success
as only due to their export orientation has been replaced by a growing convergence that the
particular variant of industrial policy that each of these countries tried was compatible with
internal power balances that allowed the state to create incentives and compulsions in critical
areas, rather than these countries’ exceptional state capacities that are not achievable anywhere
else nor the cause of outward orientation (Khan and Blankenburg, 2009).
From a political economic perspective, industrialization occurs through market mechanisms
where three variables, namely incentive, infrastructure and institutions, which are popularly
known as the three ‘I’s, play the crucial role. Incentives guide the allocation of resources and the
effort to develop new knowledge; infrastructure generates desired capabilities through develop-
ing physical assets, human capital and general technical structure; and institutions facilitate the
process of industrialization through efficacious policy responses (Lall, 1992).
It is also important to understand the stages of industrial development. In doing so a descrip-
tive framework, with the following attributes, has been developed (shown in Figure 12.1). This
is for the purpose of illustrating the stage at which Bangladesh now stands.
Non-existence stage: This stage, also termed the pre-industrial phase, consists of only one
sector – agriculture – for survival. The phase is characterized by high birth and mortality
rates, resulting in no surplus and no capital accumulation leading to no investment and indus-
trialization. The labor force is engaged in agriculture where the wage rate is very low.
Seedling stage: The seedling stage of industrialization, referred to in the Figure 12.1 as seed
stage, begins as the rate of growth in population increases and the demand for food, clothing
and agricultural production increases due to the presence of increasing returns to scale in the
sector. Surplus in production creates some opportunities for trade and increases wages a little.
Start-up phase: Being born, some small and medium-scale industries start their journey and a
few large industries like textile mills and iron foundries emerge. The wage rate is comparatively
higher in industry than in agriculture, resulting in transfer of labor from agriculture and the

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 R. A. M. Titumir

Non-existence phase Seed phase Start-up phase Growth phase Established phase Maturity phase

• Increase in
agriculture
production • Small and medium
• Surplus production scale industry • Dominant
• Slight increase in • Low level of industrial base
wage investment • Mass
• Expansion of other • Low wage rate • Modern industrial
sector consumption
activities • Less innovation • Strong social
• Division of labor • High wage rate
• Contraction of • Full absorption of and economic
agriculture labor structure
• Heavy industry • Increase in
• Higher wage consumption and
• More specialization savings
• Developed • Good infrastructure
transport system • Investment in R & D
• Increased output

• Dominant
agriculture
• Huge surplus of
labor
• Barter system, no
investment and
capital
accumulation

Figure 12.1 Diagrammatic representation of phases of industrial development (source: author)

absorption of labor by the industries. Industrial production increases through division of labor
within the sector, leading to accumulation of capital, profits for owners and reinvestment of profits.
Growth phase: The growth phase of industrialization experiences replacement of small and
medium industries with the expansion of large and heavy industries. The improvement of the
transport system facilitates trade beyond the boundary of the nation, expanding the size of the
market. More specialization, innovation and technological advancement cause diversification of
production and increase in output per capita. The higher wage rate in industries attracts more
people to urban areas causing urbanization.
Stabilization phase: The main feature of this stage (this phase is a combination of the Established
and Maturity phases described in Figure 12.1) is that production and profits tend to be stable
over the years, while competition remains fierce. The industrial base is more diversified. People
have disposable income for consuming high-value consumer goods, while the government
invests in infrastructure on a large scale resulting in rapid development of transportation, mass
consumption and sustainable rate of economic growth.

Industrial production: changes in structural variables

Transformation of the Bangladesh economy from agriculture to industry has, however, been sluggish,
causing the share of industry in the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) to increase at a snail’s
pace. In addition, recent trends of different indicators that are considered for measuring the state
of the industrial sector appear to be unsatisfactory, implying unsustainable growth in the economy.

Share in GDP
In spite of having been known as a predominantly agricultural economy, the share of the ser-
vice sector dominates the economy of Bangladesh, with the growth in the industrial sector

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 Industrialization

mostly starting after the 1980s and the sectoral share of agriculture declining. In the fiscal year
(FY) 1980–1981, the contribution of agriculture, industry and the service sector to GDP was
33.7, 17.31 and 49.62 percent respectively. In the period 1985–1990, the share of agriculture
decreased to 31.15 percent and the share of industry increased to 19.13 percent, whereas the
service sector contributed 49.31 percent. After two decades, the scenario has changed. In FY
2005–2006, the share of agriculture, industry and the service sector in GDP was 29.23, 21.04
and 49.73 percent respectively, whereas in FY 2000–2001, the contribution of agriculture,
industry and the service sector stood at 25.03, 26.2 and 48.77 percent respectively. In FY
2012–2013, the share of agriculture, industry and the service sector in GDP was 16.78, 29 and
54.05 percent respectively, whereas the shares stood at 16.33, 29.61 and 54.05 percent respect-
ively in FY 2013–2014.
The service sector contributes more to GDP than industry, but its rate of growth exhibits
a lower and slower rate than industry. In 1980–1981, the rate of growth in agriculture, indus-
try and the service sector was 3.31, 5.13 and 3.55 percent respectively, which stood at 2.23,
54.57 and 3.28 percent respectively during 1990–1991. In FY 2005–2006, the rate of growth
in industry reached the peak and was calculated at 9.8 percent, whereas the rate of growth in
agriculture and the service sector was 5.5 and 6.6 percent respectively. The rate of growth in
industry, agriculture and the service sector fell to 8.39, 3.35 and 5.83 percent respectively in
2013–2014.
The industry sector in Bangladesh is officially categorized into four sub-sectors, namely
(a) mining and quarry, (b) manufacturing, (c) electricity, gas and water supply and (d) construction.
Manufacturing is the leading sub-sector of industry, which contributes most to GDP. During
FY 1990–1995, the average contribution of manufacturing was 10.52 percent, which reached
more than 15 percent in FY 2000–2001.The contribution of this sub-sector to GDP has, how-
ever, increased at a slower rate of late and been calculated at 17.75, 18.28, 19 and 19.45 percent
in FY 2010–2011, FY 2011–2012, FY 2012–2013 and FY 2013–2014 respectively, whereas the
rate of growth has been calculated at 8.68, 10.31, 9.96 and 10.01 percent in FY 2013–2014, FY
2012–2013, FY 2011–2012 and FY 2010–2011 respectively.
Mining and quarrying always constitute a tiny share of GDP because of both the lack of nat-
ural resources and inefficiency in using the available ones. Less than 2 percent of total industrial
contribution to GDP was supplied by the sub-sector during 1997–2002. The rate of growth in
the mining and quarrying sector has, however, stood at 5.22 percent in FY 2013–2014, whereas
the rate was calculated at 9.35, 6.93 and 3.62 percent in FY 2012–2013, FY 2011–2012 and FY
2010–2011 respectively.
The contribution of electricity, gas and water supply to GDP is negligible, although the
sub-sector facilitates the process of industrialization. During 1990–2000, the contribution of
this sub-sector to GDP was 1.3 percent, whereas the contribution increased to 1.3 percent
in FY 2010–2011 and 1.46 in FY 2013–2014. The sub-sector, however, experienced a rate
of growth of 2.1 percent in FY 1997–1998 and 7.68 percent in FY 2001–2002, indicating
an increase of 5.58 percentage points. In FY 2010–2011, FY 2011–2012, FY 2012–2013 and
FY 2013–2014, the rate of growth in the sector stood at 13.56, 10.58, 8.99 and 7.4 percent
correspondingly.
Construction as an emerging sub-sector of industry grew by 4.5 percent in FY 1990–1991
and 7 percent in FY 1997–1998. Following the highest increase of 2.5 percentage points
between FY 1990–1991 and FY 1997–1998, the rate of growth in the sub-sector stood at
7.21, 6.95, 8.42, 8.04 and 8.56 percent in FY 2009–2010, FY 2010–2011, FY 2011–2012, FY
2012–2013 and FY 2013–2014 respectively.

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Table 12.1 State of sick industries

Name of the corporation Total number of established Presently owned by

industries in the 1970s the corporation
Bangladesh Jute Mills Corp. (BJMC) 77 18
Bangladesh Sugar and Food Industries Corp. (BSFIC) 54 15
Bangladesh Steel & Engineering Corp. (BSEC) 54 9
Bangladesh Chemical Industries Corporation (BCIC) 13 13
Bangladesh Textile Mills Corp. (BTMC) 72 11

Source: Bangladesh Ministry of Finance (2014).

Table 12.2 Export of different goods, 2011–2013

Sector Export earnings (in million US$) Share in total export earnings (in %)

2011–2012 2012–2013 2013–2014 2011–2012 2012–2013 2013–2014

Frozen food 598 544 458 2.5 2 2.3
Tea 3 2 2 .00 0.0 0.0
Raw jute 266 230 80 1.1 0.9 0.4
Ready-made 9,603 1,104 8,228 39.5 40.8 41.5
garments
Knitwear 9,486 10,476 7,910 39.0 38.8 39.9
Leather 330 400 333 1.4 1.5 1.7

Source: Bangladesh Ministry of Finance (2014).

Sick industries
An industry is considered sick if it cannot run its normal activities, suffers continuous losses or
experiences gradual wiping out of its capital resulting in threatened financial viability (Bakshi,
2005). In both the public and private sectors in Bangladesh, a trend of an increasing number of
sick industries has been noticed lately, which, if not addressed, presents an ominous situation for
the country’s industry sector in the near future (Table 12.1).

Sectoral concentration
Industry moves ahead when different types of products are produced and the economy does not
depend on one or two goods. The industrial sector consists of four sub-sectors, although it has
remained concentrated in terms of manufacturing. The export of a few goods like ready-made
garments (RMG), frozen food and medicine is polarizing the industry and lack of diversification
of products may adversely affect the situation if one or two lose their market (e.g., in the event of
cancelation of the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) or any shock to the global economy).
Similarly, only six products (Table 12.2) contributed 86 percent of total manufactured export
earnings. Out of these six products, RMG alone contributed 81.4 percent in FY 2013–2014.

Export market concentration

The industrial sector is concentrated not only in terms of products but also in terms of a smaller
market. The destination of exported products is a few countries such as the United States and

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 Industrialization

some European countries. In FY 2013–2014, 57.32 percent of total export earnings came from
six countries – the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium and Italy.

Energy and power

Energy and power is considered a driving force for the industrialization of an economy, and
development of the power sector is an urgent requirement for an economy to thrive efficiently.
As discussed earlier, inadequacy of power supply can substantially hinder the growth of the
industrial sector and the development of other sectors of the economy (such as agriculture), and
the service sector is also challenged due to crises in power supply along with frequent power
tariff hikes. The matter of balancing the power supply against the demand for it in industry has
remained unresolved for years; in addition, the forecast for demand for power in the country is
not considered credible and realistic.
To meet its demand for fuel, the industry sector depends on natural gas, which is not renew-
able and needs a huge amount of capital for extraction.The use of gas by industry was relatively
low before the 1990s and started to increase after that period. In FY 1999–2000, the industry
used 41.52 billion cubic feet of total gas, which increased to 63.44 billion cubic feet in FY
2005–2006 and stood at 68.9 billion cubic feet in FY 2013–2014.

Technology
Bangladesh is lagging behind in technological catch-up and there is no deliberate effort to steer
the catching-up process. Share of technology in total manufactured export, per capita GDP
and ranking in different indexes manifests the poor condition of technological advancement
in the country and calls for more initiatives in this area. In 2007, of Bangladesh’s total manu-
factured exports 1.15 percent were high-tech manufactured goods, while the figures were
6.4 percent for India, 25.96 percent for Thailand, 52.28 percent for Malaysia and 18.41 per-
cent for Japan. With this lower share of high-tech exports, the government allocated Tk 3.67
billion as development and non-development expenditure for the Ministry of Science and
Technology, which is 3 percent higher and 0.84 percent lower, respectively, than the revised
and proposed budget of FY 2012–2013. India allocated Rs 62.75 billion to science and tech-
nology in 2013, which is 5 percent and 24.75 percent higher, respectively, than the proposed
and revised budget of the previous year, although India exhibits good performances in tech-
nology (Economic Times, 2013).

Trade orientation
Bangladesh has been following the export-oriented strategy. External trade is currently domi-
nated by exports and imports of manufacturing products. The situation differs from what
prevailed in the early 1980s when jute and jute products were the principal export items.
In 2003, manufacturing accounted for 92 percent of total merchandise exports, up from
77 percent in 1990. The share of food, on the other hand, fell from 14 percent in 1990 to
7 percent in 2002, and that of agricultural raw materials from 7 to 1 percent. Among exports
of manufacturing products, textiles and clothing (RMG and knitwear) accounted for nearly
75 percent of total merchandise exports in 2003–2004, indicating a high export concentra-
tion in this sector. Further, export of RMG comprises mainly low-value items. Nevertheless,
the country remains vulnerable in terms of concentration of fewer products, and fewer
markets and related external shocks.

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 R. A. M. Titumir

60

50

40
Percent

30

20

10

0
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
Bangladesh India Thailand Malaysia Japan

Figure 12.2 High-end technology export in total manufactured exports, 2003–2011 (source: World
Bank, 2012b)

Value addition
Value addition is the net output of a sector after adding up all outputs and subtracting inter-
mediate inputs, and is calculated without making deductions for depreciation of fabricated
assets or depletion and degradation of natural resources (UNStats, 2012). High value-added
industry creates the opportunity to accelerate industrial growth in an economy. If the industry
cannot add any value, the industrialization process does not progress and therefore hampers the
economic growth. The lesser value addition is due to a combination of factors, including inad-
equate backward linkages, innovation and skills formation.

Locational concentration
In Bangladesh, the capital city Dhaka, which accommodates 9 percent of the total population,
is the hub of most economic activities and contributes 36 percent of the total GDP (World
Bank, 2012a). RMG industries, which contribute a major share of manufacturing products
and export earning, are based either in Dhaka or around Dhaka where the infrastructure facil-
ities are more widely available than in any other part of the country. Consequently, regional
economic inequalities have been intensifying, and unplanned urbanization in Dhaka has been
impeding the pace of growth and development. There are certain shifts that have taken place in
the peripheries of Dhaka and Chittagong because of proximity of governmental and commer-
cial organizations, availability of infrastructure and institutional transactions.

Labor
Industrialization in developing countries, which lack capital and technology, largely depends on
adequate supply of labor. Despite the decreasing rate of employment in agriculture that has been
observed of late, the size of the labor force employed in agriculture is still greater than that
employed in industry in Bangladesh (Table 12.3). The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics’ Labor Force

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 Industrialization

Table 12.3 Percentage of employment by industry, 1995–2010

Sectors LFS LFS LFS LFS LFS

1995–1996 1999–2000 2002–2003 2005–2006 2010
Agriculture, forestry and 48.85 50.77 51.69 48.10 47.50
fishery
Mining and quarry − 0.51 0.23 0.23 0.18
Manufacturing 10.06 9.49 9.71 10.97 12.34
Electricity, gas and water 0.29 0.26 0.23 0.21 0.18
Construction 2.87 2.82 3.39 3.16 4.79

Source: Bangladesh Ministry of Finance (2014).

Table 12.4 Consumer price index of labor in industry and real wage index (base
year: 1969–1970)

Fiscal year Consumer price index of labor in industry Real wage index
1981–1991 998.4 100.5
1992–2001 1,702.4 127.1
2001–2002 2,024 150
2002–2003 2,068 169
2003–2004 2,129 177
2004–2005 2,216 181
2005–2006 2,351 183
2006–2007 2,524 184
2007–2008 2,740 206
2008–2009 2,885 243

Source: Bangladesh Ministry of Finance (2014).

Survey (LFS) of 1995–1996 shows that only 9.5 percent of the total labor force was employed in
industry, compared to 63.2 percent in agriculture. According to the LFS 1999, only 13.22 percent
of the total labor force was employed in industry, whereas 48.85 percent and 37.93 percent were
employed in agriculture and the service sector respectively. The latest available LFS, which dates
back to 2010, suggests that 47.5 percent of the total labor force works in agriculture compared to
17.49 percent in industry and 35.01 percent in the service sector (BBS, 2011).
The wage rate determines the cost of a firm, the living standard of labor and the savings and
investment level of an economy (Table 12.4).The nominal wage in the industrial sector exclud-
ing construction was Tk 721 in FY 1983–1984 in Bangladesh, which increased to Tk 1,502
in FY 1989–1990 and to Tk 2,832 in FY 2000–2001. The Wage Index suggests that the wage
was Tk 6,778 in FY 2010–2011, Tk 7,221 in FY 2011–2012 and Tk 7,978 in FY 2012–2013,
resulting in a 3.96, 6.54 and 10.48 percent rate of growth in nominal wages in FY 2010–2011,
FY 2011–2012 and FY 2012–2013, respectively.
The wages paid to workers need to be enough to allow them to live and support their fam-
ilies. If the wage is insufficient to meet the needs of workers, their productivity may go down,
causing the cost of production to rise and the lowering of profits.
The informal labor force that receives a relatively lower wage is considered less efficient and
less productive than the formal labor force that receives a relatively higher wage. In the manu-
facturing sector, the number of formal laborers is 1,975,000, whereas the number of informal

167
 R. A. M. Titumir

sector laborers is 2.29 times bigger than that of labor engaged in the formal sector and amounts
to 4,517,000, according to the LFS of 2010. In the agriculture sector, the number of formal and
informal laborer employed are 517,000 and 25,898,000, respectively.

Capital
In today’s world, investment largely occurs through the accumulation of capital at the private level
rather than the public. In the same vein, total investment in the economy of Bangladesh largely
consists of private investment. In 1990–1995, the share of private investment was 7.51 percent
(as opposed to public investment of 6.48 percent). In 1995–2000 the share of private investment
increased to 14.59 percent, while public investment was 6.79 percent. Of late, however, the rate
of growth in private investment has come down. It comprised 21.39 percent of GDP in FY
2013–2014, as compared to 21.75 percent in FY 2012–2013, whereas public investment increased
to 7.3 percent in FY 2013–2014 from 6.64 percent in FY 2012–2013, implying that much public
investment is going into unproductive sectors, causing inflationary pressure in the economy.
Market capitalization is an indicator of the ability of the capital market to mobilize capital
and diversify risk in an economy. The market capitalization refers to the sum that derived from
the current stock price per share times the total number of shares outstanding. The total mar-
ket capitalization indicates the value of the companies of a country. In Bangladesh, most of the
companies are not traded publicly. As of 2013, the total amount of market capitalization is a
paltry Bangladeshi Tk 13,725.9744 crore.
After the War of Liberation in 1971, the flow of foreign direct investment (FDI) started to come
to newly independent Bangladesh, which was insignificant at that time. Since then, Bangladesh
has been trying to attract foreign investment to underwrite its savings–investment gap as well as to
redress its export–import imbalance. FDI inflow in Bangladesh in each year shows a positive trend
but cannot by any means be termed satisfactory. Moreover, almost 65 percent of FDI has been
repatriated over the last ten years (Rayhan, 2009). Bangladesh received more than US$9,284 mil-
lion of FDI over the last ten years, of which US$1,293 million was received in 2012, making it the
highest amount of FDI inflow during a single year (Figure 12.3).
The total capital flight from Bangladesh over the past four decades alarmingly presents
30.4 percent of its total GDP (Halim, 2014). A high interest rate, ensnared banking system and
lack of suitable policy are making the situation worse. Thus a study in 2013 of Global Financial
Integrity estimated the annual average capital flight from Bangladesh at US$1,608 million
between 2002 and 2011 (Kar and LeBlanc, 2013).
In FY 2013–2014, there was a transfer of US$553 million, from US$455 million in FY
2012–2013, implying a 21.54 percent increase in capital outflow (Bangladesh Bank, 2014).
There has also been capital flight through illegal means such as hundi, money-laundering, etc.

Sectoral changes and stage of growth

This section attempts to locate the country’s stage of industrialization on the basis of sec-
toral change (Figure 12.4). In 1947, the Indian subcontinent was divided into two, India
and Pakistan – the latter comprised West Pakistan and the East Pakistan (now independent
Bangladesh).The West Pakistan-based government dominated the people of East Pakistan who
suffered from economic discrimination. Most of the profit from East Pakistan flowed to West
Pakistan. Moreover, the economy was totally dependent on agriculture, which was traditional,
labor-intensive and technologically backward, to meet the food needs of a vast population.

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 Industrialization

1,400 100

1,200 80

60

Growth rate (in percent)

1,000
USD (in million)

40
800
20
600
0
400
–20

200 –40

0 –60
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

Foreign direct investment Growth rate in FDI

Figure 12.3 Flow of foreign direct investment, 2001–2013 (source: Bangladesh Ministry of
Finance, 2014)

The only export-oriented good was jute. During the 1960s and 1970s, the major share of the
manufacturing sector in national income and manufacturing employment was accounted for
by jute.
Soon after the liberation, industrial development was very slow. RMG expanded heavily in
the 1980s and boomed in the 1990s due to cheap labor, a large foreign market, foreign invest-
ment, and export quotas in the United States and European countries. The RMG sector has
shown rapid rates of growth over recent decades.
According to the Export Promotion Bureau (EPB), the contribution of the RMG sector to
national exports was 41.5 percent in FY 2013–2014. The contribution of RMG, mainly woven
textiles and knitwear, to national exports was 39.9 percent or US$7,910 million whereas it was
38.8 percent or US$10,476 million in FY 2012–2013. Bangladesh has now become a significant
RMG supplier to North America and Europe.
In the 1980s, the pharmaceutical sector made advances in Bangladesh to become one of the
most developed hi-tech sectors contributing to the country’s economy. The development of
this sector accelerated after the Drug Control Ordinance of 1982, which provided protection
to local products.
One of the other flourishing industries in Bangladesh is the food industry. It consists of
processed, frozen and manufactured foods, which are exported abroad. One of the notable
components of this industry is the export of frozen fish and shrimps. From the 1970s to the
1980s, this component contributed to 5.6 percent of Bangladesh’s foreign exchange earn-
ings, in the 1980s–1990s it grew to 8.3 percent and has doubled to 16.42 percent in the last
decade.
During the 1980s, tea and leather, among other products, also gained in importance. In
the 1990s, sectors like ship-breaking, steel, cement and cold storage developed and gained
momentum.

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 R. A. M. Titumir

Stabilization phase

Growth phase

(2000–2012)
Electronics, glass, aluminum,
plastics, ceramic
1990s
Start-up phase
Ship breaking, steel, cement and cold
storage
1980s
Pharmaceutical, tea manufacturing,
leather factories
After 1971–1980
Ready-made garments

Pakistani period and early independence:

Agriculture and only jute industry

Figure 12.4 Sectoral phase industrialization, 1947–2012 (source: author)

Conclusions
The major indicators of industrial performance considered in this chapter present a picture of a
slow rate of transition from agriculture to a sustainable manufacturing base, with a narrow prod-
uct base, limited absorption of labor, inadequate innovation and technological advancement,
and insufficient capital deepening.
Identification of the gaps and triggers of acceleration are, therefore, imperative for concen-
trated policy inducement to animate the industry. Policy making has to comprehend the fact
that there is no alternative way to achieve sustainable development without increasing the rate
of growth of industrialization.
Policy issues are the key factors to convincingly define performance of industry instead
of incongruence. For example, the inconsistent monetary, infrastructural, fiscal, currency and
interest rate policies are major causes of the struggling performance of industry. The contrac-
tionary monetary policy of the central bank to curb inflation and resolve the balance of pay-
ments is exerting pressure on the industrial sector. The cost of loans for the private sector is
increasing due to such policies, and private-sector credit growth has been declining for several
years. High interest rate spread is also an underlying characteristic of the financial market of
Bangladesh. Budgetary expenditure frequently exceeds the proposed allocation in Bangladesh
with non-development expenditure exceeding the allocation and the development expenditure
falling short of the allocation. This structural bottleneck of budget implementation affects the
economy by retarding long-term infrastructural development and capacity.
The infrastructural bottlenecks are hindering the process of achieving the desired level of
industrialization. For example, the gap between peak demand and maximum generation of
electricity is high, resulting from the substantial gap between capacity and maximum gener-
ation of power. Using the available funds, better solutions are required to reduce the current
and inter-temporal costs of infrastructure, including road, rail and water transport, focusing on
quality, quantity and security.

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Concentration of industrial production in few regions and few products is one of the major
impediments to achieving sustainable growth of industry. Products as well as markets need to
be diversified. Such are to be explored by focusing on domestic capability, national and inter-
national prospects and the risks associated with future products and markets. There are several
problems related to technology acquisition. Effective policies, instruments and fiscal incentives
have to be put in place for much-needed support for research and development in technological
catch-up to boost the industrial sector.
Above all, to achieve successful industrialization, the government has to play a proactive role
in terms of regulation, incentives and entrepreneurial pathways.

Notes
1 For a review of the industrial policy debate since the 1980s, see Chang (2011).
2 For literature relating to Bangladesh, see Khan (2013b).

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Bank. [Online] Available from: www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/
WDSP/IB/2012/11/15/000333037_20121115012318/Rendered/PDF/NonAsciiFileName0.pdf
[Accessed: August 26, 2014].
World Bank. (2012b) World Development Indicator 2012. [Online] Available from: http://data.worldbank.
org/indicator/NV.IND.TOTL.KD.ZG [Accessed: September 27, 2014].

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 13
LABOR
Farida Chowdhury Khan

There have been substantial changes in labor conditions in Bangladesh as it has moved from a
mostly rural economy in the 1970s to becoming the world’s tenth most populous nation with
a substantial urban labor force and a globalized economy that exports about 19.5 percent of its
GDP and earns 9.8 percent of its national income as remittances from other countries (World
Bank, 2012a).
Given the high population density of Bangladesh, it is important to provide quality jobs for
its large and growing workforce. This chapter looks at changes in employment and the nature
of work within the country, primarily focusing on the recent two decades, and seeks to under-
stand future prospects. After reviewing the structural changes in the Bangladesh economy and
its workforce, the chapter considers the state of rural employment, rural–urban migration for
jobs, and the growing informal sector in urban and peri-urban areas.
Drawing on secondary literature and data, it illustrates the precariousness of work in unregu-
lated emerging sectors of the economy and the difficulty of establishing safe working conditions
with decent pay. It demonstrates that it is not a lack of will or tradition on the part of labor to
demand its betterment, but the highly competitive labor market characterized by a perfectly
elastic supply of poor and vulnerable workers that allows employers to pay low wages, under-
invest in safe working conditions, and violate wage contracts with impunity.
It is worth noting that there are very few academic studies that study employment from an
economy-wide perspective in Bangladesh. The Labor Force and the Household Expenditure
and Income Surveys done by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) are two potential
sources of data, but most economic studies have focused on specific sectors such as garments,
issues such as women’s participation or child labor, or self-employment schemes such as micro-
credit. Economists have therefore come to rely on international organization or donor reports
as primary sources of information on the overall economy.

Overview of sectoral changes in Bangladesh

There has been substantial economic change in the past two decades – a gradual structural
transformation to manufacturing and services from agriculture. Bangladeshis have always been
known as rice farmers and fishermen. Over time, as the pressure on land has increased due to
housing and other needs, and rivers have faced stress from human activity, crop production has

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declined. Nationwide, over half of rural households are ‘functionally landless’, which means they
have less than 0.2 hectares of land (BBS, 2007).
The expansion of physical infrastructure such as roads and bridges, rural electrification and
the growth of marketing outlets have transformed the rural sector and village life. New oppor-
tunities for employment are mostly in the service sector in transportation or retail. Many work
in small shops, tailoring and other craft enterprises – as rickshaw pullers, or petty traders in vil-
lages and local bazaars. Migration to cities, as well as to other countries, has become a common
feature in rural Bangladesh. Remittances from abroad are now a critical source of savings for
the economy.
This increase in remittances has led to Bangladesh receiving less official development assis-
tance (ODA), commonly understood as foreign aid, from international donors over the years.
This is also due in part to the growth of the economy, which has been around 6 percent in the
last decade, and the success of the export sector. Ready-made garments are the major source of
foreign exchange, followed by remittances.
In the late 1980s garments accounted for only 39 percent of all exports, but by 2011 this
sector provided 80 percent of all export earnings. This reliance on garments as the primary
export-oriented manufacture implies that it is the main sector to which workers turn for jobs.
Public-sector jobs accounted for substantial employment in the past until the 1980s when these
began to be divested or closed down, leading to job losses and a transition of the workforce to
the private sector (Bhaskar and Khan, 1995; Uddin, 2005). Although there were other export
sectors such as leather processing that emerged during the initial transition to the private sector,
workers who have been retrenched from many formal-sector jobs must turn to ready-made
garments as the primary provider of industrial employment. The service sector has grown sub-
stantially and accounts for over 52 percent of the economy, but job creation has not been com-
mensurate and only 39 percent of workers are employed in this sector (Table 13.1), the major-
ity of them being in trade, restaurants, and hotels (ILO, 2013a). Compared to the early 1990s,
the share of crop production has declined to 11 percent, and industry has risen to 28 percent.
Within industry, manufacturing and construction have been the two sources of growth (World
Bank, 2012b).
A characteristic of Bangladesh has traditionally been that there are marked seasonal varia-
tions in agricultural production and, therefore, in the demand for labor. These seasonal varia-
tions have declined due to the adoption of multi-cropping technologies.The actual surface area
on which crops are grown has decreased, while the intensity of cropping has increased, resulting
in more cropped land per year. However, the techniques adopted over time, such as irrigating
the land with shallow and deep tube wells, low-lift pumps and large-scale canals, have reduced
the demand for labor (Alauddin, 2004).
Because of floods and drought in the least developed north-west regions, crop failures are
common. The majority of poor rural households here have always been engaged in sharecrop-
ping and working as wage labor in agriculture. These have been subject to uncertainty because
of the changes in agricultural production.
The effect of microcredit has been shown to lower the supply of labor for agriculture with
a move to sharecropping (Pitt, 2000). The participation of women as agricultural workers has
always been low and continues to remain so, particularly given the option to be self-employed
with the availability of microcredit loans (Rahman, 2000).
While employment generation in the rural sector is virtually absent because of the changes
in crop production, fisheries have also declined as a result of overfishing and water pollution.
Estuarine fishing in coastal areas has also declined, leading to a rapid decline of this activity as a
result of high poverty among the fishing community (Nabi et al., 2011).

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Table 13.1 Employment of adults aged 15+ by branch of economic

activity, 2001–2010 (%)

2001 2003 2006 2010

Agriculture 50.77 51.69 48.10 47.50
Industry 10.00 9.93 11.18 12.57
Services 39.23 38.38 40.72 39.93

Source: BBS (2011).

Most of the growth in the economy is located in and around the two cities of Dhaka and
Chittagong, and these have emerged as the main destinations for internal migrants seeking jobs.
The two cities are also the primary domestic and international trading hubs and the dominant
seats of major administrative and economic functions (Shilpi, 2011). Access to these cities has
determined the earnings and consumption abilities of households. Because of the division of the
country into different parts by the large rivers that run through it, the regions of the economy
that have the least access to Dhaka and Chittagong are those that have the lowest employment
and earning opportunities. This has led to the persistence, for instance, of the Monga, or the
famine seasons during the lean periods in crop production, for the populations who live in the
north-west regions that are furthest from the two cities and therefore do not allow temporary
migration or commuting for work with ease.

Changes in population and labor force

The population continues to grow at 1.5 percent as Bangladesh has yet to go through a full
demographic transition, during which the population growth rate declines as the fertility rate
drops.The projected population in 2050 will include a huge labor force of close to 95 million or
more (ILO, 2013a), which could be a demographic dividend or a demographic strain, depend-
ing on job opportunities. The ratio of employed people divided by the working age population
rose from 52.5 percent in 2000 to 56 percent in 2010.This attests to the economy’s job-creation
efforts, particularly given that the population grew over this time. However, the gender break-
down of this phenomenon reveals some limitations.The employment to population ratio is only
33.9 percent for women while it is 76 percent for men. The female labor force participation
(LFP) is the more common measure used to look at the entry of women into the workforce.
The female LFP has increased from 24 to 36 percent over this period, while for men it has fallen
slightly from 83 to 82 percent (Table 13.2). This measure remains relatively low in South Asia
except for Sri Lanka and a few pockets in India.
The total labor force in 2010 was estimated at 56.7 million, of which 39 million are men
and 17 million are women, 13 million are in the urban areas, and 43 million are in rural sectors.
Counter to what is commonly found in South Asia, the LFP for women in urban areas is lower
than that in rural areas. Khuda (2011) maintains that LFP in rural areas is driven by poverty and
female-headed households that are identified as the ultra-poor or those with less than 0.5 acres
of land.
The ILO (2013a) further states that Bangladesh has had problems providing employment in
the formal sector. It is the informal sector that has expanded vastly, and currently supplies a live-
lihood for 87.5 percent of the workforce. In 2000, 76.5 percent of the workforce relied on the
informal sector for employment, but its increased importance in employment provision speaks

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 F. Chowdhury Khan

Table 13.2 Labor force participation rate aged 15+, 2001–2010 (%)

2001 2003 2006 2010

Total 54.89 57.30 58.52 59.27
Male 83.95 87.39 86.73 82.51
Female 23.86 26.07 29.10 35.97
Urban 55.77 56.77 55.52 57.34
Rural 54.66 57.47 59.36 59.75

Source: ILO (2013a).

Table 13.3 Informal employment of workers aged 15+, 2001–2010 (%)

2001 2003 2006 2010

Total 76.24 79.15 78.44 87.50
Male 73.08 78.94 76.18 85.50
Female 84.92 79.88 85.69 92.30
Urban 51.26 66.51 66.96 75.00
Rural 82.10 83.18 82.01 91.30

Source: ADB (2010).

to the lack of formal jobs. The share of women in the informal sector has also risen over this
time (Table 13.3), and the percentage of women working in the formal sector has fallen from
20.3 percent to only 8.9 percent of total workers over this decade.
This is corroborated by empirical studies carried out by the Asian Development Bank.
Their survey estimates that 73 percent of the labor force (41.6 million) works primarily in the
informal sector (ADB, 2010). It also indicates that most people have multiple jobs, and that
95 percent of the labor force is involved in informal-sector activity. The nature of these jobs is
such that income is low, there is no social protection coverage, and labor productivity is about
one-sixth of that in formal-sector enterprises.
These facts point to a situation depicted by Todaro (1969) wherein migration is spurred by
a very low probability of formal employment and the informal sector constitutes most of the
economy. Gatchell (2010) characterizes this as a dual-sector Lewis type of phenomenon and
notes how neither agriculture nor industry have been able to absorb labor in the requisite fash-
ion. In addition, the feminization of work is reflected in the entry of women into the labor
force. Over the period 2000–2010, the annual growth in the proportion of females in the work-
force was 7.31 percent compared to 2.06 percent for males. Unemployment among females
was decreasing over the same period and it is well known that the vast majority of them were
employed in the garment factories (BBS, 2011).
Kabeer (2001) explains that these jobs have allowed women a degree of autonomy from their
families and the ability to save and send money back to their families at home. She also points to
why women have not been able to organize for better working conditions and pay.Together, the
brutal tactics used by employers, documented extensively by the media, and the elastic supply
of labor can explain this failure of strong collective organization.

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Productivity and earnings

International productivity comparisons indicate that GDP per hour in Bangladesh is among the
lowest in the world (van Ark, 1999). Nutrition, low capital intensity, and rudimentary technol-
ogy are all factors.
While wages on average in Bangladesh are still rising and the share of workers who get
paid well below the median has fallen, these benefits have not accrued to temporary and
female workers. Also, the growth in manufacturing wages has not kept up with the growth
in income per capita. Comparisons with other countries show a low wage to productivity
ratio. In agriculture, the real wage when compared to the price of rice has hardly changed.
For such a change to occur, there needs to be a concerted effort to produce crops with
greater profitability. However, infrastructure, access to market information, and institutions
for risk management in production and marketing are either weak or non-existent (Rashid,
2002). Therefore both wages and productivity have remained stagnant in agriculture. In
fact, the urban wage rate, measured as the wage rate of unskilled construction workers in
major cities, is the most significant variable in explaining the dynamics of agricultural wages
(Rashid, 2002).
Floods and natural disasters have affected wages as well.Wages of daily laborers in agriculture
declined between 2.5 and 3.3 percent from their pre-flood wages for every one-foot increase in
water levels in the short term (Mueller and Quisumbing, 2011).
A minimum wage exists in the ready-made garments sector along with 35 other sectors.
Since 2007, that general minimum wage is Tk 1,800 for all sectors, and industry-specific
minimum wages exist in ready-made garments. The Minimum Wages Board has never estab-
lished such minimums for agricultural work. At the current exchange rate, which is Tk
80 = US$1, the unenforced minimum wage in industry is 75 cents per day. Bangladesh has
not ratified the International Labour Organization’s Minimum Wage Fixing Convention
1970. As mentioned above, most of the workforce is employed in the unregulated or infor-
mal sector.

Informal sectors
The 15th International Classification of Labour Standards (ICLS; ILO, 2004) identifies informal
enterprises as units that

• sell some of their output in markets;

• are not separate legal entities independently of their owners;
• do not maintain a complete set of accounts;
• have production activities that cannot be distinguished from other activities of their owners;
• generate a size of employment below a certain specified level;
• are not registered under a specific form of national legislation (business register);
• do not register the enterprise or employees.

Household production for own use is excluded if no part of the output is marketed and
agricultural activities are also excluded. By implication, almost all firms with fewer than ten
employees are informal enterprises.
In 2003, the 17th ICLS broadened the definition to include certain types of informal wage
employment, employment outside informal enterprises. This larger concept is referred to as

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informal employment. According to the 17th ICLS, ‘employees are considered to have informal
jobs if their employment relationship is, in law or in practice, not subject to national labour
legislation, income taxation, social protection or entitlement to certain employment benefits’
(advance notice of dismissal, severance of pay, paid annual or sick leave, etc.). Note that this def-
inition is made at the level of the job rather than the level of the individual worker on the job
since a person can simultaneously have two or more jobs.
The ILO (2013a) finds that the majority of women in the informal sector fall under the
category of ‘unpaid family workers’, whereas most men are ‘self-employed’ and assisted by tem-
porary or unpaid workers.
Bangladesh’s population density is exceptionally high. According to 2011 census data, the
total population density is about 1,015 people per km2 and is the highest in the world – three
times higher than India – excluding city-states and small islands. With an estimated population
of 15 million, metropolitan Dhaka is a primate city with roughly three times the population
of metropolitan Chittagong. At 15,700 people per km2, the density of the Dhaka metro-
politan area is higher than the density of the largest megacities in the world (Muzzini and
Aparicio, 2013).
The share of formal employment in Dhaka is 51 percent, much higher than the rest of
Bangladesh. Although 49 percent of this megacity works in informal enterprises, such enter-
prises are mostly located and growing in peri-urban areas in the country. The only formal
firms moving to peri-urban areas are garment firms, in an attempt to avoid delays due to
traffic congestion in the large cities. Because of the lack of infrastructure, formal enterprises
are unlikely to locate outside the metropolis. Most growth has therefore come from informal
enterprises.
The nature of these informal enterprises is twofold. One type of enterprise serves the formal
sector through subcontracting, reducing costs for the formal sector. Usually these activities tend
to be lower in the value chain of products. For example, shipbreaking provides scrap metal for
the construction industry and is largely unregulated. The same holds for bricks and limestone,
as well as shrimp-fry collection or tea growing and processing.
The other type of informal enterprise provides final products, primarily services such as
retail, repair, transportation, food processing, etc. These include small shops, mobile street ven-
dors, door-to-door sellers, or micro-factories within private residences.These are many in num-
ber and have cropped up throughout the country with increases in investible income and as
a result of microcredit loans and remittances from abroad. While it is beyond the scope of this
chapter to examine all such sectors, it must be realized that they account for employment as
revealed in the statistics above, they are unregulated and hence cannot guarantee safe or reliable
work, and the line between these enterprises and formal ones is difficult to draw within the
context of Bangladesh. Examining a few sectors in the first category of subcontracting enter-
prises will yield some general observations.
Brickmaking is a significant informal activity in Bangladesh. There are over 7,000 operating
kilns, contributing to employment for over one million people. The country is highly depend-
ent on bricks for construction, primarily because of a lack of stone. The boom in construction
over the last two decades underscores the importance of this sector and its future potential in
providing jobs. However, the brick industry is highly polluting because of the sulfur and par-
ticulate matter emitted, and the work conditions are harsh. Entire families may be employed in
brickmaking and the work is subdivided so that family members work alongside each other,
with men doing more skilled work and women and children performing basic tasks such as
hauling or brick-breaking.

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Another example of an environmentally unsafe informal sector is shipbreaking. Workers

break large ships with basic hand tools and carry huge pieces ashore in groups, with little or
no safety equipment or even basic footwear. The shipbreaking industry received substantial
negative publicity in 2009 and 2010, which led to new policy measures being adopted by the
government.The measures involved requiring ships entering Bangladesh’s waters to carry proof
that they have been decontaminated of toxic chemicals, which brought the industry to a halt for
a month. Substantial lobbying followed, and shipbreaking was revived with a new certification
system in 2012. Bangladesh imported 260 scrap ships, the highest in five years, with an unfor-
tunate commensurate increase in worker deaths and injuries in this activity. The scrap metal
from shipbreaking feeds into the steel re-rolling industry and construction, and the boom in
construction has allowed private steel firms to become highly profitable and acquire sufficient
political clout to influence shipbreaking policy.
Hussain (2013) catalogs the border area in Sylhet where landlessness has risen because
migrants from London have bought up much of the land. Here, the discovery of gas or extrac-
tion of limestone leads to working conditions in which labor is vulnerable and paid little. He
details the coal trade on the India–Bangladesh border, where workers are employed with no
safety standards and are covered in soot, inhaling the black dust of this coal which is then trans-
ported for industrial and power production.

Worker safety
The Bangladesh Labor Law, which was adopted in 2006, is only one instance of the various
institutional changes in labor policy that have occurred over the last 15 years. The increased
demands for better conditions, particularly in the garments sector, have created many bodies,
laws, and policies (ILO, 2013a). In addition, international bodies have sought higher labor stand-
ards and many firms themselves have sought better and guaranteed productivity from labor. But
it is also recognized that there is little financing of labor administration and it is not high on
the list of the state’s priorities. Bangladesh, along with the rest of South Asia, has not ratified the
Labor Administration Convention that 74 other countries have adopted.
Safety in Bangladesh implies safety net programs, and these are primarily focused on address-
ing poverty, employment generation, and reducing vulnerability rather than strengthening
working conditions. A small fraction of these large development expenditures include the Food
for Work Programs, the Rural Development Program, and the One Hundred Day Employment
Generation Program. They also include programs for women or the ‘hard-core poor’ such as
Vulnerable Group Feeding or Vulnerable Group Development.1 Education programs such as
the Food for Education Program, the Primary Education Stipend Program, and the Reaching
Out of School Children Project target increasing school enrollments. There are also various
programs for tribal and excluded groups such as the Test Relief, Gratuitous Relief, and for
Food Assistance in the Hill Tracts (Khuda, 2011). Too numerous to cover within the scope of
this chapter, many of these assistance programs have been funded through donor aid programs
and have subsequently been channeled through numerous non-governmental organizations
throughout the country.
Since unregulated work is the primary source of employment, and much of it is located in
the peri-urban areas outside the purview of the formal state’s reach, labor regulations mostly
remain on paper and do not affect the actual working conditions of those who hold paid
employment across the nation. This is particularly true for vulnerable groups such as women
and children (Table 13.4).

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Table 13.4 Safety of work in Bangladesh, 2002–2011

2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
Total occupational injuries 1,774 1,347 894 1,127 1,274 1,024 895 1,000 1,323 1,403
Total fatal occupational injuries 342 255 141 238 334 246 219 293 416 545
Total non-fatal occupational injuries 1,432 1,092 753 889 940 778 676 707 907 858
Fatal injuries per 10,000 registered workers 1.25 1.20 1.74
Non-fatal injuries per 10,000 registered workers 5.35 3.38 2.74
Total injuries leading to permanent disabilities 333 240 128 135 228 227 184 249 336 455

Source: ILO (2013a).

 Labor

Bonded and child labor

There are an estimated 6.6 million working children in Bangladesh, accounting for more than
5 percent of the 120 million child workers in the world (Hossain and Rahaman, 2011).
Article 34 of the constitution of Bangladesh prohibits forced labor (Kara, 2012) but there is
no definition of forced labor, nor any associated penalties for such work. Often bonded labor
coincides with child labor, and at other times children may work voluntarily as part of a house-
hold or family enterprise. It appears that microcredit may have had an adverse effect on chil-
dren’s schooling by drawing them away to work on household projects set up with microloans
(Islam and Choe, 2013).
In the construction industry, children are used in stone- and brick-breaking, and may work
alongside women as in other countries in South Asia. Children also work in the bidi or trad-
itional cigarette production. A large proportion of children, particularly girls, are involved in
domestic housework in urban and rural areas. There are also many waste collectors of various
kinds in Dhaka, combing through the rubbish dumps and wandering the streets with sacks over
their shoulders. Many of these are girls as well.
In many small factories, children aged 5–15 can account for a large proportion of the pro-
duction workforce. The work undertaken includes the manufacture of metal products such
as pins, bangles, and zippers, as well as candle-making, kite-making, and electronic assembly.
According to the Bangladesh Institute of Labor Studies (BILS), nearly 2,000 child workers
in the 10–14 age group work in the ship-breaking industries (Hossain and Rahaman, 2011).
Garment-making establishments have used workers who are under the age of 14, and tanneries
and other chemical factories also use child labor. These types of work often lead to exposure
to dangerous chemicals, which can cause various illnesses that could be stunting or even fatal.
Domestic workers in urban areas, particularly when they are live-in, may be on-call to work
whenever required. This is true of children as well. Child domestic work is different from most
other kinds of work because of its unique framework of space and time. Since such work is not
regulated, remains outside public view, and is potentially always monitored by employers, it can
be construed as involuntary work some or much of the time. Laws protecting working children
do not reach the space of child domestics. Newspaper reports indicate cases of abuse and even
deaths of children. According to the National Child Labor Survey for 2002–2003 (BBS, 2003),
55 percent of child domestic workers in Bangladesh are female (Jensen, 2007). Adult female
domestic workers often encounter similar susceptibilities.
Outside urban areas, documented sectors in which bonded working conditions can be found
are those at the very bottom of the value chain of the shrimp industry. The use of children in
shrimp processing, primarily in south-western Bangladesh, is well documented (Kara, 2012;
Jensen, 2013). Typically, children are taken from indebted families and kept at worksites where
they may receive inadequate food and sleeping time, and little or no medical treatment when
illness strikes. These children spend hours on the muddy banks of parasite-infested saline water
bodies or on small boats, catching shrimp fry. They sort the shrimp from fish, wash them, clean
them, and hang them to dry. They also transport the fish in baskets. These children are mostly
not paid, may work up to 18 hours at a time, and are threatened, beaten, and sometime sexu-
ally abused. This phenomenon has accelerated since several coastal storms devastated the area
in 2008 and 2009, increasing landlessness. Adults and the elderly are employed in shrimp cul-
tivation, which has generated little employment but has replaced food production, reducing
the food security of the population. The work in shrimp distribution and processing involves
18–24-hour shifts. Many shrimp farmers and workers higher up the value chain in distribution
are also in debt bondage (Kara, 2012).

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 F. Chowdhury Khan

Tea plantations are another sector in which workers have barely reproduced themselves
for generations. Picking tealeaves and processing tea, laborers can work two to three consecu-
tive shifts for very low wages and in forced or bonded conditions (Kara, 2012). Many of these
workers are from tribal groups such as the Oraons, who were brought from the region of Bihar
by the British to these tea plantations over 150 years ago. They continue to do such work to
this day.

Organized labor
One must note, as mentioned above, that Bangladesh has had a strong tradition of labor unions
going back to the 1920s in the jute and cotton industry. In 1947, labor unions were created in
East Pakistan to mirror the All India Trade Union Congress and were connected to leftist pol-
itical activity. To curb communist movements in the country, the military dictator Ayub Khan
introduced unions at the level of factories in the 1960s (Rahman and Langford, 2012). With
the creation of Bangladesh, all factories were nationalized and labor unions became a political
tool of the ruling party. By 1975, 35 percent of the formal sector had union representation
(Docherty and van der Velden, 2012) and organized labor was represented by the three union
systems.
Given the widespread inefficiency and corruption in public-sector enterprises, unions did
not serve the interests of workers under the military rule between 1975 and 1991. Instead, they
were used as an arm of the military dictatorship. Inter-union rivalries and nepotism were ram-
pant in public enterprises while competition over lucrative trade union positions and offices
and violence, even murder, became a permanent feature (Rahman and Langford, 2012). During
the process of economic reforms in the 1980s, the dissolution of public enterprises led to the
demise of factory unions. A World Bank study (Devarajan et al., 1997) maintained that gains to
the economy from trade reform would be amplified when labor contracts could be renegoti-
ated. Specifically it was said that trade reform can reduce the effect of featherbedding or the
negotiation of union contracts that pay workers more than their marginal product. The policy
implication for Bangladesh – a country with strong trade unions and a protected unionized
sector – is that the benefits of trade liberalization for economic growth may be greater than
otherwise predicted.
As labor shifted to private enterprises, the advent of unionization, primarily in the gar-
ments industry, was a slow one. Despite a 500 percent increase in employment between 1990
and 2007, it was not until 2000 that union representation became a fixture in this sector. In
2006, a number of violent incidents took place, provoked by the demand for back pay and
pay increases. The result was the formation of a minimum wage board that increased min-
imum wages by 75 percent. This was followed by a setback of union expansion in the period
2006–2008 because of the emergency caretaker government that ruled for almost three
years. Unfortunately, a consistent implementation of the wage rate never occurred outside
the export processing zones, despite the involvement of the government in the wage-setting
exercise.
Recent incidents such as fires in many garments factories and the tragic collapse of the Rana
Plaza building in Savar, near Dhaka, has led to substantial global focus on the rights of workers
in Bangladesh. In a sincere but somewhat uninformed US Senate memo, it was written that

many barriers still exist to greater worker representation in Bangladesh. Chiefly, gar-
ment factory owners and managers have serious misperceptions regarding the role
of organized labor and the potential of constructive labor relations. For their part,

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workers are largely uninformed about their rights to associate, organize, and bargain
collectively. A sustained effort to educate employers and workers about these rights
will be required before Bangladesh’s garment factories can enjoy the benefits of an
empowered workforce.
(US Senate, 2013)

It is evident that the history of labor unions and the struggles of labor in this part of the
world have been forgotten in such a statement. Citing Bangladesh’s failure to improve worker
safety and labor rights, in June 2013 the US government suspended Bangladesh’s eligibility for
tariff benefits under the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) program. Although this policy
did not affect the US$4 billion worth of annual ready-made garments exports to the United
States, which are not under the GSP program, it did impact approximately US$40 million
worth of imports in ceramics, tobacco, and other products.

Conclusion
The world economic climate today is based on scale efficiencies and competitive advantage.
Both of these are enhanced through labor-saving technological change. Therefore, how can a
labor-abundant and resource-scarce country such as Bangladesh create more employment and
still strive to be competitive internally and abroad?
Meeting the objective of employment generation may require a concerted multi-sectoral
approach, focusing on both saving resources and preserving them. Such an approach, par-
ticularly in agriculture, would have to ensure minimum utilization of land and water while
using labor more effectively. This goes against the practices that have been adopted as
part of the green revolution. The land- and water-intensive agriculture now in place has
drained water tables and may also be linked to the rising problem of high levels of arsenic
in drinking water.
Agro-businesses will be able to produce crops profitably and hire workers at the prevalent
wage rates only if there is a guaranteed income through stable prices, adequate transportation
to market of goods, and crop insurance programs. Such options need to be presented to farmers
in all regions of the country.These have to be combined with environmentally friendly policies
that help stabilize resource provision for the long term. Such policies can include dredging of
rivers, ensuring the flow of rivers, and a commitment to cleaning and maintaining the surface
water of rivers to make them usable and even potable.
Brick production and construction methods that are environmentally damaging can be
replaced with green techniques that use indigenous materials such as bamboo or other recycled
materials. Research by experts within the Housing and Building Research Institute show there
are prospects for using such materials and processes, involving techniques that are labor-intensive
in nature and do not create hazardous working conditions.
Educational policies to enhance worker skills will allow them to be absorbed in the service
sector and enhance external migration for better-paying jobs. The work security of migrants
abroad needs to be enhanced through bilateral and multilateral negotiations.
Within the country, workers need training, credit, and job-placement organizations so as to
allow them to optimize internal migration. The differences in income that distinguish migrant
households and others need to be addressed so that all communities and groups, including
women, can securely enjoy migrant work without fear of losing their property and land.
Another important point is the case of ready-made garments. Although some economists
have been concerned by the focus on a single sector for growth, this particular industry received

183
 F. Chowdhury Khan

a beneficial effect from the global recession. Being highly competitive on price, products from
Bangladesh found an expanded demand in a market that had less purchasing power and sought
products of good value. Bangladesh has emerged as the second largest exporter of garments in
the world, China being the largest. Given China’s success in export-led growth through econ-
omies of scale, it is not infeasible to think of Bangladesh following this type of growth path by
leveraging a single sector in which it has such an advantage. Ancillary industries may follow
through linkages and can be encouraged if they generate employment.
Therefore, ready-made garments can still have potential for growth in world markets, given
Bangladesh has sealed its reputation as a quality supplier. However, this must provide benefits
rather than come at a cost to workers. Recent tripartite agreements and the post-Rana Plaza
safety agreements between buyers and producers must be implemented and accountability cre-
ated. To serve the country, garment factories must ensure that workers are paid, work in safe
factories and settings, and do not suffer harassment for which there is no legal recourse.
An initiative by the World Bank, the Northern Areas Reduction-of-Poverty Initiative (NARI),
intends to provide assistance to women in impoverished northern areas of Bangladesh that suf-
fer from the Monga, which has been mentioned above. This program expects to manage their
transition to employment opportunities in the garment industry, and attempts to ensure fair-
ness, efficiency, and safety along the labor supply chain.The plan is that women will be given an
orientation before they migrate and provided transitional housing and training in technical and
life skills before they arrive in urban areas. They will also be placed in export processing zones
where working conditions and labor safeguards are more reliable. Implementation and effects
remain to be seen.
Bangladesh is known for its resilience and its innovation. Some of the answers already exist
in the development literature – create more backward linkages to increase value-added, choose
technology carefully so that capital-intensive and extractive industries are not the only sources
of growth. But others may not be so evident – to what extent should we have infrastructure to
facilitate market-based development that is always labor-saving?
Bangladesh may rethink emulating such a model when, even in the United States, tech-
nology is reducing jobs in the ‘labor-intensive service sector’ such as health or education
(Rotman, 2013).
Instead investment in education, the environment, and eco-friendly infrastructure may be
the policies that have the highest dividends in the future. Resource-saving and labor-using
technologies are not the norm today. But they may make the greatest economic sense for
Bangladesh if it is to provide employment for a productive population.

Note
1 Hard-core poor are those with (1) landlessness or less than half an acre of land, (2) family income of less
than Tk 300, (3) lack of productive assets, and (4) women who are daily or casual laborers.

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 14
FOREIGN TRADE
Selim Raihan1

Bangladesh pursued an import-substituting industrialization strategy in the 1970s, the key

objectives of which were to safeguard the country’s infant industries, reduce the balance of pay-
ments deficit, use the scarce foreign exchanges efficiently, ward off international capital market
and exchange rate shocks, lessen fiscal imbalance and achieve higher economic growth and the
self-sufficiency of the nation. However, in the face of the failure of such an inward-looking
strategy to deliver the desired outcomes, along with rising internal and external imbalances,
trade policy reforms were introduced in the early 1980s. Since then trade liberalization has
become an integral part of Bangladesh’s trade policy. Bangladesh has been able to reduce its
protection for the domestic sectors quite significantly by undertaking substantial reductions in
quantitative restrictions (QRs), drastic opening up of trade in many restricted items, signifi-
cant rationalization and diminution of import tariffs, a move to a freely floating exchange rate
system and considerable adjustments to monetary and fiscal policies. Another important elem-
ent of trade policy reform was the introduction of generous promotional measures for exports.
While import and exchange rate liberalization was intended to correct the domestic incentive
structure in the form of reduced protection for import-substituting sectors, export-promotion
schemes were undertaken to provide exporters with an environment in which the previous bias
against export-oriented investment could be reduced significantly. The reform measures and
export incentives have witnessed an impressive export performance.
However, one important concern is that the export growth has been overwhelmingly domi-
nated by the ready-made garment (RMG) sector alone, which grew by taking advantage of the
Multi Fiber Arrangement (MFA) quotas and preferential access in foreign markets. The export
responses of all other major commodities have been rather weak. Therefore it is not clear to
what extent the policy of liberalization benefited the diversification of the export sector. The
government has introduced a number of incentives for export-oriented sectors. However, the
RMG sector appears to be the prime beneficiary of these incentives, and for the non-RMG
sectors such schemes have proven to be less effective. Therefore export diversification remains a
critical challenge for Bangladesh.
This chapter analyzes the challenges and potential of the foreign trade of Bangladesh. The
next section of this chapter provides an overview of the import policies and import regimes in
Bangladesh, followed by an overview of the export policies and export regimes in Bangladesh

187
 S. Raihan

with an emphasis on the RMG industry.The fourth section highlights the importance of a com-
prehensive trade policy, and the final section offers some conclusions and policy implications.

Import policies and import regimes in Bangladesh

Trade policy between 1972 and 1980 consisted of significant import controls. Under the Import
Policy Orders (IPOs), items were categorized as to whether their importation were allowed,
prohibited or required special authorization. With the exception of a few cases, licenses were
required for all other imports. The import-licensing system was subject to criticism for not
being sufficiently flexible to ensure its smooth functioning under changing circumstances.
Moreover, it was characterized by complexity, deficiency in administration, cumbersome foreign
exchange budgeting procedures, poor inter-agency coordination, rigid allocation of licenses and
time-consuming procedures (Bhuyan and Rashid, 1993).
In the early 1980s, import liberalization started to take place. The import-licensing system
was abolished and imports were permitted against letters of credit (L/C).The long ‘Positive List’
in the IPOs of importables was replaced by two lists, namely the ‘Negative List’ (for banned
items) and the ‘Restricted List’ (for items importable on fulfillment of certain prescribed condi-
tions), and imports of any items outside the lists were allowed. Since 1990, the Negative and
Restricted Lists have been consolidated into one list, namely the ‘Consolidated List’ (Raihan,
2007).The range of products subject to QRs was curtailed substantially during the 1980s, 1990s
and 2000s.Whereas during the mid-1980s, about 40 percent of all import lines at the HS 4-digit
level was subject to trade-related QRs, these restrictions had been drastically reduced to less
than 2 percent toward the end of 2000s (Raihan and Razzaque, 2007).
Beginning from the late 1980s the tariff regime had become increasingly liberalized. In
1991–1992 the unweighted average rate of tariffs was around 70 percent (Raihan and Razzaque,
2007) and by 2013–2014 it had fallen to 13.2 percent (Sattar, 2014). Much of this reduced pro-
tection was achieved through the reduction in the maximum rate. In 1991–1992 the maximum
tariff rate was 350 percent, which came down to only 25 percent in 2004–2005 (Raihan and
Razzaque, 2007), and it has been kept at this rate in recent years. The number of tariff bands was
24 in the 1980s, 18 in the early 1990s and only four in recent years (Raihan and Razzaque, 2007).
Bangladesh has no tariff quotas, seasonal tariffs or variable import levies (WTO, 2000). All these
measures have greatly simplified the tariff regime and helped streamline customs administration
procedures. A drastic reduction in unweighted tariff rates during the 1990s also resulted in the fall
in import-weighted tariff rates. The import-weighted average tariff rate declined from 42.1 per-
cent in 1990–1991 to around 13 percent toward the end of 2000s (Raihan and Razzaque, 2007).
One important aspect of the tariff structure in Bangladesh relates to the use of import taxes
that have protective effects (also known as para-tariffs) over and above the protection provided
by customs duties (World Bank, 2004). These taxes have been the infrastructure development
surcharge (IDSC), supplementary duties (SD) and regulatory duties. One of the major reasons
behind this is that although the VAT was instituted in the early 1990s as a revenue-replacing
tax, it failed to achieve the desired success in early years. In 1991/92 customs duties were 70.6
and para-tariffs were 3.0; in 2001/02 customs duties were 21.0 and para-tariffs were 8.4; and in
2011/12 customs duties were 13.6 and para-tariffs were 12.9 (Table 14.1). Therefore, it appears
that, despite the lowering of customs duties, the presence of para-tariffs did not significantly
lower the total protection rate during the 2000s (Table 14.1).
The liberal import policies led to a large growth in imports into Bangladesh, as shown in
Figure 14.1. In 1972, total imports were only US$836.5 million, which rose to US$9060.9 mil-
lion in 2000 and increased further to US$43,854 million in 2014.

188
 % of GDP Million US$

10
15
20
25
30

0
5
10000
15000
20000
25000
30000
35000
40000
45000

5000

0
1972 13.7
1973 11.9
1972 863.5
1974 10.3 1973 956.4
1975 8.1 1974 1,289.4
1976 17.6 1975 1,571.2
1977 12.4 1976 1,778.3
1978 15.5 1977 1,192.6
1979 15.8 1978 2,058.9
1980 17.9 1979 2,462.2
1981 14.1 1980 3,239.4
1982 15.5 1981 2,865.5
1983 14.7 1982 2,883.1
1984 13.4 1983 2,586.5
1985 12.8 1984 2,548.5
1986 11.8 1985 2,860.0
11.7 1986 2,585.8
1987 2,879.5
1988 12.2 1987
1988 3,255.9
1989 12.8 1989 3,557.8
1990 13.1 1990 4,076.6
1991 12.2 1991 3,785.2
1992 12.3 1992 3,915.2
1993 14.1 1993 4,677.9

189
1994 13.9 1994 4,681.8
1995 17.3 1995 6,580.6
Foreign trade

1996 16.4 1996 7,601.8

1997 15.8 1997 7,625.1
1998 16.1 1998 8,058.9
1999 16.6 1999 8,525.9
2000 17.0 2000 9,060.9
2001 18.7 2001 10,102.6
2002 9,060.9
2002 16.6
2003 9,761.8
2003 16.2 2004 10,229.7
2004 15.7 2005 13,891.4
2005 20.0 2006 15,626.7
2006 21.8 2007 18,268.6
2007 22.9 2008 22,873.1
2008 25.0

Export policies and export regimes in Bangladesh

2009 23,726.3
2009 23.2 2010 25,106.3
2010 21.8 2011 35,373.9

Figure 14.2 Trend in the total import–GDP ratio, 1972–2014 (source: World Bank, 2015)
2011 27.5 2012 37,272.0
2012 27.9 2013 40,135.2
Figure 14.1 Trend in the total imports (million US$), 1972–2014 (source: World Bank, 2015)

2013 26.8 2014 43,854.0

2014 25.2

and promotional measures for exports. While import liberalization was meant to correct the
total imports in GDP. Figure 14.2 shows that the import penetration ratio was only about 8 and
13.7 percent during the early 1970s, and has increased to more than 25 percent in recent years.

An important element of trade policy reform has been the use of a set of generous support
The surge in imports also resulted in a rising import penetration ratio, defined as the share of
 S. Raihan

34,344.0
40000

29,304.9
35000

26,886.6
25,627.3
30000

18,472.4
25000

17,359.9
16,181.0
Million US$

13,530.3
20000

11,744.9
9,994.8
15000

7,257.3
7,227.6

6,876.9
6,791.2
6,588.1
6,028.7
5,876.9
5,075.5
4,507.6
4,122.0
10000

3,039.7
2,990.7
2,405.6
2,062.6
1,844.5
1,541.7
1,442.8
1,228.3
1,199.6
1,132.3
1,041.5
995.3

985.1
952.2

942.1
739.1
678.2

645.2
561.5
527.5

478.6
461.1

5000
356.8

0
1972
1973
1974
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
Figure 14.3 Trend in exports (million US$), 1972–2014 (source: World Bank, 2015)

domestic incentive structure in the form of reduced protection for import-substituting sectors,
export-promotion schemes were undertaken to provide the exporters with an environment
in which the previous bias against export-oriented investment could be reduced significantly.
Important export incentive schemes available in Bangladesh include, among others, export per-
formance benefit (XPB), bonded warehouse, duty drawback, duty-free import of machinery,
back-to-back L/Cs, cash subsidy, interest rate subsidy, tax holiday, income tax rebate, retention
of earnings in foreign currency, export credit guarantee scheme and special facilities for export
processing zones (EPZs) (Raihan and Razzaque, 2007). Apart from the incentive schemes, the
government has also provided generous institutional support to the exporters. A few sectors,
especially RMG, have been major beneficiaries of these reforms.
Extensive export-promotion measures and favorable market access in the European Union
and the United States have helped Bangladesh’s exports rise remarkably during the past
40 years: from a meager US$356.8 million in 1972 to US$ 34,344 million by 2014 (Figure 14.3).
With the considerable rise in export earnings at a rapid pace, the export-orientation ratio,
i.e., the ratio of exports to GDP, also rose significantly from only 5.7 percent in 1972 to
19.8 percent in 2014 (Figure 14.4). Therefore, if one juxtaposes the trade policy regimes and
export performance, liberalization programs may be considered to have been successful in
energizing exports. However, the export growth is overwhelmingly dominated by the dyna-
mism in the RMG sector alone. More than three-quarters of total export earnings, since the
late 1990s, have been due to woven and knitted RMG products, with the relative significance
of all other sectors declining. The growth of Bangladesh’s RMG exports had largely been
attributable to the international trade regime in textiles and clothing, which, until 2004, was
governed by the MFA quotas. The quota system restricted competition in the global market
by providing reserved markets for a number of developing countries including Bangladesh,
where textiles and clothing items have not been traditional exports. The duty-free access for
Bangladesh’s RMG products in the European Union has also greatly supported the growth of
the sector.Therefore, the policy of trade liberalization is not the only reason for export success,
since, apart from RMG, the export responses of all other major commodities such as raw jute,
jute goods, tea, leather and leather products, and frozen food and shrimp have been very weak.

190
 Foreign trade

25

20.2
19.9

19.8
19.5
17.7
20

17.0

16.9
16.4

16.0
14.4
13.4
15

12.4
12.3
% of GDP

11.8
11.8

11.4
11.1
10.9

10.5
9.7
9.0
9.0
10

7.6
7.0

6.7
6.5

6.1

5.9
5.7

5.6
5.6

5.5
5.5

5.4
5.4
5.2
5.1
5.1

5.0
4.7
3.7

3.4

5
2.9

0
1972
1973
1974
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
Figure 14.4 Trend in the export–GDP ratio, 1972–2014 (source: World Bank, 2015)

Therefore, while on the one hand there are other, more dominant reasons than liberalization
for Bangladesh’s export success in RMG, on the other hand the export performance of other
sectors despite the considerable policy reforms has been disappointing. It is in this context that
it is argued that mere liberalization of the trade regime does not necessarily guarantee export
success.
It also important to note that export markets for Bangladesh have been highly concentrated,
with North America and the European Union being the major destinations. In 2012–2013,
around 54 percent of the country’s total exports went to the European Union, while another
23.5 percent was destined for North America.
It then follows from the above that despite the impressive growth record, the export base and
the export markets have remained rather narrow for Bangladesh, which is a matter of great con-
cern. Undiversified exports both in terms of product range and markets are likely to be much
more vulnerable to various shocks than well-diversified exports. Despite the policy reforms and
various incentives offered, it seems that Bangladesh has failed to develop a diversified export
structure.
RMG has been the key export sector, and an important contributor to growth and employ-
ment generation, in Bangladesh. Woven and knitwear products are the two main RMG export
items. Over the past two-and-a-half decades RMGs have emerged as the flagship products of
Bangladesh’s export trade. Almost unknown in the late 1970s, RMG climbed to its current
position of prominence within a short span of time. Figure 14.5 shows that from a small base of
only US$31.6 million in 1983–1984, RMG exports have grown to more than US$21 billion
in 2012–2013.
The highly labor-intensive nature of the production process characterizes the garment
industry. As late as 1984, only around 0.1 million people were employed in the export-oriented
garment sector, but the number grew to a million in 1994/95. By 2002/03, the sector employed
two million workers, and surpassed the three million mark by 2008/09. In the two-and-a-half
decades after its beginning, it employed 4.4 million in 2012–2013. Some 80 percent of the
workers employed in the industry are women.

191
 S. Raihan

21,515.7
25000

19,089.7
17,914.5
20000

12,496.7
12,347.8
10,699.8
15000
Million US$

9,211.2
7,900.8
6,417.7
10000

5,686.1
4,912.1
4,859.8
4,583.8
4,349.4
4,020.0
3,781.9
3,001.3
2,547.1
2,228.4
1,555.8
1,445.0
1,182.6

5000
866.8
624.2
471.1
433.9
298.7
131.5
116.2
31.6

0
1983–84
1984–85
1985–86
1986–87
1987–88
1988–89
1989–90
1990–91
1991–92
1992–93
1993–94
1994–95
1995–96
1996–97
1997–98
1998–99
1999–00
2000–01
2001–02
2002–03
2003–04
2004–05
2005–06
2006–07
2007–08
2008–09
2009–10
2010–11
2011–12
2012–13
Figure 14.5 Bangladesh’s RMG exports, 1983–2013 (source: Bangladesh Export Promotion
Bureau, 2014)

The growth of RMG exports has had favorable effects on macroeconomic balances. It has
helped maintain a sustainable trade deficit, which has declined from around 10 percent of GDP
in the early 1980s to less than 5 percent in recent times. The current account balance (deficit)
has also improved.This improvement has been accompanied by declining net external assistance
flows. In fact, the reduced dependence on foreign aid has been a remarkable development for
Bangladesh’s economy, which is attributable to the RMG-led robust export growth and the
recent surge in remittances. The rising shares of export trade and remittances in the econ-
omy starkly contrast with the declining significance of foreign aid. In recent times, the ratio of
external assistance to GDP has been less than 1 percent as against 35 percent of exports and
remittances taken together. It is in this context that the RMG-led export growth is argued
to have transformed Bangladesh from a predominantly aid-dependent country to a largely
trade-dependent nation.

Need for a comprehensive trade policy?

The need for a comprehensive trade policy can be justified in many accounts. The govern-
ment has a long-term development strategy in the form of the five-year plan and the per-
spective plan. However, trade-related strategies, as currently followed under the three-year
policy framework, particularly related to imports and exports, seem inadequate to meet the
medium- and long-term development needs of the country. There are also strong debates over
consistency between the objectives and strategies specified in the trade policy and various
measures taken under the government’s budgetary framework. As part of supporting domestic
import-substituting industries, various budgetary initiatives should be devised in such a way that
the country’s export-led industrialization would not be adversely impacted. There should be a
comprehensive trade policy under which a more realistic tariff rationalization program could be
undertaken, keeping in view a long-term vision regarding international trade liberalization.The

192
 Foreign trade

regulatory framework directly encompassing international trade has close links with monetary,
fiscal and industrial policies. Although concerned ministries/departments/agencies during the
stage of policy formulation put their efforts into maintaining coherence with other policies by
taking suggestions from relevant stakeholders, there is still concern regarding a lack of coherence
in various policies. In view of the gradual rise of interlinkage between trade, investment and
industry, there is a need for a comprehensive trade policy to ensure coherence of these policies.
There are overlapping interests of manufacturers, exporters and importers regarding policies
related to exports and imports – as such import policies need to take note of export policies
and vice versa. A lack of coherence in these policies hampers potential export earnings as well
as industrialization. Under a comprehensive trade policy, policies related to export-oriented
industries need to be integrated, and the interests of import-substituting industries should be
provided with adequate focus. During the last one-and-a-half decades, multilateral, bilateral and
regional trade regimes have experienced a number of changes that have had different implica-
tions on production, trade, investment and employment in Bangladesh. There is also a growing
importance of service industries and service trade, including the temporary movement of nat-
ural persons. A comprehensive policy for international trade will help to address these diverse
sets of issues in a more meaningful way and bring larger gains from trade, while boosting indus-
trialization and employment.

Conclusion and policy implications

One of the import issues in the import policy of Bangladesh is the further liberalization of the
tariff regime. The main problem with further tariff rationalization is the concern related to the
potential revenue shortfalls of the government. Although the loss in revenue could arguably be
made up either by expanding the domestic tax base or by increasing the VAT net or a combin-
ation of both, the tax administration in a least developed country like Bangladesh is not as flex-
ible as in developed countries for undertaking an increased revenue mobilization effort within
a short period of time. Also, increasing the rates of revenue-generating tax measures such as VAT
is difficult given the dominance of the informal economy.
One difficult alternative for the future is to consider a tariff structure with the highest duty
rate lower than the current one, but with necessary adjustment in other slabs (both across tar-
iff lines and rates) so that on aggregate it can be revenue neutral (or with a marginal effect on
revenue) with respect to current collections from import taxes.This arrangement, however, may
require considerable readjustment of tariffs rather than replacing the existing tiers with lower
rates in a linear fashion. Also, the success in ensuring revenue neutrality will require information
on the tariff elasticity of imports (and/or the price elasticity of imports), which might not be
readily available. It is to be noted that revenue-neutral adjustments in the tariff structure will
keep unchanged the average nominal protection given to the domestic import-substituting
activities and consequently the resultant policy-induced anti-export bias may not be affected.
Nevertheless, it would be unwise to reverse the process of liberalization and thus the pro-
gress achieved in the previous decade. The use of para-tariffs in recent years has increased the
total protection rates, which appears to be incompatible with the liberalization measures that
Bangladesh undertook earlier. It is, therefore, important to ensure the neutrality of SD and VAT
by applying them to the domestic industries in a non-discriminatory fashion, which could
contribute to increased government revenue, on the one hand, and reduced anti-export bias,
on the other.
Another scope for tariff liberalization is the mutual exchange of tariff preference under
Regional Trading Arrangements (RTAs) and Free Trade Areas (FTAs) involving Bangladesh.

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 S. Raihan

Such arrangements may result in significant trade creation with favorable effects on employ-
ment generation and poverty alleviation.While Bangladesh remains committed to a multilateral
trading system, options of trade expansion through regional cooperation should be given ser-
ious consideration.
In future Bangladesh may opt for an analytical approach to tariff liberalization. Under this
approach there may be scope to devise the tariff structure in such a way that it has limited effects
on the revenue position of the government, but contributes to lowering the high rates of effect-
ive protection enjoyed by a number of sectors. Although the outcome may be diminished or
unchanged nominal protection for the whole economy, the efficiency gains achieved through
reduction in effective protection can be beneficial to resource allocation.
However, across-the-board tariff reduction may not be desirable not only because of the
revenue concern of the government but also because of the need for providing some support to
domestic industries with significant growth and poverty-alleviation effects. By adopting a pro-
active and analytical policy regime, effective support for the growth of small and informal-sector
activities with significant poverty-alleviation effects can be provided. In fact, policies should be
devised in such a way that trade can act as a tool for development.
Furthermore, the strategy and scope of future tariff liberalization need to be put in the
context of intended policy objectives. Reduction in import tariffs is to reduce policy-induced
anti-export bias, but this does not necessarily imply an improved export response. The existing
level of policy bias against exports is relatively low and, even leaving aside the problem of poten-
tial revenue shortfall, it needs to be emphasized that while further reduction in anti-export bias
through tariff cuts is one thing, generating export supply response is another matter. Given a
weak performance of non-RMG sectors, in future policy options and/or support measures for
exports would be much more difficult and involved than such simple measures as removal of
QRs and reduction of tariffs.
Export policies and associated incentives are formulated to provide a predictable and secure
environment for the exporters. It specifies objectives, designs strategies and sets up export targets
to achieve. Given the constraints to supply response, the export policy can play a significant role
in energizing export and bringing diversification into the export basket. However, one major
problem has been not having the strategies well- and narrowly defined. Lack of clear guidelines
as regards implementation or ways to provide support may result in ineffectiveness of the strategy.
A policy of supporting or undertaking a program itself cannot ensure achievement of objectives.
Policy frameworks need institutions to become effective. In other words, it is institutions
through which strategies are ultimately implemented. Besides, trade or export policies usually
encompass a number of institutions or departments and coordination of their tasks has import-
ant implications for all eligible exporting firms benefiting from incentives. Therefore, strategies
need to be outlined in detail and the roles and responsibilities of relevant institutions and
departments should be articulated. Lack of coordination and integration in the various elements
of export policy strategy has always been a problem in Bangladesh. Since strategies remain too
broad, it is difficult to analyze whether they ultimately work or to identify the reasons for their
non-implementation and thus the lessons to be learnt for similar future exercises.
For effective export promotion, in addition to the export policies, a set of other comple-
mentary policies and programs are critically required. Stability of the macroeconomic environ-
ment, effectiveness of the export-promoting and -supporting institutions and smooth function-
ing of the financial markets are necessities. Furthermore, the quality of governance should be
improved through promoting transparency and accountability, and by reducing the extent of
corruption. The government should also take an effective role in technology diffusion and in
providing appropriate physical infrastructural facilities.

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 Foreign trade

Table 14.1 Average custom duties and para-tariffs, 1991–2011

Year Customs duties Para-tariffs Total protection rate

1991–1992 70.6 3.0 73.6
2001–2002 21.0 8.4 29.4
2011–2012 13.6 12.9 26.5

Source: World Bank (2004), Sattar (2014).

The export-led growth philosophy underscores the need for setting up an incentive struc-
ture that overcomes the problem of serious policy-induced anti-export bias. The notion of
anti-export bias is related to the trade policy measures that act to favor the import-substituting
sector and discriminate against export activities. The principal route to this ‘bias’ or discrim-
ination is accomplished by altering domestic prices. While for exporters it is not possible to
influence the world price, import tariffs and QRs allow the producers to raise the domestic
price of their commodities above the world price. The resultant profitability (and thus rela-
tively high price of import substitutes to export goods) under the shield of protective meas-
ures encourages reallocation of resources from the production of exportable goods to that of
import substitutes. Also, policy-induced domestic protection may result in increased demand
for non-tradable goods, diverting further resources into this sector at the cost of exportable
goods. Bangladesh has liberalized its economy quite considerably now and, particularly in the
1990s, the pace of liberalization has been very rapid. Trade liberalization has managed to mod-
erately reduce the policy-induced anti-export bias. Further liberalization and rationalization of
the tariff regime could contribute to improving the incentive for exports.
Supporting the export sector by removing the anti-export bias is one of the most import-
ant reasons for undertaking liberalization. However, it is worthwhile enquiring whether the
policy-induced anti-export bias is the only obstacle to expanding exports. While tariff rational-
ization and the liberalization of the trade regime is one thing, how far this will stimulate export
response is another. In the 1990s, Bangladesh’s export growth was mainly driven by RMG and
thus it cannot be ascertained whether the liberalization measures or the peculiarities associated
with the export markets contributed to the robust export performance. Export response to
liberalization in other sectors has been either weak or non-existent. It may be that any signifi-
cant export response in these sectors can only be stimulated by addressing other demand and
supply-side problems.
The strategy of export-led growth is to be supported by a more neutral policy regime and
accordingly one of the basic objectives of trade reform has been to remove the policy-induced
anti-export bias in the domestic economy. The removal of the anti-export bias, therefore, will
largely depend on correcting the price-incentive structure so that resources can be allocated
between the export and non-export sector on the basis of comparative advantage. Liberalization of
such trade-restricting measures as high tariffs and QRs contributes to the reduction of disincentives
to export activities by curtailing the artificially maintained high domestic prices enjoyed by the
import-substituting industries. It is important to note that a policy of subsidizing export production
can mitigate the negative effects of protection. However, given the fiscal burden of the government
such a strategy may not be a viable option, especially in the long run.
Bangladesh’s major export markets are the European Union and North America, which
account for about 90 percent of the country’s exports. Until now, South–South trade has been
rather negligible for Bangladesh, although overall the share of South–South trade has been on

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the rise in the global context in recent years. In spite of the SAFTA and preferential treatment
in India and China, Bangladesh has not been able to put in place an appropriate strategy to
enhance its market access to China and India by taking advantage of the preferential treatment
that has been offered and the bilateral trade deficits that have raised grave concerns in these two
countries. There is a need to urgently address this task, along with identification of the areas of
investments that will be required in this context.

Note
1 This chapter draws on the author’s earlier works, especially Raihan (2007), Raihan and Razzaque
(2007), Razzaque and Raihan (2007).

References
Bangladesh Bank. (2013) Annual Review of Export Receipts (2012–2013). [Online] Available from: www.
bangladesh-bank.org/econdata/openpdf.php?i=7 [Accessed: June 5, 2014].
Bangladesh. Export Promotion Bureau. (2014) Export Promotion Bureau, Bangladesh. [Online] Available
from: www.epb.gov.bd/index.php [Accessed: June 5, 2014].
BGMEA. (2014) Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exports Association. [Online] Available
from: http://bgmea.com.bd/home/pages/TradeInformation#.U5MoSfmSy5J [Accessed: June
5, 2014].
Bhuyan, A. R. and Rashid, M. A. (1993) Trade Regimes and Industrial Growth: A Case Study of Bangladesh.
Dhaka: Bureau of Economic Research, Dhaka University; San Francisco: International Centre for
Economic Growth.
Raihan, S. (2007) Dynamics of Trade Liberalisation in Bangladesh: Analyses of Policies and Practices. Dhaka: Pathak
Samabesh.
Raihan, S. and Razzaque, M. A. (2007) A Review of the Evolution of Trade and Industrial Policies
in Bangladesh. In: Razzaque, M. A. and Raihan, S. (eds.). Trade and Industrial Policy Environment in
Bangladesh with Special Emphasis on Some Non-Traditional Export Sectors. Dhaka: Pathak Samabesh.
Razzaque, M. A. and Raihan, S. (eds.). (2007) Trade and Industrial Policy Environment in Bangladesh with
Special Emphasis on Some Non-Traditional Export Sectors. Dhaka: Pathak Samabesh.
Sattar, Z. (2014) Is Trade Policy Losing Direction? [Online] Available from: www.pri-bd.org/main/view_
publication/is-trade-policy-losing-direction_67 [Accessed: October 1, 2014].
World Bank. (2004) Trade Policies in South Asia. Report No. 29949. Washington, DC: World Bank Poverty
Reduction and Economic Management Unit South Asia Region.
World Bank. (2014) World Development Indicators. [Online] Available from: http://data.worldbank.org/
data-catalog/world-development-indicators [Accessed: June 5, 2014].
WTO. (2000) Trade Policy Review: Bangladesh. Trade Policy Review Body. WT/TPR/S/68. Report by the
WTO Secretariat. Geneva: World Trade Organization.

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 15
INTERNATIONAL LABOR
MIGRATION AND
REMITTANCE
Tasneem Siddiqui

Bangladesh has participated in the international short-term labor market as one of the major
labor-sending countries since the mid-1970s. Gulf and other Arab countries and some of the
Southeast Asian countries are major destinations of Bangladeshi workers. The total number of
Bangladeshi workers who have participated in this labor market for short-term employment
now stands at more than 90 million, with a steep increase in numbers since 2000. Remittances
sent by the migrants, skills attained during migration and the growing interpersonal networks of
migrants play a major role in reducing poverty and enhancing the development of Bangladesh.
This chapter provides an understanding of the developmental outcomes of migration on the
country’s local and national economies.
In this chapter labor migrants are defined on the basis of the UN International Convention
on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (1990).
It defines a migrant worker as ‘a person who had been employed, is employed or going to
be employed in a country of which he or she is not a national’. International remittances are
defined as the portion of migrant workers’ earnings sent back from the country of employment
to the country of origin (ILO, 2000).
Voluntary labor migration has been a significant factor in the growth and development
of many countries. In 2013, 232 million people were living outside their countries of origin
(United Nations, 2013).The World Bank estimates that remittances totaled $582 billion in 2014,
$435 billion of which went to developing countries (World Bank, 2015). It is now generally
understood that along with the financial flows, migration also leads to transfer of ideas, skills and
knowledge; allows connectivity; creates interpersonal links; and contributes to the economic
development of both destination and origin countries. Migration has been included as one of
the important development tools in the post-2015 sustainable development agenda framed by
the UN General Assembly in September 2014.

Nature and extent of labor migration

Bangladesh has a long history of labor migration. Migration linked to trade and spread of
religion was a common experience of those residing in the territory that now constitutes
Bangladesh. In the early 1940s, work on British merchant ships offered a new opportunity of

197
 T. Siddiqui

900,000

800,000

700,000

600,000

500,000

400,000

300,000

200,000

100,000

–
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
Figure 15.1 Labor migration, 1976–2014 (source: RMMRU, 2014)

migration for Bangladeshis. The migration route has taken various twists and turns since then,
but voyages beyond borders in search of a better life and livelihood still continue to be a major
feature of Bangladeshi society and economy.
The present form of contractual labor migration began in the 1970s to cater to the labor
needs of the Gulf countries and later to the countries of Southeast Asia. The foremost char-
acteristic of this type of migration is its short duration and presence of specific job contracts.
Almost all of those who participate in this labor market have to return home on completion
of their contracts.
According to the Bureau of Manpower Employment and Training (BMET), from
1976 to 2014, more than nine million Bangladeshis went abroad as short-term contract
migrants. Figure 15.1 captures the growth of official labor migration over the last 38 years.
The graph indicates that in 1976 the flow from Bangladesh was less than 10,000. By 2008
it reached its peak of 800,000. Since then the migration figure has not picked up in a
major way. In 2011 a total of 568,062 people migrated. Compared to 2011, 2012 experi-
enced 6.99 percent growth whereas in 2013 migration decreased 32.67 percent. In 2014,
it increased slightly with 3.85 percent on the previous year. There is no figure on return
migration.
For a long time Bangladeshi migrants were predominantly male. A handful of women did
migrate, but they were predominantly professionals, holding positions as doctors, nurses and
teachers. The migration of semi-skilled and less-skilled female workers is a new phenomenon
in Bangladesh.Their share has risen consistently since the lifting of protective restrictions by the
government in 2003. Between 1991 and 2000, female migrants made up less than 1 percent of
the total flow.This contrasts sharply with 2014, when female migrants constituted 18 percent of
total flows (Siddiqui and Anas, 2015). Growth of female migration reflects both the real increase
in the number of female migrants and the decrease in the flow of male migration in that year.
Traditionally, labor migrants from Bangladesh have predominantly migrated to the Gulf and
other Arab countries. Since the mid-1990s, Southeast Asia has also become an important des-
tination for Bangladeshi migrants. From 1999 to 2004, Saudi Arabia received 60 to 70 percent

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 International labor migration and remittance

30.00

25.00

20.00
Percentage

15.00

10.00

5.00

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an

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an

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e
s

ea s
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au i
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iu

er
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a

s
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Figure 15.2 Destination countries of Bangladeshi migrant workers in 2014 (source: RMMRU, 2014)

of Bangladeshi migrants. Since then migration to Saudi Arabia has gradually fallen. For the last
couple of years less than 2 percent of workers have migrated to that country. Migration to the
United Arab Emirates (UAE) has constantly been growing since 2001. In 2011 49.77 percent
of the total Bangladeshi workers went to the UAE. In September 2012, the UAE government
placed a ban on the entry of further Bangladeshi workers to that country. In 2014, Oman
attracted the highest number of Bangladeshi migrants (24.84 percent). Qatar was the second
highest migrant-receiving country for Bangladesh in 2014, and 14 percent of the workers went
to Singapore last year. Despite high expectations for increased flows to Malaysia under the gov-
ernment to government (G2G) accord, only a handful of people could migrate due to ensuing
complications in the implementation of the accord. Singapore received the third highest num-
ber of labor migrants, with 54,750 workers in the same year. Figure 15.2 offers a breakdown of
the distribution of migration from Bangladesh among receiving countries.
The Gulf and other Arab countries are also the major receivers of female migrants from
Bangladesh. In 2014 the UAE was the single most important destination for Bangladeshi
female migrant workers, receiving 30.54 percent of the total female migrant workers. Jordan
(26.49 percent) is the second highest female migrant receiving country, followed by Lebanon
(15.77 percent), Oman (15.24 percent), Qatar (8.43 percent) and Mauritius (2.39 percent).
Female migrant workers have doubled in Oman and Qatar compared to the previous year. Since
2013, a good number of female workers have migrated to less frequent destination countries
like Singapore, Hong Kong and Mauritius.
While Bangladesh is divided into 64 administrative districts, it is interesting to note that
the majority of the migrants originate from only five districts. These are Comilla, Chittagong,
Dhaka, Tangail and Bramanbaria. These districts account for 40 percent of the total migrants,
of which Comilla tops the list at 11.48 percent. The Global Household Survey (Mahmood
and Siddiqui, 2014) shows that there is a correlation between the destination and source areas.
The majority of migrants from Chittagong and Comilla migrate to the Gulf. Migrants from

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 T. Siddiqui

Dhaka and Tangail mostly migrate to Southeast Asian countries. It appears that social networks
as well as the operation of informal dalals (sub-agents) result in chain migration from source to
destination areas.
Migration from Bangladesh also varies according to skill composition. Breakdown of migra-
tion flows according to the categories of professional, skilled, semi-skilled and less-skilled
between 1976 and 2014 shows that less-skilled workers constituted the largest percentage of
migrants from Bangladesh at 50 percent, followed by skilled at 31.35 percent and semi-skilled
at 15.07 percent. Only 2.42 percent were of the professional category. A continuing issue of
concern is the falling percentage of skilled workers: in 2014, the share of skilled migrants was
45.43 percent. Bangladesh has not experienced the rise in skilled labor migration that took
place in the case of other labor-sending countries operating in similar labor markets.
Over the years, the remittance flow to Bangladesh has grown significantly. Currently it is
the seventh largest recipient of the international flow of remittances. In 2012 Bangladesh alone
accounted for 44 percent of the remittances received by least-developed countries (UNCTAD,
2012). Up to 2011 the annual remittance flow on average grew more than 10 percent. In certain
years its annual growth rate accelerated up to 30 percent. Remittance records are available from
1976, during which year the country received US$23.7 million. By 2012, it received US$14
billion in remittances. The cumulative effect of negative growth in labor migration resulted in
negative growth of remittances in 2013, when the flow of remittance dropped 2.3 percent in
comparison to 2012. But in 2014, it increased significantly with different policy initiatives taken
by Bangladesh Bank. This year Bangladesh received a total of US$14.94 billion in remittances.
Traditionally, 50 to 60 percent of remittances came from Saudi Arabia. Since the fiscal year
2008–2009, however, this share has fallen to less than 30 percent. Saudi Arabia remains the single
largest remittance source country for Bangladesh, followed by the UAE (19.22 percent), the
United States (14.83 percent), Kuwait (8.21 percent), Malaysia (7.22 percent) and the United
Kingdom (6.59 percent). Although remittance data places the United States as the third largest
remittance-sending country, in actuality it is not. The third position of the United States is due
to the fact that remittances are routed to Bangladesh from different countries by the central
bank of Bangladesh via the United States. Gender-segregated data are not available.

The role of remittance in the national economy

A cross-country study of 71 developing countries found that a 10 percent increase in official
international remittances per capita will lead to a 3.5 percent decline in the share of people
living in poverty (Adams and Page, 2005). Evidence from Latin America, East, West and South
Africa, South Asia and other regions suggests that remittances reduce the depth and severity of
poverty (Ratha et al., 2011). This section concentrates on identifying the role of migration and
remittances on the national economy of Bangladesh.This is done by looking at the influence of
remittances on macroeconomic indicators and employment generation.
Bangladesh is a small deltaic country of 147,570 km2 with a population of 165 million.
During the initial years of its independence the country was termed a ‘bottomless basket’ by its
development partners. However, over the last four decades it has been successful in changing its
image from the ‘test case of development’ to one of the new-wave economies of the world, or as
one of the next 11 countries with the potential to become one of the world’s largest economies
in the twenty-first century. The country has demonstrated major success in reducing maternal
death and child mortality, increasing school enrollment of girls, etc. In 2010, the World Bank
and International Monetary Fund counted Bangladesh as one of the fastest GDP growth coun-
tries of the twenty-first century and JP Morgan termed it as one of the frontier five economies.

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 International labor migration and remittance

It is expected to become a middle-income country by 2020, even at the current rate of 5 to

6 percent GDP growth. An important driver for positive changes is the vast reservoir of human
resources for national and international markets.
Experts have identified three main economic sectors that have contributed to the eco-
nomic and social development of Bangladesh. These are garment manufacturing, services and
labor migration (Rahman, 2010). In 2010, flows of incoming remittances were almost 12 times
higher than foreign direct investment to the country and six times higher than total foreign
aid received. The remittances sent by the migrants are equivalent to 11 percent of the GDP
of the country. As early as the mid-1980s the steady flow of remittances was identified as the
external source of finance that would resolve the long-standing problem of foreign exchange
constraints, negative balance of payments and poor supply of national savings (Quibria, 1986).
For nine years in a row Bangladesh has been able to maintain a surplus current account balance
mostly due to the steady inflow of remittances. The current reserve of the country is US$20
billion (Bangladesh Bank, 2014). More than half of this foreign exchange reserve is derived from
migrants’ remittances.
The creation of employment for its working-age population is a major task for successive
governments. Each year around 1,700,000 youths reach working age. However, annually the
formal sector can only create 200,000 new jobs within the country. The rest have to find jobs
in the informal sector, become self-employed or remain underemployed. In comparison to
local-level employment opportunities, around 600,000 to 700,000 jobs are secured through
foreign employment. Therefore, foreign employment has a major role in relieving the pressure
to create work at home for the working-age population (Siddiqui, 2006).
The migration of workers has also created jobs indirectly. A separate ministry, the BMET
office, 48 district employment and manpower offices and 37 technical training centers are the
major public-sector agencies whose job is to manage migration.The movement of migrants not
only created jobs for line ministries and agencies, it also accelerated the working areas and size
of a few other ministries, i.e., the Ministry of Civil Aviation, and the Customs and Immigration
Department of the Home Ministry. To process recruitment, a powerful private sector has
emerged. Currently there are more than 800 licensed recruiting agencies in Bangladesh. Travel
agencies, medical centers and public and private inter-district transport companies all became
viable because of migrant customers. The operation of various airlines has also increased.

Impact of migration on migrants and their families

Most of the research conducted on the impact of migration concentrates on the economic and
social gains of migrants and their families. A review of the recent literature (Siddiqui, 2012) on
South Asia, Southeast Asia and eastern and southern Africa found that through migration, a large
number of unemployed and underemployed workers found meaningful employment. Male
migrants from Bangladesh mostly find jobs in the unskilled sector such as welding, construction,
sales, driving and gardening, and as general laborers.Women mostly find jobs as domestic work-
ers and a small number in garments and other manufacturing sectors. Migration has increased
their income level. The World Bank (2012) finds that on average the earnings of international
migrants are US$309 per month while the International Organization for Migration (IOM)
and Bangladesh Bank (2009) found that the bottom half of migrants earned less than US$148
per month. Afsar (2009) compared the wage rate of Bangladeshi low-skilled workers with that
of other labor-sending countries and found that Bangladeshis were earning the least. However,
they earned more than what they would have earned in Bangladesh. Other studies, of course,
have highlighted the fact that such earnings should be viewed in the context of fewer rights

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in the workplace, poor work and living conditions as well as health risks (Siddiqui, 2006). In
the case of female migrants, long working hours, restriction on movements, unprotected living
arrangements, mistreatment and abuse also need to be factored in while assessing an individual’s
gains from migration.
A major beneficiary of overseas employment of workers is the family left behind. Migrant
remittances are treated as one of the most valuable inputs to family income. Evidence is emer-
ging that shows that migration of family members not only increases household income but
also acts as insurance during unforeseen situations (Siddiqui and Mahmood, 2014). Sharma and
Zaman’s survey (2009) found the mean annual remittance size of international migrants to be
US$1,500 annually. The IOM–Bangladesh Bank study (2009) found that household income
increased 1.5 times due to flow of remittances. A few studies have found that the poverty level of
migrant households is lower than non-migrant households. Sharma and Zaman’s study, based on
an analysis of the 2010 HIES survey, showed that poverty headcount rates of remittance-receiving
households in Bangladesh are 61 percent lower than poverty headcount rates of households that
do not receive remittances. Only 13 percent of the remittance-receiving households were in a
below-poverty situation in 2010 compared to 33.6 percent of non-receiving households. Of course,
remittance-receiving families may have been in less poor economic condition to begin with.
Siddiqui (2001) found that international migration created both positive and negative out-
comes for children’s education. In some cases it is associated with increased enrollment of chil-
dren of migrant households, and in other cases the school performance of children deteriorated
after the migration of a parent. Similarly, migration both empowered as well as disempowered
wives in the absence of their male spouses. In the absence of the husband in some families,
women became the head of the household and their decision-making autonomy increased
(Akram and Karim, 2005). On the other hand, in cases of extended families with the presence
of in-laws, wives’ movements were restricted.

Impact of migration on local economies and communities

Siddiqui and Mahmood (2014) found that non-migrant members of migrant families and
returned migrants contribute more compared to non-migrant families in modernizing agricul-
ture by using mechanized equipment, high-quality seeds and insecticide and ensuring adequate
irrigation. They have shown that compared to non-migrant families, the migrant families con-
tribute more to the rejuvenation of rural economies through the production of cash crops,
fisheries, etc. On top of this, through their improved purchasing power they directly influence
the rural market place. A World Bank study (2012) found that both internal and international
migration stimulates the local economy, even if remittances are not directly invested by families.
It enhances development of the local market through consumption.
Migration also contributes to community development. The ‘left behind community’ con-
stitutes an important part of the self-identity of migrants. Migrants individually or as a group
organize support for community members experiencing misfortunes such as sudden death and
illness. Siddiqui and Mahmood (2014) found that migrants contribute to their religious institu-
tions, such as mosques, madrasas, temples and orphanages, and support Haj for elderly family
members. Through formal and informal scholarship programs they support the education of
poor students. They also donate books to school libraries, support the regular maintenance of
graveyards and construction of link roads, etc. Such contributions have received institutional
shape in the case of the Bangladeshi diaspora in the United Kingdom and United States. They
mobilize support for their communities through their home town associations and professional
bodies. Philanthropy and charity are extremely important as they target the poorest of the poor

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in a community. Therefore in the absence of social security measures by the state, these support
systems function as a safety net for the poor.

Governance challenges
Since the early 2000s successive governments in Bangladesh have undertaken various meas-
ures at the national and international levels to improve the governance of the migration sec-
tor. In 2001 the then government created the Ministry of Expatriates’ Welfare and Overseas
Employment.The new ministry lifted restrictions on female labor migration in 2003. In 2006
it enacted the Overseas Employment Policy. In order to reduce fraud in the labor-migration
process, it institutionalized an online registration system for workers. To provide services in
the destination countries it increased the number of labor attachés in various missions of the
country. Most importantly, in 2013 it replaced the 1982 Emigration Ordinance by enacting
a new law entitled the Overseas Employment and Migration Act 2013. Currently, it is in
the process of reforming the 2006 Overseas Employment Policy. With the aim of reducing
the cost of migration it successfully negotiated a G2G bilateral agreement with Malaysia on
labor recruitment. The central bank of Bangladesh also initiated major reforms. Over the
years, it has ensured speed in remittance transfer as well as access to services at the doorstep
of migrants by engagement with money transfer agencies, non-governmental organizations
and mobile networks.
Nonetheless, labor migration is an extremely complex process.Within the country it requires
commitment and determination to offset the challenges posed by forces that are engaged in
corruption and are opposed to policy change. It also requires efficient negotiation skills with
the governments of receiving countries liaising with employers and private recruiting agencies
in those countries. The following is a discussion of the major challenges that Bangladesh needs
to resolve to protect its workers in destination countries.
The cost of migration is very high for South Asian countries in general, and is highest in
the case of Bangladesh. Afsar’s research (2009), based on 60 interviews with returnee workers,
showed that the average cost of male migration was US$1,980, and for women it was US$857.
The Household Remittance Survey 2009 of the IOM indicates that migrants on average spent
US$2,738 when they migrated to the Middle East. RMMRU’s survey of 10,000 Bangladeshi
workers repatriated from Libya (2011) found that 74 percent of them paid between US$2,740
and US$4,110 in migration costs.
Siddiqui (2011) found that the cost of male migration to Saudi Arabia reached its peak
in 2011 and ranged from US$4,000 to US$5,400. Migration costs for the UAE, Oman and
Libya again ranges from US$2,700 to US$3,400. In Bahrain and Qatar it is around US$2,700.
Compared to male migration, the cost for female migration is much less. According to a gov-
ernment functionary, in the UAE the cost for female migrants varies from US$270 to US$950;
in Lebanon it varies from US$400 to US$1,000. The cost of migration varies significantly on
the basis of skill category. Unskilled workers pay more compared to skilled workers. According
to the Bangladesh Association for International Recruiting Agencies, a skilled migrant pays
30 percent less than an unskilled worker. In recent multilateral forums like the Global Forum on
Migration and Development, the Abu Dhabi Process and the Colombo Process, the high cost
of migration has been identified by some origin and destination countries as one of the major
hindrances in ensuring protection for migrant workers.
One of the major problems of Bangladesh is that it sends workers to only a few countries.
Traditionally, Saudi Arabia used to take more than 50 percent of Bangladeshi workers. After that
Malaysia became the major destination, followed by the UAE. Currently, it is Oman. After a

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 T. Siddiqui

certain point, these countries did not want to take workers from Bangladesh as they wanted to
diversify their source countries. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have imposed restrictions on
the migration of Bangladeshi workers to their respective countries. It was expected that a large
number of migrants would find work in Malaysia after the signing of the G2G agreement. But
over the last two years only 4,500 workers have been able to migrate to that country. However,
restriction on formal migration creates scope for movements through irregular channels. In
recent times, incidents of death en route and detention on arrival have registered an increase
in the number of Bangladeshis. It is extremely difficult for the government of Bangladesh to
address the problem of irregular migration as transnational crime syndicates are involved in
such flows.
Since the 1950s labor migration has been managed in Gulf countries under the Kafala (spon-
sor) system. Individual countries use some variations on this system. The Kafala system derives
from the Bedouin principle of hospitality that imposes obligations in the treatment and protec-
tion of foreign workers (Khan and Harroff-Tavel, 2011). Kafils are meant to pay the placement
fee, if any, to the government, air ticket for the worker, commission to the recruiting agency if
employed and the cost of a medical check-up. But large numbers of Kafils have transformed the
system into an avenue to earn money. In Saudi Arabia, an Arab citizen can employ eight people
in his house as driver, gardener, cook, etc. Sub-agents in Gulf countries buy or manage such visas
from Arab citizens, then sell them back home.
In most of the Gulf countries, the Ministries of Labor issue employment permits. These
permits issued by the governments are, on many occasions, illegally sold to different agents
and sub-agents in that country. The recruiting agencies/large-scale brokers in the destination
countries buy those employment permits with partial payment of placement fees. The recruit-
ing agents or sub-agents immediately make a huge profit. The second tier of intermediary, who
could be a local of another nationality, then sells those visas to the highest-bidding recruiting
agencies in the country of origin. There is evidence of third and fourth tiers of intermediaries.
Shah (2008) provides some evidence of visa trading in some of the GCC countries. She
quoted the Saudi Minister of Labor, who acknowledged that 70 percent of the visas issued by
the government are sold on the black market and his government was determined to crack
down on this. The Bahraini Minister of Labor and Social Affairs regretted that the practice
of visa trading has plagued the Bahraini job market for the last 20 years. As early as 1997 the
Kuwait Human Development Report identified the presence of visa trading as one of the fac-
tors that promoted the influx of foreign workers in Kuwait and advocated curbing the practice.
Contract substitution is another right-curtailing measure practiced by some employers. In
this case the workers are made to sign a second contract with reduced wages and living and
working conditions once they reach the country of destination. On some occasions, workers
are given a different job than that stipulated in the contract. In Malaysia some of the work-
ers end up working on plantations while their original contracts were to work in factories. In
Saudi Arabia workers are often hired as cooks and security guards, and are then sent to work as
agricultural laborers. Because of extreme hardship, a good number flee these jobs to seek other
types of employment. As they desert the jobs for which they had obtained visas, they become
undocumented workers, vulnerable to other forms of hardship including jail and deportation.
Although there exist country-wise wage differentials, there is a trend of paying less than min-
imum wage to the workers. Women are paid less than men in similar types of work in the gar-
ments sectors of the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain. Studies on Bahrain, Kuwait, Lebanon and
the UAE show that the average working hours of domestic workers per week is over 100 hours,
which is more than double the standard 40–48 hours per week (Esim and Smith, 2004). The

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 International labor migration and remittance

International Labour Organization highlights that 50 percent of domestic workers in Kuwait,

Bahrain and the UAE alleged physical, verbal or sexual abuse (Esim and Smith, 2004).
To reduce the scope of job change, the employers withhold all forms of documentation such
as job contracts, travel documents and passports from the migrant workers. In their negotiations
with the origin countries, the receiving countries ensure that the occupational mobility of the
laborers is minimal. Under such circumstances the workers’ power to negotiate in the labor
market becomes restricted. Workers who do not have documents have major problems seeking
legal redress when the conditions of their contracts are not honored by employers.
The lack of possession of documents also curtails workers’ rights to move freely in their
places of employment. Particularly in Malaysia, workers are harassed routinely by law enforce-
ment agencies.They are under pressure to produce identification documents whenever they are
demanded. The movement of domestic workers in Bahrain, Kuwait, Lebanon and the UAE is
strictly controlled. Restrictions include lack of access to telephone, receiving and sending cor-
respondence, and social isolation from other domestic workers or friends.

Conclusion
International migration plays a key role in the development discourse of Bangladesh. At the
macro level it supports the country by ensuring a steady supply of much-needed foreign
exchange. It eases pressure on the government for employment creation. Although migration
ensures better income and reduces the poverty level of migrant households, the economic and
social costs of migration are heavily borne by migrants and their families. The contribution
of migrants’ remittance in agricultural and enterprise development as well as its influence on
local markets through consumption has been highlighted. Migrants’ support to disadvantaged
members of the community in many instances works as social security for those who cannot
access state support. However, robust data are required to understand the impact of migration
on poverty and local-level development.
Successive governments have taken positive steps to establish good governance in this sector
and identified challenges that the government and civil society have to meet to protect workers
abroad. Incorporation of migration in the ten-year perspective plan of Bangladesh may further
enhance the developmental potential of migration. Fraud within the country and irregular
migration flows remain a significant challenge to ensuring better rights for those who migrate.
Protection of the increasing numbers of female migrants, particularly those who work as
homebound domestic workers, is another challenge for the government of Bangladesh and its
civil society. Collaboration with other labor-sending countries may help to establish common
minimum standards, including costs of migration and wage rates, and ensure the safety of female
workers.

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 16
URBANIZATION
A. K. M. Riaz Uddin

The role of cities in enhancing economic growth has inspired pro-urbanization policies in
many less developed countries including Bangladesh. Major factors favoring the demographic
shift toward rapid urbanization include economic efficiency due to the agglomeration benefits
of cities, surplus labor due to the productivity rise in agriculture, enhanced value in urban
industrial and service sectors vis-à-vis rural agriculture and people’s preference for urban amen-
ities. However, due to the diversity and magnitude of unaddressed social and environmental
issues, urbanization falls short of being an adequate marker of progress by itself. Urban primacy
with a disproportionately high concentration of population in Dhaka, market failure stemming
from inadequate state mechanisms, pressures of the global economy, the disconnection of com-
mon citizens from urban management decisions and inadequate understanding of emerging
urbanism top the chart of major obstacles in this regard. This chapter presents a brief overview
of the history, current state and future potential and challenges of urbanization in Bangladesh.
In the global context, 3 out of 500 major urban agglomerations are in Bangladesh, namely
Dhaka (16th with a population of 17.1 million), Chittagong (96th with 4.45 million) and
Khulna (490th with 1.07 million). Notably, while the population of Chittagong and Khulna
has grown by 16 and 17 times, respectively, since 1950, that of Dhaka has increased by 52 times
(Based on Brinkhoff, 2015; World Urbanization Prospect, 2015). Thus Dhaka’s emergence as a
megacity and the magnitude of its growth occurred at the expense of small and medium-sized
urban agglomerations, leading to a skewed urban system in Bangladesh. However, one has to
note that part of the growth of Dhaka as a city is also attributable to the spatial expansion of
city boundaries. This disproportionate growth has its ramifications and causal links with many
aspects ranging from urban governance, poverty and planning to urban amenities, livability
and social capital. The graphs in Figure 16.1 show the relative growth of the ten largest urban
agglomerations (as at 2014) of Bangladesh since 1950,1 which demonstrate the unattended shift
toward urban primacy in this period.

Major historical determinants

The current urban landscape of Bangladesh bears the marks of notable historic events. Major
events along the temporal trajectory in shaping the urban system of the region, now known as

207
newgenrtpdf
Mymensingh
Chittagong

Rajshahi

Rangpur
Comilla
Khulna

Barisal
Dhaka

Sylhet

Bogra
Cities
1990

Rangpur
Barisal
Mymensingh
Comilla
Bogra
1980

2015

Sylhet
Rajshahi
Khulna
Chittagong
Dhaka
Rangpur
Figure 16.1 Comparative growth in the ten largest urban agglomerations, 1950–2015
Barisal
Mymensingh
Comilla
Bogra
1970

2010

City
Sylhet
Rajshahi
Khulna
Chittagong
Dhaka
Rangpur
Barisal
Mymensingh
Comilla
Bogra
1960

2005
Sylhet
Rajshahi
Khulna
Chittagong
Dhaka
Rangpur
Barisal
Mymensingh
Comilla
Bogra
1950

2000
Sylhet
Rajshahi
Khulna
Chittagong
Dhaka

15000

10000

5000

15000

10000

5000

0
Population’000
 Urbanization

Bangladesh, can be summarized in terms of the six phases described below (see Bagchi, 1976;
Kemper, 1989; Ahmed, 2010).
Pre-Mughal period: The historic precursor of the urban settlement rested on the indigenous
settlement on the Jamuna–Brahmaputra–Padma and Meghna rivers and later penetration by
travelers and conquerors such as the Aryans, Mongolians, Arabs, Persians, Turks and Afghans.
Mughal period: The capture of Bengal by Mohammed Khilji in 1199 made way for the
Mughal period and Bengal came under the control of the Delhi Sultanate. Bengal succeeded in
retaining regional independence within the Mughal Empire. Later Akbar’s son Jahangir founded
the city of Dhaka in 1608, thus initiating a vibrant urban life in Bengal.
Foreign traders intervention: From the early sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century,
Portuguese and British traders’ efforts to settle in Bengal were thwarted by Bengali opposition
to foreign economic intervention, with the exception of a British trading ‘factory’ in Calcutta.
British colonial period (1757–1947): The British conquest in the battle of Plassey in 1757
started the 190-year British colonial period in this region. From the outset Bengali prominence
gradually declined, and the loss of importance of Dhaka in favor of Calcutta converted Dhaka
as well as the whole of Bangladesh into a hinterland of industrial commercial agglomeration
around Calcutta. Despite British involvement, the advent of the industrial revolution did not
reach Bengal.
From Partition to War of Liberation (1947–1971): The partition divided Bengal into two parts
along religious lines. The Muslim-majority region fell into East Pakistan, administered through
Dhaka but under the coercive and exploitative political and economic control of West Pakistan.
The sequence of events that induced discriminatory controls led to a bloody war in 1971 that
ended in the independence of Bangladesh on December 16, 1971.
Post-independence (1971–): The legacy of a long colonial past, the destruction of the 1971
War of Liberation and concomitant genocidal attacks produced a broken economy destined to
external dependence. However, the unitary form of government, lack of spatially based policy
and trade liberalization in a globalized economy gave rise to a Dhaka-oriented migration caus-
ing rapid urbanization and primacy in the subsequent period.

Important demographic trends and patterns

While the gradual growth of the urban population is well appreciated, the relative growth over
time can reveal how it has fluctuated (Table 16.1). For a more detailed, regionally disaggregated
trend of urbanization, see Rouf and Jahan (2007). It is evident in Table 16.1 that the rate of
urbanization was highest during 1960s and 1970s, and slowed to modest rates in the 2000s.
The dominance of Dhaka as an urban agglomeration has grown very fast in recent decades
and projections suggest that the dominance will continue to grow in the coming years, sug-
gesting that Dhaka will continue to absorb and accommodate significant shares of the new
urban population over the coming decades. Evidently, a major source of urbanization is through
migration. Migration patterns suggest that the majority of migration is rural to urban migra-
tion (85 percent) followed by urban to urban (7 percent), rural to rural (6 percent) and urban
to rural (2 percent).2 Estimates of the composition of urban residents in major cities reveal that
the share of the migrant population is 84.6 percent for Dhaka, 68 percent for Chittagong and
50 percent for secondary towns.3 Among the major attractors of urban migration in terms of
stated purposes are: (1) 71 percent in Dhaka and Chittagong cite employment and 21 percent
business, with a similar ratio applicable to secondary towns; (2) 23.3 percent in two major
metropolitan cities cite children’s education as an important reason; (3) 15.3 percent of Dhaka

209
 A. K. M. Riaz Uddin

Table 16.1 Level of urbanization and urban growth, 1901–2011

Census year Total Annual Total urban Urbanization Inter-census Inter-census Annual
(A) population growth population level (%) variation variation growth
(B) rate (%) (D) (E) (F) (%) rate (%)
(C) (G) (H)
1901 28,927,786 1.61 702,035 2.43 165,035 30.73 2.72
1911 31,555,056 0.87 807,024 2.56 104,989 14.95 1.40
1921 33,254,096 0.53 878,480 2.64 71,456 8.85 0.85
1931 35,604,170 0.69 1,073,489 3.02 195,009 22.20 2.02
1941 41,997,297 1.67 1,537,244 3.66 463,755 43.20 3.66
1951 42,062,610 0.02 1,819,773 4.33 282,529 18.38 1.70
1961 50,840,235 1.91 2,640,726 5.19 820,953 45.11 3.79
1974 71,479,071 2.66 6,273,602 8.78 3,632,876 137.57 6.88
1981 87,120,119 2.87 13,535,963 15.54 7,262,361 115.76 11.61
1991 106,315,000 2.01 22,455,174 21.12 8,919,211 65.89 5.19
2001 124,355,000 1.58 28,605,200 23.00 6,150,026 27.39 2.45
2009 146,670,000 2.08 37,520,000 25.51 8,814,800 30.82 3.41

Source: Columns B and D from BBS as in Jahan (2012); others are calculated by the author.

and Chittagong residents are student migrants; (4) the lure of city life is strongest for Dhaka and
Chittagong at 22.3 percent and weakest for smaller towns at 13 percent; (5) distress-induced
migrants are 11 percent in metropolitan Dhaka and Chittagong and 8.3 and 6.6 percent in the
larger and smaller district towns respectively (Rahman, 2011, p.7).

Local and regional economy

The key driver of the urban revolution is economic force. Hence a comprehensive view
of the economic processes that produce the urban reality and the consequent feedback of
urbanization itself needs to be examined carefully if not critically. Economic globalization
and the consequent reshuffling of production activities across the globe found cheap labor
in places like Bangladesh and gave rise to a new entrepreneurial culture that dominates the
political economic reasoning and forces that shape migration and urbanization. This con-
comitant shift has found an unprepared urban governance structure in Bangladesh that is
customary in a weak state, and the later crystallization of a profit-laden political dynamics
made people-oriented planning difficult. The concentration of manufacturing (LQ = 1.5) and
the construction industry (LQ = 2.19) in Dhaka, measured by the Location Quotient (LQ)
method, is testimony to this pattern.4 Using this measure, Choe and Roberts (2011) identify
major high-concentration (LQ > 1) sectors to be public administration and defense (1.61) and
electricity, gas and water supply (1.37).
The manufacturing sector, especially ready-made garments (RMG), caters to an inter-
national market. The real estate sector feeds the accentuated demand in the housing market
that is presumably a ripple effect of manufacturing growth based in Dhaka, among other trad-
itional factors of urbanization. As a result of export-led policy and the subsequent adaptation
of the local market to global economic linkages, the trade to GDP ratio of Bangladesh’s econ-
omy has increased from 14.5 percent in 1973–1975 to a phenomenal 55.9 percent during
2011–2013.5 The productivity advantage of urban manufacturing in terms of economies of

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 Urbanization

Table 16.2 Incidence of poverty in the divisions of Bangladesh, 2005–2010 (headcount ratio, HCR)

Division 2005 2010

Total Urban Rural Total Urban Rural
National 40 28.4 43.8 31.5 21.3 35.2
Barisal 52 40.4 54.1 39.4 39.9 39.2
Chittagong 34 27.8 36 26.2 11.8 31
Dhaka 32 20.2 39 30.5 18 38.8
Khulna 45.7 43.2 46.5 32.1 35.8 31
Rajshahi 51.2 45.2 52.3 35.7 30.7 36.6
Sylhet 33.8 18.6 36.1 28.1 15 30.5

Source: HIES (2005) and HIES (2010), as in Bangladesh. Planning Commission (2011).

scale is demonstrated in the distribution of firm sizes and employment in favor of large firms,
with large firms employing 62 percent and small and micro firms 34.5 percent of the 1.17 mil-
lion workers in Dhaka (Choe and Roberts, 2011, p.129). However, a detailed regionwide com-
parison shows that Dhaka is more competitive than any other city in Bangladesh but lags behind
in international comparisons.

Urban poverty: the ‘good’, the ‘bad’ and the ‘ugly’

Despite the productivity advantage of urban areas, the most significant driver of massive
city-bound migration, urban economic growth is not commensurate with in-migration and
urban poverty persists (Hossain, 2011, p.2). The distinctive character of urban poverty vis-à-
vis rural poverty, the sustained trend of urban-bound migration and the threat of climate
change-induced migration call for urban-specific poverty policies.Table 16.2 shows the regional
distribution and temporal change of absolute urban poverty in comparison to its rural coun-
terpart. As regards the relative measure, during the 1990s inequality in urban areas was on the
rise and was also growing faster than its rural counterpart (Bangladesh. Planning Commission,
2005). However, the Sixth Five Year Plan (Bangladesh. Planning Commission, 2011) reported
that rural inequality increased from 2000 to 2005 while urban inequality remained constant.
The urban poor find their accommodation in slums and squatter settlements. The largest con-
centration of these settlements is found in Dhaka, where 30 percent of people live in slums,
followed by Chittagong, Khulna and Rajshahi (see Jahan, 2012, for details).
Islam (2005) noted that the number of people migrating to Dhaka each year is around
550,000. The push factors, such as natural disaster, loss of employment and property and des-
titution, are fittingly supplemented by the powerful pull of a growing labor market associated
with the industrial sector in Dhaka. Admittedly, this migration flow gives rise to Bangladesh’s
comparative advantage in international trade via cheap labor, a prime driver of export-oriented
industrial development mostly in and around the capital and, to a much lesser extent, in other
parts of Bangladesh. Starting with 12 members in 1978, the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers
and Exporters Association (BGMEA, 2014) now has 4,222 member factories. Despite signifi-
cant standardization in the manufacturing industry, job volatility and occasional wage insecur-
ity is present. However, the relatively advantaged urban poor employed in the formal sector,6
estimated at 10 percent of the urban population (Siddiqui et al., 2010, p.211), get more political
and media attention at the expense of their counterparts working in the volatile informal sector.

211
 A. K. M. Riaz Uddin

Other formal-sector constituents are hospital workers, hotel workers, salespersons, class-four
employees, police and ansars (paramilitary). The major occupation in the productive ‘informal
sector’ is rickshaw pullers, who significantly serve the demand for public transport in the cit-
ies. Beside them are tokai (street children), domestic servants and poor female household heads.
This category is more prone to uncertainties, lack of recognition and humiliation in society.
The third category is the ‘underclass’, comprising beggars, prostitutes and criminals who are
mostly in the unproductive ‘informal’ section of the city. Both in society and in social science
they are considered to be anathema. However, recently the definition of ‘informal’ has been
contested and redefined (Roy, 2005). In Hall and Pfeiffer’s (2000) view the informal sector is
‘ungovernable’, but as per De Soto (2000) it is ‘people’s spontaneous and creative response to
the state’s incapacity to satisfy the basic needs of the impoverished masses’. Hossain (2013) and
Hackenbroch and Hossain (2012) are among notable studies on the political contestation for
space and utilities in the context of Dhaka.

Governance, planning and institutions7

Since the inception of Bangladesh as an independent country, planning was exercised predom-
inantly in a sector-based approach to suit the unitary form of government. Though the need
for decentralization was repeatedly highlighted in policy documents such as the Five Year Plans
and the PRSP, changes to the institutional frameworks in the subsequent decades favored the
concentration of power. It is therefore not surprising that urbanization in Bangladesh over this
period has happened at the expense of secondary and tertiary urban agglomerations as well as
other major cities outside the capital Dhaka. Even for Dhaka, despite the recurrent outcry for
a metropolitan government with adequate authority for decision making and integrating the
activities of some 19 ministries and 51 government organizations that are directly involved in
the administration and development of the city, the recent change conferred by the govern-
ment divided the city into two jurisdictions such that the pre-existing power of the mayor has
been further contracted (Liton and Hasan, 2011). Several factors act as deterrents to local-level
economic development. In the case of major cities they are predominantly spatial and intu-
itional disintegration. In the case of smaller urban areas these include an array of issues such
as power contestation between local government representatives and members of parliament,
dependency on the national government for resources, limited reflection of local knowledge on
needs and potentials in a sector-based national framework, and, due to ambiguity in the flow of
resources, lack of interest among people in paying higher taxes.
During the British colonial period, East Bengal’s decline in importance and the overarch-
ing commercial interest of the rulers precluded economic development and urbanization in
this region. However, urban municipal management financed through municipal taxation,
followed by contributions from government and urban elites, was carried out with the
watchful contestation of educated urbanites and continuity of financial transparency (Ahmed,
2010). Two notable proposals, one by the Civil Surgeon of Dhaka, Dr. Cutcliffe, in 1968
and another by town planner Patrick Geddes in 1917 were not implemented.8 However,
the establishment of Dhaka Municipality in 1964 was a significant event that provided the
institutional structure for the urban management of Dhaka. During the Pakistan era the first
notable institutional measure was the formulation of the Building Construction Act 1952,9
for prevention of the haphazard construction of buildings and excavation of tanks, the Town
Improvement Act of 1953, which made way for the creation of the Dhaka Improvement Trust
(DIT) in 1956 (to be later superseded by RAJUK), and the gradual creation of a number
of development authorities for other major cities.10 During the late 1950s, apart from local

212
 Urbanization

political leaders, donor agencies, especially UNDP and the UNCHR, expressed an interest
in assisting urban development in the Indian subcontinent. Consequently, master-plans were
prepared for a number of big cities in India, erstwhile Pakistan and Sri Lanka during the
late 1950s. Under this initiative the Dhaka (1959), Chittagong (1961) and Khulna (1966)
Master-Plans came into existence.
As the disparate nature of the planning initiatives become more evident, the Urban
Development Directorate (UDD) was formed in 1965 to fill the institutional void to
address nationwide urban and regional planning. Decentralization of urban development
attracted some attention during that period. The UDD later carried out a number of not-
able master-plans, mostly outside Dhaka. After independence the emphasis on nationwide
coordinated urban planning lost impetus. However, recently a draft Urban and Regional
Planning Act 2014, proposed by the UDD, has been under consideration, which is expected
to enhance a much-needed nationwide framework for planning.11 Important master-plans
prepared during the 1960s had attracted little attention and lost context after independence.
Later the master-plans with a physical focus were replaced by a comprehensive three-tier
structure plan following UK models, which resulted in a number of city plans including
the Dhaka Metropolitan Development Plan (DMDP, 1995) for the period 1995–2015. The
lowest tier of this plan, namely the Detailed Area Plan (DAP), offered an effective regula-
tory instrument for the government in development control. However, high land prices in
Dhaka, the powerful interests of land developers and the large size of the construction indus-
try based in Dhaka has made this a politically contested matter for Dhaka and also increas-
ingly more so for other metropolitan areas.

Infrastructure and urban amenities

Dhaka, statistically the most popular destination of migration in Bangladesh, has occupied
a deplorable position in noted quality of life comparisons.12 If other cities and towns in
Bangladesh fared better, people would ‘vote with their feet’ and concentrate elsewhere for
a better life. This scorecard matches well with the institutional limitation described above.
In view of the incredible pace at which urbanization happened after independence and the
pressure it has created on pre-existing amenities, this is not surprising. Inadequacy in urban
facilities persisted with some heterogeneity across different types of cities, despite signifi-
cant improvements in technology, a steady increase in people’s incomes and the increasing
involvement of the private sector in urban service delivery. The steady growth of the part-
nership with the private sector over time to deal with the lack of public-sector resources
led to a retreat of the state, on the one hand, and enhanced control of business interests in
public goods provision, on the other. Table 16.3 summarizes the current status of housing,
infrastructure and amenities in urban areas of Bangladesh.
Added to this is the heightened concern over the law and order situation related to urban
living in the face of extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, political violence inflicted
on common people and attacks on atheist writers that have claimed a number of lives in
recent times.

Urban social transformation

In the historical time frame urban living is not new,13 but the urbanization we are familiar with
and the social reality produced by it is not old either. For Bangladesh, with delayed integration

213
Table 16.3 Status of major urban infrastructure and facilities

Type of service/infrastructure Status

Housing i NHP reported that the deficit of housing units was 3.1 million in
1993, 5 million in 2000, 6.2 million in 2010. For 2015 the number
of required units for urban areas was estimated at 10 million
(NHA, 2012). For a segment-wise analysis of urban housing
market characteristics, see Ahmad (2015).
ii As of 2001, 54.73% of urban houses had temporary structures,
23% had semi-permanent structures and 22% had permanent
structures. However, these statistics have significantly improved in
the subsequent years (Jahan, 2011).
iii After the national adoption of export-led development strategy,
public-sector investment in housing facilities for urban poor
has diminished, and as such in Dhaka eviction, gentrification,
densification have resulted in lower per capita floor space available
for the urban poor (Ghafur, 2011).
Transportation i The transportation network of Bangladesh has shown four major
characteristics: namely (a) growth of road at the expense of rail
and water transport, (b) increase of private automobile ownership
due to favorable policies at the expense of public mass transit,
(c) gradually higher dependence on private sector both in services,
operation and infrastructure provision, (d) poor transportation
safety, especially in road and inland water transport, reportedly
claim an estimated 4,000 lives each year in these two modes.a
ii In Dhaka, for instance, though strategic recommendation put
more emphasis on traffic management, bus consolidation, mass
rapid transit, safety improvement and pedestrian facility among
other things (DTCB, 2005), public sector favors highway projects
and flyovers that have had limited and mixed impacts on easing
transport problem.
Water supply According to various surveys, the majority of urban people in
Bangladesh (70–80%) used tube well as the major source of drinking
water, followed by supply water (20–30%). Three major metropolitan
cities, namely Dhaka, Chittagong and Rajshahi, have daily water
supply deficit of about 14%, 6% and 58% respectively (Jahan, 2011,
pp.55–56).
Sanitation The most common form of urban sanitation is simple latrine
connected to septic tank system. Connection to the public sewage
system is relatively rare. However, the basic service has increased from
32.4% in 1981 to 70.5% in 2002 (Jahan, 2011, p.56).
Solid waste management An estimated 20,000 tons of solid and liquid waste is generated in
223 municipalities and towns per day with 0.5 kg/capita/day rate of
waste generation (APO, 2007, p.25). As a city grows in prominence
so does its proportion of uncollected solid waste. According to
Bahauddin and Uddin (2012), waste collection efficiency in different
urban areas varies from 37–70% with an average of 55%.
Electricity Access to electricity in urban areas has increased from 75% in 1990 to
88% in 2010 (World Bank, 2015).

Note: aEstimated by the author based on Mahmud et al. (2013) and Azad (2009).
 Urbanization

with industrial development owing to bottlenecks during colonial periods, the urban phe-
nomenon created by mass rural to urban migration is more recent. Hence, urban social life in
Bangladesh, with the strong influence of migrants’ kinship and village network ties, cultural
traditions and ‘districtism’, remains markedly underdeveloped (Siddiqui et al., 2010). On the
downside this has precluded the consolidation of a meritocracy, but on the other hand it has
helped sustain the support systems needed for new migrants in the urban setting. Kuhn (2003)
showed that migrants’ social network capital in their destination has a significant role in reducing
the uncertainties associated with migration and settling in new places.The gradual formation of
urban social life and tensions across social classes have simultaneously created ‘parallel cultures’
and a class reflection in the artist community. Reflection of such crisis in the film industry is
captured in the phrase the ‘Manna factor’ (Ahmed, 2008), and the spatial manifestation of this
cultural middle space in the rural–urban continuum is termed by Hoek (2012) as the ‘Mofussil
Metropolis’. On the flipside, apart from urban-bound migration, historical events such as the
long exodus of Hindus to India, Urdu-speakers to Pakistan and Anglo-Indians to Western coun-
tries have led to cultural and linguistic homogenization (Siddiqui et al., 2010, p.343) at the
expense of pre-existing diversity. Over time, urbanites, especially in the large cities like Dhaka,
showed a decline of interest in participating in non-political organizations, which indicates
erosion of social capital. However, the rate of such participation is higher among the educated
and high-income groups. Thus, the working-class poor are not inclined to form organizations
and trade unions, and show little promise of being agents of change for the future. Such social
inequality and bottlenecks for future change is further bolstered by education opportunities
differentiated by social privilege, namely faith-based madrasa education for the Muslim poor,
Bengali-medium schools for low- and middle-income people and English-medium schooling
for upper-middle- and high-income groups. This is supplemented by the gradual mushroom-
ing of private universities, a relatively new phenomenon. Although after independence the
agenda of the new leadership promised a strong role for the state, the role of the state in public
welfare and social equality has gradually declined. This is particularly true for the urban poor.
Hossain (2013) presents a detailed account of how slum dwellers survive and access basic ser-
vices through fierce and contested negotiation with different intermediaries, political agents
like ward commissioners and members of parliament and non-governmental organizations/
community-based organizations, and local musclemen (mastans). Hence, one can readily con-
clude that although urban-bound migration is seen as a means of improving one’s lot, the
opportunities for upward mobility through merit and hard work are very limited and as such
the prevalent urban social structure does not offer strong prospect for capability enhancement
as a basis for social justice.

Urban future
The notion of ‘urban’ is constructed on the non-ubiquity of resources and economic activ-
ities across space, and as such most descriptions of urbanization focus on the economic growth
potential associated with it. As far as the future is concerned, a change of perception needs to be
in order in favor of envisioning the city as a living and growing place for people and their suc-
cessive generations, as opposed to reducing cities to engines of growth and production relying
on short term goals. Managing the urban future in Bangladesh entails recognizing that (1) the
future of the country is largely an urban future, (2) many of the changes that urbanization brings
in the physical and natural environment are irreversible and unsustainable, (3) the urban econ-
omy and society are inexorably meshed with both their rural counterparts and the national
superstructure, (4) the urban system constitutes a closely connected system of agglomerations

215
 A. K. M. Riaz Uddin

that have a hierarchy of dependency and exchange, and (5) urban management has to come to
terms with the emerging ambience and institutions spawned by globalization and market forces.
Apart from mainstreaming spatiality in the planning approach at the national level, other local
and regional planning exercises need to be in place which will engage with the emerging plan-
ning perspectives and adopt a reflexively contingent approach to urbanization in Bangladesh.
The pressure on existing urban facilities and natural amenities owing to the density rise
in major cities and bourgeoning production interest is symptomatic of the negative eco-
nomic externalities to the pre-existing population. The outgrowth of the real estate industry in
response to the inflated demand for housing, for instance, is responsible for the disappearance
of wetland and open spaces in Dhaka. Alam (2014) estimated that more than 100 km2 of land
in the Flood Flow Zone demarcated by the statutory Dhaka Metropolitan Development Plan
has been converted into housing areas both via public and private developers at the expense of
climatic and flood management risks.14
As far as public policies are concerned, the Sixth Five Year Plan (Bangladesh. Planning
Commission, 2011) identifies unbalanced growth, the primacy of Dhaka and the ensu-
ing pressure on the already fragile infrastructure and available land as problematic. The
PRSP (Bangladesh. Planning Commission, 2005) has also highlighted the importance of
‘balanced regional growth’ and ‘capturing spatiality in planning process’ besides the trad-
itional sector-based approach. These policies, though accommodative of civil society con-
cerns about urban management, have a great deal of catching up to do in implementation.
Meanwhile, suggestions to curb further urban degeneration have come in many forms,
namely, residential regeneration by density (Zaman and Laing, 2013), green urbanism
(Neema et al., 2013), administrative and fiscal decentralization, regional metropolitan gov-
ernance (Talukder, 2006) and sustainable and smart building (Bahauddin and Uddin, 2012),
among others. However, considering the magnitude of the urban problem, one proposal that
stands out in terms of its potential systemwide impact is that of Compact Township (CT)
by Rashid (2013), which emphasizes compact urban development in rural settlements that
‘economize on land by seeking profitable measures that compactify land use, beautify habi-
tation, and utilize agglomeration economies’.

Conclusion
Third World urbanism in general, and that of Bangladesh in particular, is an intricate subject
to conceptualize and a difficult issue to handle in a reality marked by the inadequate capacity
of the state, crony capitalism, lack of reliability of formal institutions and absence of collective
agencies for different levels of urban entities and vulnerability to external forces, among other
things. Roy’s (2009) articulation of the non-plannability of Indian cities due to ubiquitous
informality closely resembles the reality in Bangladesh. Considering the empirical evidence of
the shortcomings of a rational comprehensive planning doctrine and the limitation of the state
on one hand, and the dire need to create efficient and just cities on the other, better knowledge
of the contingent urbanism and searching for new solution spaces to create the necessary condi-
tions have now become urgent.

Notes
1 Data source: United Nations (2014).
2 Estimates of migration patterns in 1991 census, in Rahman (2011).
3 Power and Participation Research Centre Urban resident survey 2009.

216
 Urbanization

4 For this specific example: Location Quotient of region r and industry i = Share of an industry i in
employment in region r / Share of industry i in national employment.
5 1973–1975 data from Hossain et al. (2009) and 2011–2013 data from WTO (2014).
6 For definitions of the formal and informal sector, see Siddiqui et al. (2010, pp.212, 239).
7 Preparation of this section, especially the observations on the temporal changes in planning institu-
tions, greatly benefited from a personal interview with Dr. Khurshid Zabin Hossain Taufique, Deputy
Director, Research and Coordination of Urban Development Directorate.
8 The proposal by Dr. Catcliffe, though appreciated by many, could not be implemented for lack of
funds. Geddes’ report, entitled ‘Report on Town Planning, Dacca’, however, was not taken seriously but
was later proven both intuitive and economical.
9 The Building Construction Act 1952 (East Bengal Act No. II of 1953). Available at: http://goo.gl/
Y7ZTAA [Accessed: May 17, 2015].
10 DIT was later transformed into Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha (RAJUK) through the Town
Improvement Amendment Act 1987. Ordinances that gave birth to development authorities include
the Chittagong Development Authority Ordinance 1959, Khulna Development Authority Ordinance
1961 and Rajshahi Development Authority Ordinance 1976.
11 Urban and Regional Planning Act 2014, draft available at: http://goo.gl/Keaghu [Accessed: November
22, 2015].
12 Dhaka ranked 140th out of 140 cities in the 2012 Economist Intelligence Unit Ranking, only to out-
perform war-torn Damascus in the 2014 ranking. In the Marcer Quality of Living Rankings 2015,
Dhaka is ranked 211 out of 230 cities. Available online at: http://goo.gl/yuhuKT [Accessed: May
4, 2015].
13 See Mark (2014) for a concise account of ancient cities.
14 City development authorities such as RAJUK play a major role as real estate developers. Private devel-
opers are recognized as members of the Real Estate and Housing Association of Bangladesh (REHAB)
and the Bangladesh Land Development Association (BLDA).

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 17
POVERTY, INEQUALITY AND
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Syed Akhtar Mahmood

Bangladesh has achieved significant reductions in the incidence of poverty since independence
in 1971. This chapter documents this record and surveys the literature explaining this substan-
tial achievement. It argues that the spread of entrepreneurship, both in the economic and social
spheres, has played an important role, complemented by government actions on the policy side.
While the role of the government, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the private
sector in Bangladesh’s development has been the subject of some discussion, less attention has
been paid to the synergy between these players.Yet, this synergy is an important part of the story
of poverty reduction in Bangladesh and will be even more important as the country strives to
eradicate poverty.
At independence, Bangladesh was predominantly rural and agricultural. More than 70 per-
cent of GDP originated in the rural sector (agriculture and rural non-farm activities) and more
than 85 percent of people lived in villages. Poverty was widespread, with 74 percent being classi-
fied as living below the poverty line in 1973–1974. Agricultural productivity was low and many
poor people had to seek employment as agricultural workers or in non-farm activities. They
were landless or their farms, mostly very small, could not provide even subsistence income.
Connectivity was poor and many villages in Bangladesh existed in isolation from all but their
immediate neighbors.
Forty years later, there has been a significant, in some cases a dramatic, change in the
scenario. The poverty headcount, i.e., the proportion of the population living below the pov-
erty line, fell to 31.5 percent by 2010 (World Bank, 2013). Agriculture’s share of GDP fell
to 18 percent by 2012 (from 32 percent in 1980), with services (54 percent) and industry
(28 percent) accounting for the remainder (World Bank, n.d.). The rural–urban divide has
given way to a rural–urban continuum with more significant variations even among rural areas
(Rahman, 2012).

Trends in poverty and inequality: 1972–2010

Poverty measurement
Although poverty is usually associated with low income, economists mostly base poverty meas-
urements on consumption, recognizing that income is important because it enables people to

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 Poverty, inequality and entrepreneurship

consume goods and services. Consumption does not depend solely on one’s own income but
also on cash or in-kind transfers from others – including relatives, friends and government.
The usual approach is to define a minimum basket of goods and services that a person needs
to consume to be considered non-poor. This includes both food and non-food items with the
minimum food bundle (for Bangladesh) being one that provides the minimum nutritional
requirements for a diet corresponding to 2,122 kcal/day (World Bank, 2013). The monetary
amount needed to consume such a basket defines the poverty line; people with incomes below
that amount are considered poor.
Poverty lines are periodically updated. The latest update for Bangladesh was in 2010, which
revised the 2005 food poverty line to adjust for rise in prices and to account for changes
in non-food/food rates. The definition of poverty lines and estimates of poverty are based
on the Household Income and Expenditure Surveys (HIES) carried out periodically by the
Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics.
Poverty analysts commonly make a distinction between the poverty headcount index, which
measures the proportion of the population that is poor, and the poverty depth index, which
measures the extent to which individuals fall below the poverty line as a proportion of the
poverty line. Thus, a national poverty headcount index of 30 percent indicates that 30 per-
cent of the population in a country are poor based on that country’s definition of the poverty
line. However, it does not tell us if most people are living just below the poverty line or far
below it. This information is provided by the poverty depth index. Also known as the pov-
erty gap index, this measure is very useful for policy. For example, a government wanting to
assess the fiscal implications of an income-transfer program designed to take people out of
poverty needs to know not just how many people live below the poverty line, but how far
below it they are.

Poverty trends
Poverty trends: 1972–1999
Poverty rates remained more or less unchanged during the 1980s (Ravallion and Sen, 1996)
and started declining during the 1990s at a rate of about 1 percent per year (Sen, 2003). Low
rice prices helped, particularly to bring down rural poverty, which fell at a slow pace in the
1980s but relatively faster in the 1990s. Urban poverty also declined slightly faster in the 1990s
compared to the 1980s.
Poverty analysts look at poverty not only in terms of incomes and consumption but also
in terms of human development indicators such as health status and educational attainments.
Progress on this front was even faster during the 1980s and 1990s. Sen (2003) refers to a 2001
BIDS study that estimated a decline in the human poverty index from 61 percent in the early
1980s to 35 percent in the late 1990s (Sen, 2003).1

Poverty trends: 2000–2010

Many countries have experienced ups and down in their attempts to reduce poverty.
Bangladesh’s story is more consistent with progressively better performance over time.The pace
of poverty reduction accelerated during 2000–2010 when roughly 16 million Bangladeshis
escaped poverty; the number of people living below the poverty line dropping from 63 mil-
lion to 47 million. In 2000, every other Bangladeshi was considered poor (the poverty count
rate was 48.9 percent); ten years later, the proportion had fallen to one-third (31.5 percent)

221
 S. A. Mahmood

60 National
Urban
Poverty headcount rate (in %)

50 Rural

40

30

20

10

0
2000 2005 2010
Figure 17.1 Poverty trends, 2000–2010 (source: World Bank, 2013)

40
National
35 Urban
Extreme poverty headcount

Rural
30
25
rate (in %)

20
15
10
5
0
2000 2005 2010
Figure 17.2 Extreme poverty trends, 2000–2010 (source: World Bank, 2013)

(Figure 17.1). The rate of poverty reduction increased to 1.74 percent per annum during this
period, up from an average of 1 percent the previous decade (World Bank, 2013).
A noteworthy and reassuring feature of Bangladesh’s recent poverty reduction experience is
that even the extreme poor have not been left behind. The poverty headcount for the extreme
poor dropped from 34.3 percent in 2000 to 17.6 percent in 2010, with the number of extreme
poor falling from 44 million to 26 million (Figure 17.2). With such huge numbers still living in
extreme poverty, the poverty challenge remains acute in Bangladesh. Nonetheless, the achieve-
ments of the last decade are remarkable.
As in the 1980s and 1990s, the reduction in income poverty helped improve other dimen-
sions of people’s lives. According to the World Bank (2013),

between 2000 and 2005, a large number of households saw improvements in terms
of the materials used in the constructions of their homes (that is, more households
were in homes with walls and roofs made of corrugated iron, steel, and cement) as
well as in their access to services (that is, more households in homes with sanitary
latrines and electricity).

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Beneath the macro picture: micro-level ups and downs

The macro data presented in the earlier sections, while illuminating, do hide an important part
of the reality. They do not tell us that during a particular period, when many people escape
poverty, many non-poor households may simultaneously descend into poverty. An escape from
poverty today is no guarantee of a life free of poverty; reversals are part of the harsh reality for
many Bangladeshis living at the margin.
Sen (2003) provides a fascinating portrait of such dynamics based on a panel data-set for
two points in time, 1987–1988 and 2000. The 21-village study, covering 379 rural households,
suggests a drop in the poverty headcount ratio from 57 to 49 percent over this period. This is
consistent with the macro-level findings from the HIES data for the same period.
However, as Sen observes, ‘While the incidence of poverty in general has declined there
are winners, losers, and “break-even” households.’ Some 119 households (about 31 percent
of the sample) were poor in both time periods; this is the ‘always-poor’ category. At the
other end of the spectrum, 95 households (25 percent) classified as ‘never-poor’ were above
the poverty line in both periods. The two intermediate categories saw fluctuating fortunes,
in one case for the better and in the other for the worse. Sen terms the first the ‘ascending
households’. The 98 households in this category (26 percent of the sample) escaped poverty
during this time.The other group, the ‘descending households’, were non-poor in 1987–1988
but, by 2000, these 67 households (18 percent) had slipped below the poverty line. The net
poverty reduction rate is thus 8 percent, roughly consistent with aggregate poverty measures
for the same period.
The above findings are instructive.They suggest that higher rates of poverty reduction can be
achieved if steps are taken to prevent vulnerable households’ descent into poverty. In the above
study, 28 percent of the households were able to escape poverty over a 12-year period.This gross
rate of poverty reduction (28 percent) is significantly higher than the 8 percent net reduction in
the poverty rate observed in the sample villages and the roughly similar rate of overall poverty
reduction in the country during the same period.
The study provides important clues on how to prevent such declines. First, income growth
obviously matters.The study found that the ‘always-poor’ group had an annual per capita income
growth of only 0.4 percent, compared to 10.4 percent for the group that escaped poverty. In
explaining these stark differences, Sen makes a distinction between ‘capability’ and ‘opportun-
ity’. The former is assessed in terms of initial levels of asset (land) ownership. The study found
that in the low-wealth group (i.e., those owning up to 0.2 hectare of land), 53 percent of the
non-poor households subsequently became poor, while only 39 percent of the poor households
escaped poverty. In contrast, for the high-wealth group (owning 1.01 hectare of land or more),
only 32 percent of the originally non-poor households slipped into poverty while 63 percent
of the poor households went above the poverty line.
While initial asset levels matter, the ability of different households to make use of the assets
and create income opportunities is also important. Even with the same level of initial asset hold-
ings, some households may do better than others. The study revealed the importance of com-
bining multiple exit routes out of poverty. Households that escaped poverty pursued multiple
strategies, such as going for more agricultural diversification, off-farm activity and livelihood
migration. Most ascending households adopted high-yield rice technology and diversified into
high value-added non-rice crops. Many also went for non-crop agriculture, such as poultry,
livestock and fisheries. Some saw family members migrating and sending back remittances. Not
all households are able to pursue such multiple strategies because of their initial low asset hold-
ings and/or mishaps in life, such as flooding and ill-health, thus remaining poor or descending

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into poverty. For households with a stronger asset base, accidents in life often led to transient
poverty, while for those with a low asset base, such mishaps made them chronically poor.

Trends in inequality: 1972–2012

Inequality has a bearing on poverty trends. Thus, unequal growth in income is likely to lead to
a slower reduction in poverty than a more equitable growth pattern. During the 1980s, inequal-
ity, measured by the distribution of consumption expenditures, hardly changed in Bangladesh.
In the 1990s, income growth was accompanied by rising inequality in both urban and rural
areas. Consumption inequality (as measured by the Gini index of real per capita consumption)
increased from 32 to 38 percent in urban areas and from 26 to 30 percent in rural areas dur-
ing 1991–2000. This partly explains why poverty reduction in the 1990s was moderate, even
though faster than in the 1980s. Growing inequality during this period was a matter of concern
to poverty experts who believed that this posed a threat to both future growth and the speed of
poverty reduction in Bangladesh.2 While this concern was justified a priori, subsequent devel-
opments painted a different picture.
During the 2000s, nationally, there was a modest decline in consumption inequality, as meas-
ured by the Gini index. During 2005–2010, for example, the largest increase in per capita
consumption was experienced by the population below the 70th percentile of consumption
distribution (World Bank, 2013). The pro-poor nature of growth during this period, particu-
larly in the second half, is a major reason for the substantial reduction in poverty in this decade.
The substantial reduction in poverty during the 2000s was both a rural and an urban phe-
nomenon. In urban areas, the poverty rate fell from 35 percent in 2000 to 21 percent in 2010.
Rural Bangladesh continued to remain poorer than the cities but here too poverty dropped
substantially. In 2000, one out of two people in rural areas (52 percent) was considered poor; by
2010, this ratio had fallen to one out of three (35 percent) (World Bank, 2013). Indeed, poverty
reduction was faster in rural areas in this period: 39 percent compared to 33 percent in urban
areas. These positive developments notwithstanding, much more remains to be done to reduce
poverty in rural Bangladesh. Not only does a sizeable proportion of the rural population live
below the poverty line, the bulk of the poor suffer from extreme poverty. While 36 percent of
the poor in urban areas were extremely poor in 2010, the proportion was 60 percent for the
rural poor. Nonetheless, it is reassuring that the poverty headcount ratio for the extreme poor
also declined substantially during the 2000s, by about 17 percent. In 2010, only 8 percent of
the urban population were considered extremely poor, while the figure was 21 percent in rural
areas (World Bank, 2013).

Regional variations in poverty

Hidden underneath the overall poverty figures are significant variations in poverty levels and
trends between regions. The World Bank’s Poverty Assessment for 2000–2005 cautioned about
an emerging ‘East–West divide’ in the country (World Bank, 2008). The report documented
unequal progress in the rate of poverty reduction during the 1990s; the Dhaka division enjoyed
a significant drop in poverty levels while poverty incidence changed little in the Chittagong and
Sylhet divisions. In 2000, the western region of the country, i.e., Rajshahi division, had a poverty
rate of 61 percent, much higher than in the eastern, central and southern regions (48 percent
in Chittagong division, 45 percent in Dhaka division and 40 percent in Barisal division). The
south-western division of Khulna was in between with a poverty rate of 51 percent (World
Bank, 2008).

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The situation worsened in the first half of the 2000s. During 2000–2005, poverty rates
declined significantly in the eastern and central regions of Bangladesh, i.e., the Chittagong,
Sylhet and Dhaka divisions, which had lower poverty rates to start with. Poverty reduction was
much slower in the poorer divisions of Rajshahi, Khulna and Barisal in the west and the south.
These differential trends further accentuated the disparity in poverty rates between the eastern/
central and western/southern regions of Bangladesh, raising the specter of regional disparity.
The report highlighted the need to create economic opportunities in the lagging regions so that
they could catch up (World Bank, 2008).
That catch-up process seems to have begun in the second half of the 2000s. During this
period, poverty reduction was faster in the western/southern divisions of Rajshahi, Khulna and
Barisal.This reversal of fortunes helped lower disparity. By 2010, poverty rates in these divisions
had come close to those in the eastern and central divisions of Chittagong, Sylhet and Dhaka
(World Bank, 2013).

Explaining poverty and inequality trends

Poverty reduction in Bangladesh has been the result of a mix of factors: income generation as a
result of economic growth; transfers of incomes from government, families and friends; and pro-
vision of social services by both government and non-governmental organizations that enabled
the poor to take advantage of economic opportunities. Transfers and social services have also
helped poor people cope with mishaps that, otherwise, would have eroded their capacity to take
advantage of such opportunities and escape the clutches of poverty.

Overall economic growth

The Bangladesh economy has grown at a respectable rate during the past three decades; the
real per capita GDP and real GDP grew at an annual rate of 2.7 percent and 4.8 percent
respectively during 1980–2012 (World Bank, n.d.). This growth has created income-earning
opportunities for poor people by generating jobs and increasing returns to their assets,
mainly land. The decline in the rate of population growth over time (from 2.5 percent
annually in the second half of the 1970s to 1.4 percent in the 2000s) has narrowed the
divergence between growth rates of aggregate GDP and per capita GDP (World Bank, n.d.).
Thus, an average Bangladeshi is benefiting more from the economy’s growth now than 20
or 30 years ago.
Growth has also been stable, especially in the last two decades. During 1992–2012, GDP
grew more than 4 percent in all years. Many developing countries have grown at similar or
faster rates over long periods of time but not necessarily in a stable manner. Fluctuations in
growth rate often affect the poor more than other income groups. Richer people can draw on
savings during periods of income contraction and rebuild during better times. However, poor
people live at the margin and periods of income slowdown may force them to sell assets, such
as land, or forgo the accumulation of assets, such as schooling for their children. Both affect
long-term incomes. Thus, not only GDP growth but also its relative stability has contributed to
poverty reduction in Bangladesh.
For a long time, agriculture was the most important driver of growth in Bangladesh. As men-
tioned above, its share in the economy has steadily declined over time; so has its role as the major
growth driver. In the 1980s and 1990s, growth was largely driven by agriculture with non-farm
activity in rural areas also playing an important role. The paradigm has shifted with export-led
industrialization and remittances now playing a leading role.

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The story of this transformation has been eloquently and convincingly told by Hossain et al.
(2013). A key actor in this story in the relatively unskilled labor who initially concentrated in
the agricultural sector, then began to have a presence in rural non-farm activities and later
participated in a big way in the construction and manufacturing export sectors. Most of these
people came from poor families. By being able to participate in these activities, they and their
families could benefit from growth in these sectors. This is a major reason why economic
growth in Bangladesh has had a substantial trickle-down and poverty-reducing effect. As is well
known, the growth of the female-labor-intensive garments industry, and its dominant role in
manufacturing growth, meant that poor women also benefited directly from the growth of the
manufacturing sector, especially from the mid-1990s onwards.

Growth in the rural economy

The story, however, begins in agriculture.The adoption of high-yielding varieties of rice (HYV
rice) and the spread of irrigation led to an increase in agricultural growth rates and productivity
in the 1980s. Rising productivity helped release surplus labor, which first sought income-earning
opportunities in rural non-farm activities and later in urban areas, outside the comfort of their
villages. Rural non-farm activities initially had low productivity, in some cases even lower than
in agriculture. Over time, however, more productive activities were initiated as people moved
from being subsistence-driven to becoming entrepreneurial. According to Hossain et al. (2013),
this trend started in the 1990s.
The first boost to poverty reduction came through the spread of HYV rice that increased
agricultural productivity and thereby returns to land. HYV rice was introduced to Bangladesh
in the 1960s and, after a slow start, took off in the late 1970s. The spread of HYV rice cultiva-
tion, especially in the boro (winter) and aman (rain-fed) seasons, helped generate income for
poor people in at least two ways. First, since most farmers are poor, an increase in the productiv-
ity of their land increased their incomes. Second, because HYV rice requires almost 50 percent
more labor than traditional varieties, it created on-farm job opportunities that benefited land-
less people as well as very small landowners who needed supplementary income through wage
employment. Thus, as HYV rice cultivation took off in the 1980s, rural agricultural incomes
started increasing, leading to a decline in poverty. In the 1980s, this was mostly due to increases
in the incomes of landowners and off-farm job creation.There was some increase in agricultural
wages, but this was modest in the 1980s and started picking up only in the 1990s.3
Increased farm productivity engendered growth in non-farm activities in two ways. Rising
agricultural income created demand for non-farm products and services, while rising product-
ivity freed up agricultural workers who could engage in non-farm activities. However, much of
the increase in rural non-farm employment was in low-productivity activities, suggesting that,
during the 1980s, rural non-farm activity was largely a livelihood means for people who could
not earn a subsistence income from agriculture due to little or no land holdings and/or insuf-
ficient wage income from agriculture (Osmani, 1990).
Rural Bangladesh started witnessing a paradigm shift in the 1990s. Several factors played
a role, some originating in the villages of Bangladesh and some from beyond. Faster spread
of HYV rice cultivation and increases in crop intensity, both helped by significant increase in
irrigation coverage, further raised agricultural incomes. Agricultural wages started increasing,
as did income from landownership. A more entrepreneurial class emerged in rural areas whose
ambitions went beyond mere subsistence. In the more dynamic segment of rural non-farm
activities, average earnings went above the average agricultural wage (Sen, 1996). A number of
factors complemented the growth in agricultural output and productivity in creating income

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opportunities for poor people: microfinance, remittances, rural infrastructure, especially the
extensive rural roads network, spill-over impact of irrigation, manufacturing growth, especially
in garments, construction and general urbanization.

Microfinance and remittances

Microfinance not only had an empowering effect on women, it also helped reduce poverty.
Khalily and Osmani (2011) and Osmani and Sen (2010) have surveyed the huge body of litera-
ture that has accumulated on this subject over the past three decades. Although income from
activities funded by microfinance has generally been modest, it has helped to supplement the
incomes poor households receive from other activities, thus helping them come out of poverty.
Equally important, they often serve as a safety net helping the vulnerable families deal with
mishaps in life that otherwise would have led them back to poverty, as we learned from Sen’s
(2003) paper on the micro-level dynamics of movements in and out of poverty. Microfinance
has helped many families take advantage of increasing demand for non-farm goods and services
by providing them with the capital to set up micro-businesses.There is evidence that, while pre-
viously a substantial part of the microfinance provided to women was siphoned off to the male
members of the household for investment in small businesses, in the 2000s women increasingly
entered economic activities on their own.
Bangladesh is rapidly urbanizing. In 1974, only 8 percent of the population lived in areas
classified as urban; by 2011, one out of three Bangladeshis (35 percent) lived in a city or town.
Many of these urban ‘residents’ are people with close ties to the villages, where many of their
family members, relatives and friends continue to live. A large part of the income of these
people is sent back to rural or peri-urban Bangladesh as remittances that, in addition to sup-
porting consumption, also provide capital for investment in both agriculture and non-farm
activities. The increase in migration is the result of both pull and push factors, i.e., increased
income-earning opportunities in the urban areas, landlessness and rising productivity in agri-
culture that freed labor from the farms.4
International migration has been an additional, and important, source of remittances. In
2011, these accounted for 10 percent of Bangladesh’s GDP, up from 5 percent in the early
2000s. There is a pro-poor bias in international migration – more than half (58 percent) of all
migrants abroad in 2008 came from households owning less than 0.4 hectares of land, including
those who are landless.This is significantly higher than the 38 percent observed in 2000 (World
Bank, 2013). However, Osmani and Sen (2010) have found an anti-poor bias in the share of
income remitted; the share of the wealthier classes in rural Bangladesh is greater than that of the
poorer households. They suggest that 70 percent of the increase in rural inequality is explained
by international migration. Nonetheless, international migration has had a positive impact in
other ways. For example, casual agricultural laborers have benefited from indirect effects of
international migration through the rural labor market: wages have risen faster in villages with
high growth in remittances from abroad (World Bank, 2013).

Manufacturing employment
Bangladesh has become increasingly export-oriented in the last three decades, with the share of
export in GDP increasing from about 7 percent in the late 1970s to 18 percent by 2010. The
bulk of exports come from the manufacturing sector whose share of GDP has increased from
21 percent in 1991 to 30 percent in 2010. Unlike in some developing countries, notably India,
Bangladesh’s manufacturing growth has been employment-intensive. This is particularly true

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 S. A. Mahmood

of the ready-made garments (RMG) industry, the fastest-growing part of the manufacturing
sector, which accounted for 53 percent of manufacturing employment in 2005/06 compared
to only 16 percent in 1990/91.5 Labor productivity growth has been modest in manufacturing.
Hence, manufacturing wages have grown at a slow pace but are, nonetheless, higher than agri-
cultural wages. It is well known that the growth of the RMG industry has created large-scale
job opportunities for women. Asfar (2000) found that 90 percent of them were migrants from
rural areas and 75 percent came from poor households. The significant employment growth in
manufacturing in the past two decades, dominated by RMG employment, has thus had a sub-
stantial positive impact on poverty reduction.
Another source of jobs for poor people is the significant growth in construction, fueled
partly by remittances and partly by overall economic growth. One reflection of the growth of
construction is the rapid increase in the number of real estate companies, from only 10 in 1994
to 1,200 in 2012. An estimated two million workers are employed in the construction sector,
mostly recruited from villages (World Bank, 2013). Both RMG and construction growth have,
in turn, generated spill-over growth in activities such as textiles, garment accessories, cement,
bricks and tiles, and iron and steel re-rolling mills. In addition, several smaller industries catering
to the domestic market have also been important job creators.

Connectivity
The processes discussed in earlier sections are underpinned by an important phenomenon, i.e.,
rising connectivity. A pioneering contribution here has been that of a public body, the Local
Government Engineering Department, which, starting in the 1980s, has created a massive net-
work of rural roads thus opening up the villages of Bangladesh. The construction of other
infrastructure, such as roads linking smaller towns to larger cities, and large bridges such as the
Jamuna Bridge, has also boosted connectivity. Rahman (2012) captures this well in the follow-
ing comment:

Thanks to this network stemming from the late 1980s, urban agglomerations have
transformed the rural-urban divide into a rural-urban continuum stretching from
metropolitan Dhaka and Chittagong to larger secondary towns to rural towns to mar-
ket centres to villages.

The role of entrepreneurship

Poverty reduction strategies often focus on interventions that provide direct support to poor
people such as cash transfers, subsidized provision of food and job-creation schemes (e.g.,
food-for-work programs). While these have a role in addressing poverty, Bangladesh’s experi-
ence highlights the importance of economic growth and the ability of poor households to take
advantage of that growth by participating in economic activities.The story of poverty reduction
summarized in the previous section also underscores the critical role of entrepreneurship in
both generating growth and creating opportunities for the poor to benefit from it.
Entrepreneurs see a problem, need or opportunity and take the initiative to mobilize a
variety of resources, human, financial, organizational and others, to address the problem, meet
the need and grab the opportunity. In doing so, they take risks. This broader definition of
entrepreneurship goes beyond the world of business to encompass social entrepreneurship
where the objective is to meet some social goal, such as providing primary health care. The
pioneering farmers who adopted HYV rice growing in the 1960s and those who followed

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them later were entrepreneurial in some ways since they saw an opportunity to increase yields
on their farms and took the risk of going beyond their comfort zones of traditional rice cul-
tivation. As the spread of HYV rice, aided by expansion of irrigation, boosted incomes in
rural Bangladesh and created a demand for non-farm goods and services, a new set of entre-
preneurs emerged to satisfy these needs. Taking advantage of a liberalized agricultural input
market, one group of entrepreneurs ventured into the distribution of modern agricultural
inputs, such as fertilizer and irrigation machinery. This, in turn, spawned newer businesses
such as irrigation machine parts and servicing. This trend started in the 1980s and intensified
in the 1990s.
While this story of entrepreneurship was unfolding in rural Bangladesh, another started in
the cities, notably in Dhaka and Chittagong. This was the emergence of the garment industry
in the mid-1980s. A combination of simple technology, huge supply of labor and some early
innovations that eased the supply of credit (notably the back-to-back letter of credit system)
enabled a wide range of entrepreneurs, many without prior business experience, to enter the
industry. The practice of subcontracting further broadened the entrepreneurial reach of the
industry. While the entry of a heterogeneous mix of entrepreneurs, especially the small subcon-
tractors, has created problems such as poor working conditions (such as unsafe buildings and
unethical treatment of workers), low productivity and environmental damage, this broad-based
industrial entrepreneurship did help in spreading economic benefits more widely.This has been
facilitated by the demonstrated ability of people to learn from others. Indeed, many garment
entrepreneurs started as managers in garment factories and then, after learning the trade, set up
their own businesses.
The entrepreneurial drive has further intensified in the last decade-and-a-half. As incomes
rose in rural areas with remittance flows and further increases in agricultural output, and as the
villages of Bangladesh became more connected with urban areas, demand for goods and ser-
vices expanded and became more diversified. Both existing and new entrepreneurs have rushed
in to respond to this demand. Farmers too have become more enterprising, a manifestation of
which is the spread of high-value-added agriculture, such as vegetables and fruit cultivation,
which cater to rising incomes in both rural and urban Bangladesh. The spill-over impact from
one business to another continued. One large-scale example is the emergence of a large textile
industry to serve the needs of the garments sector. At the smaller end of the spectrum, examples
include a whole slew of businesses such as sale of mobile phones and SIM cards, stimulated
by the growth of mobile telephony. The spread of such small businesses has helped raise the
incomes of households below or just above the poverty line.
Finally, mention must be made of social entrepreneurship, as exemplified by the work of
NGOs. Much has been written on the rich variety of NGO activity in Bangladesh.6 It is not
possible to do justice to this literature here. Instead, it is useful to highlight one phenomenon
that promises to be a game-changer. This is the synergy between social and economic entre-
preneurship. An example of this comes from the world of sanitation. Several years of NGO
activism and awareness building is creating demand in rural areas for newer services, such as
improved sanitation facilities, which is being transformed into effective demand due to inflow
of money from remittances, financial inclusion activities and growth in general. This, in turn, is
creating small business opportunities, such as supply of improved toilet facilities. The aggrega-
tion of these small businesses is creating demand for products and services that large investors
can provide, such as manufacturing of the base material needed for the improved toilet facilities.
Such synergies are now emerging and, as entrepreneurs exploit these, another major phase of
transformation will be rolled out in Bangladesh with important implications for the reduction
of poverty and inequality.

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 S. A. Mahmood

Conclusion
Bangladesh has achieved significant progress in reducing poverty, especially in the last decade.
The incidence of extreme poverty has also gone down and, in the last decade, there has been
a drop in inequality as well. A confluence of policy, provision of social services and entrepre-
neurship has contributed to this. Government policy has played an important role in mod-
ernizing agriculture, enhancing connectivity and promoting export-oriented manufacturing.
Government and NGO programs, sometimes working separately and sometimes in tandem,
have led to significant improvements in human development indicators. Finally, as argued in the
previous section, an entrepreneurial spirit has been unleased that has responded to opportun-
ities, both domestic and international, and thereby helped generate growth and created scope
for poor people to participate in the growth.
But there is a large unfinished task. Some 26 million Bangladeshis are still classified as extreme
poor and about 50 million non-poor people are still vulnerable given that their consumption
is less than 1.5 times the poverty line. Child malnutrition remains high. The bulk of the labor
force is unskilled and the quality of education remains poor. Entrepreneurship, while blos-
soming, is still constrained by inadequate infrastructure, unreliable utility services and myriad
regulatory bottlenecks. These are some of the issues that will need to be tackled if Bangladesh
is to make substantial progress in eradicating poverty and achieving human development in the
coming years.

Notes
1 The Human Poverty Index, developed by the UNDP, measures the degree of deprivation of the pop-
ulation of a country along three essential elements of human life: longevity, knowledge and a decent
standard of living. A decrease in the value of this index denotes improvement.
2 See, for example, Sen (2003).
3 Rice wage per day, i.e., amount of rice that can be bought by daily wages, stagnated for the most part in
the 1980s and increased modestly from 3.5 kg in 1990/91 to 4.5 kg in 1999/2000.
4 Panel data reported in the World Bank’s latest poverty assessment report for Bangladesh indicates that
16 percent of households reported having some member of the household who has migrated within
the country, up from 13 percent in 2000. These figures do not reflect the full extent of domestic migra-
tion because these exclude seasonal migration of labor for the construction sector. The importance of
landlessness as a driver of domestic migration is reflected in the statistic that 57 percent of the domestic
migrants are landless or almost so (World Bank, 2013).
5 Hossain et al. (2013) cite an employment elasticity of 0.61 with regard to manufacturing value-added;
for RMG, it is estimated to be 1.66 during 1990–2005. They compare this to employment elasticity in
Indian manufacturing; 0.33 during 1986–1996 and 1.42 during 1996–2002.
6 See, for example, World Bank (2006).

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 18
MICROFINANCE
Muinul Islam

Microfinance has been a buzzword of development thinking since the 1980s when the micro-
credit model implemented by Professor Muhammad Yunus through the Grameen Bank (GB)
gained worldwide fame as a successful system of providing access to collateral-free bank credit
to the rural landless poor people of Bangladesh, predominantly women, with a truly remarkable
record of repayment of the loans on time. But, GB is designed as an institution for the develop-
ment of the rural poor rather than merely a bank – it evolved as a model for overcoming poverty.
During the last three decades, the ‘Grameen Bank model’ of microcredit has been replicated
in more than 150 countries as a tool for fighting poverty. GB and its innovator, Muhammad
Yunus, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 as recognition of Yunus’s contribution in
innovating a successful model of poverty reduction through collateral-free microcredit to mil-
lions of landless people worldwide. The supporters of the Grameen Bank model claim that it is
an effective tool in overcoming poverty. Its detractors do not agree, because, they argue, poverty
is ‘systemic’, constantly created and recreated by the exploitative social, economic and political
system of a country institutionalizing inequalities of income and wealth, social power and par-
ticipation. In this chapter, we present a review of the Grameen Bank model.

A short history of the Grameen Bank and

microcredit in Bangladesh
GB challenged the collateral-based banking principle right from the experimentation stage
when Yunus started an action research project in 1976 in a village named Zobra, located near
the University of Chittagong, Bangladesh. He had been teaching economics there since 1972
following his return from the United States after completing his PhD and a short career of uni-
versity teaching.1
The Grameen Bank Project (GBP) challenged the myth that rural landless women in a
least developed country like Bangladesh are not creditworthy or ‘bankable’, because they
cannot provide acceptable collateral securities to the banks in support of their loan appli-
cations. The rationale of collateral security-based banking was that in the absence of such
collateral, banks cannot legally pursue the defaulting loan recipient nor recover the overdue
and stuck-up loan by disposing of the collateral security. Collateral-based banking has been
inherently elite-focused, where rich and propertied people in a society logically become

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the main beneficiaries of bank loans. The segmentation of the credit market resulting from
collateral-based banking largely deprived common people of access to formal institutional
credit.
The modern banking system was established in South Asia during British rule in India.
During the Pakistan era, the banking sector was used for developing the state-patronized cap-
italist sector in the economy with the help of bank loans doled out to favored groups of busi-
nessmen in the name of industrialization. The famous ‘twenty-two families’ of Pakistan were
considered symbols of state-patronized entrepreneurs who monopolized bank loans in Pakistan
through their connections with the ruling clique. The role of banking was so important in the
growth of ‘crony capitalism’ in Pakistan that the nationalization of banks became a key issue in
the autonomy movement of the 1960s in the then East Pakistan, leading ultimately to the inde-
pendence struggle and Liberation War of Bangladesh in 1971.
Banks were nationalized in Bangladesh in 1972 to follow up on the election promises of the
Awami League in 1970. But, the banking sector could not play a significant role in reviving the
war-devastated economy of Bangladesh during the Mujib regime of 1972–1975, in spite of the
rapid expansion of the banking network throughout the country. During those crisis-ridden
years, the nationalized banks were directed to provide loans to keep the loss-making public
enterprises afloat, which created a chronic liquidity crisis in the banks. Moreover, the banking
sector had to provide credit to the government to strengthen the reconstruction efforts of the
war-devastated economy. However, by mid-1975, banks in Bangladesh showed signs of recovery,
and started to expand their investment activities. But, unfortunately, since the political changes
of 1975, the banking sector of Bangladesh has been misused by the ruling clique as a major
tool for transferring capital from depositors to the richer sections of the population. The credit
market remains a highly segmented market in Bangladesh, and the poor have been effectively
kept out of mainstream banking.
When the initial success story of the GBP was highlighted throughout the country, Yunus
faced ridicule from senior bankers for his idea of collateral-free banking for the poor. Critics
claimed that his initial success was a fluke, and the project would fail if he moved his field of
experimentation to some remote areas of the country where his image as a university professor
would not matter. He formally launched his project in the districts of Tangail and Chittagong
in 1979 and extended it to Rangpur, Dhaka and Patuakhali in 1982. Four years of successful
experimental operation of the GBP somewhat silenced the critics. After proving the viability of
his innovation to policy makers and critics, the GBP was transformed into the GB in October
1983 when the government promulgated the Grameen Bank Ordinance to establish GB as a
special type of bank for providing collateral-free loans to landless women and men in the rural
areas of Bangladesh.

A review of the Grameen Bank model as a model

of overcoming poverty
Before we review the Grameen Bank model as a model of overcoming poverty we need to
briefly highlight Yunus’s conceptualization of poverty. Yunus declares in his autobiography,
Banker to the Poor: ‘Poverty is not created by the poor; it is created by the structures of society,
and policies pursued by society’ (Yunus and Jolis, 1998, p.215).Yunus’s conceptualization of the
task of development is as follows:

The first and foremost task of development is to turn on the creativity inside each person.
Any program that merely meets the physical needs of a poor person or even provides a

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 M. Islam

job is not a true development program unless it leads to the unfolding of his or her cre-
ative energy.
… To me, the essence of development is changing the quality of life of the bottom
half of the population. And that quality is not to be defined by the size of the consump-
tion basket. It must also include the enabling environment that lets individuals explore
their own creative potential. This is more important than any mere measure of income
or consumption.
(Yunus, 2008, p.56)

His conceptualization of poverty continues:

Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong with their seeds. Only society
never gave them a base to grow on. All that is required to get poor people out of pov-
erty is for us to create an enabling environment for them. Once the poor are allowed
[to] unleash their energy and creativity, poverty will disappear very quickly.
(Yunus, 2008, p.54)

Terming credit as the ‘solid foundation’ on which anti-poverty programs can find a firm
grounding, he answers his critics in the following words:

Some critics are eager to point out that micro credit alone cannot solve the problem of
poverty. No one ever claimed that it could. But micro credit lays down a solid foundation
on which all other anti-poverty programs can find firm grounding and achieve better
results.
Poverty is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. It is about people’s lives and their liveli-
hoods. To free people from poverty, all aspects of their lives need to be addressed, from
the personal level to the global level, and from the economic dimension to the political,
social, technological, and psychological dimensions. These are not separate and discon-
nected elements but closely intertwined.
(Yunus, 2008, p.75)

Yunus claims that by 2030 poverty will be banished to a museum. He firmly believes that
such a dramatic utterance is meant to drive home the point that if the whole nation seriously
strives to overcome poverty, then poverty can be overcome.
Yunus has also outlined a ten-point set of ‘hurdles’ for a family of a GB member to clear in
order to be considered to have ‘escaped from poverty’. The ten points are:
1. The bank member and her family live in a tin-roofed house or in a house worth at
least 25,000 taka (roughly equivalent to $370). The family members sleep on cots or
a bedstead rather than the floor.
2. The members and her family drink pure water from tube wells, boiled water, or
arsenic-free water purified by the use of alum, purifying tablets, or pitcher filters.
3. All of the member’s children who are physically and mentally fit and above the age of
six either attend or have finished primary school.
4. The member’s minimum weekly loan repayment installment is 200 taka (around $3).
5. All family members use a hygienic and sanitary latrine.
6. All family members have sufficient clothing to meet daily needs, including winter
clothes, blankets, and mosquito netting.

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7. The family has additional sources of income, such as a vegetable garden or fruit bear-
ing trees, to fall back on in times of need.
8. The member maintains an average annual balance of 5000 taka (around $75) in her
savings account.
9. The member has the ability to feed her family three square meals a day throughout
the year.
10. All family members are conscious about their health, can take immediate action for
proper treatment, and can pay medical expenses in the event of illness.
(Yunus, 2008, p.111)

On the basis of the conceptualization of poverty revealed in Yunus’s writings and sayings out-
lined above, we present the following review of the Grameen Bank model. It is significant
that within one decade after the birth of GB, Fuglesang et al. (1993) could rightly identify the
mission of the Grameen Bank model: ‘credit and banking are only a small part of what is hap-
pening. The development activities now emerging from Grameen amount to a comprehensive,
all out and defiant attack on poverty in Bangladesh’ (Fuglesang et al., 1993, p.5). Rahman et al.
(2002) also agrees with Fuglesang and Chandler on this issue: ‘GB is not merely a bank as its
founder wants us to believe. It is indeed a poverty alleviating program with sharp focus on the
persons behind the poverty curtain’ (Rahman et al., 2002, p.87).
Yunus insists that GB is a bank for the rural poor, not a non-governmental organization
(NGO), and declares that access to credit is a basic human right. GB credit caters to the rural
landless poor. GB does not have clients but members. A landless intending member is defined as
a person belonging to a rural family owning less than 0.5 acres of cultivable land, or assets not
exceeding the value of one acre of land. The basic assumption of the Grameen Bank model is
that the landless poor people of rural areas have the skills to successfully operate a productive
enterprise if they are provided with the small capital they require. So, banking operations must
be taken to these people without the elaborate procedural formalities and paperwork required
by the formal-sector banks. GB is not an outcome of a preconceived plan: it is an idea that has
evolved and continues to evolve through its experience of working with poor people.
After trial and error, the system has evolved as follows. Five intending borrowers are formed
into a group. A chairperson and a secretary of the group are nominated by the members. GB
field operations primarily focus on group formation, training, motivation and conscientization
of members of such groups about bank rules, regulations and ‘The Sixteen Decisions’ (Sholo
Shiddanta) in regularly scheduled weekly meetings in a center, conducted by a bank assistant of
GB.2 Each center elects a chief and deputy chief for one year.The weekly meetings at the center
begin and end with a center chief leading members in the recitation of ‘The Sixteen Decisions’.
When all the members of a group demonstrate their knowledge of GB and its rules and regula-
tions, then the group is recognized by GB. For about a month, the attendance and participation
of the members of such a recognized group in weekly center meetings are observed before the
initiation of the loan process. Then loans are extended to two members selected by the group.
Regular weekly installments of repayments of a loan taken by the first two members for two
months will ensure GB loans for the next two members. The chairperson of the group gets the
GB loan last. Up until 1996, 5 percent of each loan used to be automatically deposited into
the group fund, and members made weekly payments of Tk 1 into the group fund. Since 1996,
this practice of a 5 percent deduction from the loans for the group fund has been discontinued.
Instead, members’ weekly deposits for the group fund was raised to Tk 10. The group fund,
which now consists of the earlier deducted amount and the accumulated weekly deposits,
belongs to the group. Its use is decided on by the group, including the rate of interest on loans

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 M. Islam

taken from the group fund. Earlier, members also used to pay an additional 25 percent of their
total interest payment into an emergency fund. Since 1996, the emergency fund has been dis-
continued, and has been transformed into a life insurance fund. GB pays 12 percent interest on
the money already accumulated in the life insurance fund; members do not pay any premium.
In case of death of a member during the repayment period of a loan, Tk 2,000 is given to the
family of the deceased from the life insurance fund for meeting the cost of burial/cremation
and other rituals. Now, 3 percent of a loan is deducted for a loan insurance fund, which is used
to adjust the outstanding principal and interest amount in case of death of a borrower during
the repayment period (for repeat loans, 3 percent is not deducted).
In the weekly center meeting, five members of a group are seated in a row, and, generally,
six to ten such groups are seated in rows at the weekly meeting. (A center may also have fewer
than six groups.) Weekly repayment of loans, deposits to group funds, discussion of new loan
requests and any other matters of interest to members are regularly transacted and/or discussed
in the center meetings. Holcombe rightly observes that group and center operations hold the
key to the successful operation of the GB. The whole group is the guarantor for all the loans
taken out by members of that group, and the open transaction of all business in a center meet-
ing reduces opportunities for corruption (Holcombe, 1995, pp.37–41). A new loan is processed
for a member only after full repayment of the existing loan. The prospect of getting a new loan
on the basis of the regular repayment record of a member acts as an incentive for repayment on
time for all the members of a group.
The GB hierarchy runs from the GB head office, zone, area, branch, center and group. GB is
at once highly centralized and highly decentralized; at once tightly controlled and loosely con-
trolled; members are effectively brought into the organization to monitor and be accountable
for loans and other functions. GB’s participatory management and empowerment of managers
at the field level is a hallmark of the organization (Holcombe, 1995, pp.164–167).
GB has funded projects involving more than 450 purposes during its 31 years of oper-
ation (in 1993, Fuglesang and Chandler mentioned 442 recorded purposes; Fuglesang et al.,
1993, p.93). The activities are grouped into seven categories: (1) processing and manufactur-
ing, (2) agriculture and forestry, (3) livestock and fishery, (4) services, (5) trading, (6) peddling
and (7) shopkeeping. Among the activities of male borrowers, the following were the ten most
prominent in 2013: milking cow, rice/paddy trading, bamboo works, grocery shop, cow fatten-
ing, paddy husking, paddy cultivation, stationery shop, land lease and bidi making. The ten most
common activities of female borrowers in 2013 were: rice/paddy trading, grocery shop, milk-
ing cow, bamboo works, cow fattening, paddy cultivation, paddy husking, farming, land lease
and miscellaneous business. GB has also begun providing loans for larger collective enterprises
like shallow tube wells, deep tube wells, rice-husking machines, fishery projects, power tillers,
threshers, leasing of land for farming, leasing of rural market places (haat), etc. Fuglesang and
Chandler observe that

Yunus demonstrates that the critical factor in economic empowerment of the poor
is not conscientization alone but institution building and an enabling organizational
framework for participation. He envisages that small, medium and even very large
enterprises can be owned and managed by the poor, and not the least, by the women.
(Fuglesang et al., 1993, p.73)

GB has proven in the last 31 years of its phenomenal progress that the poor are more bankable
than the rich, provided suitable mechanisms are innovated to ensure proper utilization of credit
in income-generating activities. GB has successfully built a system in which repayment rates of

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loans disbursed stay around 98 percent. Rahman et al. (2002) records the following factors con-
tributing to such an excellent repayment rate: well-designed poverty-focused programs, close-
ness to the borrowers, peer pressure and the process of group formation, ensuring loan utiliza-
tion, loans for appropriate activities, the group fund as a cushion against unforeseen expenditure,
incentives of repeat loans, consciousness-raising activities like ‘The Sixteen Decisions’, strict
supervision and the participatory management style of GB (Rahman et al., 2002, pp.205–211).
Apart from successfully running the microcredit program for the poor, GB has been operating
innovative housing loan schemes for members, higher education loan schemes for the children
of members, interest-free loan programs for beggars, health services and saving schemes for
members.3 Fuglesang and Chandler (1993) especially highlight the following feature of GB:

We suggested that Grameen was more than a bank. We saw it as a socio-economic

formation for people’s participation … Now, we feel that the Bank has significance far
beyond such a formation. It is a people’s movement with quite extraordinary implica-
tions in terms of its organizational growth in size, capacity and quality.
(Fuglesang et al., 1993, p.238)

The Grameen Bank Monthly Update of January 2014 states that GB has disbursed about
US$12.33 billion (Tk 958,963.03 million) since its inception, and the cumulative amount
repaid since inception is about US$11.24 billion (Tk 873,890.05 million). The monthly dis-
bursement of January 2014 was Tk 11,327.89 million, and the amount repaid during the month
stood at Tk 10,639.81 million with a repayment rate of 97.32 percent. The total deposits of
GB stood at US$1.9 billion by the end of January 2014. The number of houses built with GB
housing loans stood at 695,557. Higher education loans were given to 52,675 male and female
students. The total number of GB members reached 8,574,280 by the end of January 2014, and
the number of groups served by GB stood at 1,323,035. The number of centers was 143,098.
The number of villages covered by GB stood at 81,390, and they are covered through 2,567 GB
branches.There are 80,312 beggar members served by interest-free GB loans of Tk 170.25 mil-
lion.The cumulative number of village phones established through GB loans stood at 1,291,202
(Grameen Bank, 2014, pp.1–2).

A critique of the Grameen Bank model and microcredit

One must admit that the microcredit concept institutionalized by Yunus’s GB has successfully
shattered the myth of the indispensability of collateral-based formal banking. In the last three
decades, with the fast-spreading fame of the Grameen Bank model, NGOs in Bangladesh, some
of which had already been active in the field of rural development with foreign aid-financed
programs and some others initiated primarily as microcredit institutions (MCIs), were quick
to adopt ‘Grameen-type’ group-banking programs of their own, with suitable modifications
introduced in their individual versions. Consequently, Bangladesh has witnessed a dramatic pro-
liferation of NGOs operating in the field of microcredit throughout the country. The govern-
ment of Bangladesh has established an umbrella organization named the Palli Karma Shahayak
Foundation (PKSF) for lending money to MCIs at concessional rates of interests for field-level
delivery of microcredit. A regulatory authority, named the Micro Credit Regulatory Authority,
has also been formed recently under the auspices of the Bangladesh Bank. The World Micro
Credit Summit Conference was held in Washington, DC, in 1997 to expedite the replication of
the Grameen Bank model in different countries around the world.The 2006 Nobel Peace Prize
citation recognized the crucial role played by the Grameen Bank model as an effective tool for

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fighting poverty. Therefore, it should be admitted that the Grameen Bank model has provided
a viable mechanism to Bangladesh as well as to the world to deliver collateral-free credit to the
poor worldwide.
But there are still doubts in the minds of many critics as to whether it has evolved as a viable
model of poverty alleviation for which a total reorientation of the banking system is a neces-
sary, though not sufficient, requisite. It is even debatable whether ‘microcredit’ can successfully
bear the burden of poverty alleviation within the system of ‘poverty creation and recreation’
perpetrated by the capitalistic system of surplus expropriation and appropriation that is getting
stronger and stronger in the context of globalization, becoming an all-pervading integrating
force throughout the world under the philosophy of the ‘open market economy’ that currently
dominates mainstream development thinking. There are strong arguments for the point of
view that poverty is ‘systemic’, meaning that the inequality-augmenting forces actively creat-
ing and recreating poverty through different dimensions of the ‘system’ are too dominant in
different societies to be counterbalanced by the economic empowerment process of landless
rural women stimulated by microcredit. For example, Islam (2009) hypothesizes that poverty
is being created and recreated in 12 dimensions of the social, economic and political system
of Bangladesh.4
Field-level researchers like Hossain (1988) and Rahman et al. (2002) find that the GB mem-
bers have higher income levels, higher average asset levels and higher average expenditure on
education, health and housing. They think that GB has made a positive contribution to over-
coming poverty.Todd (1996) has documented a number of case histories to forcefully claim that
GB has been empowering the rural women of Bangladesh by placing them at the center of the
development of the families of the borrowers. But, after more than two decades of GB oper-
ation, a debate has started worldwide as to whether microcredit can create a sustainable process
of successful graduation from poverty among borrowers of GB and other NGOs.The critics are
highlighting the following facts:
First, according to Ahmad (2007), the rate of interest charged by GB comes to about
26.6 percent, if it is calculated on the basis of average balance method, though the nominal base
rate charged is shown as 10 percent (Ahmad, 2007, pp.32, 59–60).Yunus claims that the rate of
interest of GB loans is 20 percent, if calculated by the average balance method. It seems that the
debate mainly revolves around the issue of whether deductions for loan insurance should or
should not be considered when calculating the rate of interest. Ahmad also calculates the rate
of effective cost of credit (RECC) for GB loans, which comes to 30.5 percent (Ahmad, 2007,
p.32). The rates of interest charged for housing loans are, however, lower. Critics claim that
GB is charging too high a rate of interest for its loans to poor borrowers. Ahmad also shows
that interest rates charged by the major NGOs in Bangladesh, like BRAC, PROSHIKA and
ASA, in their microcredit operations become as high as 38.6 to 40.8 percent when calculated
by the average balance method (Ahmad, 2007, pp.32, 60–61). These high rates of interest may
make microcredit quite burdensome for the poor, critics believe. But, we suggest, the rate of
interest charged by GB should actually be compared with the exorbitant interest rates (around
10 percent per month in Bangladesh) charged by traditional moneylenders (mahajons) of the
informal credit market, because the formal banking system with its collateral security-based
banking products does not reach the target groups served by GB. On the other hand, the rates
of interest charged by commercial banks would be much higher than their declared lending
rates if calculated using the average balance method and factoring in the compounding of
interest accrued. Hossain (1985, p.103) finds that the average rate of return of investments
funded by GB loans comes to about 45 percent, which is significantly higher than the rate of

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interest of GB. However, there seems to be some scope for reduction of the rate of interest
charged by GB and the NGOs.
Second, there is serious duplication of coverage of target groups of GB and of NGOs in
many areas of Bangladesh – the same person taking loans simultaneously from different institu-
tions working in the same area. This trend is harming the quality of borrowers and the pro-
ductive use of microcredit as well as the repayment record of the loans.This is also creating loan
syndicates in many areas, where unscrupulous persons and criminal-minded groups operate to
siphon disbursed credit through fraudulent tactics involving female borrowers. More seriously,
this duplication is creating a chronic ‘credit dependence’ among the rural poor of Bangladesh.
Repeat loans by GB have also been creating a ‘perpetual debt trap’ for GB members.
Third, regular repayment of loans by the microcredit recipients raises the velocity of credit
circulation to about 3.53 or 353 percent in a year (Ahmad, 2007, p.37). This high velocity
implies that the MCIs, especially the NGOs, have emerged as profitable businesses, whereas the
majority of the borrowers are not coming out of the poverty trap because of the demanding
repayment routine imposed by the MCIs and the high percentage of failures of projects pursued
with the help of microcredit. This high velocity makes the case for reducing the interest rate
charged by GB and the NGOs even stronger.
Fourth, there is a debate over the proportion of borrowers coming out of poverty by suc-
cessfully using loan money. Hossain (2002, pp.158–159) claims that 91 percent of GB borrow-
ers think that GB has made a positive contribution to their standard of living, and the average
household income for GB members was 50 percent higher than target groups in his control
villages and one-fourth higher than non-participants in the project villages. On the other hand,
Ahmad (2007, p.46) claims that only 28 percent of borrowers experience some improvement
in their condition even after more than two decades. Moreover, many families emerge from
poverty only temporarily, as health problems in the family, crop failures or occasional flood dev-
astation and environmental catastrophe cause serious damage to the lives and livelihood as well
as the assets of those families (Islam, 2009, pp.176–177).
Fifth, in an increasing number of loan cases, the father, husband or son misuses the female
members of the family just to collect the loan. In such cases, the money is often wasted on
marriage ceremonies, dowry, communal feasts and festivals, or even for purchasing consumer
durables. This indicates a serious decline in the quality of supervision and monitoring by GB
with the achievement of widespread coverage of the target population (Islam, 2009, p.177).
Notwithstanding the criticisms, one should not deny the fact that a large section of development
thinkers have recognized the Grameen Bank model to be a powerful tool in overcoming poverty.
The shortcomings do not invalidate the success story created by Yunus through his innovation.

Appendix A: Grameen’s ‘Sixteen Decisions’ (Sholo Shiddanta)

Since 1984, ‘The Sixteen Decisions’ have become an integral part of Grameen Bank. All bor-
rowers have to recite them in weekly sessions in the center. All are required to make continuous
strides to implement these decisions:

1. The four principles of Grameen Bank – Discipline, Unity, Courage and Hard Work – we
shall follow and advance in all walks of our lives.
2. We shall bring prosperity to our families.
3. We shall not live in dilapidated houses. We shall repair our houses and work towards con-
structing new houses as soon as possible.

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 M. Islam

4. We shall grow vegetables all the year round. We shall eat plenty of them and sell the surplus.
5. During the plantation seasons, we shall plant as many seedlings as possible.
6. We shall plan to keep our families small. We shall minimize our expenditure. We shall look
after our health.
7. We shall educate our children and ensure that they can earn to pay for their education.
8. We shall always keep our children and the environment clean.
9. We shall build and use pit latrines.
10. We shall boil water before drinking or use alum to purify it. We shall use pitcher filters to
remove arsenic.
11. We shall not take any dowry at our sons’ weddings; neither shall we give any dowry in our
daughters’ weddings. We shall keep the center free from the curse of dowry. We shall not
practice child marriage.
12. We shall not inflict any injustice on anyone; neither shall we allow anyone to do so.
13. For higher income we shall collectively undertake bigger investments.
14. We shall always be ready to help each other. If anyone is in difficulty, we shall all help.
15. If we come to know of any breach of discipline in any centre, we shall all go there and help
restore discipline.
16. We shall take part in all social activities collectively.

Notes
1 Yunus received his PhD fromVanderbilt University, USA and taught at Middle Tennessee State University
before returning to Bangladesh in 1972. He successfully conducted a number of action research projects
in rural communities in the vicinity of the Chittagong University campus. One of Yunus’s projects was
awarded a gold medal by the government of Bangladesh, and he gained nationwide fame as a dedicated
researcher even before embarking on experimental collateral-free banking in a branch of a nationalized
bank located near the university campus. He persuaded the bank manager to give a collateral-free loan
to one woman, and offered himself as a guarantor of the loan. Successful repayment of that loan led to
other loans. The Grameen Bank Project (GBP) was the outcome of that experiment.
2 The Sixteen Decisions are presented in Appendix A.
3 Yunus has created 36 sister organizations of GB, discussion of which is beyond the scope of this chapter.
4 The 12 dimensions are: (1) agrarian structure, (2) increasing inequality in education, (3) increasing
commercialization of the health system, (4) public revenue and expenditure system, (5) banking system,
(6) foreign aid and corruption, (7) failure in employment creation, (8) effects of smuggling on domestic
production, (9) excessive centralization of decision making, (10) disempowerment of local government
institutions, (11) criminalization of politics and (12) governance failure and lack of good governance.

References
Ahmad, Q. (ed.). (2007) Socio-Economic and Indebtedness-Related Impact of Micro-Credit in Bangladesh. Dhaka:
University Press Limited.
Fuglesang, A., Chandler, D. and Akuretiyagama, D. (1993) Participation as Process: Process as Growth. Dhaka:
Grameen Trust.
Grameen Bank. (2014) Grameen Bank Monthly Update in Taka: January 2014. Statement No. 1. February 5.
Holcombe, S. (1995) Managing to Empower: The Grameen Bank’s Experience of Poverty Alleviation. London:
Zed Books.
Hossain, M. (1985) Credit for the Rural Poor: The Experience of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Dhaka:
Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies.
Hossain, M. (1988) Credit for Alleviation of Rural Poverty: The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Dhaka: International
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Hossain, M. (2002) Credit for Alleviation of Rural Poverty: The Experience of Grameen Bank in
Bangladesh. In: Rahman, A. et al. (eds.). Early Impact of Grameen: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis. Dhaka:
Grameen Trust. pp.127–175.
Hye, H. A. (1996) Below the Line: Rural Poverty in Bangladesh. Dhaka: University Press Limited.
Islam, M. (2009) The Poverty Discourse and Participatory Action Research in Bangladesh. Dhaka: Research
Initiatives, Bangladesh (RIB).
Rahman, A. et al. (2002) Early Impact of Grameen: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis. Dhaka: Grameen Trust.
Todd, H. (1996) Women at the Center: Grameen Bank Borrowers after One Decade. Dhaka: University Press
Limited.
Yunus, M. (2008) Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism. Dhaka: Subarna.
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 PART IV

Energy and environment

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 19
POWER AND ENERGY
Potentials, crisis, and planning

Moshahida Sultana

Bangladesh’s main identified energy sources are gas, biomass, coal, hydro, solar, and wind. Of the
total commercial energy consumption, approximately 67 percent comes from natural gas, 19 per-
cent from oil, and 14 percent from coal (Islam, 2014). Bangladesh imports oil, of which 22 per-
cent is unrefined and 78 percent is refined oil, according to 2014 estimates (Bangladesh. Ministry
of Finance, 2015). Although more than 67 percent of the commercial energy demand is met by
gas, a substantial amount of biomass is still widely used in rural areas for both commercial and
non-commercial purposes including cooking and heating in the brick fields. According to the
draft Renewable Energy Policy 2014, biomass fuels supplied 62 percent of total primary energy.
About 58 percent of the total gas is used for power generation (Islam, 2014). Although plan-
ners and policy makers identified overdependency on gas for electricity production as one of
the main reasons for the persistent energy crisis in Bangladesh, the power crisis cannot be fully
explained by the scarcity of gas alone; structural problems originating from a lack of long-term
integrated planning also need to be taken into account.

It is reported that in 2012, average daily load shedding was 500–800 MW (6.6–10.6%
peak demand), against the peak demand of 7518MW. Industrial consumers are
reported to have met their electricity need by installing captive power plants with
extra investment and operated them with natural gas or imported oil.
(Islam, 2014, p.103)

Although the situation has improved significantly since 2012 and maximum generation reached
7356 MW in June 2014, interrupted electric supply and high price of electricity are still ham-
pering economic growth. In order to solve the crisis, Bangladesh chose to (1) diversify its energy
mix by installing more oil-based plants, (2) emphasize extraction of coal, (3) increase partici-
pation of the private sector in both energy production and power generation, and (4) develop
cross-border electricity interconnectivity.
In an effort to reduce dependency on gas, Bangladesh decreased its installed capacity of
gas-based electricity production from 82.17 percent in 2008 to 67.12 percent in 2013 and
increased its oil-based installed capacity from 5.38 percent in 2008 to 21.97 percent in 2013.
However, this effort to reduce dependency on gas has not significantly changed the scenario as
generation of electricity from oil has remained limited only during peak hours, whereas gas has

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remained the primary source of electricity generation in the fuel mix. For this reason we see that
in 2013, while the share of gas-based power plants became 67.12 percent of the total installed
capacity, the share of actual electricity generation was much higher, at 78.12 percent. In the same
year Bangladesh had an installed capacity to generate 21.97 percent of electricity from furnace
oil, when it actually generated only 14.56 percent of electricity from furnace oil (BPDB, 2013).
Among the five coalfields discovered in Bangladesh, Barapukuria is the only coalfield where
commercial production started in 2005. Bangladesh Power Development Board (BPDB) pro-
duces 0.75 percent of electricity from the Barapukuria coal-based power plant. In addition to
indigenous coal, Bangladesh also uses 3–4 million tons of imported coal from India. Despite
having substantial deposits of quality coal, Bangladesh is not extracting it because of concerns
over the method of extraction, the quality of mining technology, and the impact on the envir-
onment and livelihood of people living in the mining area.
As a result of reform measures undertaken by the government, private-sector participation in
both the power and energy sectors has increased significantly. Though Bangladesh has BAPEX,
an exploration and production unit of the national oil company, Petrobangla, international oil
companies (IOCs) have been awarded all of the offshore blocks and most of the onshore gas
blocks for extracting gas. Currently, Petrobangla accounts for only 45 percent of the total gas
production in the country, against the IOC contribution of 55 percent (Islam, 2014). Similarly,
there has been a significant increase in private-sector power generation in the last decade.
Participation of the private sector started back in 1997 when the first independent power pro-
ducer (IPP) in Bangladesh started to provide power to the national grid through three power
plants of 11 MW capacity each, for the sale of electricity to the Rural Electrification Board
(REB). By 2014–2015, 47.68% of electricity supply came from public sector, 45.41% from pri-
vate sector, and 6.91% from import (Bangladesh Ministry of Finance, 2015).
Bangladesh is also planning regional cooperation in the energy sector with neighboring
countries through cross-border trade, interconnecting power transmission systems, cross-border
and trans-boundary pipeline transmission, and common energy projects. A new transmission
line has already been set up under an Asian Development Bank (ADB) supported interconnec-
tion project to import power from India. In 2013, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina inaugurated
the import of 500 MW of power from India. In April 2014, Bangladesh agreed to provide
a ‘power corridor’ to neighboring India to transmit around 6,000 MW of hydro-electricity
from Arunachal in north-eastern India to Bihar in the north-west across Bangladesh territory.
However, no consensus was reached on how much electricity Bangladesh would get as a facili-
tator of power transmission. As part of regional cooperation, a newly formed joint venture com-
pany named Bangladesh India Friendship Power Company (BIFPC), with equal ownership by
Bangladesh’s BPDB and India’s NTPC, will generate 1,320 MW of electricity from a coal-based
power plant located close to the Sundarbans, the largest mangrove forest in the world.

Energy scenario: potential and crisis

Natural gas
Indigenous natural gas meets 67 percent of total commercial energy demand in the country.
Of 25 onshore gas fields discovered, 17 are in production. The total amount of gas produced in
2013 was 801 bcf against an estimated demand of 1,000 bcf. There was a shortage of 199 bcf
of gas (19.9 percent shortage) (Islam, 2014). Some 58 percent of the total gas produced is used
for power generation, of which 41 percent is used for power and 17 percent for captive power.
The remaining 42 percent of gas is used for industry (17 percent), domestic uses (11 percent),

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Table 19.1 Coal reserve of coalfields

Coalfields Year of discovery Depth of coal Magnitude of mine Reserves in million

bed (m) area (km2) tons
Phulbari, Dinajpur 1997 150–240 30 572
Dighipara, Dinajpur 1995 327 200
Khalaspir, Rangpur 1989 257–483 12 400
Barapukuria, Dinajpur 1985 119–506 6.88 390
Jamalgonj, Bogra 1962 648–1,158 16 1,053

Sources: Compiled by author, data gathered from the Energy and Mineral Resources Division, Ministry
of Power, Energy and Mineral Resources, Government of Bangladesh.

Santos
1%
Tullow BAPEX
4% 4%

BGFCL
34%

Chevron
50%

SGFL
7%
Figure 19.1 Share of production of gas by operators (source: Bangladesh Ministry of Power, Energy and
Mineral Resources, 2013)

fertilizer (7 percent), CNG transport (5 percent), commercial (1 percent), and unaccounted for
(1 percent) (Bangladesh. Power Division, 2010).
Until 2010 gas-based power generation constituted over 82 percent of the country’s total
generation mix, which has now been reduced to 67 percent as oil-based rental plants and
quick rental power plants started operating to ease the electricity shortfall during 2010–2011.
Bangladesh has a target to reduce gas-based generation to 25 percent of 30,000 MW of elec-
tricity by 2030 by exploring the offshore gas blocks and importing LNG (Bangladesh. Ministry
of Finance, 2013).

Coal
There are five known coalfields in Bangladesh with about 3 billion tons of coal reserves, of
which 1,062 million tons is extractable. About 5.55 million tons of coal were extracted from the

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Barapukuria coalfield using underground coal mining methods between 2005 and 2013. BPDB
is the main consumer of this extracted coal for Bangladesh’s only 250 MW coal-based power
plant in Barapukuria Table 19.1).
The government of Bangladesh has set a target to generate 50 percent of 30,000 MW of
electricity from coal by 2030 to ease the dependency on gas (Bangladesh. Power Division,
2010). But the impact on the environment of such coal-based generation is yet to be studied
as coal is the dirtiest fuel on earth. It has been a long-debated issue in Bangladesh whether
the mining method in the Phulbari coalfield would be open-pit. Investors seem to be more
interested in open-pit mining as it is more profitable. The environmental cost of open-pit
mining has been systematically underestimated by the investors.The local inhabitants strongly
opposed the project as their livelihoods would be affected. In the face of strong protests the
government canceled the deal with Asia Energy for the Phulbari mine. As a solution to the
situation, discussions are under way to explore the possibility of using the underground gas-
ification method.

Petroleum fuel
Oil accounts for about 20 percent of the country’s total energy supply. Some 25 percent of
power generation is furnace oil- and diesel-based. The only oil reserves found in Kailashtila
and Haripur have a reserve of 150 million barrels and only 40 percent of it is producible. Of
the total petroleum fuels consumed in 2013, 45 percent were used for transport, 25 percent for
power, 19 percent for agriculture, 4 percent for industry, and 7 percent for domestic consump-
tion (Islam, 2014).
About 60 percent of the oil needs to be imported in refined form, and the imported unre-
fined oil is refined by Eastern Refinery Limited (ERL). Since refined oil is more costly than
unrefined oil, the oil import bill is rising fast, creating immense pressure on the economy since
2010–2011. Bangladesh’s imported petroleum products cost over 60 percent of the country’s
export earnings in 2010–2011, when the furnace oil-based rental and quick rental power plant
came into operation. According to the Power Sector Master Plan 2010, oil-based power gener-
ation will be 5 percent of the targeted 30,000 MW generation facility by 2030 and will require
more refining and storage capacity.

Solar energy
To promote solar energy use in rural areas, the government has consistently encouraged pri-
vate investment in developing the solar industry. In 1997, the government established the
Infrastructure Development Company Limited (IDCOL), which still remains the market
leader in private-sector energy and infrastructure financing in Bangladesh. IDCOL works with
non-governmental organizations (NGOs), private companies, and international financial insti-
tutions, namely the World Bank, to finance and implement various solar energy projects located
mainly in rural areas. IDCOL has a target to finance six million Solar Home Systems (SHSs)
by the end of 2016. As of November 2014, a total of 3 million SHSs have been installed under
the program. Even though the importance of solar energy in solving the energy crisis has been
discussed in the policy arena, there has not been any large-scale government investment in pro-
moting solar energy so far. BPDB has some small-scale solar energy projects in the Chittagong
Hill Tract area and different locations in urban areas.

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Biomass
In Bangladesh, three major types of biomass fuel resources are in use: wood fuels, agricultural resi-
dues, and animal dung. Biomass fuel supplies about 62 percent of total primary energy consump-
tion. Traditionally biomass has not been considered as a commercial energy source. However, due
to the growing energy crisis there has been increasing interest in improving the energy efficiency of
biomass (cow dung, agricultural waste, poultry waste, etc.) by converting it to biogas and upgrading
the rural energy consumption pattern. IDCOL has already financed two commercial projects, a 250
kW biomass-based power plant project and a biogas-based electricity generation plant.

Wind energy
Primary studies show that winds are available in Bangladesh mainly during the monsoon and
around one to two months before and after the monsoon (seven months in total, from March
to September). In this period, when demand for electricity is high, there is the potential to use
wind power in the southern coastal areas of Bangladesh, including Kaptai, Kuakata, Swandip,
and St. Martin. BPDB installed a 900 kW capacity grid-connected wind plant in the Muhuri
Dam area of Sonagazi in Feni, and a 1,000 kW wind battery hybrid power plant has been
established on Kutubdia Island. These are the only large-scale projects set up so far, but as of
mid-2015, none of them are in operation.

Hydropower
The total hydropower potential of the country was reported as 1,500 MkWh/year at Kaptai,
Matamuhuri, and Sangu. The first hydropower generator was installed in Bangladesh in 1962
through the Kaptai Hydro plant, which inundated 40 percent of the agricultural land of the
Chittagong Hill Tract area. In 2013, the total generation capacity of five hydropower units
installed at Kaptai was 230 MW and electricity generated was 893.9 MkWh (Islam, 2014).
Implementing the Sangu and Matamuhuri Hydro projects, which have the potential to generate
500 MW of electricity, is a much-debated issue among experts. Dam-based hydropower is no
longer regarded as renewable energy due to its negative impact on the environment and ecology.

Planning energy and power: institutions and reforms

The Ministry of Power, Energy and Mineral Resources (MPEMR) is responsible for overall
policy formulation, investment decisions, and regulation of the power and energy sector in
Bangladesh. In 1998, energy was separated from power by creating two separate divisions: (1) the
Energy and Mineral Resources Division (EMRD) and (2) the Power Division. The EMRD is
responsible for formulating all policies related to exploration, production, and distribution of
natural gas, liquid petroleum, and mineral resources. The Power Division is responsible for
implementing power sector reforms and ensuring adequate power-generation capacity. A regu-
latory body (Bangladesh Energy Regulatory Commission) was created much later in 2004.

Power: generation, transmission, and distribution

The first institution established in independent Bangladesh was BPDB, a statutory body
created in 1972 for electricity generation, transmission, and distribution. The first reform

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that took place in the history of Bangladesh electricity generation was the creation of a sep-
arate body, the REB in 1977 and the subsequent creation of a cooperative-based model for
expansion of access, known as Palli Bidyut Samity (PBS). After 1977 BPDB was responsible
for distribution in urban areas and the REB was responsible for electrification in rural areas.
The process of second reform was driven by the need for quick disbursement of the Energy
Sector Adjustment Credit program (ESAC) by the World Bank. In 1987, the prospects of
using ESAC to make progress on the reorganization of BPDB led to a reorganization study
that recommended that BPDB’s distribution operations be decentralized. Finally, in 1990,
following the recommendation of the World Bank, the transmission and distribution system
in the Greater Dhaka Area including the Metropolitan City was transferred to a newly cre-
ated government agency called the Dhaka Electric Supply Authority (DESA).
Faced with serious electricity shortages in the mid-1990s, the Cabinet approved the Power
Sector Reforms in Bangladesh (PSRB) prepared by an inter-ministerial committee in consult-
ation with major development partners including the ADB. The PSRB formed the basis for
the power sector reforms undertaken during 1994–2008. These reforms include (1) creating
PGCB to take over power transmission from BPDB; (2) splitting DESA to form DESCO to
take over power distribution in part of Dhaka city; and (3) enacting the Private Sector Power
Generation Policy that allowed IPPs to generate and sell electricity. In 1995 the World Bank
was instrumental in setting up and financing the Power Cell of the Ministry of Energy and
Mineral Resources. The Power Cell played a key role in drawing up the government state-
ment of policy on private power generation in 1996, which in turn opened the door to
potential investors to conduct the reforms associated with the power industry and promote
private-sector development.
Further institutional reforms were undertaken during 2001–2008 with the objective of ver-
tically unbundling the power sector. In 2000, to set a long-term target, the Power Division
formulated the Policy Statement on Power Sector Reforms and established (1) the West Zone
Power Distribution Company (WZPDC) in 2001 to take over power distribution from BPDB,
and (2) the Dhaka Power Distribution Company (DPDC) in 2006 to take over the remaining
operations of DESA. Presently DESA is known as the DPDC. As a result of the reforms BPDB
is now a single buyer purchasing electricity from public-sector generation plants and IPPs and
selling it to power distribution companies.
The Private Sector Infrastructure Guidelines 2004, Policy Guidelines for Enhancement of
Private Participation in the Power Sector 2008, and Policy Guidelines for Power Purchase
from Captive Power Plant 2007 mainly promoted private-sector participation through IPPs,
small power plants on a fast-track basis, and procurement of surplus power from captive power
plants and small power plants. From 2009, public–private partnership power plants came into
the system and the government entered into contractual agreements for high-cost temporary
solutions, such as diesel- and liquid fuel-based rental power and small IPPs on an emergency
basis. This has imposed tremendous fiscal pressure as the government has to give huge subsidies
on imported refined oil purchases.
The BPDB, the REB, the Local Government Engineering Department (LGED), and a sig-
nificant number of private-sector agencies including NGOs are involved in renewable energy
development. A nodal agency called the Sustainable & Renewable Energy Development
Authority (SREDA), as envisioned in the Renewable Energy Policy, has been founded.
Independent renewable energy directorates have also been set up under BPDB and REB. To
involve the private sector in renewable energy, Bangladesh established the IDCOL in 1997.
IDCOL is now playing a major role in bridging the financing gap for developing medium- and
large-scale infrastructure and renewable energy projects in Bangladesh.

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Energy and mineral resources: exploration, production, and distribution

The Energy and Mineral Resources Division (EMRD), created in 1998, has administrative con-
trol over the Geological Survey of Bangladesh, Petrobangla, the Bureau of Mineral Development
and the Department of Explosives. EMRD also supervises and monitors the Hydrocarbon Unit
and the Bangladesh Petroleum Institute.
The part of the Oil and Gas Development Corporation (OGDC) that was in operation
since 1961 was reorganized as Bangladesh Oil, Gas, and Mineral Corporation (Petrobangla) in
1972. Petrobangla continued its exploration efforts, while the Bangladesh Petroleum Act was
enacted in 1974 to facilitate international participation under the Production Sharing Contract
(PSC). The mandate of Petrobangla is to (1) explore and develop natural gas and other mineral
resources; (2) coordinate the production, transmission, distribution, and marketing of natural
gas resources through subsidiary companies; (3) conduct oil and gas exploration activities; and
(4) enter into PSCs with IOCs.
The reorganization of Petrobangla started with the unbundling of exploration, production,
and transmission. An exploration company, Bangladesh Petroleum Exploration & Production
Company Limited (BAPEX), was created in 1989, and one transmission company, Gas
Transmission Company Limited (GTCL), was created in 1987. After its formation in 1989,
BAPEX has continued both exploration and production for Petrobangla (Figure 19.1).
Bangladesh created a separate corporation, the Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation (BPC),
for importation, processing, and marketing of oil. BPC procures crude oil and supplies the
refined petroleum products to the privately owned power plants (BPC, 2014). Recently, the
government showed an interest in allowing the owners of the oil-fired power plants to import
refined petroleum products on their own.Trade unions resisted this decision. Currently, two pri-
vate plants, owned by power conglomerate Summit, have already secured permission to import
oil. An additional 24 plants are seeking permission to import petroleum products directly from
abroad (Platts.com, 2014).

Regulatory institution
The Bangladesh Energy Regulatory Commission (BERC) was set up in 2004 to regulate gas,
electricity, and petroleum products. Its mandate includes (1) setting electricity and gas prices,
(2) setting performance norms for sector entities, (3) reviewing and approving long-term
development plans for the gas and power sectors, and (4) resolving disputes among sector
entities. Since its inception, the independence and competence of BERC has remained a ques-
tion because the appointment of commissioners to BERC demonstrated interference by the
government.

Actors in power and energy

Donors
The planning and policy making of Bangladesh show that most of the developments in both
the power and the energy sector were driven by donors’ agendas. The World Bank, ADB, and
International Monetary Fund have always prescribed reducing energy subsidies and increasing
fuel and electricity prices (International Institute for Sustainable Development and Bangladesh
Institute of Development Studies, 2012). Their involvement in planning and policy making
encouraged corporatization of public institutions and greater participation of the private sec-
tor in both the energy and the power sector. These financial institutions were interested in

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Ministry of Power, Energy and Mineral Resources

Energy and Mineral BERC

Resources Division Power Division

Power Cell

CEI BPDB REB DPDC DESCO

IPPs Rural Power

Co. Ltd. PBS

PGCB APSCL EGCB NWPGCL WZPDCL

PETROBANGLA

Exploration &
Production Transmission Distribution CNG & LPG Mining
Production

Bangladesh Bangladesh Gas Gas Trans. Titas Gas T&D Co. Ltd Rupantarita Barapukuria Coal
Petroleum Fields Co. Ltd. Co. Ltd. Prakritic Mining Co. Ltd.
Bakhrabad Gas Sys. Ltd.
Expl. & Prod. Sylhet Gas Gas Co. Ltd.
Maddhyapara
Co. Ltd. Fields Ltd.
Jalalabad Gas T&D Sys. Ltd. Granite
Mining Co. Ltd.
Pashchimanchal Gas Co. Ltd.

Figure 19.2 Power and energy institutions in Bangladesh

international capital flow in exploration and production of energy, and encouraged greater par-
ticipation of both local and international companies in generation and distribution.

National Committee to Protect Oil Gas Mineral Resources Power and Port
The National Committee is a platform of left-leaning political parties, social and cultural activists,
professionals, practitioners, and experts engaging in movements to protect oil, gas, mineral resources,
power, and ports. The National Committee has been involved in movements against government
policies, plans, projects, and PSCs that go against national interests. The platform works as a pres-
sure group to build the national capacity of the public institutions managing resources, giving
due consideration to the environment, the community, and ecology.The committee also works to
protect people’s right to energy, power, and mineral resources by standing against corporatization
and unfair contracts with foreign companies (National Committee to Protect Oil Gas Mineral
Resources Power and Ports, 2014). Some of the popular movements of the National Committee
include movements against export of gas, unfair PSC awards, privatization of power, the open-pit
coal mine in Phulbari, and the coal-fired power plant near the Sundarbans.

Trade unions
Trade unions in the power and energy institutions are aligned with mainstream political par-
ties and are often depicted by donor agencies as anti-developmental and corrupt organizations

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playing a key role in resisting privatization. In recent decades the separation of various tasks
from BPDB through vertical separation, outsourcing, and contracting has already contributed
to shrinking the size of trade unions. Trade unions are not only losing members but are also
continuously encountering various obstacles to increasing participation. The trade unionists are
strictly against privatization and other reforms leading to commercialization. Trade unions have
been deliberately weakened since the 1980s as a direct result of politicization by the political
parties that support the free market economy, liberalization of services, and dependency on
donors (Sultana, 2009).

State actors
State actors are those who work in the government offices including high-ranking government
officials in Petrobangla, BAPEX, BERC, BPDB, EMRD, the Power Division, and energy advi-
sors to the prime minister (Figure 19.2). The state actors play a key role in formulating plans,
policies, and PSCs in consultation with IOCs and the donors providing technical assistance for
institutional reforms.

Non-state actors
Non-state actors include IOCs, NGOs, local consultants, and local experts working in the
field of power and energy. IOCs that are awarded the offshore and onshore blocks are the key
actors engaged in extracting energy resources. NGOs play a key role mostly in the promotion
of renewable energy in rural areas. Bangladesh has a group of local consultants and experts who
are commissioned to formulate policies and plans in consultation with the donor agencies and
foreign experts.

Energy and power: political economy of planning, policies,

Acts, and contracts
Since 1971 Bangladesh has developed many policies, plans, acts, guidelines, and contracts related
to energy and power. Bangladesh’s first national energy policy was approved in 1996, and revised
in 2005. Bangladesh also has some sub-sectoral policies: for example, the Petroleum Policy
1993, Private-Sector Power Generation Policy 1996, Renewable Energy Policy 2008, and Draft
Coal Policy 2010. In addition, there were some master-plans, policy guidelines, frameworks,
and roadmaps prepared in consultation with different international financial institutions. There
was no single integrated energy policy that could accommodate the short-term and long-term
national goals and objectives of the power and energy sectors. In most of the situations, the
planning, policies, acts, guidelines, and roadmaps were highly influenced by foreign consultants
from international financial institutions and donor countries. The involvement of donors in
the series of developments and reforms that have taken place in the power and energy sectors
since independence shows Bangladesh’s dependency on foreign experts in formulating policies,
guidelines, plans, and regulations.
In 1974, with the formation of Petrobangla, the Bangladesh government enacted the
Petroleum Act 1974. Immediately after that Bangladesh entered into PSCs with several foreign
companies for exploration of gas in some of the offshore blocks. By 1978 the IOCs had with-
drawn from the offshore areas after making extensive seismic surveys and drilling seven offshore
exploration wells. At that time Bangladesh did not have any guidelines or policy for explor-
ation of hydrocarbon resources. However, the Bangladesh government understood the need for

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establishing an institution for building human resources in the hydrocarbon sector. In 1981, the
Bangladesh Petroleum Institute (BPI) was established by the government of Bangladesh under
the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources.The main objective of the BPI was to train pro-
fessionals and technicians engaged in the petroleum sector.There was no petroleum policy until
1993. During the BNP tenure, the government of Bangladesh approved the Petroleum Policy
in order to provide a guideline for hydrocarbon exploration. It should be noted that even before
the policy was approved, Bangladesh signed a PSC with Shell Oil and Scimitar Exploration in
1980s, during the autocratic regime of Ershad. And it was during the Ershad regime that a new
model PSC was formulated to encourage gas exploration.
After 15 years of military rule (1975–1990), when the first BNP-led political government
came to power, the process of formulating policies started. The World Bank’s advice to the
government to improve the incentive and contractual terms for oil and gas exploration led to
the publication of a new Petroleum Policy in mid-1993. This was followed by an investment
promotion roundtable conference hosted by Petrobangla in late 1993 targeted at IOCs. This
conference, which was organized by specialized consultants and funded by the World Bank,
gave a major impetus to the opening up of the gas sector to foreign private capital for explor-
ation activities (World Bank, 2004). Between 1993, when the Petroleum Policy was approved,
and 1996, when the first National Energy Policy was approved, Bangladesh signed four PSCs
with Cairn Energy, Holland Sea Search, Occidental, and Meridian Inc. Besides ensuring proper
exploration, production, distribution, and rational use of energy sources to meet the growing
energy demand, one of the objectives of the National Energy Policy 1996 was to encourage
public- and private-sector participation in the development and management of the energy sec-
tor (Bangladesh. Ministry of Power, Energy and Mineral Resources, 1996). The energy policy
formulated at that time was highly influenced by the interests of international financial institu-
tions including the World Bank Group and the ADB.
Starting from 1994, a parallel reform was going on in the power sector with (1) the prep-
aration of the PSRB with assistance from the ADB, and (2) the formation of Power Cell with
assistance from the World Bank. When the PSRB recommended unbundling the power sector,
corporatization of sector entities, and establishing an independent Regulatory Commission,
Power Cell was created to facilitate the recommended unbundling and corporatization. The
ADB assisted the government in all aspects of the PSRB including providing technical assis-
tance for vertical unbundling of the power, and promoting and financing private-sector invest-
ments (ADB, 2009). The Private Sector Power Generation Policy 1996 was formulated to
develop a guideline for local and foreign private companies. In this policy various incentives
like tax exemptions and income tax exemptions were given to foreign investors, consultants,
and private power producers. The policy also encouraged the receiving of funds for technical
assistance from donor agencies.
The Awami League (AL)-led government was in power from 1996 to 2001. During this
political regime, in 1997, more changes to the model PSC were made. Four PSCs were
awarded to IOCs in a joint venture with Petrobangla. In 1998 a Policy Guideline for Small
Power Plant in Private Sector was created, which was updated later in 2008. This policy was
adopted to allow private-sector investors to establish small power plants on a fast-track and
build–own–operate basis, to generate electricity for private use and to sell the surplus to
other users. In 1998, IPP contracts were awarded for the Meghnaghat and Haripur projects.
In 1999, a Hydrocarbon Unit was formed under the EMRD for technology transfer in the
hydrocarbon sector. It was developed as a project financed by the Norwegian government
and later administered by the ADB with a view to strengthen the hydrocarbon sector. The
planning process of establishing cross-border electricity interconnection also started during

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the AL regime, when USAID completed the Pre-Feasibility Study on Four Border Electricity
Interconnection in 2000. There was no basic difference in the energy policy of the BNP
and the AL as the previously planned power sector reform agenda continued even after the
change in government in 1996. Finally, before the election the AL-led government set some
long-term targets through the ‘Vision and Policy Reforms for Power Sector Reforms 2000’,
which identified the need for foreign direct investment for expansion of the sector.
Through the 2001 election the BNP again came to power. The significant change that took
place in this regime was the creation of a regulatory body. Parliament passed the Bangladesh
Energy Regulatory Commission [BERC] Act 2003 to give the regulatory body a wider man-
date and independence. The idea behind the creation of BERC was also driven by the donor
agenda because in order to facilitate corporatization and private power generation it was neces-
sary to ensure the depoliticization of electricity pricing. And this regulatory body was created
to regulate electricity pricing.
The year 2004 was an important year for energy policy making, planning, and imple-
mentation because this year witnessed five important developments: (1) the National Energy
Policy 2004 was approved, (2) the Gas Sector Reform Roadmap (GSRR) 2004 was approved,
(3) BERC was established, (4) the PGCB’s corporate bond issuance was approved for raising
funds, and (5) the Power Pricing Framework 2004 was formulated.
The GSRR 2004 provides for further incentives to attract private investments for exploration
and production of oil and gas and gas distribution in specified franchise areas. In gas transmission,
private-sector participation is encouraged for building gas pipelines on build–operate–transfer
basis, with the state-owned gas company, GTCL, retaining overall responsibility for gas trans-
mission. It is further proposed that minority stakes in GTCL and gas distribution companies
be offered to the private sector to bring in private-sector management practices and efficiency
improvements to the state-owned gas companies (World Bank, 2008).
In 2005, a Power System Master Plan was prepared with technical assistance provided by the
ADB. The study covered power sector planning for 20 years covering the period 1995–2015
and recommended a generation and transmission expansion plan up to 2025. The master plan
established the fact that the Phulbari Coal Project may be able to supply its coal for less than the
estimated forecast cost of imported coal, whereas the cost of coal from the Barapukuria Coal
Mine may be higher. Thus this master plan emphasized extraction of coal from the Phulbari
mine.This plan used the forecast data from Asia Energy to justify the idea that Bangladesh needs
to develop domestic primary energy resources to supply energy for power generation. In the
last year of the BNP-led government, in 2006 a Pre-Feasibility Study on Power Transmission
Interconnection between India–Bangladesh and India–Sri Lanka was conducted by USAID.
In the same year a Power Sector Financial Reconstruction and Recovery Plan was approved.
During the two-year caretaker government’s term (2006–2008), three policy guidelines were
prepared: (1) Policy Guideline for Power Purchase from Captive Power 2007, (2) Remote
Area Power Supply Guideline 2007, and (3) Policy Guideline for Enhancement for Private
Participation in Power Sector 2008. During this time the NWZPGC was corporatized, the 3
Year Roadmap for Power Sector Reform 2008–2010 published, and the Renewable Energy
Policy of Bangladesh 2008 was prepared.
The new AL-led government, on assuming power in early 2009, started tackling the
problems in the power sector by (1) introducing and promoting a rental power-generation
system while launching a roadshow to induce the private sector to invest in power sector
development, (2) awarding offshore blocks to Tullow and Oil and Natural Gas Corporation
(ONGC), (3) revising the gas sector policy framework, (4) introducing a gas fund, (5) for-
mulating the Power Sector Master Plan 2010, (6) establishing SREDA to promote renewable

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energy, (7) importing electricity from India, and (8) signing a contract with Russia to develop
a nuclear power plant by 2018.
The steps the Bangladesh government has taken to support quick rentals to solve the imme-
diate crisis include: (1) BPDB is obligated to purchase rental power produced at high cost and
to sell the power at the regulated bulk tariff with no effective means to avoid the loss creation
in the dealing operation, and (2) the government has incorporated an ‘indemnity’ clause in the
Expeditious and Enhanced Supply of Power and Energy (special provision) Act 2010, to stop
any legal action against the government official concerned in the matters of allowing controver-
sial rental power plants and other irregularities, if there are any. As a result BPDB has become a
loss-making organization, which the government is supporting by extending loans to BPDB. In
2011–2012 the total subsidy as a percentage of government expenditure was 92 percent, and in
the power sector it was 45.5 percent. Most of the subsidies/loans were spent to purchase refined
oil for running the power plant and most of the subsidy/loans in the power sector were spent on
giving loans to BPDB to purchase electricity at a high price from the rentals and quick rentals
and sell it at market price.
The government has revised the gas sector policy framework with the objective to expedite
the award of contracts in the third round of bidding for IOCs for undertaking offshore explor-
ation activities. The government also formulated a new PSC in 2012. Between 2009 and the
present, Bangladesh has signed two PSCs with Singapore- and Australia-based Santos-Krish
Energy, India-based ONGC in 2014, and one PSC with US oil company Conoco Phillips in
2011. The Gas Development Fund (GDF), which was created to finance development projects
in the gas sector, minimize foreign investment, and maximize the financial capacity of domes-
tic gas companies, did not make any substantial progress even after the second term of the
government.
During the AL-led government, Bangladesh signed a contract with Russia to develop a
5,000 MW nuclear power plant in Ruppur. The Power Sector Master Plan 2010 set the tar-
get composition of power supply as of 2030 to be 50 percent for domestic and imported coal,
25 percent for domestic and imported (in the form of LNG) natural gas, and 25 percent for
other sources such as oil, nuclear power, and renewable energy. The government’s long-term
plan to promote renewable energy remained vague as the government’s target changed fre-
quently after the inclusion of nuclear energy in the future energy mix. In the 2011–2012
budget speech the finance minister said the target was to generate 5 percent and 10 percent
(approximately 2,000 MW) of total power production by 2015 and 2020, respectively, from
renewable energy sources. One year later, in the 2012–2013 budget speech, the finance minister
announced a plan to produce 500 MW of electricity from renewable energy sources by 2020.
As part of regional cooperation Bangladesh has started to build a coal-based power plant,
with equal ownership of BPDB and NTPC of India, to start generating 1,320 MW electricity
by 2018. This has faced strong resistance from the National Committee to Protect Oil, Gas,
and Natural Resources. In 2013, the AL-led government started to import electricity from
India. In 2014, Bangladesh agreed to provide a corridor to India to transmit electricity from
its north-eastern state of Assam to Bihar by using a new electricity network passing through
Bangladesh.
The planning and policy making of the last four decade show two common trends: (1) the
government of Bangladesh focuses more on short-term measures than on long-term ones, and
(2) most of the reform measures, plans, policies, and guidelines were developed with foreign
assistance. The national plans, such as a development plan for domestic primary energy like coal
and natural gas, a development plan for power and infrastructure, and a plan for fuel transpor-
tation, are independently formulated by each government division, among which there is no

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efficient coordination. One of the reasons could be that the plans were mostly prepared by for-
eign experts in an uncoordinated way.

There is no permanent institutional mechanism within the country or under national

planning system to transfer/accumulate the knowledge and experience of preparation
of the Master Plans. As a result, the country is to depend continuously on foreign
experts to prepare the Master Plans. Energy Master Plans are prepared on the basis of
many assumptions. When assumed actions do not take place, progress is affected.
(Islam, 2014, p.71)

Conclusion
Over the last decade, on average Bangladesh has allocated approximately 16 percent of its devel-
opment budget for development of power and energy, whereas before 2001 average spending
was around 20 percent. In 2012 the energy subsidy was about 4 percent of the GDP and almost
a quarter of the total budget. However, this subsidy disproportionately benefits the wealthier
segment of society, for two reasons: (1) wealthier people use more commercial energy, and
(2) every year the subsidy is increased, mostly to import oil for privately owned quick rental and
rental plants selling electricity at high prices. According to Bangladesh Economic Review, in
2015 about 32 percent of the total population were without any electricity and per capita elec-
tricity generation was 348 KWh, one of the lowest in the World. Although power generation
increased during the AL-led government’s term (2009–2013), the price of electricity increased
seven times between 2009 and 2015. One of the reasons for this price rise is the government’s
decision to purchase electricity from IPPs, rentals, and quick rentals. To increase electricity
production in peak hours, Bangladesh increased its installed capacity of oil-based plants. It is
estimated that Bangladesh’s oil imports have increased by 41.5% from 2009 to 2014 (Bangladesh
Ministry of Finance, 2015). In 2013, the Islamic Development Bank lent US$2.2 billion to
Bangladesh for oil imports.
Although Bangladesh has set a target to generate 5 percent of its total electricity from
renewable energy sources by 2015, the share of renewables is still less than 1 percent of total
electricity generation. Only 70 MW power is being generated from renewable energy sources.
Exclusive dependence on external financial assistance, in the form of loans or grants, is a major
obstacle to spreading this emerging source of energy all over Bangladesh. No initiative has
been taken so far to set up research and development and a manufacturing unit in the coun-
try to develop national capacity to use renewable energy in a cost-effective way. The SREDA,
established in 2012, could play a vital role in this regard. It is worth mentioning that it is the
only free source of energy whose conversion cost is decreasing rapidly with technological
development.
The power and energy sector reform measures and diversifying energy mix have been
able to increase electricity generation but have failed to solve the persistent energy crisis
that Bangladesh has been facing for a long time. The origin of the persistent power cri-
sis in Bangladesh is not the scarcity of energy resources or overdependency on a single
resource for power generation, but the structural problem in planning and policy making.
Historically, the unplanned development of the energy sector, prioritizing the power sector
without ensuring energy sources, lack of coordination between energy and power sectors,
and international financial institutions’ neoliberal reform agenda have significantly influ-
enced the policy and planning of the energy sector. Overdependency on foreign capital for
power and energy development projects, more spending on subsidizing private power plants

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to meet short-term goals, lack of long-term planning, and limited spending on national
capacity development are some of the reasons why Bangladesh has been unable to develop
its national capacity in the power and energy sectors. Moreover, the recent concerns over
energy diplomacy and the rising disputes surrounding the coal-based plant project’s envir-
onmental sustainability are yet to prove the impact of regional cooperation in ensuring
energy security. Overemphasizing commercial interests of foreign companies and flight of
corporate capital have systematically undermined the need for developing national capacity
and ensuring energy security.

References
Asian Development Bank (ADB). (2009) Sector Assistance Program Evaluation for Bangladesh Energy Sector.
Independent Evaluation Department. Project Number: SAP: BAN 2009-36.
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gov.bd/en/budget/13_14/budget_speech/speech_en.pdf [Accessed: December 12, 2014].
Bangladesh. Ministry of Power, Energy and Mineral Resources. (1996) National Energy Policy.
Dhaka: Ministry of Power, Energy and Mineral Resources.
Bangladesh. Ministry of Power, Energy and Mineral Resources. (2013) Annual Report 2012–2013.
Dhaka: Hydrocarbon Unit, Energy and Mineral Resource Division. p.14. [Online] Available from: http://
hcu.portal.gov.bd/sites/default/files/files/hcu.portal.gov.bd/annual_reports/c57120a6_40d2_4236_
9a63_a02d77ed2de4/Annual%20Report%20.%20FY%2020%2012-2013.pdf [Accessed: March 15,
2015].
Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation. (2014) [Online] Available from: www.bpc.gov.bd [Accessed: March
26, 2014].
Bangladesh. Power Division. (2010) Power System Master Plan. Dhaka: Ministry of Power, Energy and
Mineral Resources.
BPDB. (2013) Bangladesh Power Development Board Annual Report 2012–2013. Dhaka: BPDB.
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Studies. (2012) A Citizen’s Guide to Energy Subsidies. Geneva: International Institute for Sustainable
Development.
Islam, M. N. (2014) Energy Security in the Ganges, Brahmaputra and the Meghna (GBM)
Basins: Bangladesh Perspective. In: Situation Analysis on Energy Security: Ecosystems for Life –
A Bangladesh–India Initiative. Gland, Switzerland: International Union for Conservation of Nature
(IUCN).
National Committee to Protect Oil Gas Mineral Resources Power and Ports. (2014) [Online] Available
from: http://ncbd.org [Accessed: March 26, 2014].
Platts.com. (2014) Two Dozen Bangladesh Oil-Fired Power Plants Seek Fuel Import Permission.
[Online] Available from: www.platts.com/latest-news/oil/dhaka-bangladesh/two-dozen-bangladesh-
oil-fired-power-plants-seek-27860503 [Accessed: December 17, 2014].
Sultana, M. (2009) The Impact of Globalization on the Labor Force: The Case of Public Services in
Bangladesh. Journal of Business Studies. 31 (1). pp.31–54.
World Bank. (2004) Project Performance Reassessment Report. Washington, DC: Energy Sector Adjustment
Credit, Sector and Thematic Evaluation Group.
World Bank. (2008) International Development Association Program Document For A Proposed Power Sector
Development Policy Credit. Report No. 43669-BD. Washington, DC: World Bank.

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 20
CLIMATE CHANGE
M. Asaduzzaman

Climate change is a major topic of global and national debate and action (or rather inaction).
This is also the case in Bangladesh, which is judged as the country most vulnerable to climate
change impacts (Maplecroft, 2014). Against this background, this chapter takes stock of the
situation regarding interlinkages between climate change and the development process in the
country.

Global climate change, extent and

contributory causes
Climate change basically constitutes two elements: a change in the global temperature and a
change in the level and pattern (spatial and temporal) of precipitation from the average in a
given location. The average global temperature is rising and brings in its wake changes in evap-
oration and oceanic and atmospheric circulation with the consequence of uncertain precipi-
tation. Globally, between 1880 and 2012 the average temperature has risen by 0.85 °C (with a
range of 0.65 to 1.06 °C depending on data sets) and is expected to further rise by 1–3.7 °C by
2100, the range depending on what kind of physical modelling exercise is undertaken. By now
the general consensus seems to be that short of drastic global action the temperature will rise by
at least 2 °C by the end of this century.
The reason behind the rise in temperature is what goes by the term ‘greenhouse effect’.
Greenhouses are used in colder regions of the world for growing plants and vegetables during
winter periods by preventing the heat within the contraption from escaping and thus keeping
it warm. The better the insulation of the greenhouse, the higher is the temperature within. The
atmosphere of the Earth also acts as a kind of insulation around it and prevents part of the heat
received from the sun from escaping, which makes it warm. Indeed, our planet would not have
been habitable had there been no natural greenhouse effect.
Certain gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O)
have heat-trapping qualities in the atmosphere and are thus called greenhouse gases (GHGs).
If the concentration of these gases increases in the atmosphere, more heat from the sun
received on earth is trapped within the atmosphere, raising the temperature of the earth’s
surface and the oceanic water. Among these, the concentration of CO2 particularly has risen

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fast in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution in England and elsewhere in the
Western advanced countries, due to increasing use of fossil fuels such as petroleum products,
coal and natural gas for transport and power production, but also due to deforestation and
soil disturbance caused by land-use changes. At present, the large developing countries such
as China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa are also among major emitters of carbon
dioxide. Besides CO2, CH4 and N2O are also major GHGs. CH4 is emitted from wet rice
fields, livestock and manure management, and waste management, while N2O is emitted
from agricultural activities where nitrogenous compounds such as urea or other nitrogen-
ous fertilizer is used. CH4 and N2O are emitted in much lower quantities but have far more
warming potential, molecule for molecule, than CO2. For CH4 it is 21 times and for N2O
more than 300 times.
The available figures indicate that between 1750 and 2010, the world has emitted about
2,000 giga tons (i.e. two million million tons) of GHGs in terms of carbon dioxide equiva-
lent (equivalency drawn based on warming potential and persistence of the gas in the atmos-
phere). Of this, 900 giga tons were emitted between 1750 and 1970 while the 40 years from
1970 to 2010 witnessed emissions of 1,100 giga tons (or 55 per cent) of the total. In 1970 the
world’s total emission was about 27 giga tons. In 2010 it had increased to more than 48 giga
tons. Of the total GHGs emitted in 2010, 76 per cent was due to carbon dioxide, 16 per cent
was due to methane and the rest due to other gases. High-income countries of the West and
high–middle-income countries accounted for 18–19 giga tons each and thus two-thirds of total
global emissions in 2010.
How will the future global temperature and precipitation behave? To be sure, the future
earth is going to be much warmer than at present as, even if emissions of all GHGs are
stopped right now, the past cumulative emissions will continue to raise the average tempera-
ture of the atmosphere, land surface and the oceans with consequent changes in precipita-
tion. The general consensus appears to be that the way things are now, a 2 °C warming by
2100 is unavoidable.

Manifestation of climate change in Bangladesh

Temperature trend and projections
In Bangladesh, the rise in the average temperature over the last 100 years has been 0.48 °C, with
average maximum and minimum temperature changes being 2.63 °C and 1.38 °C, with sub-
stantial variation across districts. For 2100, the expected rise is quite substantial for both average
maximum and minimum temperatures. The average maximum temperature may rise by 2 °C
by mid-century while by the end of the century it may be as high as 4 °C. For the average min-
imum temperature, the projections are 3.5 °C and 5 °C, a hefty increase.

Rainfall patterns and projections

Average rainfall in Bangladesh has shown an increasing trend and the rise has been 26 mm dur-
ing the dry period and nearly 300 mm for the pre-monsoon period. The monsoon period has
also experienced a rise similar to the pre-monsoon period. The projections provide very mixed
results, depending on global emission scenarios. In some cases, the period up to 2050 or so
indicates increased rainfall but a decrease afterwards, while for others there is a general tendency
to rise.Yet, there are very substantial spatial variations. Thus the picture regarding precipitation
is going to be quite uncertain.

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GHG emission and pattern in Bangladesh

On a global scale Bangladesh’s GHG emissions are tiny. In 2005, the latest year for which official
figures are available, the country emitted only around 38 mn mt of carbon dioxide from energy
production and use. The distribution of this by sector is energy industries (power production
mainly) 33 per cent, manufacturing and construction 20 per cent, transport 15 per cent, resi-
dential 12 per cent, agriculture 5 per cent, commercial activities 1 per cent and the rest from
unspecified sectors. Carbon dioxide is also emitted from other activities such as deforestation
and land-use change mainly due to soil disturbance, which was somewhat more than 18 mn mt.
Methane emission was mainly from agriculture (1.2 mn mt) and from waste management (0.64
mn mt), making a total of 1.84 mt. In terms of carbon dioxide equivalent it is just about 39 mn
mt, i.e. just about equivalent to carbon dioxide emission from energy activities. Nitrous oxide
emission is just about 0.038 mn mt, which is accounted for mainly by application of nitrogen-
ous fertilizer in agriculture, and in terms of carbon dioxide equivalent it comes to 11.9 mn mt.
Barring small sources such as carbon monoxide and other oxides of nitrogen, on the whole
Bangladesh’s GHG emission came to around 96 mn mt of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2005.
Given the world total of 48 giga tons, this is practically nothing.
The future emissions level and pattern in the country will depend on the level and pace
of economic development. Bangladesh at present consumes very low levels of energy, particu-
larly in the form of fossil fuels. However, higher growth levels and the possibility of attain-
ing middle-income country status in five to seven years’ time mean that energy demand will
increase due to faster industrialization, rising output of power, higher demand for transport and
residential houses, particularly with rapid urbanization. On the other hand, demand for food
and the consequent rise in rice production will increase demand for energy, use of nitrogenous
fertilizer and wet rice culture. All of these will lead to a fast rise in emission of carbon dioxide,
methane and nitrous oxide unless technological change helps in lowering emissions per unit of
economic activity.
There is as yet no estimate of future total emissions. But for energy activities, there are esti-
mates that indicate that by 2030, the total energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide equiva-
lent gases will be 146 mn mt, a rise of three-and-a-half times that of the 2005 level. Electricity
generation alone may raise emissions by four times from 11.9 to 59.2 mn mt, while industrial
emissions will rise by twice, from 16 mn mt to 48 mn mt. The present author believes that the
actual rise will be even faster because, since 2005/06, the rate of growth of the economy has
been faster than before.

Pathways of climate change impact

Climate change is manifested initially in two ways: a rise in temperature and changes in precipi-
tation. But neither of these is observed in linear fashion. For temperature, while the long-term
trend of average temperature may be upward, there may be a lot of variation around the mean
temperature over years, between seasons and over space. For rainfall, while its variability is cer-
tain there is little certainty about long-term trends. In general, increased variability of weather
as well as rising temperature is the hallmark of climate change. Weather extremes will become
the norms over time. These in themselves will be unsettling for water availability and quality,
agriculture and food production, and health.
The rising temperature and uncertain precipitation are likely to bring in their wake
second-round physical changes, among which one may count, at least in the Bangladesh con-
text, severe and frequent floods, more severe and frequent droughts alternating with excessive

261
 M. Asaduzzaman

Cyclones and storm

Industry and infr changes
surges Inundation and
beach eriosion
Human habitation Trade
Economic and Salinity ingress patterns
Sea-level rise
livelihood impacts in coastal zones Food production
and security
Temperature Polar ice Thermal exp'n of Agric and land use Economic and
Human and animal extremes melting water changes livelihood changes
health
Species
migration
Pathogens and vector- Temperature rise
borne diseases Carbon-enriched
atmosphere Biodiversity
Natural and anthropogenic atmospheric
concentration of GHG

Climate change Wet paddy culture Fossil fuel use Drought and heavy Flooding
rains

Rainfall runoff changes

Temp'r
Glacial melt
rise
River flow

Figure 20.1 Pathways of climate change impacts (compiled by author)

rainfall, more severe cyclonic storms and surges along the coast, sea-level rise due to thermal
expansion of water and consequent inward movement of the coastline and inundation of pre-
sent coastal plains along with ingress of salinity. In the case of Bangladesh, sea-level rise due to
thermal expansion of water is exacerbated by the geological subsidence of the seabed adjacent
to the coast. Also, much of the excess carbon in the atmosphere gets stored in the oceans, mak-
ing the water acidic.
The above second-round physical impacts along with the initial temperature rise and uncer-
tain precipitation may cause further impacts for human systems of agriculture and food pro-
duction (including marine food chains affected by ocean acidification), health, energy systems,
industries and infrastructure, human habitation and migration behaviour, particularly as natural
hazards become more frequent and severe. Finally all these are likely to cause adverse economic
and livelihood impacts for the people in the affected country. Note that once the initial forces
of temperature rise and uncertain precipitation are set in motion, the various layers of impact
may run together and become interactive with each other. The pathways of these impacts are
shown in a simple diagram in Figure 20.1.

Possible future impacts of and vulnerability due to climatic variability

and climate change in Bangladesh
National circumstances influencing impacts and vulnerability
The impacts of and vulnerability to climate change and climatic variability are influenced by
several factors. These depend upon the so-called base-line conditions as well as the future evo-
lution (as appropriate) of physiography, normal climatic conditions, river systems, coastline char-
acteristics, proneness to natural hazards, demographic factors, characteristics of economic sectors
and level of economic development. Obviously, this is not the place to discuss in detail any of
these issues. We will provide a very brief picture of these characteristics in qualitative terms. For
details, interested readers may consult the Second National Communication of Bangladesh to

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the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) submitted in

2012 (Bangladesh. Ministry of Environment and Forest, 2012).
Bangladesh is by and large a flat delta with a river system (Ganges–Brahmaputra–Meghna)
that is the third largest in the world after the Amazon and the Congo. Much of the water (nearly
90 per cent) that flows through this river system originates in the upper riparian countries of
India, China, Nepal and Bhutan. Of the total area of 144,000 km2 of the country, about 73,000
km2 is permanent or temporary wetland, including about 54,000 km2 as floodplains of the riv-
ers.The country has a long shoreline with a very low-lying coastal plain barely a few feet above
the sea level. The climate is tropical with a long summer, short winter and high rainfall, which
of course have inter-annual, inter-seasonal and geographical variations.
The country is highly prone to natural hazards. Floods are a regular phenomenon that
from time to time become very severe and inundate much of the country as they did several
times during the last quarter-of-a-century. Only 30 per cent or so of the country’s area can
be said to be generally flood-free; other areas experience flooding to different degrees. Every
year 3–4 million ha of land suffer from drought, which sometimes may be quite severe. The
coastal plain accounts for some 29,000 km2 of area of the country and for 30 per cent of
cultivated land. More than one-half of the coastal area suffers from various degrees of salinity,
particularly during the rainless months. The coastline is also ravaged from time to time with
cyclonic storms with heavy casualties of lives and property, as was the case in 1992, 2007
and 2008.
The country at present has a very large population of more or less 160 million crammed into
a small space of 144,000 km2 or so, and is thus one of the most densely populated countries of
the world. Most (nearly 70 per cent) people are rural but urbanization is growing fast.
The national economy (as measured by GDP) has been growing at just short of 6 per cent
over the period 2005/06–2013/14 at 2005/06 prices, but at more than 6 per cent rate per year
for the most part (Bangladesh. Ministry of Finance, 2014). On the other hand, the structure
of the economy has been changing quite remarkably. It shows a continued fall in importance
of agriculture and ascendance of both manufacturing industries and services. Agriculture now
accounts for only 16 per cent or so of the national economy, but remains vital for food security
as it provides practically all the staples the country consumes and also because it employs nearly
55 per cent of the labour force. Agriculture is dominated by the cultivation of rice, which is
grown in three rice seasons. The dry-period boro, wholly depending on irrigation, accounts
for nearly 55 per cent of total domestic production of rice. The partly rain-fed, partly irrigated
aman rice accounts for nearly 38 per cent and the wholly rain-fed aus accounts for the rest of
the domestic production of nearly 35 million mt (of cleaned rice). This is three times the pro-
duction level in the mid-1970s.
The dry-period rabi crops are affected least by natural hazards like flood and cyclonic storms
but may be affected by drought if irrigation facilities become inadequate. On the other hand,
aman may be affected adversely in any given year and location by floods, drought and cyclonic
storms, while aus is prone to losses due to flood. But all the crops may be adversely affected by
rising temperature and its variability, which may not be optimal for their production.
Apart from the growth in income, the country has been successful in attaining or almost
achieving many of the Millennium Development Goals. While poverty fell substantially
from nearly 49 per cent to 40 per cent between 2000 and 2005/06, it fell further to 31.5
per cent by 2010; in education there has been gender-parity at primary level; and there have
been major reductions in child and infant mortality. Maternal mortality rates have also fallen
of late.

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 M. Asaduzzaman

Projected natural hazards and impacts

Floods: Flooded area may rise by 6 per cent and 14 per cent respectively for 2030 and 2050
(Bangladesh. Ministry of Environment and Forest, 2012). But the modelled expansion in area
depends on the global climate change scenario that may be assumed. On the other hand, the
changes may vary by location and cause of flooding (CCC, 2009). The study finds that area
inundated only due to climate change may vary from insignificant change to 16 per cent
depending on location. It also reports a rather substantial rise in medium to heavily flooded
land types in all study areas.
Drought: The frequency of drought in general may rise, while droughts may also be severe
over time. As rainfall uncertainty cannot be modelled well, it is difficult to estimate the area
expected to be exposed to drought. But in general, it is expected that the north-western parts
of the country that in general experience less rain now will be most affected, but models also
indicate that even areas with high rainfall such as the south-eastern hilly regions may also
experience drought.
Sea-level rise: How much the sea level will rise is difficult to predict at the moment as it
depends on the rise in global and regional temperatures and other factors such as geological
subsidence. Coastal inundation may be projected based on assumptions regarding the assumed
sea-level rise as well as the extent of rainfall and its temporal pattern. It is expected that without
the sea-level rise, the area expected to be normally inundated in the coastal areas (due to tidal
influence and above 30 cm) may be about 17,000 km2.This may rise by 14 per cent by 2050 for
a sea-level rise of 27 cm. By 2080, for a sea-level rise of 62 cm, the area inundated may rise by
27 per cent. But if there is 10 per cent more rainfall, the area inundated may rise by 32 per cent.
The rising sea level may lead to two specific impacts, one being rising frequency and severity
of cyclonic storms, particularly as rising sea surface temperature (SST) allows far more energy
to be stored during their formation, while the other is rising salinity in river waters and the
coastal soil. For cyclones, modelling results indicate that depending on rise in SST, the severity
of wind speed may increase. Taking the 1991 cyclone as the reference point, which had a max-
imum wind speed of 225 km/hour, for a 2 °C rise in SST the wind velocity may go up to 248
km/hour and to 275 km/h for a 4 °C rise in SST. If the sea-level rise is one metre, the storm
surge may be 10.6 metres high for a 2 °C rise in SST in place of the present 7.6 metres. Present
coastal embankments and polders will be no match for such ferocity of nature.
At present, 10 per cent and 16 per cent of the coastal zone is under a salinity level of 1 and
5 parts per thousand (ppt) respectively. By 2050 it is expected that the area under 1 ppt salinity
will increase to 17.5 per cent; and for 5 ppt salinity level, 24 per cent.

Vulnerability of future agriculture

Crops: Understanding future vulnerability of agriculture is extremely important for its role in
food security. There have been several attempts over the years to model such vulnerabilities
for major crops. But modelling the impact of all climatic variables has been difficult as stand-
ard models generally only account for temperature and precipitation changes and sometimes
also carbon enrichment. The adverse impacts of flooding, drought, salinity and storms surges in
an integrated manner, allowing for feedbacks and interactions among them, have hardly been
accounted for.
Given these difficulties, one may first try to find out the impact of temperature and precipi-
tation changes. An analysis of long-term time series (Sarker et al., 2012) indicates that variability
of maximum daily temperature has negative impacts on boro rice yield while aman and aus

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rice yields are impacted similarly by variability of minimum daily temperature. Precipitation
changes have lower adverse impact on rice output. Others have reported similar results of nega-
tive impact of variations in maximum and minimum temperature for boro varieties and also to
an extent of rainfall changes (Basak et al., 2009). As a result, it has been estimated that by 2050
20 per cent of the boro rice yield may fall while the loss would be even higher, 50 per cent,
by 2070.
Given the impacts of temperature and precipitation, it has been found that when the impact
of flooding is included along with initial climate change and carbon enrichment, boro yields
are found to be negatively impacted while the impacts on wheat yields are generally positive
(Bangladesh. Ministry of Environment and Forest, 2012). But for aman yields, the effects depend
on the area of the country.
Droughts may be much more damaging in future. For moderate drought for aman, a 30–40
per cent yield reduction may occur, while for more severe drought, the damage may be 45 per
cent or so. For crops such as wheat and potato, up to 50 per cent of the crop output may be lost.
Salinity increase may likewise be quite damaging. For salinity levels up to 0.5 ppt, nearly 40
per cent of crops may be lost, while for salinity between 0.5 and 1 ppt the damage may be up
to 60 per cent. For even higher salinity levels, the whole output may be lost. As we have seen
earlier, the area under higher salinity will increase by nearly a third; this will mean large losses
in crop output in the coastal areas.
Fisheries: For fisheries, there are many climatic and climate-impacted factors that may influ-
ence fish output. Much will also depend on location and type of fisheries – riverine, marine,
pond or floodplain. In general, for the given temperature rise riverine fisheries will be little
affected for most major economic fish species, while there is likely to be an increase in area
under floodplain fishery due to rising flooding frequency and depth. Pond fishery now is an
important cultured fishery. Severe flooding and cyclonic storms may both be damaging due to
overtopping of ponds, as was found after Cyclone Sidr in 2007. There is little information on
the impact of ocean acidification on marine and estuarine fisheries.
Livestock: Temperature, water quality, feed cultivation and availability will affect livestock
productivity, while natural hazards like flood, drought, cyclone and salinity ingress will all lead
to loss of livestock and output. Temperature rise and heat stress can also lower productivity. The
disease burden of livestock may increase, raising mortality and lowering output.
Certain modelling exercises indicate that there may not be much of a change in beef output
of cows for the present scenarios of climate change, which show little change in body-weight
gains (i.e. likely meat output) for 2030 and 2050 under these scenarios. If at all, there may be
a slight gain. For dairy cattle, experiments indicate a negative impact of temperature rise and
increased humidity by 2050 up to 8 per cent.

Vulnerability of human health

Temperature rise, heat stress and rising humidity may take a toll on human health in several
ways. The changing climate may be more conducive for vector-borne diseases and harmful
pathogens, and thus the disease burden may increase and mortality and morbidity may rise.
Heat stress along with higher humidity may also increase prevalence of heat stroke, dehy-
dration, cardiovascular and skin diseases and consequent mortality and morbidity, particu-
larly in urban areas where these are likely to be felt more. Drinking-water problems due
to rising salinity will be a major problem in coastal areas. Higher salinity of water may also
increase incidence of higher blood pressure among people, while cases of auto-abortion of
pregnant women in high salinity zones may also be on the rise. Furthermore, prevalence

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of gastroenteric diseases such as diarrhoea, dysentery and cholera may go up, as has been
observed when disease patterns during drought and normal years are compared (Dey et al.,
2011). Spread of malaria may increase, as indicated in some studies. Kala-azar and dengue
may also be more frequent than before.
All these health-related adverse impacts may be measured by composite disability
adjusted life years (DALY). A study on Bangladesh finds that a major coastal storm may
result in the loss of as many as 37 million DALYs, with the burden primarily borne by
young people (Nelson, 2003). Another study on the health impacts of climate change
reports that there is significant impact of climatic variability on three childhood diseases,
diarrhoea, fever and acute respiratory infection (BCCRF, 2014). Extreme precipitation par-
ticularly has significant adverse impacts on health, and by 2050 the resultant loss may be
3.4 per cent of GDP.

Vulnerability of biodiversity and forests

Biodiversity in general is influenced heavily by climatic factors as each type of plant, animal
and other life forms has specific ecological niches conditioned, among others, by these cli-
matic factors. There are specific biodiversity and ecological niches in the country, the climatic
parameters of which may change, sometimes drastically. Although no quantification is avail-
able, these may be adversely affected. However, what would be the ultimate resultant change
cannot be predicted a priori. For specific ecosystems such as the Sundarbans, the largest man-
grove in the world, however, certain predictions can be made. Rising salinity in general will
result in changes in plant species as those susceptible to higher salinity will migrate northward
while those less susceptible will thrive. Thus, Sundari (Heritiera fomes) and Gewa (Excoecaria
agallocha) may give way to Goran (Ceriops decandra). It is estimated that with 32 cm sea-level
rise and consequent salinity, 20 per cent of Sundari-dominant areas will be reduced to only
10 per cent and areas with well-diversified plant species will diminish from 60 per cent to 30
per cent by 2100 under 88 cm sea-level rise. The overall economic value of the Sundarbans
will decline.

Vulnerability of infrastructure
Infrastructure for transport and communication as well as water control such as embankments
are already vulnerable to floods, heavy rains and cyclonic storm surges. As the physical impacts
of climate change mount, so will the damage when flooding frequency, intensity, depth and
duration increase, as well as the frequency and intensity of cyclonic storm surges along the
coast. Increased flooding, for example, may, as estimated, make 58 per cent of national highways,
which are design-built to withstand flooding of 100-year return period, vulnerable. Some 65
per cent of railway tracks will also be vulnerable.

Urban vulnerability
Urban areas will be particularly vulnerable. Such areas will be subject to drainage congestion,
breaches of town protection embankments, heat island effects, deterioration of water and sani-
tary infrastructure, and consequently will become vulnerable to outbreaks of disease. At the
same time increased frequency and severity of natural disasters may lead to a faster rate of
rural–urban migration than at present, putting public services under severe strain.

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Vulnerability of the overall economy

The above discussion has shown how the physical impacts of climate change may occur and
how such impacts may adversely or otherwise influence the performance of several natural
and human systems of biodiversity, agriculture, human health infrastructure, etc. There has
been some attempt to integrate these losses in the case of, say, physical impacts such as flood,
drought, cyclonic storms on economic output, while others have tried to find out the implica-
tions of climate change for the growth rate of the country. One such exercise tried to find out
the direct and indirect impacts of floods, drought and cyclonic storms of historically observed
magnitudes for the future. In general, a flood of 2004 magnitude is expected to result in a loss
of about 2.2 per cent of total output, of which most will be due to agricultural and industrial
dislocations. For a 2007 magnitude cyclonic storm, the total output loss may be 1.7 per cent;
again much of it would be due to negative agricultural output changes but also housing losses.
A sea-level rise of one metre may lead to 2 per cent output losses, confined again mainly to
agriculture and also trade and services. Drought, interestingly, appeared to be less costly in
terms of output losses. Apart from such losses, dislocations in consumption and investment
expenditures will also lead to further negative impacts on output, with mainly agriculture
being on the receiving end.
An attempt to link climate change with growth in Asian countries has been made. The
sample includes Bangladesh (Akram, 2012). Though the Bangladesh results cannot be singled
out, the study shows an interesting result in which temperature rise always appears to have sig-
nificant negative impacts, while increased precipitation generally has a positive influence. As
climate change means a long-run rise in temperature but uncertain rainfall, this means that cli-
matic variability will have significant negative growth effects on Asia-Pacific countries includ-
ing Bangladesh.
Yu et al. (2010) conducted a study to understand the agricultural sector’s vulnerability and
risks to food security due to climate change and variability. They found that between 2005 and
2050, the discounted value of lost agricultural GDP will be about US$26 billion. Through the
linkage effects, this may lead to a loss of US$121 billion in national GDP. Much of the direct
losses, however, will be due to climatic variability rather than climate change as such.

Socio-economic dimensions of vulnerability

The ultimate vulnerability of a population in a country depends not simply on the possible
negative physical and human system impacts, but also on its adaptive capacity. So far there has
been only one study in Bangladesh that integrates socio-economic adaptive capacity with phys-
ical and human system impacts to measure livelihood vulnerability (Toufique and Islam, 2014).
Unfortunately it does not do the exercise for future climate change.

Response to climate change

The above discussion on impacts of climate change, though still not comprehensive, suffi-
ciently indicates the serious challenges that Bangladesh may face in its quest for sustainable
development and reaching middle-income country status. The question is how the country has
been preparing for the eventuality and to protect itself and its economic and social gains. The
response may be listed under three broad categories: namely, planning for adaptation and miti-
gation, adaptation and mitigation actions, and participation in global climate change talks. Each
of these will be briefly discussed below.

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Planning for adaptation and mitigation

As the issues of climate change and its possible impact became increasingly clear, the need for
planning for managing climate change has been strongly felt. As Bangladesh is a tiny emitter of
GHGs on a global scale and because the least developed countries (of which Bangladesh is one)
were initially not obligated to mitigate, adaptation rather than mitigation did get priority. One
of the early planning studies was the National Adaptation Programme of Action (NAPA) 2005,
which was later revised in 2008. This called for immediate adaptation in priority areas. After
NAPA 2005 came the Bali Action Plan in 2007, which, although not a planning exercise, set
the basic principles for all subsequent climate change-related plans, programmes and strategies
of the government.
The Bali Action Plan was drawn up in response to Decision 1/CP13 of UNFCCC in Bali
in 2007. The Bali Action Plan for Bangladesh set four inviolate principles for all climate-related
actions by the government.These were and still are food security, water security, energy security
and livelihood security including health. After the Bali Action Plan, Bangladesh formulated the
Bangladesh Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan (BCCSAP) 2008 (Bangladesh. Ministry
of Environment and Forest, 2008), which was slightly revised in 2009. The BCCSAP has six
pillars (Food Security, Social Protection and Health, Comprehensive Disaster Management,
Infrastructure, Research and Knowledge Management, Mitigation and Low Carbon
Development, and Capacity Building and Institutional Strengthening) with nearly 40 pro-
grammes. So far this has remained the basic planning and guideline document for all climate
change interventions by the government.The BCCSAP has been subsequently subsumed within
the Sixth Five Year Plan, 2011–2015 (Bangladesh. Ministry of Planning, 2011). Subsequent to
these, Bangladesh is now in the preparatory stages for formulation of the National Adaptation
Plan (NAP) (based on Decision 1/CP16 in Cancun and subsequent decisions in later COPs),
which is now a prerequisite for flow of substantial funds under the Green Climate Fund (GCF)
of the UNFCCC.
While Bangladesh previously was under no obligation for mitigation, under the BCCSAP it
committed itself to low carbon development. Recently it prepared the Action Plan for Energy
Efficiency and Conservation 2013 for raising efficiency in generation, transformation, trans-
mission, distribution and consumption of power as well as non-electric energy consumption.
The country is also now under an obligation to prepare what is called the Intended Nationally
Determined Contribution (INDC) (to global GHG emission reduction).This has recently been
done while a Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Action (NAMA), which is also necessary as a
long-term strategy for accessing the GCF, is still a matter for the future.
In all this planning, one thing appears to have been missed out. Sectoral and macroeconomic
policies, despite some attempts at mainstreaming, still hardly refer to climate change impacts and
their ramifications for these policies and their need to be appropriately harmonized with each
other. An exercise related to such a lack of harmonization found that this is extremely limited
even in the case of agricultural policies (Asaduzzaman and Munir, 2013).
Planning itself is of little use unless the required investments can be financed.There are some
estimates of the adaptation costs for impacts of extreme weather events such as flood or cyclones
on transport and water management infrastructure. A World Bank study finds that by 2050,
flood-proofing infrastructure may necessitate an expenditure of US$3.3 billion (at 2009 prices),
83 per cent of which would be required for redesigned roads and 13 per cent for cross-drainage
in polders (World Bank, 2011). For cyclonic storms, a total of US$2.4 billion might be necessary,
half of which would be necessary to build and operate multi-purpose cyclone shelters while 36
per cent would be necessary for redesigned polders.

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Response: adaptation to and mitigation of climate change

Bangladesh has always adapted to climatic phenomena and related natural hazards. However,
adapting to the impacts of climate change and additional climatic variability has not fully started
yet. The country has established two funds for implementing the BCCSAP, the Bangladesh
Climate Change Trust Fund (BCCTF) financed with domestic resources and the Bangladesh
Climate Change Resilience Fund (BCCRF) financed by development partners. The BCCTF
so far has allocated Tk 19.3 billion or nearly US$250 million for 207 projects, 87 of which have
been completed. BCCRF has so far allocated almost US$146 million.There are, however, some
question marks on the nature of the projects financed under both funds.
While neither BCCTF nor BCCRF appear to have financed many mitigation projects, if
any, on the other hand the government has already installed more than three million roof-top
solar panels, which is also a mitigation activity with wide-ranging co-benefits (Khandker et al.,
2014). Furthermore, the government is going ahead with the establishment of more efficient
power plants in the country, thus lowering carbon emission per unit of power output.

Response: participation in global climate change talks

Bangladesh has, particularly since the Bali COP in 2007, been a vocal member of the least
developed country group in the climate change talks. It has been represented on several major
committees and sub-committees under the UNFCCC.

Conclusion
Bangladesh’s vulnerability to climate change impacts have been discussed above. This is based
upon an incomplete set of data as only the surface of the problem has been scratched so far.
Much still needs to be researched, studied and analysed before one can take definitive actions
on them. Yet, what is already known appears to paint a very disturbing future for the country.
Unless proper adaptation measures are undertaken immediately, the people in general will suffer
from food insecurity, ill health, aftershocks of disasters and shrinking opportunities of livelihood.
The process of economic development will be slowed down and the dream of a Sonar (Golden)
Bangla may turn into a pipe dream, if not a nightmare.

References
Ahmed, A. U. (2006) Bangladesh Climate Change Impacts and Vulnerability: A Synthesis. Dhaka: Climate
Change Cell, Department of Environment.
Akram, N. (2012) Is Climate Change Hindering Economic Growth in Asian Countries? Asia-Pacific
Development Journal. 19 (2). pp.1–18.
Asaduzzaman, M. and Munir, Q. (2013) Policy and Policy Harmonization for Adaptation and Mitigation in
Agriculture under Climate Change in Bangladesh. Dhaka: Sustainable Development Networking
Foundation (SDNF). [Unpublished.]
Asian Development Bank (ADB). (1994) Climate Change in Asia: Bangladesh. Manila: Regional Study on
Global Environmental Issues.
Bangladesh Climate Resilience Fund (BCCRF). (2014) Climate Change and Health Impacts: How Vulnerable
Is Bangladesh and What Needs to Be Done. Draft Final Report. Dhaka: BCCRF.
Bangladesh. Ministry of Environment and Forest (MoEF). (2002) Initial National Communication under
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Dhaka: MoEF.
Bangladesh. Ministry of Environment and Forest (MoEF). (2005) National Adaptation Programme of Action
(NAPA): Final Report. Dhaka: MoEF.

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Bangladesh. Ministry of Environment and Forest (MoEF). (2008) Bangladesh Climate Change Strategy and
Action Plan 2008. Dhaka: MoEF.
Bangladesh. Ministry of Environment and Forest (MoEF). (2012) Second National Communication of
Bangladesh to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Dhaka: MoEF.
Bangladesh. Ministry of Finance. (2014) Bangladesh Economic Review [in Bengali]. [Online] Available
from: www.mof.gov.bd/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=285&Itemid=1
[Accessed: 12 October 2015].
Bangladesh. Ministry of Planning. (2011) Chapter 10: Environment, Climate Change and Disaster Risk
Management. In: Sixth Five Year Plan FY2011–FY2015: Accelerating Growth and Reducing Poverty
Part 2 – Sectoral Strategies, Programmes and Policies. Dhaka: Ministry of Planning.
Basak, J. K., Ali, M. A., Islam, M. N. and Alam, M. J. B. (2009) Assessment of the Effect of Climate Change
on Boro Rice Production Using CERES-Rice Model. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on
Climate Change Impacts and Adaption Strategies for Bangladesh. 18–20 February. pp.103–113.
Climate Change Cell (CCC). (2009) Impact Assessment of Climate Change and Sea Level Rise on Monsoon
Flooding. Dhaka: Climate Change Cell, Department of Environment. Component 4b: Comprehensive
Disaster Management Programme, Ministry of Food and Disaster Management.
Dey, N. C., Alam, M. S., Sajjan, A. K., Bhuiyan, M. A., Ghose, L., Ibaraki,Y. and Karim, F. (2011) Assessing
Environmental and Health Impact of Drought in the Northwest Bangladesh. Journal of Environmental
Science & Natural Resources. 4 (2). pp.89–97.
Khandker, S. R., Samad, H. A., Sadeque, Z. K. M., Asaduzzaman, M.,Yunus, M. and Haque, A. K. E. (2014)
Surge in Solar-Powered Homes. Washington, DC: World Bank Group.
Maplecroft. (2014) Climate Change and Environmental Risk Atlas 2015. Bath: Maplecroft.
Nelson, D. I. (2003) Health Impact Assessment of Climate Change in Bangladesh. Environmental Impact
Assessment Review. 23. pp.323–341.
Sarker, M. A. R., Alam, K. and Gow, J. (2012) Exploring the Relationship between Climate Change and
Rice Yield in Bangladesh: An Analysis of Time Series Data. Agricultural Systems. 122. pp.11–16.
Toufique, K. A. and Islam, A. (2014) Assessing Risks from Climate Variability and Change for Disaster-prone
Zones in Bangladesh. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. 10. pp.236–249.
World Bank. (2011) The Cost of Adapting to Extreme Weather Events in a Changing Climate. Bangladesh
Development Series Paper No. 28. Dhaka: World Bank.
Yu,W., Alam, M., Hassan, A., Khan, A. S., Ruane, A. C., Rosenzweig, C., Major, D. C. and Thurlow, J. (2010)
Climate Change Risks and Food Security in Bangladesh. London: Earthscan.

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WATER
Md. Khalequzzaman

Water is the most valuable natural resource in Bangladesh. Water is the lifeline for agricul-
ture, fisheries, inland navigation, industries, and aquatic ecosystems. Anyone who lives in
Bangladesh is familiar with the phrase ‘panir opor nam jibon’, i.e., water is synonymous with life.
Other popular nationalistic slogans and songs that illustrate the importance of water and the
inseparable link between the socio-political culture and water include ‘tomar amar thikana –
Padma–Meghna–Jamuna’ (i.e., our address is the Padma–Meghna–Jamuna Rivers) and ‘Ganga
amar ma, Padma amar ma’ (i.e., the Ganges is my mother, the Padma is my mother).
The geographic region known as Bangladesh is but a small part of the
Ganges–Brahmaputra–Meghna (GBM) basin, which occupies a 1.7 million km2 area in
China, Nepal, Bhutan, India, and Bangladesh. Only 7.4 percent of the GBM basin is located
in Bangladesh, yet 27 percent of the basin’s total population lives there (Babel and Wahid,
2008). Since Bangladesh is located in the downstream part of the GBM basin, the state of the
water, both in terms of quantity and quality, are directly tied to activities in the upper region
of the basin. All 57 major rivers in Bangladesh originate outside the country, of which 54 flow
from India and 3 from Myanmar. Concerning the 57 trans-boundary rivers, there exists only
one bilateral treaty between India and Bangladesh on sharing the Ganges River flow during
the lean season. Despite the existing treaty, Bangladesh did not receive the agreed amount for
most of the period during 2008–2012 (Islam et al., 2013). Bangladesh’s dependence for flow
of water on upper riparian countries is the root cause of vulnerability of this precious resource
(Muhammed, 2004). Of the total annual renewable flow of 1,211 billion m3 of water in the
GBM basin, only 105 billion m3 (8 percent) originate, within the territory of Bangladesh (Babel
and Wahid, 2008). More than 80 percent of Bangladesh is floodplain and Bengal delta plain, and
is highly vulnerable to sea-level rise as it is a densely populated coastal country of low relief
comprising broad and narrow ridges and depressions (Morgan and McIntyre, 1959). A World
Bank (2000) report predicted a total of 10 cm, 25 cm and 1 m rise in sea level by the year 2020,
2050 and 2100, which will affect a total of 2, 4 and 17.5 percent of the land mass in Bangladesh,
respectively. Milliman et al. (1989) reported a 1 cm/year sea-level rise in Bangladesh. The most
recent prediction for relative sea-level rise in Bangladesh is much higher than the earlier pre-
dictions. Some estimates predict relative sea-level rise of four meters in Bangladesh by the year
2050 (Pethick and Oxford, 2013). A four-meter rise in sea level will inundate about 40 percent

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of the land area of Bangladesh and will displace 50 million people (Gardiner, 2014). The geo-
logical records indicate that periods of rapid climate change often culminate in transient cli-
mates, with more extreme conditions than subsequent long-term climates (Zachos et al., 1993).
The future rise in sea level due to climate change will result in severe challenges for all aspects
of water resources management in Bangladesh.
The future success of Bangladesh’s strategy for adaptation against climate change will mainly
depend on how successfully the government of Bangladesh can persuade the government of
India and other co-riparian countries to come up with an integrated water and sediment
resources management plan that will ensure necessary water and sediment inflow in coastal areas
during all seasons in the future. As it stands now, India has unilateral control over water resources
in all 54 common rivers and they do not allow enough water (and sediment) flow during
the dry season, which results in more salinity ingress in coastal rivers, which renders the soil
unsuitable for domestic uses and crop production. Several studies document that the amount
of sediment flow in rivers entering Bangladesh from upper riparian countries has declined
from 2 billion tons/year in the 1960s to about 1 billion tons/year in the 1990s (Holeman,
1968; Curry and Moore, 1971; Subramanian, 1978; Milliman and Meade, 1983; Milliman and
Syvitski, 1992; Khalequzzaman et al., 2004). This reduction in sediment influx has resulted in
higher coastal erosion, lower sedimentation on the delta plain, subsidence of land inside coastal
polders, intensification of tidal range, and lower land formation (Khalequzzaman et al., 2004;
Pethick and Oxford, 2013).
Co-riparian countries within the GBM basin need to address the future of water resources
management in the context of climate change. Being a downstream country in the GBM basin,
Bangladesh does not have much maneuvering power in negotiation for a fair share of water. It
is mainly up to the upper riparian nations to abide by the international norm and best manage-
ment practices in managing trans-boundary rivers. Bangladesh needs to bring up the issue of
an integrated water and sediment resources management plan in the context of climate change
during negotiations at all levels with India and other upper riparian countries. Bangladesh
should expect India to respect the principles of water resources management science, i.e., to
follow the globally accepted norm of watershed or basin-scale management of water resources.
In other words, India should do what it would do with the common rivers if Bangladesh were
a part of India. All stakeholders in the GBM basin will have to accept the fact that water (and
sediments) is the life-sustaining resource for millions of people living in the GBM basin and
the ecosystems it supports. It is imperative that the lifelines of the Bengal delta – the rivers –
are allowed to flow freely as nature intended. The formation of a GBM Basins Commission to
ensure the ecological functioning of all rivers and their tributaries in the basin area will be a
step in the right direction. Currently, India’s water resources management plan appears more
like a weapon of control against Bangladesh. If one looks at the water control structures on
all common rivers that enter Bangladesh from India, it will be obvious that India could never
implement those water control structures against its own people, because neither science nor
politics will support such actions. Bangladesh should seek equality and justice from India and
other co-riparian nations, because its survival depends on it.
Water is one of the most valuable and essential resources that humans need to sustain their
livelihood. It is needless to say that without enough good water our survival will be threat-
ened. Bangladesh has plenty of both surface water and groundwater supply to support the
entire population in Bangladesh. The amount of water per capita in Bangladesh is 7,939 m3/
person/year; however, only 688 m3/person/year of the amount is generated within the coun-
try. By comparison, India’s per capita water amount is 1,729 m3/person/year, of which most
of the amount is generated within the country. Less than 1,000 m3/person/year is considered

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as water-stressed (Climate Data Information, 2010). In fact, after human resources, water is the
most abundant resource in Bangladesh. If managed properly, water can transform Bangladesh
into a very resourceful nation.

Land-use and quality of water

Water quality in rivers and streams is controlled by land-use practices in watersheds. There is a
common saying among environmental communities that ‘we all live downstream’. For example,
any land-disturbing activities (e.g., agriculture, forestry, and urbanization) in a watershed can
generate loose sediment, part of which will be washed down neighboring streams, increasing the
turbidity of water downstream. Similarly, part of the fertilizers and pesticides used in a watershed
will end up in a stream with run-off (termed as non-point sources of pollution). Also, indus-
trial, sewage, medical, and household waste are directly discharged into a river at a given point
(termed as point sources of pollution), which degrade, the quality of water downstream. Both
point and non-point sources of pollution need to be identified, contained, and treated properly
in watersheds to maintain water quality in rivers and streams. At the present time, very limited
data are available for surface water quality on the watershed scale in Bangladesh (Anwar, 1993).

Water Quality Assessment Program

The state of water quality in Bangladesh is extremely poor (BAPA, 2014; Shahjahan, 2004;
Anwar, 1993). Because of the lack of water resources management plans, policies, or mecha-
nisms by which all stakeholders living in a (sub)watershed can participate in decision-making
processes, both the quality and quantity of water in Bangladesh have reached a very critical
situation. According to one study, Bangladesh ranks 86th out of 142 countries in terms of the
Environmental Sustainability Index (Samuel-Johnson and Esty, 2002). A recent study ranked
Bangladesh 169th out of 178 countries in terms of the Environmental Performance Index,
with a total score of 25.61 out of 100 (Environmental Performance Index, 2014). The study is
partly based on the quality of water in those countries. Arsenic and other sources of ground-
water contamination are widespread in 59 out of 64 districts in Bangladesh. Now more than
ever before, the people need to protect the quality of surface water as an alternative source of
water for drinking, irrigation, industry, and other beneficial uses. Moreover, surface water and
groundwater are interrelated. The quality of groundwater can only be ensured through a better
protection of surface water and recharge areas on the ground.
A National Surface Water Quality Assessment Program (NSWQAP) needs to be formulated.
One of the tasks of this program will be to delineate the watershed boundaries of all creeks,
streams, and rivers in the country. The NSWQAP will have to be multi-disciplinary in nature
(Lindsey et al., 1997). For example, the Geological Survey of Bangladesh under the Ministry
of Mineral Resources, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Water Resources, and the
Ministry of Environment can jointly form such an entity. All point and non-point sources of
pollution need to be identified and located on watershed maps. Depending on the hierarchical
level (e.g., first-order stream, second-order stream, major rivers, etc.), hydrological unit codes
(like postal codes) or names can be assigned to those watersheds. Once named, the people liv-
ing in a watershed will be able to identify themselves with a common natural boundary in
their neighborhood. When the people can identify themselves with a watershed in which they
live, through proper education they will develop a sense of belonging. In turn, they will feel
encouraged to protect the quality of water through Best Management Practices (BMPs) designed
for various land-use activities (Ridge and Seif, 1997). The BMPs are a series of activities and

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programs designed to maximize land-use by certain sectors (e.g., agriculture, forestry, urban
planning, etc.) while safeguarding the environment. Since most of the watershed areas of major
rivers lie outside the political boundary of Bangladesh, it will be necessary to reach agreement
with upper riparian nations in order to successfully implement water-quality improvement
plans on a large drainage basin scale.

Beneficial uses of surface water

The concerned authorities of the government (e.g., the Ministries of Environment, Water
Resources, Agriculture, Mineral Resources, etc.) need to assign certain beneficial use(s) for
each water body. Designated beneficial uses will include drinking (e.g., as an alternative source
of drinking water in areas where groundwater is contaminated by arsenic), fishing, irrigation,
swimming, navigation, etc. The designation process will have to ensure the participation of
the general public. Depending on the designated use, maximum contaminant levels for vari-
ous water-quality parameters (e.g., amount of chemicals and microbes present) will have to
be established (Elder et al., 1999). For example, if water from a given river is used for drinking
then the number of coliform bacteria present in the water will have to be zero, whereas the
same water used for fishing can have up to 200 counts of bacteria per 100 ml of water (Georgia
Department of Natural Resources, 1999). The government will have to guarantee the quality
of water for beneficial uses.

Sources of pollution
With proper policies, laws, Acts, and stricter enforcement of laws, the point sources of pollution
in a watershed can be controlled. An inventory of all toxic and hazardous chemicals that are
produced, used, and discharged by every facility (industry, factory, workshop, laboratory, etc.)
will have to be prepared for all watersheds in Bangladesh. Each facility that uses any chemical
that has potential for health and environmental hazards when introduced into water bodies,
land, and/or air will need to have written permission to discharge a total maximum daily load
(TMDL) of such substances after proper treatment.The amount permitted for discharge by each
facility will be determined and controlled by concerned authorities based on research data on
river flow characteristics and accumulated impacts of such chemicals on ecology and human
health. A similar action plan was implemented by the United States through a program called
National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES), which was an outgrowth of the
Clean Water Act 1972 and Safe Drinking Water Act 1974 (Elder et al., 1999). The amount of
point sources of pollution in water is now very much under control in the United States.
Non-point sources of pollution include (but are not limited to): agricultural run-off, urban
run-off, fertilizers, pesticides, acid rain, animal waste, raw sewage, septic tank leakage, and house-
hold waste. Since the sources of pollution are not known or identified, it becomes problematic
to control their discharge into rivers and streams in a watershed. Proper sampling techniques
and long-term monitoring of water quality at carefully selected locations can help to delineate
the ‘sources’ of such diffuse pollution.

Immediate plan
The proposed NSWQAP needs to take some immediate measures to protect and improve the
quality of surface water. The following is a list of activities and proposed plans of action that

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need to be carried out to ensure quality of surface water: (1) the NSWQAP needs to adopt a
plan to delineate watershed boundaries of all streams and rivers. Base maps showing drainage
networks and roads that can be used to access various points along those rivers and streams need
to be prepared at different scales. Various maps showing soil type, geology, land use and land
covers (agricultural lands, forestry, wetlands, urban areas, etc.), flood propensity and depth, and
ecologically sensitive areas need to be prepared for each watershed; (2) the NSWQAP needs to
identify all potential sources of pollution (e.g., landfill, tanneries, pulp industries, fertilizer indus-
tries, pharmaceuticals, electroplating workshops, soap industries, chemical industries, ceramic
industries, textile industries, paint and dye shops, furniture manufacturing, underground stor-
age tanks for petroleum), and geo-reference them on base maps. The Geographic Information
System (GIS) can be of great help in preparing various types of maps for each watershed; (3) the
NSWQAP needs to establish baseline data on basic water quality in the entire country. Science
teachers in high schools/colleges and students in science departments at universities (as well as
any other groups of qualified people) can be trained within a very short amount of time about
sampling procedures and analysis of water quality. The teachers can then act as coordinators or
trainers to train other participants in the program. University science teachers, scientific and
research officers with non-governmental organizations, and other qualified persons can play a
pivotal role in the water-quality assessment program for nominal financial benefits or as volun-
teers. Once the volunteers or participants are prepared and equipped with basic sampling instru-
ments, all major rivers and streams can be sampled on predetermined days at certain times of
the year to establish a ‘snapshot’ of water quality nationwide (Peavine Watershed Alliance, 2000).
Such information, when published, will have tremendous value to researchers and/or planners
in assessing impacts of point sources and non-point sources of pollution. If sampled several times
a year over a long period of time, the trends in water-quality parameters can be assessed in the
context of seasonal, climatic, and land-use changes in different watersheds. The government
will have to allocate a budget on a priority basis to implement all phases of this project; (4) the
government needs to establish mutually beneficial partnerships with various stakeholders (e.g.,
farmers, industrialists, fishermen, and any other groups of people who live in a watershed) and
research institutions (e.g., colleges, universities) to facilitate understanding about water-quality
problems and to devise plans of actions to solve those problems; (5) the government authorities
need to develop manuals of BMPs that are appropriate for agriculture, industry, poultry farms,
urban development, forestry, and other sectors to reduce pollution generated by those sectors
(Georgia Soil and Water Conservation Commission, 1994;Allen, 1999); (6) the NSWQAP needs
to determine TMDLs for various contaminants that should be permitted to discharge in the
water bodies by both point sources and non-point sources of pollution (Georgia Department
of Natural Resources, 2002).The amount of discharge from point sources of pollution will have
to be controlled by the NPDES program; (7) several locations along streams and rivers in each
watershed need to be selected very carefully to collect and analyze water samples for the follow-
ing parameters: pH (acidity), alkalinity, hardness, dissolved oxygen, biological oxygen demand,
conductance, total dissolved solids, turbidity, total suspended solids, nitrate-nitrogen, ammonia,
phosphate, chloride, sulfate, trace metals (lead, zinc, chromium, iron, copper, aluminum, arsenic,
etc.), and coliform bacteria. The list of parameters to be studied should be modified depending
on the specific situation and needs in a watershed and available resources.

The Water Act

The government of Bangladesh recently published the Water Act 2013, which is based on
the National Water Policy, and designed for integrated development, management, extraction,

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 Md. Khalequzzaman

distribution, usage, protection, and conservation of water resources in Bangladesh. In general,

if one takes a critical look at the Act, the new law has provided the right framework for better
management of water resources in the country.
The formation of the high-powered National Water Resources Council (henceforth termed
as the Council) with the prime minister as the head implies the importance the government
is assigning to the management of this precious resource. An Executive Committee under the
Ministry of Water Resources will implement the decisions taken by the Council. The intention
to take initiatives for a basin-scale, integrated water resources management of trans-boundary
rivers and exchange of data on flooding, drought, and pollution with co-riparian countries are
good steps in the right direction.
As per this Act, all forms of water (e.g., surface water, groundwater, seawater, rainwater, and
atmospheric water) within the territory of Bangladesh belong to the government on behalf of
the people. Private landowners will be able to use the surface water inside their property for all
purposes in accordance with the Act. A worthwhile initiative is the requirement for permits/
licenses for large-scale water withdrawal by individuals and organizations beyond domestic use.
Without prior permission issued by the Executive Committee, no individuals or organizations
will be allowed to extract, distribute, use, develop, protect, or conserve water resources, nor
will they be allowed to build any structure that impedes the natural flow of rivers and creeks.
However, the maximum amount of surface water or groundwater that can be withdrawn by
individuals or organizations is not mentioned in the Act. Setting up a priority order for water
usage in an area where the water resources are in critical condition is also a significant step.
The priority order as depicted in the Act is as follows: drinking water > domestic usage > irri-
gation > fish culture > biodiversity > wildlife > instream flow > industry > salinity con-
trol > power generation > recreation > miscellaneous. It should be noted that only drinking
water and domestic usage are considered as basic rights.
In view of water resources protection and conservation, the Act made a timely decision to
address the water needs of irrigation and urban areas in the context of available surface water,
groundwater, and rainwater. The situation of drinking water supply in Dhaka City is a good
example in this context. For instance, Dhaka City annually receives about 2,000 mm of precipi-
tation, of which about 80 percent occurs during the rainy season. If the rainwater is harvested
and distributed after proper treatment then the water needs during this time period can easily
be met.
The need for water resources management in the context of natural drainage patterns has
also been correctly highlighted in the Act. Management of water resources within the terri-
tory of the country in rivers, creeks, reservoirs, flood flow zone, and wetlands has been assigned
to the Executive Committee under the Ministry of Water Resources, which is another note-
worthy decision. Draining of wetlands that support migratory birds has been prohibited by the
Act. Consequently, without prior permission from the Executive Committee, the building of
any structure that can impede the natural flow of water has been prohibited; however, a few
activities, including dredging of rivers for maintaining navigability, land reclamation projects by
filling wetlands, flood control, and erosion control structures will be exempted pending prior
permission. It is not clear as to how or if the government will address the issue of land grabbing
and encroachment that are clear impediments to natural flow in the flood flow zone, wetlands,
and foreshore of rivers.
Instituting public hearings for the proposed national water management plan is also a good
decision, provided it is practiced diligently. There have been occasions in which the opinion
and interest of the stakeholders were ignored, which led to the failure of such projects. The Act
includes provisions for punishment and financial penalty for non-compliance with the Act,

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including failure to abide by government policy, ordinance, non-cooperation with government

officials, refusal to present necessary documents, providing false information, affiliation with
perpetrators, and protection measures for water resources management. The maximum pen-
alty for violations is set at five years of imprisonment and/or monetary penalty of Tk 10,000.
The amount of monetary penalty was set at Tk 500,000 in the draft proposal of the Act in
2012. This drastic reduction in the monetary penalty may encourage many people to pay the
penalty instead of abiding by the law. Punishment related to water quality degradation caused
by industrial discharge and other sources of pollution is not adequately addressed in the Act.
Water pollution issues are deferred to the provisions of the Environmental Protection Act of
1995 without much clarification. The Act remains nebulous without a clear commitment by
the government to ensure the quality of water for various beneficial uses as outlined in the
Environmental Protection Act.The Act does not address the need for establishing effluent treat-
ment plants or the maximum contaminant levels that will be allowed for discharge to receiving
bodies of water by industries and other potential sources of pollution. Since the Act outlines
various punishable activities, it is expected that provisions for punishment and penalties for
water-quality degradation will be included in future amendments.
No court can accept any lawsuit under the provision of this Act without a written com-
plaint from the Director General of Water Resources Planning Organization or his appointee,
which is a severe drawback of this Act. Although the Act is formulated to protect the quality and
quantity of the water resources that belong to the people, no individual or organization will be
allowed to file a lawsuit against other individuals, organizations, or government authorities even
if they violate various provisions of the Act.The Act provides unlimited power to the Executive
Committee to take any action that they deem necessary to implement various provisions of the
Act. This Act also exempts the government authority of any violation, non-compliance, neg-
ligence, wrongfully causing financial damage to individuals or organizations, and/or avoiding
implementing the Act in the name of good faith. Limitless power of the Executive Committee
without any provision for checks against such power may lead to wrongdoing and anarchy.
Although an accused party will be allowed to defend him- or herself in court, there is no clear
provision to appeal against any judgment passed.
The Act recognizes the significance for managing all forms of water resources in the con-
text of natural flow of surface water and recharge of groundwater. The Act provides the legal
framework for development, management, extraction, distribution, usage, protection, and con-
servation of water resources. However, the Act falls short of making a commitment by the gov-
ernment to ensure the quality of water for various beneficial uses. The lack of clear directives
to facilitate recovery of the flood flow zone by evicting land grabbers and encroachers remains
a serious weakness of the Act. The unlimited power vested in the Executive Committee with-
out any liability has the potential for misuse of the Act. The people – the ultimate owners of
water resources – should be empowered to file complaints and lawsuits against other individuals,
including government agencies, who are in non-compliance with the Act. Hopefully, future
amendments will address the drawbacks of the Act to make it a useful tool for better manage-
ment of water resources.

Save the water – save the nation

Sustainable development requires integration of economic planning and preservation of nat-
ural resources, as well as safeguarding the environment (IUCN Conservation Series, 1992). No
civilization can survive and thrive without clean water. Bangladesh as a nation is fortunate to
have plenty of this vital resource. However, the quality of this valuable resource is deteriorating

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 Md. Khalequzzaman

quickly before our eyes. It is only through a better understanding of the sources of pollution and
processes that affect the quality of water that we can save this precious resource for us and for
our future generations. Understanding of a problem, however, is only half of the solution. The
other half of the solution lies in communal actions. People in the GBM basin can play a role in
preserving the quality of water. All countries in the GBM basin need to join hands to protect
this invaluable resource, as well as our very existence as a civilized society.

References
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Commission. p.68.
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Babel, M. S. and Wahid, S. M. (2008) Freshwater under Threat: South Asia. Nairobi: UNEP and Asian
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 PART V

State, society and rights

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 22
HUMAN RIGHTS AND
THE LAW
Mohammad Shahabuddin

As in many polities of the Global South, politics and political institutions in Bangladesh are
often shaped by the common experience of colonial oppression and nationalist responses to
it, military dictatorship, or, more recently, new forms of violence ignited by market liberaliza-
tion and a particular (often narrow) understanding of democracy (reduced to electoral rituals)
and ‘progressiveness’ (in a teleological sense, the ‘West’ being the essential model). Although
‘human rights’ as an ideology emerged as a necessary corrective to the evils of colonialism,
authoritarianism, and backwardness in the aftermath of World War II, most post-colonial states
including Bangladesh remained in an ambivalent relationship with the notion of human rights.
This ambivalence could be broadly characterized as two parallel streams: ‘human rights’ as an
emancipatory move, and ‘human rights’ as a hegemonic language, or to use Marks’s phrase,
as ‘romance’ and ‘tragedy’ (Marks, 2012). The first strand emphasizes the ‘ideology’ of human
rights as a central element of the project to circumscribe the monopoly of coercive force by
post-Westphalian modern states. It is conceived of as a ‘secular religion: an object of faith, a
basis for hope and a code of morality we can all accept’ (p.313). The second strand, in con-
trast, problematizes the all-pervasive nature of contemporary discourses on human rights, and,
without undermining its core values, tends to expose the way in which human rights as a
neo-colonial political ‘language’ reinforces existing power imbalances at both national and
international levels. To a great extent, an understanding of human rights in Bangladesh travels
between these two registers.

Strand one: human rights as an emancipatory move

Any standard narrative of human rights within this stream essentially finds its legitimacy in
existing international human rights standards, which then serve as a lens through which national
human rights performance can be evaluated. For example, the Bangladesh National Human
Rights Commission (NHRC) implemented a UNDP-funded project in 2012 under which
a number of compliance studies on various aspects of human rights were conducted by inde-
pendent National Consultants to analyze the gap between the international standard and the
national standard and also between legal norms and state practices. These NHRC Study Reports
(2013) invariably listed a series of recommendations on the basis of which various national and
international stakeholders would then negotiate with the government to ameliorate the latter’s

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 M. Shahabuddin

human rights performance. This standard format of conducting human rights research – inter-
national standard, national standard, gap analysis, and recommendations – is also frequently
used in academic publications as well as the annual reports of non-governmental organizations
(NGOs). This section represents a narrative of human rights very much in this orthodox line.
Since its inception, Bangladesh has been repeatedly underscoring, although theoretically, its
commitment to the peremptory norms of international human rights law. The constitution,
adopted soon after independence, incorporates a number of human rights provisions, primarily
civil and political rights, in line with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)
and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) as fundamental rights
(United Nations, 1966a). Bangladesh has also committed itself to the international responsibility
of protecting and promoting civil and political rights by acceding to the ICCPR on September
6, 2000. Earlier, Bangladesh acceded to the Convention against Torture and other Cruel,
Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) and the International Covenant on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) both on October 5, 1998 (United Nations,
1966b). Although all human rights are indivisible and interdependent, given that various aspects
of economic, social, and cultural rights have been discussed in other chapters of this Handbook,
this chapter largely deals with civil and political rights.
Article 31 of the constitution guarantees the right to life and personal liberty. As Islam (1995,
p.163) notes, ‘“[l]‌ife” within the meaning of article 31 means something more than mere animal
existence’; it includes the right to live consistently with human dignity and decency, the right to
the bare necessities of life, and all that which gives meaning and content to one’s life including
his tradition, culture, and heritage. Article 32 of the constitution provides that no person shall
be deprived of life or personal liberty save in accordance with the law. Although deprivation
can be covered by interpreting Article 31 in the right perspective, the framers of the constitu-
tion, given the seriousness of deprivation, thought fit to include a separate article limiting the
deprivation of human life.
The constitution also enumerates the principle of equality in accordance with international
human rights instruments. Article 27 of the constitution guarantees that ‘[a]‌ll citizens are equal
before law and are entitled to equal protection of law’. It is also provided that the state shall not
discriminate against any citizen on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, language, religion, polit-
ical or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, or other status (Article 28). The
constitution also recognizes that to enjoy the protection of law, and to be treated in accordance
with law, is the inalienable right of every citizen, and therefore stipulates that no action detri-
mental to the life, liberty, body, reputation, or property of any person shall be taken except in
accordance with law (Articles 31, 32).
It is also guaranteed in the constitution that no person who is arrested shall be detained in
custody without being informed of the grounds for such arrest, nor shall she be denied the right
to consult and be defended by a legal practitioner of her choice (Article 33.1).The constitution
also stipulates that

[e]‌very person who is arrested and detained in custody shall be produced before
the nearest magistrate within a period of twenty-four hours of such arrest, … and
no such person shall be detained in custody beyond the said period without the
authority of a Magistrate.
(Article 33.2)

The relevant provisions of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) as well as judicial decisions
dealing with the rights of arrested persons conform to this constitutional standard.

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Besides, the constitution guarantees protection from torture and other cruel, inhuman, or
degrading punishment or treatment for any individual. Article 35(5) specifically stipulates that ‘no
person shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment or treatment’.
This protection is guaranteed as one of the fundamental rights, derogation from which is not per-
missible under normal circumstances. The language of this article is taken verbatim from Article 5
of the UDHR. It reflects Bangladesh’s endorsement of an international standard prohibiting torture.
Under Article 4 of the CAT, each state party to this Convention must ensure not only
that all acts of torture as well as attempts to commit torture are offenses under its criminal
law, but also that they are punishable under appropriate laws. Although the prevailing laws in
Bangladesh do not have any precise definition of torture, there are a number of laws that penal-
ize conduct amounting to torture. For example, the Police Act 1861 provides that every police
officer who shall offer any unwarrantable personal violence to any person in his custody shall
be liable to a penalty not exceeding three months’ pay or to imprisonment, with or without
hard labor, for a period not exceeding three months, or to both (s. 29). However, this provi-
sion does not apply to Dhaka Metropolitan area (DMP Ordinance, 1976, s. 3), Chittagong
Metropolitan area (CMP Ordinance, 1978, s. 3), Khulna Metropolitan area (KMP Ordinance,
1985, s. 3), or Rajshahi Metropolitan area (RMP Ordinance, 1992, s. 3). Alternatively, the
respective Metropolitan Police Acts for these metropolitan areas provide that a police officer
offering personal violence and threats against any person in his custody shall be punished with
imprisonment for a term, which may extend to one year, and/or with a fine that may extend
to Tk 2,000. Similarly, the Penal Code 1860 – the principal penal legislation of the country –
criminalizes wrongful confinement of a person (s. 340) and acts causing hurt and grievous hurt
to any individual (ss. 319, 320).1 Given that the concept of ‘torture’ includes mental suffering,
acts of ‘criminal force’, ‘assault’, and ‘criminal intimidation’ are also criminalized under the
Penal Code. However, the CrPC contains provisions allowing a magistrate to place a suspect
in interrogative custody, known as remand, during which the suspect could be questioned
without his or her lawyer present. Most acts of torture occur during the periods of remand.
The constitution also sets forth a number of protections in respect of trial and punishment.
Ex post facto legislation is prohibited under Article 35; the same article also prohibits double
jeopardy. Besides, the constitution guarantees that every person accused of a criminal offense
shall have the right to a speedy and public trial by an independent and impartial court or tri-
bunal established by law; no person accused of any offense shall be compelled to be a witness
against himself; and no person shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading
punishment or treatment.
Besides these guarantees as to the protection of the life and person of an individual citizen,
the normative position in favor of democratic governance is also well accommodated in the
constitution.The constitution not only declares democratic governance to be one of the funda-
mental principles of state policy (Article 8.1), but also stipulates that

[t]‌he Republic shall be a democracy in which fundamental human rights and free-
doms and respect for the dignity and worth of the human person shall be guaranteed
… and in which effective participation by the people through their elected repre-
sentatives in administration at all levels shall be ensured.
(Article 11)2

In conformity with the international standard, the constitution also guarantees freedom of
movement (Article 36), freedom of assembly (Article 37), and freedom of association (Article
38). These rights are crucial for maintaining a democratic political environment in any society.

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 M. Shahabuddin

While the right to assemble or to form associations ensures active participation in any pol-
itical as well as non-political social process, the freedom of thought and conscience and of
speech often engenders the opportunity for creating the context and rationale for such par-
ticipation. Accordingly, freedom of thought and conscience is guaranteed in the constitution
(Article 39.1). Besides, subject to reasonable restrictions imposed by law, freedom of speech and
expression, and freedom of the press, are also guaranteed as fundamental rights of every citizen
(Article 39.2a).
Freedom of religion, in the form of the right to profess, practice, or propagate any religion,
and also to establish, maintain, and manage respective religious institutions by every religious
community or denomination, is also enshrined in the constitution (Article 41). The same pro-
vision also protects all individuals from compulsory attendance in ceremony or worship, or
compulsory education in any religion other than their own.
Yet, despite these constitutional guarantees, state practices often fall far below the consti-
tutional and, in this sense, international human rights standards. Law enforcement agencies
in Bangladesh often fail to uphold the legal standard while dealing with suspects or convicts.
The Rapid Actions Battalion (RAB), an elite force formed to ameliorate law and order
situations, has committed numerous extrajudicial killings (Table 22.1) since its inception on
March 26, 2004. Although RAB achieved limited success in destroying the ring of outlawed
underground groups as well as outlawed religious militants, in many instances RAB ignored
the due process of law while conducting its operations. A good number of deaths, under
some unusual circumstances, occurred during RAB’s raids, arrests, and other law enforce-
ment operations. RAB often defends itself by inventing stories that fit either ‘crossfire’ or
‘encounter’. During the period between June 2004 and August 2013, there were nearly
2,000 reported cases of extrajudicial killings (Odhikar, 2001–2014), of which 1,200 were
depicted as incidents of ‘crossfire’. Of these ‘crossfire’ incidents, 614 were reported to have
been committed by RAB alone, while the rest were conducted by police, other forces, or
joint forces composed of police, RAB, and Border Guards of Bangladesh (United States.
Department of State, 2005–2010). In most cases, the government did not take comprehen-
sive measures to investigate cases, despite public statements by high-ranking officials that the
government would show ‘zero tolerance’ and would fully investigate all extrajudicial killings
by security forces. According to the human rights organization Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK),
133 deaths occurred in custody in 2010 alone, including 74 deaths in prison. Many of the
deaths were allegedly the result of torture (ASK, 2011).
Since 2011, ‘disappearance’ or ‘secret killing’ has emerged as a new trend of crime, the rate of
which is very alarming as compared to any previous period. ASK reports 80 such cases of forced
disappearance in the first nine months of 2014; only in 23 cases were dead bodies found. The
number of forced disappearances in 2013 was 53, of which only five dead bodies were found
(ASK, 2013). In some cases, the relatives of the disappeared or persons killed alleged that the
law-enforcement agencies, particularly the elite RAB force, were involved with such activities
(ASK, 2012).The disappearance of the senior opposition leader, Elias Ali, in 2012 was one of the
most discussed issues in the national and international media regarding Bangladesh in that year.
In the face of the rising trend of disappearances, the chairman of the NHRC told the media
with frustration that ‘the strategy of extrajudicial killing has now been changed. Previously there
was crossfire, now citizens are picked up and then no trace of them is found. In many cases, their
families cannot even find the dead bodies at all’ (ASK, 2012). Very recently, three senior RAB
officials in custody have confessed to abducting and killing seven individuals including a senior
lawyer in Narayangonj in exchange for money offered by a local mafia group. This sensational
‘seven-murder case’ is currently being tried.

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Table 22.1 Extrajudicial killings, 2005–2013

Year Number of extrajudicial killings

2005 396
2006 355
2007 184
2008 149
2009 154
2010 127
2011 76
2012 70
2013 146

Source: United States Department of State

(2005–2013).

The constitution provides for freedom of assembly and association, and governments gener-
ally respect these rights in practice; however, quite often governments use the infamous section
144 of the CrPC to prevent opposition political groups from holding meetings and demonstra-
tions. The law made it nearly impossible to form new trade unions in many sectors, such as
the ready-made garment industry. (For a general discussion on labor issues, see Chapter 13.)
Civil service and security force employees are legally prohibited from forming unions. Similarly,
although public criticism of the government is common in Bangladesh, newspapers have to
depend on government advertisements for a significant percentage of their revenue. As a result,
self-censorship by newspapers is not uncommon. Moreover, by offering licenses to launch
new television channels solely on political considerations, coupled with shut-down of channels
owned by political opponents, the government in recent years has literally established a mon-
opoly over electronic media. In a number of cases, newspapers critical of the government were
shut down or pressured in various forms, and journalists perceived to be critical of the govern-
ment and those aligned with the opposition party face arrest (and even torture in custody) and
other forms of harassment from unspecified wings of the security forces and members of the
ruling party (United States. Department of States, 2005–2013). (Chapter 26 details the freedom
of the media in Bangladesh.)
According to the constitution, every citizen has the right to profess, practice, or propagate
any religion, and every religious community or denomination has the right to establish, main-
tain, and manage its religious institutions. However, paradoxically, the constitution also estab-
lishes Islam as the state religion. In February 2010, the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court
ruled that the Fifth Amendment to the constitution was unconstitutional. Ratified in 1979, the
Fifth Amendment overturned a previous law banning unions, associations, or parties based on
religion and stating that all citizens have a right to form a union, association, or party for what-
ever purpose they desire. The Supreme Court ruling returned avowed secularism to the con-
stitution and nominally banned Islamic political parties; however, the government made it clear
that the ban would not be strictly enforced. And finally, following the Fifteenth Amendment,
contrasting norms of Islam as the state religion and secularism coexist in the constitution. (For a
detailed discussion on the state of religious minorities and ethnic minorities in the Chittagong
Hill Tracts, see Chapters 25 and 24 respectively.)
In 2001, a High Court Division Bench ruled all legal rulings based on sharia, known as
fatwas, to be illegal. After a lengthy judicial review, the Appellate Division upheld the ban

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as part of a broader ruling against all forms of extrajudicial punishment. Despite this ban,
human rights groups and press reports indicate that vigilantism against women accused of
moral transgressions often occur in rural areas and include cruel, inhuman, and degrad-
ing punishments, such as whipping. (Chapter 23 specifically focuses on gender-related dis-
courses in Bangladesh.)
This gap in constitutional guarantees and actual practice highlighted in conventional nar-
ratives not only exposes the lack of a ‘culture’ of human rights in Bangladesh, but also justi-
fies a case for ‘more’ human rights, identifying new areas to be addressed, finding new ways
and techniques of advocacy, developing new terminologies, and so on – all within an inter-
national framework. In other words, the underlying assumption of these narratives remains that
a national legal framework in conformity with the international standard coupled with strict
observation of rule of law as well as a popular consciousness about human rights values is set to
achieve the universal good that human rights promises. However, this understanding of human
rights is problematized by an alternative approach to which we turn in the following section.

Strand two: human rights as a hegemonic language

In his oft-cited article, Mutua (2001) depicts ‘human rights’ as a metaphor that portrays an
epochal contest between savages, on the one hand, and victims and saviors, on the other. The
main authors of the human rights discourse – the United Nations, Western states, international
NGOs, and senior Western academics, among others – Mutua continues, have constructed this
three-dimensional prism of savages–victims–saviors (SVS) (p.202). Under this construction, the
‘savage’, which is presented as cruel and a negation of humanity, is not the state per se; given that
state is a neutral abstract concept, it is rather the cultural foundation – ‘bad’ culture as opposed to
something ‘universally good’ – that makes a state savage (p.203). On the other hand, the ‘victim’
is a powerless figure, a helpless innocent, ‘whose naturalist attributes have been negated by the
primitive and offensive actions of the state or the cultural foundation of the state’ (p.203). This
victimhood is often substantiated by relevant data in the form of annual human rights reports,
for example. And finally, the ‘savior’ – ‘the redeemer, the good angel who protects, vindicates,
civilizes, refrains, and safeguards’ – is often the above-mentioned key authors of human rights,
who prescribe policies and act on the basis of available data to ameliorate the human rights of
the victims (p.204). Seen through the prism of SVS, human rights discourses, therefore, appear as
a continuum of the Eurocentric colonial project, in which not only savages, victims, and saviors
are placed into superior and subordinate positions, but also solutions are sought to reproduce
European prototypes in very different cultural contexts (pp.204–205).Yet, the most far-reaching
consequence of understanding human rights through this language of power is that it prevents
human rights movements from gaining cross-cultural legitimacy, and as a consequence, human
rights as a concept remains something ‘alien’ – not homegrown, rather imposed from above by
international and local elites (p.206).
This proposition can be substantiated by a baseline survey conducted under the auspices of
the Bangladesh NHRC in 2011 to determine public attitudes and awareness of human rights,
among other things. The survey reveals that half of the respondents (50.2 percent) had never
heard of the term ‘human rights’, and 18.1 percent of those who had heard of the term could
not describe what it means (NHRC, 2011, p.10). However, the report rightly notes that the
lack of knowledge of the technical term ‘human rights’ does not necessarily mean Bangladeshis
do not understand the concept of having certain rights and being able to demand them. Yet,
the report recommends the inclusion of a basic definition of what human rights mean in all
information, awareness, and education messages (print and non-print) (NHRC, 2011). More

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interestingly, the chairman of the NHRC in his common foreword to four studies, conducted
under the auspices of the Commission and funded by the UNDP, makes clear in an unapolo-
getic way that

[T]‌here has been a growing concern that simply ratifying or legislating human rights
conventions and laws does not lead to the effective enjoyment of human rights in the
daily lives of millions of individuals. What really is necessary are initiatives that would
translate these broad and abstract human rights norms and standards into the vernacu-
lar of everyday life, transplanting these norms into ordinary human relations where they
can truly achieve their transformative potential.
(NHRC, 2012, foreword; emphasis added)

This is what Mutua’s argument draws our attention to: transplanting a very particular under-
standing of human rights norms, germinated in a particular cultural context and through a dif-
ferent historical process, into a very different socio-cultural context in the name of universality,
or translating an indigenous perception of rights and duties into that ‘universal’ vocabulary of
human rights is essentially hegemonic and, therefore, destined to remain alien.
And with an alien concept comes alien priorities that often do not reflect the ground real-
ity. For example, when the respondents were asked during the baseline survey about the major
problems in Bangladesh (as the report indicates, the term ‘human rights’ was not explicitly
used, for almost all problems facing a society have a human rights dimension), 80.9 percent of
the respondents replied price hikes of essentials, followed by electricity/gas/water problems
(51.6 percent), communication and road problems (44.7 percent), unemployment (30.6 per-
cent), education (24.5 percent), lack of income and employment opportunities (23.6 percent),
population (23.3 percent), lack of health care facilities (18.8 percent), non-availability of agri-
cultural inputs (15.3 percent), and corruption (15.3 percent) (NHRC, 2011, table 1).Very much
in this line, when the respondents were asked specifically about the rights they should have,
50.6 percent answered right to life, followed by right to education (46.4 percent), right to food
(40.2 percent), right to health (31.8 percent), right to shelter (30.8 percent), right to clothing
(17 percent), freedom of expression (15.3 percent), freedom of choice (13.1 percent), right to
equality (11.5 percent), and protection of person and property (8.7 percent) (NHRC, 2011,
table 4). When they were asked to prioritize these rights, a similar pattern emerged (NHRC,
2011, table 5).
Yet, the irony is that these basic needs of human existence have never been guaranteed as
fundamental rights under the constitution; rather they are placed under Part II of the constitu-
tion that deals with fundamental principles of state policy – principles that are otherwise sig-
nificant but not judicially enforceable as rights (Article 8).This bias in favor of civil and political
rights over economic, social, and cultural rights is a part of an old debate at the international
level. Although the UDHR (United Nations, 1948) presents a catalog of both civil and political,
and economic, social and cultural rights, when it came to the question of binding states with
strict legal obligations, enormous tensions erupted between the then major power blocs: the
liberal West advocating for civil and political rights, and the Soviet bloc emphasizing the pri-
macy of economic rights. The compromise came in the form of two different covenants of
1966: the ICCPR and the ICESCR.
Generally speaking, the post-World War II phase of international law was indeed set for reaf-
firming faith in and promoting certain crucial values: fundamental human rights, dignity and
worth of individuals, equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, among
others. In this new era, however, progression was equated to liberal values, and universalism

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simply meant the expansion of these values on a global scale. Through hegemonic languages of
power as well as incessant lobbying, advocacy, and activism of various international and national
actors, this structural bias in favor of civil and political rights has managed to endorse these
rights as ‘primarily relevant’ human rights in sharp contrast with the reality. This is what I call
here ‘alien prioritization’.
Although it is now well accepted that this division is arbitrary and human rights are indivis-
ible in nature, in his Bangladesh Compliance Study Report on ICESCR the author regrets that
Bangladesh has been mainly concerned about the civil and political rights. He therefore asserts
that since rights are ‘indivisible and interdependent’ we must not treat some as more important
than others. In particular, economic, social, and cultural rights are not subordinate to civil and
political rights, or vice versa (NHRC, 2012, p.1). The Chairman of the NHRC endorses this
in his foreword to the report:

the country remains far behind in realization of the rights and fulfillment of obliga-
tions under ICESCR. Government is yet to undertake adequate legal framework and
necessary administrative measures for adequate realization of ESC rights. Reservations
made by Bangladesh to some important provisions of the Covenant also have severely
limited its implementation at the domestic level.
(NHRC, 2012, foreword)

Another direct implication of this project of transplanting human rights is the constructed
need for expert knowledge; in other words, ‘professionalization’ and ‘bureaucratization’ of
human rights (Marks, 2012, p.318). As Odinkalu (1999) emphasizes, human rights in its oper-
ation in the Global South has been an object of specialized knowledge, while human rights
advocacy remains a privileged realm with limited participation by, even less accountability to,
the constituencies it is supposed to protect. On the one hand, he despairs, with overseas donors
as sources of reference and accountability, that the only obligations local human rights NGOs
have are reporting requirements arising under grant contracts; ‘[l]‌ocal human rights groups
exist to please the international agencies that fund or support them’ (p.3). On the other hand,
proliferation of human rights institutions and procedures has necessitated effective and efficient
experts to manage these institutional mechanisms, and through the bureaucratic indicators of
efficiency and effectiveness ‘a vision of the world is fostered in which we too hastily assume that
more meetings, more reports, more monitoring mechanisms, and more treaty ratification equate
to better social conditions’ (Marks, 2012, p.318).
However, it is not to undermine various contributions that human rights organizations in
Bangladesh have made in the field of gender justice, health, labor rights, environment, and so
on. Perhaps the question is more about inclusivity and agency: to what extent could NGO
activism for human rights accommodate subaltern perspectives on human rights, and to what
extent could the authors of human rights in Bangladesh use an alternative vocabulary of human
rights, different from the one handed down by their donors and ‘partners’, to engage with the
primary stakeholders of rights – the targets of human rights activism? Interestingly enough,
as the baseline survey reveals, when asked about the most common places where people had
heard about human rights, only 3 percent (the lowest proportion) of the respondents mentioned
NGOs (NHRC, 2011).
It is largely because of this alien nature of human rights, one might infer from Odinkalu’s
argument in the African context, that most Africans ‘do not describe their problems in human
rights terms’, for the knowledge of the contents of universal human rights norms will hardly
advance their miserable condition. And as he rightly concludes:

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People will struggle for their rights whether or not the language of human rights is
accessible to them. But they will not build their struggle around the notion of human
rights unless that language and those who wish to popularize it speak directly to their
aspirations and survival.
(Odinkalu, 1999, p.3)

This ‘crisis of human rights’ is by no means peculiar to Africa as the foregoing discussion on
approaches to human rights in Bangladesh substantiates.

Conclusion
‘Human rights’, therefore, appears to be a paradox for countries like Bangladesh: on the one
hand, it offers a necessary language to contain the state’s exercise of coercive power, on the
other hand, this very language then shapes the discourses on rights in a particular (and, for
this reason, hegemonic) way, and thereby undermines other, more inclusive ways of popular
resistance. Seen in this way, ‘human rights’ is a part of the problem as much as an import-
ant part of solutions to existing social injustices. Hence, dismantling human rights as a mere
alien concept would not take us much further; perhaps the real challenge remains in finding
ways to rearticulate human rights in a more accommodative fashion, to explore emancipa-
tory potentials of human rights in a non-hegemonic way. The success of human rights in
Bangladesh will largely depend on this promising project of rearticulating human rights itself.

Notes
1 Wrongful confinement means restraining a person in such a manner as to prevent that person from pro-
ceeding beyond certain circumscribing limits.
2 See also the preamble and Articles 7(1) and 59(1) of the constitution.

References
ASK. (2011) Human Rights Reports. [Online] Available from: www.askbd.org [Accessed: June 25, 2014].
ASK. (2012) A Review of Ain o Salish Kendra on Human Rights Situation in Bangladesh 2011. [Online]
Available from: www.askbd.org [Accessed: November 27, 2013].
ASK. (2013) Human Rights Reports. [Online] Available from: www.askbd.org [Accessed: June 25, 2014].
Bangladesh. Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs. (1972) The Constitution of the People’s Republic
of Bangladesh, 1972. [Online] Available from: http://bdlaws.minlaw.gov.bd [Accessed: July 14, 2014].
Bangladesh. Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs. (1973a) The Penal Code. Act No. XLV
(1860). Dhaka: Bangladesh Government Press.
Bangladesh. Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs. (1973b) The Police Act. Act No. V (1861).
Dhaka: Bangladesh Government Press.
Bangladesh. Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs. (1976) Dhaka Metropolitan Police Ordinance.
Ordinance No. III (1976). Dhaka: Bangladesh Government Press.
Bangladesh. Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs. (1978) Chittagong Metropolitan Police
Ordinance. Ordinance No. XLVIII (1978). Dhaka: Bangladesh Government Press.
Bangladesh. Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs. (1985) Khulna Metropolitan Police Ordinance.
Ordinance No. LII (1985). Dhaka: Bangladesh Government Press.
Bangladesh. Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs. (1992) Rajshahi Metropolitan Police Ordinance.
Ordinance No. XXIII (1992). Dhaka: Bangladesh Government Press.
Islam, M. (1995) Constitutional Law of Bangladesh. Dhaka: BILIA.
Marks, S. (2012) Human Rights in Disastrous Times. In: Crawford, J. and Koskenniemi, M. (eds.). The
Cambridge Companion to International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Mutua, M. (2001) Savages,Victims, and Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights. Harvard International Law
Journal. 42 (1). pp.201–245.
NHRC. (2011) Perceptions, Attitudes and Understanding: A Baseline Survey on Human Rights in Bangladesh.
Dhaka: National Human Rights Commission, Bangladesh.
NHRC. (2012) The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: A Study on Bangladesh
Compliance. Dhaka: National Human Rights Commission, Bangladesh.
NHRC. (2013) Study Reports. Dhaka: National Human Rights Commission, Bangladesh. [Online]
Available from: www.nhrc.org.bd [Accessed: July 10, 2014].
Odhikar. (2001–2014) Report on Extrajudicial Killings in Bangladesh. [Online] Available from: http://odhi-
kar.org/extrajudicial-killings [Accessed: July 3, 2014].
Odinkalu, C. (1999) Why More Africans Don’t Use Human Rights Language. Human Rights
Dialogue. 2 (1).
United Nations. (1948) The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. General Assembly Resolution 217A III
(December 10, 1948). New York: United Nations Secretariat.
United Nations. (1966a) International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. General Assembly Resolution
2200A XXI (December 16, 1966). New York: United Nations Secretariat.
United Nations. (1966b) International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. General Assembly
Resolution 2200A XXI (December 16, 1966). New York: United Nations Secretariat.
United Nations. (1984) The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or
Punishment. General Assembly Resolution 39/46 (December 10, 1984). New York: United Nations
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 23
THE STATE OF GENDER
Amena Mohsin

What constitutes the state of gender? Many social scientists in Bangladesh would argue that
although numbers are important, the state is not about numbers; but to understand the state
of gender or to make a situational analysis of women one needs to go beyond numbers. The
critical issue on the debate surrounding quantity versus quality is whether the numbers add
up to bring about a qualitative change in the lives of women. The latter indeed is not a homo-
geneous category. The category of woman cuts across class, ethnic and religious lines, with
each dimension defining its own parameters. The association of gender with women only in
the mainstream discourse is also interesting, though not surprising. It reveals the politics and
power associated with the societal construction of man and woman. The gendered division of
spaces, roles and attributes is about power relations. It is argued that despite much ado about
women’s empowerment, the continuation and often essentialization of the gender divides help
to perpetuate and recreate a cycle of power where women continue to remain subordinate
and marginalized. In other words, one needs to examine the structures and processes that build
up the edifice of power, instead of attempting to look at numbers only. This is not to suggest
that numbers are unimportant, but the argument around ‘critical’ mass often misses the point if
the mass is making a critical dent in bringing about qualitative changes in the lives of women,
or they remain mere numbers without having a trickle-down effect. In other words, both
numbers and their approach to issues and problems surrounding women’s lives and living are
critical.

Situating women in post-independence Bangladesh

No one can deny that women constituted an integral part of the Bangladesh movement. But
what needs to be interrogated is whether the women’s participation was subsumed under the
nationalist framework, which indeed is very much gendered, or as women in their own right.
The discourse that emerged following the liberation of the country points to the former, i.e., it
was well anchored within a nationalist framework.
Susan Brownmiller, who came to Bangladesh after the war, has referred that the Pakistani
soldiers raped about 200,000 Bengali women in 1971 (Brownmiller, 1975). Yet the 14 vol-
umes of officially documented history of the War of Independence carry only a few testi-
monies of rape.The government set up a rehabilitation center in each district for the affected

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 A. Mohsin

women. However, the centers did not keep any records of the affected women. It has been
alleged that many documents were burnt on state directives, since such records could bring
shame to the victims of rape.1 The idea at that time was to rehabilitate these women in
society as quickly as possible. Therefore at present no proper record of the rape victims is
available, nor were they ever properly compensated. According to Maleka Khan, who was
in charge of a rehabilitation center in Dhaka, a doctor at the center told her that during
the first three months of 1972, 170,000 rape victims had abortions and more than 30,000
war babies were born. This list, however, is not an exhaustive one, and excludes the most
marginalized women. Most of the war babies were given up for adoption despite protests
and pleading from their mothers. In this context Neelima Ibrahim points out in her two vol-
umes of Ami Birangona Bolchi (Ibrahim, 1998) that she called upon Sheikh Mujib to decide
on the fate of these children; his response was: ‘Send the children, who have no identity of
their father abroad. Let the children of human beings grow up like proper humans. Besides
I do not want to keep that polluted blood in this country.’ The attitude of the ‘father of the
nation’ epitomized the gendered attitude of the state and society. It reified the privileged
position of men in society and, more importantly, over women.
Brownmiller further pointed out that the Bengali men were not prepared to accept these
women; their own family members rejected some of them. In an attempt to elevate them and
make them acceptable to society, they were given the title of Birangona (war heroines) by the
father of the nation. The women activists, however, resented such a phrase at that time. It was
resented because the title did not offer them anything; in other words there was nothing beyond
the title. Moreover the expectation that the title Birangona would make them acceptable to
society did not really work out. Instead the women became marked. Such exaltations therefore
held no meaning for the affected women.
Ibrahim has detailed in her two volumes the frustrations and agonies of the Birangonas at the
state and society. In the seven cases narrated in the two volumes, the Birangonas express their
dismay at the state’s role in silencing them. They point out that the sacrifices of the freedom
fighters (mostly men) were properly recognized and acknowledged by the state. Roads were
named after them. Martyrdoms have been established. They and their children still continue to
enjoy many state benefits, and they are honored in many state functions. But the Birangonas are
nowhere. There is no memorial or road to remind the people of their sacrifices. They cannot
even come out and state with pride that they are the Birangonas. Hossain (2006) points out
the support and hope given to the rape victims and war widows by female activists, Neelima
Ibrahim, Bashonti Guhathakurta and Naushaba Sharafi, who toured the countryside and met
these survivors. Many informal groups gave welfare assistance, but in a war-torn country there
was little scope for bringing about institutional or cultural changes. The demand for justice and
trials for war criminals came in the 1990s, with Jahanara Imam playing a leading role. By the
mid-1990s a space was also being created for the Birangonas to add their voices. Researchers
and scholars, both at home and abroad, began asking questions. In this context, Mookherjee
(2006), apart from the domestic political context of the protests against the political rehabilita-
tion of wartime collaborator, Ghulam Azam and, the movement led by Jahanara Imam, the Gono
Adalot (people’s tribunal), also pointed to the international recognition of rape as a war crime
in the 1990s. Within this national and international political context, it became imperative for
women and human rights activists to search for the stories of Birangonas, to provide evidence
for the institution of war crimes trials. Female activists, at home and abroad, and the print media
played a critical role in bringing these voices out in the public domain, and one must acknow-
ledge that the taboo of shame surrounding the Birangonas is gradually giving way to them
being accepted and acknowledged as ‘joyita’, the victorious.2

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The above suggests the divergences that exist in the state versus societal discourses on
women in Bangladesh. This also suggests the contradictions that later appeared in the political
and societal landscape of Bangladesh.The state started its journey on the ‘woman’ question on a
patriarchal note; women’s movements and participation were active in the liberation movement
of the country. Bangladesh inherited these legacies at its birth.

State obligations: national and international

One observes an interlocking of the national and international/global on the woman question,
since apart from the state constitution, many of the laws regarding women, as will be seen below,
are the consequence of women’s rights movements. The movements are glocalized; they absorb
and interrogate issues based on their domestic and international contexts.

State constitution
The constitution of Bangladesh gave equal status to women in the public sphere. It does not
allow discrimination against any citizen on the basis of religion, race, sex, caste or place of birth
(Article 28(1)); guarantees women equal rights with men in all spheres of the state and public
life (Article 28(2)); entitles all citizens to equal protection of the law (Article 27); and endeavors
to ensure participation of women in all spheres of national life (Article 10). It also mandates
that nothing shall prevent the state from making special provision in favor of women or for
the advancement of any backward section of the population (Article 28(4)).3 Despite the con-
stitutional pledge of non-discrimination and equality for women, the latter were substantially
marginalized through the state retaining the personal laws. In Bangladesh there are two sets of
laws, public and personal. This was codified during British colonial rule. The personal laws are
based on religious edicts. It needs to be emphasized that each religion, as it evolved and spread
through the geographical and temporal space, absorbed the material culture of its place.The text
is often read out of context and given a patriarchal interpretation. The laws as they exist now
are discriminatory toward women.They significantly impact upon women’s lives, since the laws
regulate women’s property rights, marriage, divorce, child custody and guardianship rights. The
women’s movement in Bangladesh has consistently been demanding a uniform code of law for
men and women, but the state has denied it on plea of religion. The constitution of 1972 had
secularism as one of its state principles. The Proclamation of Order No. 1 replaced this in 1977
by the principles of absolute trust and faith in the Almighty Allah. Article 12, through which
communal political parties were banned in Bangladesh, was also dropped. These changes were
given effect through the Fifth Amendment to the constitution in 1977. The above changes
took place in the wake of the military takeover of the state administration in August 1975. The
entrance of the military into the political sphere itself is a highly masculine act that bolsters the
masculine notions of state and power. The induction of religion into politics and the revival of
religion-based political parties shrank the spaces for women.

National Women’s Development Policy

The National Women’s Development Policy (NWDP), announced on International Women’s
Day, March 8, 1997 was a big victory for women in Bangladesh. Under obligation to inter-
national conventions for legislating policies to do away with all kinds of discrimination against
women, the state formulated its first policy on women.The policy was a landmark as it brought
the private into the public, thereby seeking a break in the public–private divide, which is at the

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root of many of women’s maladies and their subordinate position. Consisting of 14 articles and
the mechanisms for implementing them, the policy covered areas ranging from women’s rights
and fundamental freedom, laws to do away with discrimination against women, all forms of
violence against women, women’s location in armed conflict, education, sports, economic activ-
ities, poverty, economic and political empowerment, housing, environment, mass media and the
plight of especially disadvantaged women. The NWDP addressed many societal and cultural/
religious values that have resulted in the structural subordination of women; this subordination,
it is argued, is a major cause of discrimination and violence against women and also a major tool
of silencing women’s voices.
The provisions for inclusion of the mother’s name along with that of the father on official
documents (Article 1(i)); recognition of women’s household work and its reflection in national
economic documents (Article 7.1); the need to ensure women’s equal rights in formulating and
implementing economic policies, trade policy, monetary policy, income tax policy and others
(Article 7.1); women to be given equal opportunity and share in wealth, work, market and busi-
ness (Article 7.1); for the economic empowerment of women, equal and full rights ought to
be provided to women in (among other things) inheritance and acquired property including
land and new laws to prepare for its implementation (Article 7.2) were all addressed. Article 8
dealt with the political empowerment of women through the provision for the increase in the
number of reserved seats through direct elections and the appointment of women in the high-
est bodies of decision making including the Cabinet. Article 4 dealt with women’s position in
armed conflict, and called for increased participation of women in peace-making (Bangladesh.
Ministry of Women’s and Children’s Affairs, 1997).
The above, if implemented, would indeed provide a broad space to women. It may be
mentioned that the policy was formulated during the Awami League regime, which is widely
regarded as a secular political party. But in 2004 the BNP Alliance government brought about
critical changes in this policy that undermined the position of women and was a major set-
back for the cause of women. The provision of equality of women in all economic policies
was replaced by women’s economic rights, as provided in the constitution; the provision of
equal rights to inherit property and land was dropped. The provision for direct elections to
increased reserved seats was modified by dropping the clause of direct elections, and also the
word ‘Cabinet’ was dropped from the provision concerning the appointment of women to
higher decision-making bodies (Bangladesh. Ministry of Women’s and Children’s Affairs, 2004).
One does not have to look very far to find answers to these changes. The BNP regime had
introduced religious elements into Bangladeshi politics and Jamaat-e-Islami was an alliance
partner in the government. According to Muslim law, as well as laws in other religions, women
(discussed later) are not entitled to equal inheritance of property. Jamaat’s ideology does not
believe in female leadership either.
Apart from these two major documents, Bangladesh has also passed many laws that have
a direct bearing on women’s lives. These laws were a fallout of the long-drawn-out demands
of women’s movements, the rights discourse in the international arena, donor pressures and
Bangladesh’s treaty obligations at the international level.

The international arena

Bangladesh has ratified all the six core human rights documents including the Convention
on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). The latter is
regarded as a landmark in the women’s movement, for it deals exclusively with women’s rights
and obligates states to transform the principles into reality. Bangladesh ratified the CEDAW in

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1984, though with certain reservations to Articles 2, 13(a) and 16.1(c) and (f), which accord-
ing to the government conflicted with sharia law based on the Holy Quran and Sunna. Later
it removed its reservations from Articles 13(a) and 16.1(f). Bangladesh’s failure to implement
Article 2 – which is considered the heart and soul of the treaty, as it obligates the state to take
measures to do away with all kinds of discrimination, including legal, customary and traditional
ones, against women and to take policy measures in this regard – has weakened its position on
women’s rights. This reservation is also contradictory to the constitution of Bangladesh, which
guarantees equality of rights and non-discrimination between men and women in all spheres
of life.
Nonetheless, these international conventions have gone a long way in strengthening the
national women’s movements. Legal interventions and policy advocacy have been strengthened
by references to international statutes and conventions. The Bangladesh women’s movement
has gradually familiarized itself with the international human rights framework, the UN system,
the conventions and instruments of international law, the processes of international conferences
and the national-level commitments to these international conventions or conferences.Various
national and international rights groups have succeeded in familiarizing the government and
various NGOs and interest groups with the various international conventions. The CEDAW
has been used to increase awareness of the different kinds of discrimination, their interlinkages
and the fact that the international community and the state have a commitment to eliminate
these discriminations. Women have been able to articulate their demands and back these up
using the language and weight of international human rights. The strength and significance of
the CEDAW for the women’s movement also lies in the fact that it was the force behind the for-
mulation of the convention and it is also the international women’s movement that participates,
through the CEDAW committee, in making states accountable for their progress in conforming
to its provisions.
Women’s organizations and NGOs are also increasingly using the reporting mechanisms
of the various conventions such as the CEDAW and CRC to engage with the state, critique
its reports and submit alternative reports and analyses. However, often the organizations that
participate in these processes are the national-level ones that are most comfortable and familiar
with the international processes. The international conventions have gone a long way in cre-
ating awareness about women’s issues and creating voices for women by addressing practical as
well strategic gender needs; and thereby creating women-friendly spaces in the processes and
institutions at the state and international levels. Through these conventions the local is linked
to the global and women’s alliances are forged across boundaries. It is argued that many of the
domestic laws referred to above are the consequence of these international conventions, more
specifically the CEDAW.

The public and private lives of women

Political participation
The issue of political participation is viewed in two ways: one is that of direct participation in
the party political process and the other is that of bringing in women’s issues as a political issue.

The political sphere

The concepts of mainstreaming, participation and empowerment are important components of
current ideologies, initiatives and assessments of women’s progress in political institutions (ADB,

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2004). In addition, current discourse regarding gender stresses the importance of the equal pro-
vision of all human rights for both men and women, including political rights. Politics has long
been a male-dominated field, for which women are thought to be unqualified and unfit, given
their traditional place in the private sphere of the home. In Bangladesh, many women have
themselves internalized norms that prohibit them from participating in political life (Gyasuddin
and Rahman, 2003). In Bangladesh, women are constitutionally guaranteed the right to be able
to participate in ‘employment or office in the Service of the Republic’ (Article 29(1)) and to
be able to form associations or unions (subject to any reasonable restrictions imposed by law in
the interests of morality or public order) (Article 38). They are, like men, allowed to stand for
publicly elected office after the age of 25 (Article 66(1)). Articles 9, 10 and 28 prohibit any dis-
crimination against women in any area of national life on the basis of their gender and proclaims
the responsibility of the state to increase their participation in such matters.4

National politics
The constitution of Bangladesh provides for a 300-member parliament known as the Jatiyo
Sangsad. Fifty seats are reserved for women who are nominated by the elected members of
the parliament in proportion to their party’s seats in the parliament. Women’s participation in
the electoral process has increased since 1979 and the scenarios have significantly improved.
For instance, in 1986 only five women won through direct election, whereas during the gen-
eral elections of 2014 20 women were elected through direct election. The overall percentage
of women’s seats in 1973 was only 4.8 percent, while in 2014 it increased to 20 percent. The
recent increase in women’s representation in the Cabinet is also noteworthy. For example, in the
1972–1975 period, of 50 Cabinet members only two were women. On the other hand, in 2008,
of 32 Cabinet members five were women.

Women and personal law: a gendered legal system

As suggested earlier, although the constitution recognizes equality of all citizens irrespective
of their sex, that does not guarantee that the women of Bangladesh enjoy their rights as equal
citizens. Though Bangladesh is a Muslim-majority society, women of all castes, creeds and reli-
gions are subject to a common male-dominated culture, besides being subject to their respect-
ive restrictive religious customs. Personal law, as practiced in Bangladesh, is religion-specific.
When it comes to decisive events and occurrences in women’s lives, these religion-based and
gender-biased laws restrict women from enjoying human rights as recognized globally.
In keeping with the famous feminist slogan ‘Personal is Political’, we need to look at the
legal forces that govern women’s personal lives in Bangladesh for a better understanding of their
conditions:

Marriage
Marriage in Bangladesh is based partly on religion or customary law and partly on statutory
laws, and contains procedural defects and lacks comprehensive coverage of human rights in
terms of: (a) choice of partner; (b) free and full consent of the parties to the marriage; (c) same
rights of partners to enter into marriage, implying (i) rights of both spouses during marriage
and upon its dissolution, (ii) rights of both spouses with respect to ownership, and (iii) rights
of both spouses with respect to ownership, enjoyment and disposition of property (Women for
Women, 2005, p.55). Discrimination against women in marriage, in customary laws practiced by

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the mainstream religious groups (Muslim, Hindu, Christian and Buddhist) as well as by some of
the ethnic communities, exists in Bangladesh.The problem starts with the fact that most personal
laws or religious laws are codified, and are based on the customary beliefs, tales and myths of
different groups. Gender discrimination or inequality is taken for granted and often uncontested
at the mainstream level; consequently even the most controversial and orthodox views are made
into laws.

Consent
In Muslim personal laws, a marriage is essentially a contract between a man and a woman. The
contract is civil in nature and therefore requires consent from both parties. It also prescribes
the consent of the woman when she reaches puberty, and she cannot be compelled by her
guardian to marry against her will; however, the possibility of this concept of free ‘consent’ can
easily be violated and twisted within the reality of Bangladesh’s culture, especially when the
idea of guardianship is brought in. This compulsion of consent is absent in Hindu marriage as
the woman is a ‘subjective partner’, and is given to the husband as a ‘gift’ for life by her father.
Among the ethnic communities where there are no codified laws, the consent of the guardians
of both parties is more important than the consent of the bride and the groom. In Christian
law, the consent of the bride and the groom is taken through a lengthy process by the respective
churches in a public manner (Khan, 2001; Women for Women, 2005, p.55).

Witness
Witness is mandatory in both Muslim and Christian law, but not in Hindu/Buddhist and eth-
nic laws/customs. In Muslim law, the criteria of witnesses is prejudicial and very gender-biased
as it requires either two male witnesses or one male and two female witnesses, making women
not only half the worth of a man, but also specifies that a man is mandatory to validate the wit-
nessing of the two women. Women are thereby made subservient to men by law (Khan, 2001;
Women for Women, 2005, p.55).

Divorce
Divorce is still a taboo and a divorced woman is looked down on not only because she is con-
sidered to be a ‘failure’ as a woman, but also because she is considered to be a burden for the
family. Divorce is never an easy option for a woman in this society. Through divorce she not
only enters a socially tabooed position, but also experiences the blatantly discriminatory and
unjust divorce system or procedure.
Under Muslim law, the husband has the unilateral right to divorce his wife, but the wife must
have the right delegated (Talaq-e-tawfeez) to her by recording it in clause 18 of her marriage
contract (as per the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance 1961).
Under Hindu law, marriage is based on destiny and is indissoluble, and divorce is not allowed,
thus compelling the woman to endure suffering in an abusive marriage. Under Christian law,
section 11 of the Christian Divorce Act 1869 is discriminatory against women: a Christian man
can obtain divorce on the ground of adultery alone, but a Christian woman must demonstrate
adultery coupled with cruelty, desertion, incest, etc. This determines women’s equal right to
divorce and related matters. It also allows men to get compensation from the person who had
illegal relations with his wife, but a woman can never claim such compensation. Moreover, a
woman cannot intervene in a suit to clear her name where she is named as an ‘adulteress’. This

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is not only discriminatory, but also humiliating and denies women dignity (Women for Women,
2005, p.68).

Maintenance/alimony
Under the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance 1961 and consequent laws, ‘a woman can
claim maintenance up to a maximum of six years even if she has means to support herself ’
(Women for Women, 2005, pp.69–70). But in reality, it is very difficult for a woman to gain
maintenance from her husband as the clauses that allow such benefits depend on compli-
cated interpretations and explanations regarding the woman’s place of residence, her moral
behavior, etc.
In Hindu law the provision of maintenance (in a variety of situations) is obligatory on the
part of the husband and/or his male relations, but it is actually an act of charity rather than a
woman’s right. In order to claim maintenance, a Hindu wife has to justify the reasons for living
apart (as there is no divorce in Hindu marriage), and has to prove that she is ‘chaste’ and that
she has not converted to another religion. The situation is equally difficult and discriminatory
for a Christian woman, as she too has to prove her ‘chastity’ in order to claim alimony from the
husband (Women for Women, 2005, p.71). In other words, the chastity and purity of a woman
needs to be grounded by law and religion, and the burden of proof lies on the woman. The
situation is better among the ethnic communities wherein these issues are settled by the com-
munity, and if a woman chooses to live separately from her husband, and remain single, the
community makes sure that her dignity, personal space and security is looked after and respected
by all community members (Women for Women, 2005, p.71).

Child custody
This is one arena that is most discriminatory toward women. Interestingly, this is a culture where
all religions consider the ‘mother’ to be divine and ‘motherhood’ to be the most respected state
of a woman; she is revered and worshipped, but ironically this same culture does not consider
a mother as equal or on a par with the father in terms of capacity, ability and status to have the
guardianship or custody of the child.
Under the classical Hanafi position for Muslims, the general rule is that after divorce the
mother is entitled to custody of the child until the age of seven for boys and puberty for girls,
subject to classical conditions, though there are some flexibilities as the ward’s best interest is
considered paramount under the terms of the Guardians and Wards Act 1890, and the mother’s
name must be included with the father’s name in the child’s documents. Under Christian law,
the terms and conditions are better in many ways, though it does have its share of discrimin-
atory conflicting issues, for example, regarding bringing up a child with a faith other than the
biological father’s faith (Women for Women, 2005, pp.71–72).
Hindu law declares the father the ‘natural’ guardian of his children but in the absence of the
father, the mother can be the legal guardian of the child and his/her property. The loophole is
that the mother can lose custody of her child if the father appoints (through a will, either orally
or written) someone else as the guardian of the child. A mother will be the legal guardian of an
‘illegitimate’ child, even if she gets married to someone else later on (Women for Women, 2005,
p.28). The reason behind this ‘female guardianship’ is very easy to understand: responsibility for
a socially unrecognized child should be the liability of the ‘unchaste’ mother, and the valuable
resources of a man should not be wasted on a child who has no legal father.

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Inheritance
The Muslim Law of Inheritance has very specific prescriptions for defining a man’s and a
woman’s share of property, and is governed by sharia law. Under Muslim law, the wife (or wives
taken together) get one-eighth if there is a child, and one-fourth if there is no child from the
estate of her husband, though the husband gets exactly double. The mother gets from the estate
of her sons one-sixth when there is a child of her son or when there are two or more brothers
or sisters or one brother and one sister of her son, and one-third when there is no child and not
more than one brother or sister of her son. On the other hand, the father gets from the estate of
his son one-sixth if there is a child of his son and in the absence of any child of his son, he gets
the entire residue after satisfying other sharers’ claims, and so on and so forth. It is significant that
the Quran provides that daughter, mother and wife would under all circumstances be entitled to
some share in the inheritance and are not liable to exclusion from inheritance, but they are not
treated as on a par with their male counterparts, i.e., son, father and husband, and to this extent
rules of inheritance are discriminatory. Women in fact were not given parity in the matter of
their shares, and as a general rule the female is given one-half the share of the male. The case
of a sister’s inheritance is equally discriminatory. According to the rule of nearer in relation-
ship excluding the remoter in relationship, children of a pre-deceased son or daughter would
not inherit if a person died leaving another son. This often rendered the child or children of a
pre-deceased child destitute. This inequity, however, has been removed by the Muslim Family
Laws Ordinance 1961, which provides that the children of the predeceased child would inherit
the share that the pre-deceased children would have inherited had he or she been alive. But the
widow of a pre-deceased son remains as helpless as before as she does not inherit anything by
this ordinance (Kamal, 1998).
According to Bangladeshi law Hindu women only get a limited share. They inherit life
interest in the property. No other female relations but the widow, the daughter, the mother, the
father’s mother and the mother of the father’s father are recognized as heirs. A daughter cannot
receive any property; she cannot get a life interest in the presence of a son, grandson and great
grandson. A wife’s right to her husband’s property is elaborately outlined in Article 8 of the
Indian Succession Act. It is stated that if a Hindu man fails to distribute his property through
a deed or testament, the inheritance will be determined based on Article 8 of the Hindu
Inheritance Law and according to the list described in that law. In this way, a Hindu widow
can demand the property of her husband under this law. Article 25 of the Hindu Marriage Law
states that a Hindu divorcee will receive a subsistence allowance from her former husband. It is
also stated that if the divorced woman does not marry again, does not engage herself in adultery
and does not earn enough, she is entitled to receive a subsistence allowance for the rest of her
life from her former husband. Women’s limited estate has been abolished and whatever prop-
erty has been or shall be inherited by a Hindu woman will be or shall be her absolute property
(Baul and Akhi, 2006).
A Christian woman is comparatively in a better position than a Muslim or Hindu woman
when it comes to the inheritance issue. She is protected under two Acts simultaneously: the
Married Woman’s Property Act 1874, which provides that the wages or earnings of any married
woman remain her separate property; and the Succession Act 1925, which makes the mutual
rights of husband and wife identical. Moreover, a Christian widow inherits, in the presence of
a lineal descendant, one-third of her husband’s property, and in the absence of a lineal descend-
ant, half of the property. A daughter is entitled to two-thirds of the property in the presence
of a widow and absence of siblings, or she can inherit all of the property in the absence of all
(Women for Women, 2005, p.33).

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The Buddhist wife or daughter does not inherit her husband’s or father’s property unless the
father gives away some portion as a gift. The only exception is the Marma Buddhist women
who inherit some property (Women for Women, 2005, p.74). Marriage and inheritance to a
large extent determine women’s location and positioning in the socio-economic and cultural
milieu of Bangladesh. The above laws are also impediments to women’s empowerment and
equality as human beings in society.

Women and work

Despite much ado about women’s empowerment through work, the relationship between
women, work and empowerment is much more problematic and complex than it appears on
the surface. The discourse on empowerment has overemphasized the visibility, mobility and
decision-making criteria to measure empowerment. It is contended here that empowerment is
a process. It is both tangible and intangible; in order for women to be empowered in a meaning-
ful way, changes are required in the socio-cultural values of society.The visibility and mobility of
women often implies more burdens for women, apart from their burden in the private sphere.
Patriarchy and the existence of personal laws are strong impediments to women’s empower-
ment. Personal laws, as discussed earlier, deny women their human rights as equal human beings;
this denial strengthens and reinforces patriarchy. Women therefore have to constantly navigate
and chart their existence through the locked system of patriarchy.
It cannot be denied, however, that despite the odds, women in Bangladesh have quite
successfully carved out spaces for themselves. The ready-made garments (RMG) sector in
Bangladesh is often looked upon as the epitome of women’s empowerment in the country.
There is no denying the exploitative nature of the work; women working in the garments sec-
tor in most instances are denied their minimal dignity as human beings. The garments industry
in Bangladesh has flourished with the exploitation of a cheap labor force, and the majority of
this force consists of women. Yet often women and girls have chosen this option for lack of a
better one. It at least provides them with a window through which they can look out and aspire
for a future. This aspiration, to take on the challenge to dream, for me constitutes the first step
toward empowerment. Women in Bangladesh have begun to dream, the given is being chal-
lenged as a construct and attempts are being made to develop a new imagination favorable to
and enabling for women.
The RMG sector, one of the dominant industries in Bangladesh, is a good site to examine
women’s location in work, since the majority of the employees come from the lowest strata
of society. This sector has had a significant impact on women in Bangladesh, for about 85 per-
cent of RMG-employed workers are women. This has led to the feminization of labor and
tied them to the forces and dynamics of globalization, for the RMG industry, with its woven
and knit sub-components, is predominantly an export-oriented sector with 95 percent of the
woven and 90 percent of the knit exports being directed to foreign markets. On the surface,
the employment of a large number of women in a vital employment sector is a positive trend; it
has made the women visible in an otherwise traditional society where purdah (veil) is regarded
as an important aspect of women’s chastity and not only the women’s but the family’s honor is
associated with it. But it needs to be emphasized that women belonging to the bottom strata of
society have traditionally worked outside their homes, so there is a class dimension to it as well.
The Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP) uprooted many women from their traditional
agricultural work, and made them migrate to urban sectors in search of work. The RMG pro-
vided them with a niche and a ‘safety net’ in which many of them were absorbed. Employers
also prefer women because they are considered more reliable – they point out that while men

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move from one factory to another within a span of three to six months, women prefer to stay
on; in other words, they are less mobile. This raises the fundamental question about the much
talked about notion of the linkage between economics and empowerment. Empowerment is
not a material concept that can be measured, though it might be a contributory factor; on the
other hand, empowerment is independence, autonomy, options and the freedom and capacity
to make choices and decisions. Women’s lack or slow pace of mobility from one workplace to
another therefore needs to be examined within the paradigm of empowerment, if it is due to
their lack of decision-making capacities or is motivated by social conditions.Through talking to
a number of garment workers, this author found that they prefer to move and live in a group,
and when they come to the cities in search of work it is normally through or with a known
person from their locality, so they have a social network and they prefer the security of that
network.The men are not constrained by such societal insecurities. In other words, the state has
failed to provide security to the women, which impedes their empowerment process.
This is not to suggest, however, that women have not renegotiated their position in soci-
ety. To take up the issue of purdah, when the female garments workers first started appearing
‘unaccompanied’ on the streets of Dhaka in the 1980s they had to face a lot of societal resistance.
To quote from a newspaper:

A group of girls … with faces in cheap makeup, gaudy ribbons adorning their oily
braids and draped in psychedelic coloured saris with tiffin carriers in their hands are
a common sight [these] days during the morning and evening hours. These are the
garment workers [a]‌new class of employees.
(New Nation, 1986, quoted in Kabeer, 2001, p.82)

The workers, however, faced the challenges quite boldly and renegotiated the concept of
purdah. They looked at their work as the means of their own and often their families’ susten-
ance and survival. They argued that people were good at criticizing but nobody would come
to their aid, so the criticisms had to be let go. Besides, they also believed that purdah is within
one’s eyes and mind; more importantly, they also considered that purdah is essential for men – in
order to be respected and honored they have to veil their eyes and state of mind. Thus through
different interpretations and even putting it across to men, they renegotiated the concept of
purdah (Kabeer, 2001, pp.82–141). This is indeed a manifestation of their conceptual maturity
and empowerment. It suggests that women are acquiring new and multiple identities as bread-
winners and workers.
Despite the above, one may term this empowerment ‘ambivalent’. The RMG sector is not
only infested with human insecurities. On the issue of human insecurity, which includes the
physical and psychological, one may take up the following issues.

Psychological and physical insecurities

Job satisfaction is an important component of the psychological well-being of the workers.
A study conducted by Pratima Paul-Majumder (2001, pp.172–207) found a wide gap between
the female worker’s expectations and actual realizations in the garments sector, with negative
consequences on their mental health.Women are mostly employed in low-skilled and hazardous
jobs like operators and helpers. The work is not contractual and they receive no appointment
letters; only identity cards are issued to them that allow them entry and exit into the factories.
Job insecurity is therefore a constant fear lingering with them. Her study found that 50 per-
cent of the garment workers worked in the factory in a tense mood. Comparatively more

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female workers suffer from stress than male workers. Some 61 percent of the female workers,
as opposed to only 20 percent of the male workers, reported that while working they were
always occupied with various worries, such as how to reach home at night safely, how to pro-
tect themselves from the supervisor’s anger, how to save their job. In the absence of day-care
facilities the mother workers also continually worried about their small children. It should be
mentioned that the existing labor laws of the country allow for day-care provision, but there is
none in these factories.
Psychological insecurity is indeed closely linked to physical insecurity. Most of the factories
are badly designed and there is inadequate provision for air and ventilation; thus fatigue and
tiredness is a common complaint of the factory workers. The extent of physical hazards varies
according to job category. Employment in the garments sector, it is suggested here, may bring
temporary relief or material well-being to the women and their families, but its long-term
implications are quite dire. One may also suggest that they take on these jobs for the sake of
survival rather than as a matter of choice, given the lack of options and closure of their trad-
itional means of livelihood, which again is a consequence of globalization and lack of a proper
development policy of the state. Women leave the jobs after three to four years with physical
impairments and consequently little prospect of future jobs due to their physical condition.The
notion of empowerment of women through employment in the RMG sector therefore needs
critical examination within the matrix of its long-term implications and the options available
to the women.
Women also suffer from extreme bodily insecurity. Fear of sexual harassment, rape, even
teasing is common. The female garment workers normally commute together for security rea-
sons. The fear of being raped always lurks at the back of their minds. Wage discrimination exists
between men and women. Legal provisions exist for the protection of women against harass-
ment, but since most of the workers are young and migrants from villages they are also unaware
of their rights. The factories have mostly been built in unplanned ways, so very few have pro-
vision for fire exits. Often factory gates are locked during working hours and consequently
deaths due to fire are on the increase in the factories; among the dead, women constitute the
majority. There are gross violations of the labor laws; corruption within the government as well
as the management is to be blamed for the situation. In most instances there is a close nexus
between the management and the government; at times the latter even owns many of these
industries. Trade unions are strongly discouraged by the private sector; besides, even where they
do exist they have often been co-opted by the management. Allegations of wide-scale corrup-
tion among the union leaders are not uncommon.
As argued earlier, women are seen as the culture-bearers of the nation. This visibility of
women is thus seen as a threat to the core cultural ethos of the nation by a large section of the
population who believe that the proper place of women is within their homes, and in order
to protect themselves they must keep themselves covered. The market is regarded as the men’s
domain; thus the public–private divide comes to the fore.The mobility of women and activities
of NGOs in the rural sector has given vent to fundamentalist forces, which finds a resonance
in urban sectors as well.

Concluding remarks
According to a UNICEF report (2014), Bangladesh has one of the highest numbers of
under-15 child marriages in the world. Some 74 percent of girls under the age of 18 and
39 percent of girls aged under 15 are married off in Bangladesh. Over 20 percent of girls
who are married off before the age of 15 become mothers of three children or more before

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reaching 24. The critical question to be asked with these numbers is whether the girls
were psychologically and physically ready to become women and carry the burdens of
motherhood. In a country where the concept of ‘child’ is missing for the majority of its
population, girls and women bear the heaviest burden. Bangladesh is making advances, but
these advances need to be unpacked through the lenses of class, ethnicity and religion. The
women’s movement in Bangladesh is a robust one and has indeed successfully brought to the
fore many issues critical to women’s lives, but the movement is still limited in terms of its
class base and often finds itself trapped within nationalist/national politics. The visibility of
women is also remarkable, but the cost of this is also very high. Bangladesh has created new
women, but not new men. Until this paradigm shift occurs, women’s struggle for recognition
as equal human beings with equal rights will go on.

Notes
1 Personal interview with Maleka Begum, women’s activist on June 30, 2014. Currently she teaches at
the Central Women’s University in Dhaka and is also a part-time faculty member in the Department of
Women and Gender Studies, Dhaka University.
2 The daily newspaper Prothom Alo used this terminology on the occasion of the observance of
International Woman’s Day in March 2014.
3 Constitution of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, as modified up to May 31, 2000.
4 Constitution of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, as modified up to May 31, 2000.

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 24
THE CHT AND THE PEACE
PROCESS
Bhumitra Chakma

A protracted armed conflict raged across the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) in Bangladesh for
nearly two-and-a-half decades before it came to an end with the signing of a Peace Accord
on 2 December 1997 by the Government of Bangladesh (GoB) and the Parbattya Chattagram
Jano Samhati Samiti (United People’s Party of the CHT, commonly known as the JSS). Since
then a post-conflict peace-building process has been under way. After 17 years, notwithstanding
success in some areas, the process has failed to build a durable peace as envisaged in the accord.
The key reasons for this are the inherent weaknesses of the accord and the GoB’s failure to
implement key provisions of it.

Background
The CHT, comprising three hill districts – Rangamati, Khagrachari and Banderban1 – is a distinct
region in Bangladesh in terms of its geography, topography and politico-economic-administrative
system and the ethno-national identity, culture and religious beliefs of its people (Al-Ahsan and
Chakma, 1989). Historically, it has been a distinct system in contrast to plains Bengal with its
own social and political processes (Mey, 1981). The British colonial administration delimited
the boundary of the CHT as a district in 1860. The CHT thereafter was administered by a
representative of the Governor General-in-Council of India separately from the areas of Assam
and East Bengal and, except for this representative, the administrative staff, including the police
force, were locally recruited from the hill people. The collection of revenue and dispensation of
traditional justice in social courts were the responsibilities of the three circle chiefs of the CHT.
The British colonial administration allowed self-rule to the hill people as much as possible,
which was strengthened by the adoption of the Chittagong Hill Tracts Regulation 1900 (popu-
larly known as the Hill Tracts Manual). The Manual outlined strict measures for the settle-
ment of outsiders in the district. This was prompted by the economic logic that the CHT
was endowed with limited cultivable lands, it being mostly a land of hills and forests (Mohsin,
2003, p.31). In 1920 the Manual was amended and the Chittagong Hill Tracts (Amendment)
Regulation 1920 declared the CHT an ‘excluded area’, independent of general administration.
In the 1935 Government of India Act, the CHT was declared a ‘totally excluded area’.
In 1947, the CHT, despite being an overwhelmingly non-Muslim area (97.2 per cent),
became part of Pakistan against the will of the hill people (Chakma, 1986). The Pakistani

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government introduced sweeping changes in the administration of the CHT. It abolished

the indigenous police force and gradually curbed the safeguard provisions of the Hill Tracts
Manual. Furthermore, various administrative, economic, developmental and other measures of
the Pakistani government had a profound impact on the lives and livelihood of the hill people.
The construction of the Kaptai dam (1957–1962) had devastating impacts on the livelihood
of the hill people. The dam inundated an area of about 400 square miles, including 54,000 acres
of cultivable land (40 per cent of the district’s ploughed land), and uprooted 10,000 ploughing
and 8,000 jhumiya (shifting cultivator) families, totalling about 100,000 people (27 per cent of
the district’s population) (Islam, 1978). The Pakistani government did not undertake adequate
measures to rehabilitate the displaced people (Ali and Tsuchiya, 2002). Consequently many hill
people crossed the border to take refuge in India in the 1960s.
The process of marginalization of the hill people accelerated after East Pakistan seceded and
became the independent state of Bangladesh. This occurred in the vortex of three processes –
(1) the nation-building and development visions of the Bangladeshi state; (2) the struggle for
autonomy by the CHT hill people; and (3) the ‘military-focused’ approach of the Bangladeshi
state to counter the autonomy movement in the CHT.
The ruling elites of Bangladesh, since the founding of the state, envisioned it as a typical
‘nation-state’ (Mohsin, 1999). This vision is reflected in the perceptions of policy elites, in the
constitution of the state and the nation-state building strategies that have been followed since
the country was born. Article 9 of the 1972 constitution reads: ‘The unity and solidarity of
the Bengali nation, [which] deriving its identity from its language and culture, … shall be
the basis of Bengali nationalism’ (Bangladesh Constitution, 1972, p.5). Furthermore, Article 3
(Part I) declared Bangla as the state language, and Article 6 (Part I) announced that the citizens
of Bangladesh were to be known as Bengalis. Put simply, the state was organized as an ideal
nation-state where diversities were ignored in order to create homogeneity in which the state
failed to ‘accord any recognition to the minorities’ (Mohsin, 1997, p.1).
The nation-building policies of Bangladesh directly flowed from the spirit and text of the
1972 constitution. From language policy to national history to school textbooks, all were
devoted to implementing the nation-state project. For example, the hill communities were
denied the right to be educated in their own languages. As if to reinforce the homogenizing
policy of the state, Prime Minister Mujibur Rahman stated in a pre-election general meeting
in Rangamati in 1973 that from that time onward the hill people would be known as ‘Bengali’
and they would have no other identity (Al-Ahsan and Chakma, 1989, p.968).
Against the backdrop of such a homogenizing and assimilationist approach to
nation-building, a resistance movement developed in the CHT. Indeed, ‘identity construction’
in the hills emerged in the form of ‘resistance to the hegemonizing and homogenising’ policy
of the Bangladesh state (Mohsin, 2001). In 1972, when the Bangladesh constitution was being
drafted, a delegation of the hill people met the prime minister and placed/made/outlined the
following four demands:

1 autonomy of the Chittagong Hill Tracts with its own legislature;

2 retention of Regulation 1900 in the constitution of Bangladesh;
3 continuation of circle chiefs’ offices; and
4 a constitutional provision restricting the amendment of Regulation 1900 and imposing a
ban on the influx of the non-hill people.

The prime minister rejected the demands of the hill representatives and advised them ‘to for-
get their ethnic identities’ and merge with ‘Bengali nationalism’ (Al-Ahsan and Chakma, 1989,

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 B. Chakma

p.967). In reaction, the hill leaders formed the JSS to spearhead the demand for the preservation
of their cultural identity and regional autonomy. The autonomy movement soon intensified.
Initially, the demand for autonomy was pursued by constitutional means. In the parliament,
the hill people’s parliamentary representative, M. N. Larma, made a sustained argument against
the assimilationist attitude and policy of the government. As Larma asserted:

You cannot impose your national identity on others. I am a Chakma, not a Bengali.
I am a citizen of Bangladesh – Bangladeshi.You are also Bangladeshi but your national
identity is Bengali … They [hill people] can never be Bengali.
(Bangladesh National Assembly Debates, 1974)

Larma’s pursuit of regional autonomy through constitutional means ended in 1975. Following
the 1975 bloody military coup, Larma went underground and organized a guerrilla force, Shanti
Bahini (SB, ‘Peace Force’; the military wing of the JSS), to press for regional autonomy for
the CHT.
Armed conflict between the Bangladeshi armed forces and the SB soon intensified. The
armed conflict challenged the Bengali elite’s vision of ‘national integration’ and the ‘nation-state’.
In reaction, the GoB massively mobilized its armed forces. It specifically peaked in the 1980s
and the CHT was virtually turned into ‘a vast military camp’ (Barua, 2001, p.70). By the 1980s,
a total of 115,000 military personnel were deployed in the CHT – one soldier for five to six
hill persons (Levene, 1999, p.354).
Together with the massive military deployment, the GoB also adopted a policy of trans-
migration of Bengalis from the plains to the hill. There were two basic objectives in the
adoption of this policy: (1) to enhance popular support for the armed forces to contain
insurgency and to create ‘strategic hamlets’ similar to that of the ill-fated American strategy
in Vietnam;2 (2) to pursue a policy of what came to be known as ‘we want the land and not
the people’.3
Immediately following the independence of Bangladesh, the settlement of Bengalis in the
CHT was initiated. Refugees returning from India after the 1971 war were rehabilitated in the
CHT, in some cases expelling the hill people from their homesteads and grabbing their agri-
cultural lands (Kamaluddin, 1980). Systematic transmigration was taken up from the late 1970s
(Anti-Slavery Society, 1984, pp.71–73). In the GoB’s own admission, 400,000 Bengalis were
settled in the CHT between 1978 and 1985 (CHT Commission, 1994, p.26). Consequently,
the Bengali population in the CHT increased from 9 per cent in 1951 to about 50 per cent in
1991. After 1991, the settlement of Bengalis continued, and still continues, although not under
the direct government-sponsored programme (Chakma, 2010).
The consequences of the militarization and settlement of Bengalis are multi-faceted. It led
to the dispossession of land by the hill people and made conflict over land more intense (Adnan
and Dastidar, 2011). More seriously, it led to large-scale massacres of the indigenous population.
The first massacre took place in Mubachari on 15 October 1979 in which both the armed
forces and the Bengali settlers were involved (Samad, 1980). In the following years, massacres
became more systematic (Amnesty International, 1986; CHT Commission, 1989 and updates
in various years). Levene asserts that the massacres of the 1970s and 1980s were the crossing of
the Rubicon from a ‘genocidal process’ to ‘active genocide’ (Levene, 1999, p.359). Against such
a backdrop, thousands of hill people became internally displaced and crossed international bor-
ders to take refuge in India (Debbarma and George, 1993).
Notwithstanding intense armed conflict, attempts to reach peace through negotiations were
launched from time to time, which eventually culminated in the signing of a peace accord on

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2 December 1997. The following sections analyse how an agreement was reached and how the
peace-building process proceeded in the following years.

Peace negotiations
Attempts at a negotiated settlement of the conflict are almost as old as the conflict itself. From
the 1970s onward, different governments attempted to resolve the conflict through negoti-
ations, notwithstanding the adoption of a ‘military-focused’ approach by the GoB to counter
the insurgency. General Ziaur Rahman took the first initiative in 1977. He constituted a com-
mittee called the ‘Tribal Convention’, comprising elders of the indigenous communities. The
key responsibility of the committee was to open a channel of communication with the JSS.
Between July 1977 and December 1978, the convention held four rounds of talks with the
representatives of the JSS before the process came to a halt. Two main factors led to the collapse
of the talks. First, the formation of the convention and its activities appeared as though the GoB
were trying to create an alternative force in the CHT, which made the JSS suspicious of the
government’s motivations. Second, from the standpoint of the JSS, a congenial environment for
a negotiated settlement was absent because of the massive deployment of the Bangladeshi armed
forces. The JSS felt that the offer of a negotiated settlement was nothing but a ploy to weaken
the armed resistance of the hill people.
General H. M. Ershad in 1988 took another initiative in which he publicly called for a
negotiated settlement of the conflict. The JSS was hesitant and had reservations about the offer,
but came up with the following set of demands: (1) autonomy for the CHT, including the
establishment of its own legislature, renaming the region Jummaland and constitutional recog-
nition of the Jumma nation’s right to self-determination; (2) removal of Bengali settlers who
had settled in the CHT after August 1947; (3) withdrawal of Bangladeshi security forces from
the CHT; (4) retention of the CHT Regulation 1900 and a constitutional provision restricting
any amendment to it; and (5) the deployment of a UN peacekeeping force (Chakma, 2012,
pp.127–128). The Ershad regime rejected the demands of the JSS and the initiative collapsed
even before formal negotiations started.
The Khaleda Zia-led BNP government, which came to power following the removal of
General Ershad’s military regime in 1990, undertook a fresh initiative for a negotiated settle-
ment of the CHT conflict. In July 1992 a nine-member multi-party parliamentary committee
was constituted to conduct direct negotiations with the JSS.The JSS responded positively to the
initiative and announced a unilateral ceasefire from 1 August 1992. The JSS advanced the fol-
lowing demands to the committee: (1) regional autonomy for the CHT with a regional council
recognized by the Bangladesh constitution; (2) restoration of land rights of the tribal people
with a ban on allocation of land to Bengalis from the plains; (3) withdrawal of security forces
from the CHT; (4) constitutional recognition of ethnic minorities and a guarantee that their
rights would not be altered without their consent; and (5) withdrawal of Bengalis who settled
in the CHT after 17 August 1947 (Chakma, 2012, p.128). The BNP government rejected the
demands, but decided to carry on negotiations. Both sides demonstrated considerable flexibility
and compromising attitudes to find common ground for a settlement of the conflict. By 1995
an agreement was nearly reached, but before an agreement was finalized, the government was
changed in Dhaka and an Awami League-led government came to power.
The new government constituted a 12-member national committee and, following in the
footsteps of the previous government, continued negotiations with the JSS. After seven rounds
of gruelling negotiations, an agreement was finally reached and the CHT Peace Accord was
signed on 2 December 1997.

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 B. Chakma

Explaining contributory factors

Several factors contributed to the conclusion of the accord. Three factors stand out.
First, conflict fatigue caught up with both the JSS and the Bangladeshi armed forces. Both
sides realized that a military victory could not be achieved and the problem was basically polit-
ical in nature; hence the path of negotiations was the best means to resolve it.
Second, the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s and the transformation of the inter-
national structure, which introduced profound changes in the geopolitical arrangement of the
South Asia region, played a significant role in the conclusion of the accord. Since the mid-1970s,
India had provided clandestine support to the JSS (Bhaumik et al., 1997), which it decided to
cease in the 1990s in view of the changed geopolitical realities. Consequently New Delhi put
pressure on the JSS leadership to negotiate with Dhaka for a political settlement of the CHT
problem. The ‘India factor’ played a critical role in forcing the JSS to come to the negotiating
table and modify its position on various issues.4
Third, over the years the GoB confronted considerable pressure from Western donor gov-
ernments, international organizations and international human rights groups to improve the
human rights situation in the CHT and resolve the conflict in a peaceful manner. Western
governments also began to tie up economic assistance with the improvement of human rights
in the CHT.The aid factor considerably influenced the decision of various governments to start
negotiations with the JSS.

Key features of the accord

The accord has four main parts. Part A terms the CHT as a ‘Tribal Populated Region’.This part
also stipulates the responsibilities of the two sides to make, change, amend and add rules and
procedures for the administration of the region. Part B deals with the existing three hill district
councils and details the amendments of the District Council Laws in order to strengthen the
existing power of those bodies. More subjects are added to the list of jurisdiction of the district
councils. The members of the district councils are to be directly elected by the people.
Part C deals with the issues relating to the creation of the ‘Chittagong Hill Tracts Regional
Council’. This part lays down the composition, power and functions of the new body. The
regional council will coordinate and supervise the activities of the three hill district councils and
municipalities of the three districts.The council will also be in charge of the general administra-
tion, law and order, and development activities of the region. Members of the regional council
as well as its chairperson are to be elected by the members of the district councils. A hill person
is to occupy the post of regional council’s chairperson. Fifteen members including the chair-
person of the 22-member council are to be from the hill communities.
Part D, under the heading ‘Rehabilitation, Amnesty and Other Matters’, deals with a range
of issues including rehabilitation of hill refugees – both India returnees and internally displaced
hill persons – as well as members of the JSS. This part also stipulates that a land survey in the
CHT following the rehabilitation of the refugees will be conducted and ownership of land will
be ‘recorded and ensured’ after proper enquiries. Further, it says that two acres of cultivable land
to each landless family will be provided. A Land Commission headed by a retired justice will be
constituted to settle land disputes. Other members of the commission are the concerned circle
chief, chairperson of the regional council or representative, a divisional commissioner/add-
itional commissioner, and the concerned hill district council chairperson. Additionally, this part
of the accord specifies that non-permanent military camps will be dismantled and the soldiers
of the dismantled camps will return to permanent garrisons. A fully fledged ministry dealing

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with the CHT affairs headed by a hill person will be created. It is to have an advisory council
to assist in its functions.

Explaining the peace process: its successes and failures

After 17 years it is evident that while the peace process has achieved success in some areas, the
accord has failed to deliver the envisaged goal of a durable peace in the CHT.
A key success of the accord is that it formally brought the decades-long conflict to an end. It
facilitated the demilitarization of the SB fighters. In the past 17 years, violence, notwithstanding
some infighting between indigenous groups, has not erupted to the level of the 1970s and the
1980s. Furthermore, the accord and the peace process introduced a notion of regional auton-
omy in the CHT, manifested in the formation of the CHT Regional Council. Some governing
power has been transferred to the local administrative bodies, i.e. the regional council and the
district councils.
However, the failures are more noticeable as the accord has failed to build a durable peace in
the past 17 years. The key reasons for this are: (1) the accord has inherent weaknesses as it did
not address some of the underlying causes of the conflict; and (2) the GoB failed to implement
the key provisions of the accord, i.e. provisions relating to demilitarization, indigenous land
rights, creation of an indigenous police force, etc. There are four issue areas that hampered the
building of peace in the CHT.
Issue 1 – identity: The issue of identity was a key factor in the rise of the conflict in the CHT.
The 1997 accord fell far short of addressing this key concern of the hill people.The accord rec-
ognized the CHT as a ‘Tribal Populated Region’ (Section A, Clause 1),5 but its specific impli-
cations and modus operandi for safeguarding and promoting the identity of the hill people is
limited.There are three reasons for this. First, the CHT is no longer a ‘Tribal Populated Region’
because the demographic character of the CHT has dramatically altered due to the transmi-
gration programme pursued by the GoB. Second, the accord is not protected by constitutional
safeguards; hence any future government can change it if it so wishes. Even a successful court
case can make the accord null and void. Third, the accord fundamentally contradicts the consti-
tution of Bangladesh, as it is a mono-national, mono-cultural and mono-linguistic document.
Without a constitutional amendment this contradiction will persist.
There was an opportunity to address the issue of identity of the hill people in 2011 when
the constitution was amended. The hill people demanded that they be recognized ‘indigenous
peoples’ in the constitution, but the Sheikh Hasina government refused to accord such a status
to the hill people.
Issue 2 – settlement of Bengalis: The issue of Bengali settlement has emerged as the central
concern of the hill people ever since the GoB adopted the transmigration programme in the
1970s. It dramatically changed the demographic character of the CHT and the hill people
began to fear that the ultimate aim of the GoB was to exterminate them.This issue was not even
mentioned in the accord. The JSS leaders subsequently claimed that there was an ‘unwritten
understanding’ between the two parties regarding the repatriation of Bengali settlers from the
CHT, but the GoB rejected the claim.6
Issue 3 – land rights: Land rights is a central concern of the hill people. For one thing, land
occupies a central place in the culture and livelihood of indigenous communities around the
world.The construction of the Kaptai dam, as noted above, inundated 40 per cent of the cultiv-
able land of the CHT and displaced 27 per cent of its population, which severely affected the
livelihood of the hill people. The in-migration programme adopted by the GoB in the 1970s
and the 1980s sharpened disputes over land in the CHT. Furthermore, lands were dispossessed

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when about 50,000 hill people took refuge in India in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, a large
number of the refugees have complained that they have not got back their lands since returning
from India.7 The 1997 accord stipulated that lands would be returned to their owners once the
ownership rights were determined. For this, a land commission would be constituted in due
course. The CHT Land Commission was formed several times, but it remained non-functional
due to political and procedural complexities. The passage of the CHT Land Commission Act
2001 also raised controversy because it reduced the geographical jurisdiction of the commission
and provided too much power to the non-indigenous chairperson of the commission.8 Indeed,
no progress has been made on the issue of land rights of the indigenous people and the return
of dispossessed lands to the owners since the accord was signed in 1997.
Issue 4 – demilitarization: Militarization of the CHT had been a key anti-insurgency strat-
egy of the GoB and the Bangladeshi armed forces were responsible for a number of massacres
and human rights violations in the CHT (CHT Commission, 1989 and updates in various
years). The hill people perceive the Bangladesh military to be the main source of their insecur-
ity. Therefore, from the perspective of the hill people, demilitarization of the CHT is essential
to ensure their security and for building a durable peace. The GoB promised in the accord to
withdraw the temporary camps, but that has not occurred in the past 17 years. The JSS leaders
have complained that Dhaka has no intention of demilitarizing the CHT as was promised in
the accord. As of March 2002, only 35 out of 520 temporary military camps were closed down
(International Working Group for Indigenous Affairs, 2002, p.318). Since then no progress has
been made on demilitarization.
The 1997 accord failed to address these four key concerns of the hill people in a manner
that could facilitate the building of trust and a durable peace in the conflict-torn CHT. In other
words, the accord and the peace process failed to remove the underlying causes of the conflict;
hence arguably it is not surprising that the accord has failed to deliver what was expected even
though 17 years have passed since the signing of the accord. According to a scholar: ‘While the
1997 accord had built and consolidated on the earlier attempts at peacemaking in the CHT, it
had failed to address the major demands and concerns of the Hill people’ (Mohsin, 2003, p.41).
Similarly, the Chakma chief has voiced concerns about the lack of ‘political will’ on the part of
the GoB. He states:

[t]‌he government side never really believed in implementing all its commitments but
was ready to promise the earth to induce the guerrillas to lay their arms down and
come back to normal life. Once the guerrillas gave up their arms, there was little they
could do.
(Roy, 2003, p.16)

Furthermore, there are several other administrative and procedural issues that rendered the
peace building ineffective. For example, no election for the CHT Regional Council and the
district councils has taken place so far. It undermined the peace-building process.
Additionally, the three-tiered administrative system is yet to be fully functional. Although the
regional council has been created, it remains a lame duck without a proper functional structure
or power. The relationship between the regional council and the three district councils is yet
to be defined.
The district councils also run on the basis of ad hoc functional rules and regulations.They are
yet to be fully functional. Power has not yet been fully devolved to these bodies as was stipulated
in the accord (Section B, Clauses 34 and 35). Power in 15 areas was transferred in 1989–1990

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when the district councils were created (before the signing of the accord). No significant step
has been taken for the devolution of power since the accord was concluded in 1997.
The Ministry of Chittagong Hill Tracts Affairs (MOCHTA) is also beset with similar prob-
lems.The rules and regulations that will guide the relationship between the MOCHTA and the
councils in the CHT have so far not been defined. The GoB has also yet to lay out a system of
coordination between the MOCHTA and other ministries of the government.
As the above discussion highlights, key provisions of the peace accord have yet to be imple-
mented, even though 17 years have passed. Indeed, successive governments since the conclusion
of the accord have demonstrated minimal ‘political will’ to implement the provisions of the
accord.

Conclusion
Although the conclusion of the accord raised hopes for peace, the peace process has not pro-
duced the intended outcome even after 17 years of peace building. As discussed in this chapter,
there are four key issues in the CHT conflict: the identity of the hill people, repatriation of
Bengali settlers, land rights of the indigenous population and demilitarization of the region.
These issues have not been addressed in the 1997 accord nor in the subsequent peace-building
process. Consequently, peace remains a distant goal in the CHT.
The non-implementation of the accord has created a pessimistic atmosphere regarding pros-
pects for peace in the CHT. According to Amena Mohsin, ‘Frustration, resentment, anger, and,
to a certain extent, feeling of helplessness and entrapment are pervasive among the Hill people
in the post-accord CHT’ (Mohsin, 2003, p.59). The JSS leaders have expressed frustration over
the non-implementation of the accord and have threatened to take up arms again.
Consequently, a protracted and arguably more complex phase of the conflict has started in
the post-accord CHT. This conflict is, on the one hand, between pro- and anti-accord factions
of the hill people and between the hill people and Bengali settlers, on the other. A section of
the hill people, the United People’s Democratic Front, Hill Women Federation, etc., opposed
the accord from the beginning because they thought the accord failed to address the key con-
cerns of the hill people. Violence between anti- and pro-accord factions began soon after the
conclusion of the accord. Meanwhile, land disputes between the hill people and Bengalis have
increased in the post-accord era. The CHT in all likelihood is heading towards more violence
in the coming years.

Notes
1 The British delimited the boundaries of the CHT as an administrative unit in 1860. In 1947 it became
a part of Pakistan as a district. In the 1980s, the CHT was divided into three separate districts.
2 The former Deputy Commissioner of Chittagong district has provided an inside account of the Bengali
settlement programme. He opposed the programme because he thought that it would have a disastrous
impact on the indigenous communities (Choudhury, 2010).
3 The statement was made by the General Officer Commanding of the Chittagong Division of the
Bangladeshi armed forces, Major-General Abul Manzur, on 26 March 1977 at a public meeting (quoted
in Mohsin, 1999, p.111). This policy is consistent from the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent
state. In 1972, Prime Minister Mujibur Rahman threatened a delegation from the CHT with the warn-
ing that if they did not abandon the regional autonomy demand, the government would eliminate them
by settling thousands of Bengalis in the CHT (van Schendel, 1992, fn 80, p.117).
4 An anonymous JSS spokesperson even termed the 1997 accord an ‘Indian accord’. Interview, July
20, 2007.

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5 Clause 1 of the accord reads: ‘Both sides, considering CHT as Tribal Populated Region, recognized the
necessity for protection of the character of this region and for overall development of it.’
6 There was possibly an unwritten agreement on the issue of repatriation of Bengali settlers because
the JSS leaders perhaps would not have concluded the 1997 accord without addressing this issue.
They were well aware of the centrality of the issue in the CHT conflict and knew that if they failed
to address the issue in some way their political future could be jeopardized. Yet they agreed to keep
it unwritten because GoB representatives explained to them that if it was made a written provi-
sion the government would not be able to withstand the political backlash that it would generate.
According to the Peace Campaign Group, the government representative insisted on keeping this
unwritten; they argued: ‘The domestic constituency does not allow the simple majority Awami
League Government to openly address the issue in the agreement … because once the issue is
addressed in the agreement, the opposition parties, particularly the Bangladesh Nationalist Party
(BNP), will come out in the streets with mass agitation that can even raise the question of survival
of the government in power. In that situation, the possibility of an agreement between the two sides
will be jeopardized. Of course, the Government understands and supports the concerns of the JSS
over the issue and can include some provisions in the agreement for the gradual removal of the set-
tlers from the CHT’ (quoted in Roy, 2003, fn 23, p.30).
7 In a survey, 97 per cent of the hill refugees complained that they were not properly rehabilitated
(Mohsin, 2003, p.72).
8 The chairperson of the regional council raised 19 objections to the Act, including one that it provided
too much power to the non-indigenous chairperson of the commission. According to this Act, the
chairperson’s decision is final if there is no consensus on any issue.

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Available from: http://archive.thedailystar.net/forum/2010/april/broken.htm [Accessed: 18 October
2015].
CHT Commission. (1989 and updates in 1992, 1994, 1997 and 2000) Life Is Not Ours: Land and Human
Rights in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh. Dhaka: IWGIA and Chittagong Hill Tracts Commission.
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Copenhagen: IWGIA.
Islam, S. N. (1978) The Karnafuli Project: Its Impact on the Tribal Population. Public Administration
(Chittagong University). 3 (2).
Kamaluddin, S. (1980) A Tangled Web of Insurgency. Far Eastern Economic Review. 23–29 May.
Levene, M. (1999) The Chittagong Hill Tracts: A Case Study in the Political Economy of ‘Creeping’
Genocide. Third World Quarterly. 20 (2). pp.339–369.
Mey, W. E. (1981) Political System in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh: A Case Study. In: von
Fure-Haimendorf, C. (ed.). Asian Highland Societies in Anthropological Perspective. New Delhi: Sterling
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Mohsin, A. (1997) Militarisation and Human Rights Violations in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Paper pre-
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Mohsin, A. (2001) The State of ‘Minority’ Rights in Bangladesh. Colombo: International Centre for Ethnic
Studies.
Mohsin, A. (2003) The Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh: On the Difficult Road to Peace. Boulder: Lynne
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Bangladesh. Modern Asian Studies. 26 (1). pp.95–128.

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 25
RELIGIOUS MINORITIES
Meghna Guhathakurta

According to the 2011 census Bangladesh population constitutes the following propor-
tions: Muslim (89.7 percent), Hindu (9.2 percent), Buddhist (0.7 percent), Christian (0.3 per-
cent),Animist and believers in indigenous faiths (0.1 percent) (Bangladesh. Bureau of Educational
Information and Statistics, 2014). Hindus, Buddhists and Christians, who constitute the major
groups of religious minorities, are located all over Bangladesh and ethnically they constitute the
majority Bengalis of the plain land, but also include ethnic minorities. Among ethnic minorities
Chakmas and Marmas are predominantly Buddhists; Barmans and Tripuras, and some Santals
are Hindus; others are animists, and Christianity is predominant in many indigenous groups, the
largest being the Garos. Geographically, religious minorities are found in every district, although
popularly the broader Khulna Division and coastal areas of the south are often known as the
Hindu Belt; Buddhists are usually found in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Cox’s Bazar, Noakhali,
Comilla and Patuakhali. Christians are located all over Bangladesh, but they have a predominant
presence among the Garos who occupy the area around the Madhupur Forests and also among
the smaller indigenous groups in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, especially in the Bandarban, the
southernmost district of the Hill Tracts bordering Myanmar.

Historical context
Although Bangladesh is known to the contemporary world as a Muslim-majority country, its
regional history, which dates back to before 500 bce, is a multi-religious one. The deltaic geog-
raphy of the region has brought in many traders from places as varied as Tibet, north India, Persia,
Southeast Asia, China, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Arabia. Hence even in pre-colonial times, state
power has often changed hands from local kingdoms to Afghans,Turks, North Indians, Arakanese
and Ethiopians. Religion has had a crucial role to play in this exchange. In more popular histor-
ical texts, ancient Bengal was characterized by a ‘Sanskritik civilization’ that either took the form
of a ‘homegrown’ hierarchical agrarian society presided over by a Brahman priest, or an egalitar-
ian agrarian society organized around Buddhist monastic institutions. The latter-day religions of
Islam and Christianity were often seen as invasive or intrusive influences from outside, the former
as a result of the conquest in thirteenth century by Muhammad Bhaktiyar and the latter through
colonialism by European powers, beginning with the Portuguese. But if this was the total story,
then contemporary Bangladesh would be hard to fathom. Richard Eaton, in his book The Rise of

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Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (1993), explains how, over a period of centuries, Bengalis,
mostly in eastern Bengal, gradually indigenized Islamic elements by adding them to pre-existing
beliefs, thereby creating a completely new blend of Bengali and Islamic world views. In addition,
out of all of India’s interior provinces, it was only in Bengal that a majority of the indigenous
population adopted the religion of the ruling class, Islam. This outcome was a fateful one as it
impacted on the 1947 division of British India into India and Pakistan on the basis of the dis-
tribution of Muslims! It also foreshadowed the state of Bangladesh that would emerge centuries
later. Globally, too, Bengalis constitute the second largest Muslim ethnic populace after the Arabs
(Guhathakurta and van Schendel, 2013).
Over the centuries one can note a kind of syncretism in the intermingling of different
cultures and religions, although this did not preclude interfaith rivalry and violence. However,
the colonial and post-colonial tract of history, especially the partition of the South Asian sub-
continent in 1947, gave rise to the concept of majority/minority communities along religious
lines. The dominant majority in India was the Hindus and the Muslims constituted the dom-
inant group in Pakistan. The communal holocaust that accompanied the creation of Pakistan
and India created an atmosphere in which religious politics came to play an important part, in
‘secular’ India as well as Islamic Pakistan. This trend disguised and marginalized the existence
of other ethnic minorities that formed the reality of South Asia. The language movement in
Bangladesh (former East Pakistan) that was distinctly different from the trend described above,
notwithstanding that there remained ethnic groups whose welfare or fundamental rights were
ignored and trampled upon in the name of national integration.

State ideology: use of religious ideology as an instrument

of state oppression
Every state needs to have a semblance of ideological consensus in order to sustain and consoli-
date its rule over the polity. For Pakistan this consensus was Islam. It served two purposes: (1) it
helped to reassert the identity of Pakistan (homeland for Muslims) vis-à-vis India or Hindustan
(homeland for Hindus) and helped to couch the liberation struggle of the Bengalis as an Indian
conspiracy against Pakistan’s integrity; and (2) it helped to rally together the right-wing elem-
ents like the Muslim League and the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) on a common platform with the
Pakistani armed forces – their common agenda being the elimination of the seeds of Bangali
nationalism from the soil of East Pakistan/Bangladesh.
It is this position, coupled with the majoritarian state structure, that created in Pakistan the
breeding ground for a politics in which non-Muslims were construed as second-class citizens.
Hindus not only formed the majority of this group, but, because of the historical relations with
India, were perceived as the ‘enemy within’. They therefore became hostages to the politics of
the dominant society and state. Mass out-migration of Hindus from Pakistan has been estimated
to be 5.3 million or 538 persons each day since 1964. The number reached as high as 703 per-
sons per day between 1964 and 1971 (Guhathakurta, 2002).
The above-mentioned reasons contributed toward Pakistan’s propaganda in terming the
Liberation War as an Indian conspiracy, with Hindus and Awami Leaguers specifically targeted
and freedom fighters termed Indian infiltrators. In 1971, 90 percent of Hindu households
were affected. Not only were their assets and properties destroyed, but they were also sub-
jected to daily humiliations such as being physically examined while traveling for signs of
circumcision, in order to determine whether they were Muslims or non-Muslims. As a result
of this attempt by the Pakistan authorities to communalize the crisis, the percentage of Hindu
refugees increased to many times that of Muslim refugees. In August 1971, for example, the

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religious composition of the refugees consisted of 6.71 lakh Hindus and 5.41 lakh Muslims
(Bhasin, 2003).
The new constitution of Bangladesh in 1972 laid down the principle of ‘secularism’ as one
of the basic tenets of statehood. This could be seen as a response to the destructive role that
reactionary forces played during the Bangladesh Liberation War in the name of Islam. This
was soon compromised, as would appear from the nature of politics and policies that subse-
quently emerged in the country. After the overthrow of the first government by a military
coup, two military-led regimes liberally used Islam both as leverage to win diplomatic friends
in the Middle East and also to legitimize themselves with the people, especially in rural areas.
Fundamentalist forces regained lost ground as secularism was replaced in the amended consti-
tution of 1977 by an absolute trust in Allah, and Islam became the state religion by the Eighth
Amendment of 1988. JI took full advantage of these developments, and ironically was also
strengthened by their participation in pro-democratic movements against the Ershad autocracy
and populist Islamist policies.
All of these developments had an adverse effect on minority communities. Their sense
of alienation deepened as the religion of the dominant majority became ensconced in the
national identity of Bangladesh, as reflected by the Eighth Amendment of the constitution
declaring ‘Islam as State Religion’. Although this did not preclude the peaceful observation
of minority religion, there was hardly any debate in the national assembly at the time of
adoption.
Minority groups within Bangladesh also faced threats and intimidation as retaliation for the
attacks on the Babri Mosque in India in 1992 by radical Hindu fundamentalists. This brought
about a backlash against Hindu temples, lives and properties. Even Christians and Buddhists
were not spared. There were reasons to believe that these acts of omissions and commissions
were also politically instigated. The Ershad regime, facing pressure from the opposition coali-
tion for free and fair elections under a caretaker government, found it politically expedient to
divert attention by letting communal forces take the upper hand. This was the beginning of the
politicization of religion that was to take extreme forms during the elections of 2001 and the
pre-election violence of 2013. These will be dealt with in a later section. But first let us review
some of the systemic roots of the discrimination that causes social exclusion of minorities in
contemporary Bangladesh.

Systemic discrimination and exclusion: the Vested Property

Act and dispossession of Hindu-owned land (often extended to
other minority groups)
When the two-nation theory was accepted by the Muslim League in the 1930s, it gave rise to
a Muslim identity politics that became part and parcel of an official discourse in the state of
Pakistan. In East Pakistan, this discourse had consequences for a large part of the Hindu landed
gentry residing within the borders of what was to become Pakistan after the partition of the
subcontinent. The violence that accompanied Partition caused many Hindus to flee in large
numbers, mostly on the Punjab front, but also in waves on the Eastern flanks, i.e., the Bengal
border. As many accounts of Partition recount (Guhathakurta, 2004), the movement on the
Bengal border occurred in waves and peaked during the communal riots of the 1950s and 1960s,
just prior to and after the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war. This massive flow of out-migration created
a serious administration problem of managing the left-behind property of evacuees. Using this
as an excuse, and with the growing hostilities with India, the Pakistani state promulgated some

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detrimental Acts and Ordinances, which were to leave behind the legacy of communal politics
for many years to come.
The Act that helped to destroy the fabric of communal harmony in East Bengal was made
under an executive order on September 9, 1965, during the Indo-Pakistan War, and was called
the Enemy Property (Custody and Registration) Order II 1965. Preceding this Act there were
many smaller Acts promulgated to administer the properties of the evacuees and which paved the
way for this ultimate Act. These were the Government of East Bengal Requisition of Property
Act (Act XIII of 1948) as a temporary measure for three years, which, indirectly through the
Ordinance No.V/80.5.2, continues to have an impact in contemporary times. Other such Acts
were the East Bengal Evacuees (Administration of Immovable Property) Act 1951, the East
Pakistan Disturbed Persons Rehabilitation Ordinance 1964, Ordinance I of 1964. All these
Acts created the pretext for the state to intervene, supervise, manage and later even transfer
the property of evacuees and persons dislocated and affected by communal disturbances. Such
Ordinances alienated the Hindu minorities in Bangladesh, and later other religious and indi-
genous communities as well, from their ownership, entitlement and right to manage their own
property. Such a legal regime readily lent itself to manipulation by vested interest groups and the
adoption of corruption and malpractice by the administration (Barkat et al., 2008, pp.49–51).
In the Enemy Property Act, India was declared as an enemy territory and all enlisted prop-
erties of the ‘enemy’, meaning minorities who had fled to India, were to be confiscated by the
state for management, and benefits accruing from business relating to such properties would also
fall under the control of the state. The war lasted only 17 days. But the way in which these Acts
alienated and dispossessed the minority community in the years to come raised questions about
the ulterior motive behind them.
With the independence of Bangladesh, the Enemy Property Act should logically have been
abolished, as it was not in line with the spirit of the 1972 constitution, nor the proclamation of
independence (April 10, 1971). But immediately after liberation, on March 26, 1972 the gov-
ernment of Bangladesh enforced the Bangladesh Vesting of Property and Assets Order 1972,
by virtue of which properties left behind by the Pakistanis and erstwhile enemy properties
were considered to be a single category. In 1974, when the government repealed the past
1969 Ordinance, it only meant that all enemy properties of firms that were entrusted to the
custodians of enemy property in the then East Pakistan remained vested in the government of
Bangladesh under the banner of Vested Property.
In 1976, the government of Bangladesh apparently repealed the previous Act, but it remained
effective under different guises and consequently further consolidated the state’s control over
these properties. Under the new provisions, the government was not only to administer and
manage the vested properties, but also to dispose of or transfer the same on a long-term basis.
Such developments indicate that the political and legal systems were becoming more hostile
to minority communities. Dispossessing the minorities from their land became a high-stakes
political game. Administration, political parties and vested interests acted in collusion against the
interest of the minorities.
Things started thawing a bit as external pressures were felt in the aftermath of the backlash
against the Hindu community, which occurred in reaction to the attack on the Babri Masjid
in India. This incident of communal hatred against the minority community in Bangladesh
provoked a strong international reaction, which was brought to bear on the then government
in power. In 1984, President Ershad and the Chief Martial Law Administrator issued a series of
circulars in which it was said that no new property would be enlisted under Vested Property,
and that properties already enlisted could not be disposed of anymore. He also issued a circular

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saying that management of Hindu properties would be carried out according to Hindu laws of
ownership and inheritance. Both external and internal lobby groups like the Hindu Boudhyo
Christian Oikyo Parishad (Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council), founded primarily as a
response to the Eighth Amendment that declared Islam the state religion, were responsible for
such measures. However, these official circulars were never translated into actual policies, as
successive regimes, especially in the BNP–JI coalition phase, further illustrated.
Abul Barkat et al. illustrate, through significant numbers of case studies, the process of dispos-
session of Hindu households through the Vested Property Act (Barkat et al., 2008, pp.121–161).
Drawing on a case study of Hindu households, reported in two different studies in 1997 and
2006, they estimate that the ‘true amount of lost assets for an average affected Hindu household
due to EPA/VPA, for the whole period between 1965 and 2006 would be Tk. 889,517’ (Barkat
et al., 2008, p.127). The researchers demonstrate that the dispossession took place by various
means: illegal occupants conniving with land officials, through violence relating to control of
harvest, use of forced eviction techniques by the administration, using forged documents, brib-
ing relevant authorities, using the death or migration of family members as a pretext for occu-
pation and the grabbing of land by officials themselves.
The Awami League, when it came to power in 1996, under the pressure of internal lobby
groups adopted the Vested Property Restoration Act 2001 in the twenty-second session
of the Jatiya Sangsad (National Parliament) on April 11, 2001, which repealed the Vested
Property Act. This Act ensured the return of vested properties to their rightful owners and
described procedures by which this could be done. The Act, though welcomed, did not
escape criticism by civil society groups, who suggested amendments to make it more fool-
proof for victims of land dispossession. As of 2014, the new Act is yet to be properly imple-
mented and the government has promised that experts and members of civil society groups
will be consulted for further amendments. With growing violence against minorities dur-
ing political unrest and elections, unfortunately the focus has been shifted in recent years;
instead of looking into systemic inadequacies and concerns, the attention of civil society
has been diverted to violence against minorities at times of elections or at times of national
crises, for example, the violence in 2013 following the verdicts against war criminals by the
International Crimes Tribunal.

Majoritarian democracies: the politics of the vote bank

In a state dominated by one religious community, minorities tend to become a vote bank for
one major political party, one that they consider to be the more secular or friendly toward
their well-being. Therefore traditionally Muslims in India are considered to be the vote banks
for the Congress and Hindus have been considered to be a vote bank for the Awami League
in pre-1971 Pakistan and post-1971 Bangladesh. In recent times, however, the politics of the
vote bank have assumed an ugly character. For example, in Bangladesh, the numbers game is
being used by the state to serve its interest, which is to establish the hegemony of Muslim
Bengalis vis-à-vis other communities. During the post-2001 election violence was unleashed
against Hindus in the south-west of Bangladesh, a region largely known as the ‘Hindu Belt’
because there are many pockets where members of Hindu community constitute the majority.
The political vendetta against Hindus was carried out systematically with the aim of destroy-
ing their economic backbone in order to terrorize them into fleeing to India. Land grabbing
was an important part of the whole objective. Incidents in the Chittagong Hill Tracts also
bear testimony to the fact that this process is being used against ethnic minorities as well
(Guhathakurta, 2008).

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The case of post-election violence against minorities

in Bangladesh, 2001
The post-election violence in Bangladesh in 2001 specifically targeted the Hindu minority
population, although it should be viewed in a broader frame because supporters of the Awami
League and other progressive forces in the rural areas were also targeted. The violence is largely
known to have been initiated by supporters of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) in vari-
ous localities. The backlash after the elections was systematic and severe. The Bangladeshi press
reported that attackers entered Hindu homes, beat family members and looted their property;
rape and abduction of women were also reported. It was the south-western and southern part
of Bangladesh, the ‘Hindu belt’, that was most affected. The following narration stems from a
visit to the district of Bhola, one of the worst-affected areas.
Among the atrocities committed were breaking into households, attacking men, women
and children with sharp knives and weapons, in certain cases threatening with guns, terrorizing
women and children by beating and chasing them, and in certain cases raping and attempting
to rape. Looting of Hindu households, and sometimes of Muslim households that sheltered
Hindus, took place throughout the night and in waves, since most householders had fled in
terror and their houses were left unguarded. No distinction was made between rich and poor
households. Houses were left almost bare. As some of the victims said, even babies’ clothes were
stolen.
Although men were terrorized as well, it was women and children who had to bear the
brunt of the attack. Once they saw the attackers, the women came out and begged for mercy or
to have their husbands spared. The attackers then turned on the women, sometimes asking one
woman to fetch another by name (‘bring so and so to me’) or else attempting to drag away the
women whom they have already grabbed. When a 12-year-old girl refused to call her mother
to the attackers, she was raped.
People who had some land but were looted of all their belongings began to cut down trees
in their homesteads and orchards as a means of earning urgently needed income. No local
NGOs had come to their rescue with relief programs. Those organizations from Dhaka that
had visited these villages to investigate the situation proved to be their only hope for salvation
and relief.
There were some cases of exodus into India, but only for those households who already had
someone living there. But in many cases the victims were too poor to take that option.They did
not have the minimum resources to make the move. In other cases where families came from
the landed class, they had too much at stake to flee without preparation.Their exact words were,
‘What shall we eat in India? We have to resort to begging.’
Although some steps were taken by the administration to arrest some of the more obvious
culprits in one of the worst-hit places and an emergency police force was stationed in the vicin-
ity of Annoda Prosad village, the systematic denial of these incidents by ruling party leaders and
the government prevented the local administration from taking sterner measures. Although the
residents of the Annoda Prosad village felt somewhat relieved by the stationing of an emergency
police camp in the vicinity, they also felt intimidated by the fact that some of the culprits were
still roaming free and that those who had been arrested were being released on bail. Many cul-
prits were reported as saying, ‘So what if they had to go to prison, it was temporary, almost like
going to your in-laws’ place for dinner’. They also intimidated the witnesses, saying that if the
villagers mentioned their names to the police or administration then they would retaliate. In the
village of Fatemabad this threat was actualized when one Hindu boy was charged with being an
accessory to a so-called abduction of a Muslim girl. The incident was in fact one of elopement,

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and some of the culprits of the October 2, 2001 incident turned the case around to point an
accusing finger at the Hindu boy and have him arrested. This was a way of showing their ven-
geance.The family of the boy was distraught. As it was, they had lost all their belongings and on
top of it all did not have the financial or moral strength to fight the legal proceedings. This was
indeed a case for legal aid.
The role of the administration from local to district level was at best evasive about the inci-
dents. Apart from setting up the police camp in the vicinity of Annoda Prosad, there was little
indication that the administration was taking positive steps to file charges or find and bring
the culprits to justice. The people in Char Kumari complained that the police had not filled in
specific charge sheets for weeks after the incident. Days had gone by before they even came to
the scene to investigate.There were also reports of attempts to cover up the complaints that had
been made. For example, in the village of Annoda Prosad a woman had wanted to file a case
regarding her husband who was missing. But the local-level leaders had tried to coax her into
believing that he had gone to India and had even produced a letter, which was read out to her
since she was illiterate. Oddly, the Officer in Charge, when asked about this incident, repeated
the story and he too gave the same excuse as to why a case could not be lodged regarding this
‘disappearance’. The District Commissioner, on the other hand, seemed more sympathetic and
was keen to maintain peace, but also did not want to take any action that would displease local
elites.
Locally it was only the media that had faithfully reported the incidents and followed them
up regularly. The role of the politicians, however, has been wanting. Local MPs have report-
edly either been inciting the attackers or indirectly supporting them by protecting the culprits
from law-enforcement agencies. The Minister for Religious Affairs elected from this area was
sympathetic but was too far away in the capital to be able to monitor the day-to-day events
(Guhathakurta, 2001).

Ahmadiyyas in Bangladesh
There is one religious group in Bangladesh that does not define itself as a religious minority,
but at different points in history members have had their rights violated and trampled on. This
is the Ahmadiyya community.
The Ahmadiyya Muslim community was founded in 1889 by Mirza Ghulam Ahmed Quadian
(1835–1908). Since its establishment in Bangladesh in 1905, members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim
community have faced persecution from other Muslim groups. The difference between the
Ahmadiyyas and other mainstream Muslim sects is the following. Members of the Ahmadiyya
community (‘Ahmadis’) profess to be Muslims. They contend that Ahmad meant to revive the
true spirit and message of Islam that the Prophet Mohammed introduced and preached. But
virtually all mainstream Muslim sects believe that Ahmad proclaimed himself a prophet, thereby
rejecting a fundamental tenet of Islam.
Sporadic attacks and threats against Ahmadiyyas became more systematic in the early 1990s
as Bangladesh returned to parliamentary government. The attacks began in earnest during
the BNP government (1991–1996), continued through the period of Awami League rule
(1996–2001), and acquired renewed vigor as the BNP returned to power in 2001, this time in
coalition with the JI and the Islami Oikya Jote (IOJ).
In December 27–29, 1991, the Khatme Nabuwat (KN), an Islamist organization dedicated to
safeguarding the sanctity of the finality of the Prophet Mohammed, held a conference to organ-
ize activities aimed at banning Ahmadiyya religious practices and identity in Bangladesh. The
anti-Ahmadiyya conferences held by KN and the Khilafat Student Movement sparked fresh attacks

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on Ahmadiyyas. On February 29, 1992, several hundred people under the leadership of the Imam
Council, a group of imams from the Helatala and Niral mosques in Khulna, attacked an Ahmadiyya
mosque and mission house on the Nirala Housing Estate in the city.The group attempted to set fire
to the buildings, stole and destroyed Ahmadiyya books, including Ahmadiyya copies of the Quran,
and inflicted damage on a charitable medical dispensary nearby.
On October 30, 1992, a procession of more than 1,200 people launched a massive attack
on the main Bakhshibazar Ahmadiyya complex in Dhaka. On November 27, 1992, a group of
anti-Ahmadiyya protestors attacked and demolished an Ahmadiyya mosque under construction
in Rajshani. On December 24, 1993, the KN Bangladesh held a conference in Dhaka to pres-
surise the government to officially declare Ahmadiyyas non-Muslims, to ban their publications
and to remove them from high-ranking government posts.
New anti-Ahmadiyya organizations emerged on the scene in 1994–1995. On March 30,
1994, the Bangladesh Times reported that the Bangladesh Khilafat Andolan and Islami Shasantantra
Andolan, two extremist Islamist organizations, had joined the JI in supporting a four-hour sit-in
demonstration organized by KN in Dhaka. The demonstrators, many of them carrying placards
and sticks, chanted slogans against the Ahmadiyyas, calling them kafirs (infidels). In March 1995,
a group of demonstrators attacked a central Ahmadiyya mosque in Dhaka. This time, secular
activists and members of civil society strongly condemned the attacks.
Violence against Ahmadis in major cities outside Dhaka began to occur in the late 1990s
and continued systematically through 2003 until in January 2004, in the face of massive protests
led by the IOJ and others, the government declared a ban on all publications by the Ahmadiyya
Muslim Jamaat Bangladesh, including the Quran and its translation or interpretations. However,
no information was sent to the Ahmadiyya community, and no official notification regarding
this ban was published. The government press release said the ban had been imposed ‘in view
of objectionable materials in such publications that hurt or might hurt the sentiments of the
majority Muslim population’ (Hossain, 2004). When the ban was challenged in court, a stay
order was issued, but the main case challenging the ban is still pending.

Systemic violence against minorities from 2012

It was expected that with the Awami League in power from 2009 the minorities would have
enjoyed relative peace. But instead, since 2012 the period has proven to be one of the most
violent. This was because the issue of minorities went beyond vote-bank politics and became
implicated in the broader concerns of the nation, i.e., secular-based versus religion-based char-
acteristics of Bangladesh’s future.
The Ramu incident in 2012 set the tone of things to follow.The 2012 Ramu violence refers
to a series of attacks on Buddhist monasteries and shrines and the houses of Buddhist inhab-
itants in Ramu Upazila, in Cox’s Bazar District, by local Muslim mobs in the early hours of
September 29, 2012. The mobs destroyed 22 Buddhist temples and monasteries and 50 houses
in reaction to the tagging of an image depicting the desecration of a Quran on the timeline of
a fake Facebook account under a Buddhist name. The violence later spread to Ukhia Upazila
in Cox’s Bazar District and Patiya Upazila in Chittagong District, where Buddhist monasteries
and Hindu temples were targeted for attacks. An estimated 25,000 participated in the violence
directed at Buddhists and Hindus.
The incumbent government’s response was that the attack was mobilized by politically moti-
vated Islamists who wanted to destabilize the Awami League government, particularly as it was
implementing its electoral promise to the people about trying war criminals (most of whom
came from the largest Islamist party). Further investigation revealed that a feud between two

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brothers who were vying for Awami League candidacy in the upcoming parliamentary elections
was responsible for nurturing the violence.
Whatever the cause, the disturbing thing was that such incidents became the ‘order of the
day’ (Santhia, Baskhali, Obhoynogor, etc.) as the political situation took a turn for the worse.
The two main parties failed to come to terms on a mutually agreed election mechanism and
the Awami League embarked on a controversial election in early 2014 as Islamists began gath-
ering momentum in their resistance to the war crimes trials. Minorities became involved with
systemic issues of social and economic control over land that was the bedrock of power for
locally entrenched vested-interest groups upon which all major parties relied; the state found
itself involved in foundational issues of religion vis-à-vis the secular power base, as memor-
ies and more particularly debates surrounding the Liberation War surfaced in the wake of the
war crimes trials. Since the notion of secularism in Bangladesh indicates religious tolerance
rather than a separation of religion from the state, the status of minorities have often become
embroiled in the identity politics of a majoritarian state, which is also to be seen in the context
of the regional politics of South Asia.
In other words, minorities in Bangladesh have become hostage to the scourge of the
identity politics to which Bangladesh’s dominant class has fallen prey. This is not a prob-
lem that can easily be rectified. It necessitates years of honest soul-searching, which cannot
be expected from a regime that seeks to survive in a neoliberal world without engaging in
power-transformative roles.

References
Bangladesh. Bureau of Educational Information and Statistics. (2014) Bangladesh: At a Glance. [Online]
Available from: www.banbeis.gov.bd/bd_pro.htm [Accessed: December 17, 2014].
Barkat, A., Zaman, S. U., Khan, M. S., Poddar, A., Hoque, S. and Uddin, M. T. (2008) Deprivation of Hindu
Minority in Bangladesh: Living with Vested Property. Dhaka: Pathak Shamabesh.
Bhasin, A. S. (ed.). (2003) India Bangladesh Relations Documents 1972–2002. Vol. 5. New Delhi: Geetika
Publishers.
Eaton, R. M. (1993) The rise of Islam and the Bengal frontier, 1204–1760. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Guhathakurta, M. (2001) The Nature of the Bangladesh State. In: Human Rights in Bangladesh, 2000.
Dhaka: Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK).
Guhathakurta, M. (2002) Communal Politics in South Asia and the Hindus of Bangladesh. In: Hussain,
M. and Ghosh, L. (eds.). Religious Minorities in South Asia: Selected Essays on Post-colonial Situation. Vol.
1. New Delhi: Manak Publications.
Guhathakurta, M. (2004) Two Women, Divided Nations. In: Menon, R. (ed.). No Woman’s Land, New
Delhi: Women Unlimited.
Guhathakurta, M. (2008) The Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) Accord and After: Gendered Dimensions of
Peace. In: Pankhurst, D. (ed.). Gendered Peace: Women’s Struggles for Post-War Justice and Reconciliation.
London: Routledge.
Guhathakurta, M. and van Schendel, W. (2013) The Bangladesh Reader. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Hossain, S. (2004) Apostates, Ahmadis and Advocates: Use and Abuse of Offences Against Religion in Bangladesh.
[Online] Available from: www.wluml.org/sites/wluml.org/files/import/english/pubs/pdf/wsf/10.pdf
[Accessed: September 28, 2014].

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 26
PRINT AND
ELECTRONIC MEDIA
Anis Rahman

The emergence of neoliberal and free market economic systems that have led to the deregulation
of the media have ensured the proliferation of numerous private and commercial media outlets
in Bangladesh. Over the past two decades, the reach of the media in Bangladesh has extended
from national to global audiences. At the same time, the ownership patterns of the media in
Bangladesh have expanded from state-ownership to commercial and non-governmental actors,
and the mode of distribution has shifted from state-controlled monopoly to multi-platform
mediation.While most of these transformations are very recent and incomplete, they also exhibit
a blend of authoritarian practices from time to time. In this context, this chapter provides a brief
historical account of the development of the media in Bangladesh, maps its recent trends and
examines the challenges faced by journalists and the resulting impact on public debate. It also
underlines the ongoing contestation of media policy making, and situates the growing import-
ance of social media against the backdrop of the subsiding digital divide and ensuing class and
cultural politics.

Development of print and electronic media in Bangladesh

The groundwork for Bangladesh’s print media industry began when the nation was still under
British rule as East India.1 Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (or the Calcutta General Advertiser), established
in 1780, was the first newspaper in the Indian subcontinent. Samachar Darpan (1818) was the
first newspaper in the Bengali language. However, the first newspaper originating from the
territory that constitutes present-day Bangladesh was Rangpur Bartabaha, established in 1847.
The early history of the press in this region is one of control and resistance that underpins the
current influence of the media in Bangladesh. The early-nineteenth-century press emerged
as a powerful source of resistance expressing clear opposition to the colonial rulers. Although
early print media emerged mostly as private and missionary entities, they were still subject to
the control and censorship of the British East India Company. Against the backdrop of such
pressures, newspapers in East Pakistan, especially the daily Ittefaq and the daily Sangbad, played a
crucial role in opposing the authoritarian system.
Broadcast media, which was also initiated under colonial rule, in contrast to print media was
instituted as a public service and later expanded and solidified as a ‘nationalist project’ with elem-
ents of linguistic and cultural diversity. In the post-Partition era (after 1947), state-controlled

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Table 26.1 Media at a glance, 2014

Media Total Remark

Total print media 1,244 477 registered
Daily newspapers 826 353 registered
Weekly papers 273 82 registered
TV channels 44 26 active, of which 3 state-owned
State radio centers 12 Bangladesh Betar
State radio FM transmitters 32 Bangladesh Betar
Private FM Radio 28 12 active
Community Radio 32 14 active
Sources: Bangladesh Ministry of Information (2014); Department of Film and Publications, (2014).

electronic media, such as All India Radio, Radio Pakistan and later Bangladesh Radio (from 1971),
played a central role in shaping national identity and reinterpreting colonial and pre-colonial his-
tories (Page and Crawley, 2001, p.26). In post-liberation crisis-ridden Bangladesh, the print media
industry became an integral part of capitalist expansion, accompanied by repeated legal repression
imposed by various civilian governments and what Ali Riaz calls ‘the military-bureaucratic oli-
garchy’ (Riaz, 1989, 1993a).2 After the fall of Sheikh Mujib’s pseudo-socialist regime in 1975, the
Ziaur Rahman government adopted the World Bank’s Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP)
that eventually facilitated the growth of private-ownership models for media such as daily, weekly
and monthly newspapers and magazines. A decade later, President Ershad took further measures
toward privatization but still kept the media under state control through military directives.3
With an impulsive response from the masses, the country moved away from dictatorship
toward a more democratic form of political rule in the early 1990s. This decade also presented a
new set of trends for the media in Bangladesh, marking a sharp transition from state ownership
to private ownership of the media. In 1991, the first caretaker government (headed by President
Shahabuddin Ahmed) removed the ‘Special Power Act (1974)’ that had been initiated by President
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to control and suppress the press, particularly newspapers. With the
elimination of this legal obstacle and the onset of a free-market economy including privatization
and liberalization, Bangladesh witnessed a ‘quantum leap’ in the media sector (Table 26.1). Just
within the 1990s the state allowed foreign satellite television broadcasting, permitted private own-
ership of television channels and began telecasting private productions on the state-owned tele-
vision station. The Khaleda Zia government allowed access to foreign satellite channels in 1992,
when other private ventures including telecommunications, banking, private universities, and real
estate were also permitted. Subsequently, the Sheikh Hasina government (1996–2001) paved the
way for further expansion of private media by permitting private satellite television.
As of late 2014, there are 358 daily newspapers and 82 weekly magazines in Bangladesh, of
which 138 newspapers and 84 magazines are published in Dhaka alone (Bangladesh. Department
of Film and Publications, 2014). Bangladesh has one state-owned radio service with 12 regional
stations, 32 community radio stations of which 14 stations are currently active, and 28 commer-
cial FM radio stations, 12 of which were active in 2014 (Table 26.1).The remainder of the radio
stations are expected to be operational soon.
Owing to escalating privatization and reinvestment of surplus by transnational corporations,
some being local companies, the advertisement market has doubled in five years. With more
than 110 advertising agencies, the media industry is thriving, whereas many other industries are
facing lay-offs. Most of the ad agencies get 15 percent commission from the media. Through

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this process, a pact has developed between the media and ad agencies (Rahman, 2009, pp.8–9).
Growth in the cable and satellite television industry has in turn been driven by massive growth
in the telecommunications sector. Giant cellphone operators, Grameen Phone, Bangla Link,
Robi, Warid and Citycell, are increasingly investing in media advertising and branding. As of
2015, the owners of the cellphone operators do not own any electronic or print media but they
are heavily interested in branding popular television programs and cultural events.

Television: the most popular medium in Bangladesh

Similar to print media, the history of television in Bangladesh traces back to the British colonial
era. In 1937, All India Radio (AIR) was born as a public service broadcaster ‘to further their
own imperialist interests and policies’ as well as ‘to deliver urgent propaganda’ of the British
Empire (Agrawal and Raghaviah, 2006). This colonial legacy was developed in post-Partition
Pakistan as a public corporation but within a nationalist framework. Bangladesh Television
(BTV) was launched in 1964 in East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) as part of the Pakistan
Television Corporation. Upon Bangladesh’s independence in 1971, the Awami League govern-
ment changed the status of BTV from a public corporation into a state broadcaster under the
control of the Ministry of Information, thus fundamentally altering its direction and operation
(Shoesmith et al., 2013, pp.237–238).
The state-owned and -controlled BTV was the dominant medium of televisual news
and entertainment for a prolonged 28 years (1964–1992), but its monopoly ended with the
advent of cable television and, subsequently, private television. The era of cable television in
Bangladesh was initiated in 1992 by the world’s two largest competing transnational televi-
sion networks, CNN International and STAR, in collaboration with the state broadcaster
BTV. The rise of private television in Bangladesh was partly influenced by the successful
liberalization of India’s broadcasting market. It was also due to the national protectionist
approach of the government seeking to counter the ‘cultural hegemony’ of Indian drama
serials and movie channels that primarily serve as a Trojan Horse of advertising for Indian
products in Bangladesh. In this context, the government permitted private ownership of sat-
ellite television channels in 1997.
Defying the global recession, the number of private television channels in Bangladesh has
increased significantly. From the low base of one in 1997 it grew to four in 2001, 19 in 2008,
27 in 2013 and 44 in 2014 (Daily Star, 2013a, November 26; Shoesmith et al., 2013; Bangladesh.
Ministry of Information, 2014; Rahman, 2014). The number includes 13 new television chan-
nels approved by the government in 2013 (Daily Star, 2013a, and Table 26.1). Although there
are three state-owned and -managed terrestrial and satellite television channels,4 there is no
public-service television or radio in Bangladesh.
According to the 2011 Nielsen Media and Demographic Survey, access to television in urban
areas has increased from 69 to 91 percent over the last decade (ACNielsen, 2011). In rural areas,
where 73 percent of Bangladesh’s population of 165 million lives, the reach of television has
increased even more, from 24 to 67 percent. By 2013 access to television surpassed 79 percent
nationally (Figure 26.1).
While the popularity of radio and cinema has declined, television has consistently ranked as
the most popular media in contemporary Bangladesh (Figure 26.2). Sales of television sets are
increasing at around 10 percent a year, both in rural and urban areas in Bangladesh (Rahman
and Alam, 2013, p.301). Consequently, television news has become the most popular genre in
Bangladesh, viewed by 72.4 percent of the total adult population.

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 A. Rahman

79%
73%
65%
61%

42%
31%

1995 1998 2002 2006 2010 2013

Figure 26.1 Growth of access to television media, 1995–2013 (sources: ACNielsen, 2006, 2013)

Despite the growth of cable television, BTV is still the only terrestrial television that the
majority of Bangladeshis can watch. Currently it has a potential coverage of 93 percent of the
country. About 92 percent of the programs on BTV are produced by BTV itself. With a view
to reaching the Bangladeshi diaspora, BTV launched its satellite version, BTV World, in 2004.5

Radio: the decline and the new height

In the era of media abundance, the once highly popular media, radio, has been losing listeners
since the last decade (ACNielsen, 2013). But very recently it is claimed to be reinventing itself
with technological innovations (Genilo et al., 2013, p.57). The benefit of such reinvention is
perhaps mostly limited to the technology-privileged urban listeners, especially the listeners with
cellphone and Internet radio access. The state-owned radio stations remain the most accessible
media for the poorest demographic of the population, especially in remote rural areas where
the influence of radio is still as visible as it was in the past. Historically, radio has been used in
both the pre- and post-liberation eras.The existence of Shadhin Bangla Betar Kendra (the radio
center of independent Bengal in 1971) was short-lived, but it was a radical media outlet during
the Liberation War (Haq, 2011a, pp.200–201). The government was initially hesitant to approve
private ownership of radio stations but market liberalization influenced the relaxing of govern-
ment restrictions. Established in 2006, Radio Today and Radio Foorty (‘Radio Fun’), and later
Radio Amar (My Radio) in 2007 and ABC Radio in 2009, have broadened the market of FM
radio in Bangladesh and for the first time offered state radio competitions for listeners in urban
areas. Subsequently, online radio began streaming in 2009. Transnational radio stations such as
BBC Bangla (UK, since 1941), VOA (US, since 1954) and NHK (Japan, since 1944) broadcast
Bengali versions of their programs aiming to reach Bengali-speaking listeners worldwide. BBC
Bangla played an outstanding role during the Liberation War and is still considered to be one of
the most authentic sources of information for the masses.

Community radio: new hope

There are 14 operational community radio stations in Bangladesh. Community radio is a
‘third-tier’ media in Bangladesh with the potential to address critical social issues at a com-
munity level and provides a platform for marginalized voices (Reza, 2012a). While the popu-
larity of state-owned radio has been gradually declining, the demand for community radio
has increased due to the community-oriented culture in Bangladesh which favors community

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79%
65%

34.6%

23.8%
20.8% 20.4%

13%
7.7%
4% 2.4%
2% 0.36%

Television Radio Newspaper Cinema Magazine Surfing

viewership listenership readership viewership readership Internet

Year 2006–2007 Year 2012–2013

Figure 26.2 Audience reach of different media, 2006–2013 (sources: ACNielsen, 2006, 2013)

initiatives. Responding to a decade of advocacy, the Community Radio Policy (CR Policy
2008) was first enacted by the caretaker government in 2007–2008. In 2011, the Sheikh Hasina
regime gave permission to broadcast to 12 community radio stations. By the end of 2013, 125
organizations had applied for permission to install and operate community radio broadcasting.
Despite financial struggles, community radio brings new hope for regional diversity and may
gear up mobilization for the decentralization of public information.

Cyberspace and changing media platforms

Although Bangladesh has a relatively low rate of Internet access (9.6 percent) compared to
other countries in South Asia (ITU, 2015), the rise and increase of online news platforms signals
a relatively new era of communication media. With an increase in Internet access and growth
of various cyber communities, print media is gradually expanding and shifting toward online
journalism.While web-only news sites have been mushrooming, the existing dominant corpor-
ate print and television media outlets are being forced to create their own web versions with
constant updates. At present there are more than 500 news sites and web portals in Bangladesh.6
Haq (2014a) outlines four categories of online news practices: online versions of mainstream
print media, news media with corporate investment, independent and small-scale news media
and citizen journalism using blog sites and social media.The growth of telecommunications and
ICT in Bangladesh (Table 26.2) has resulted in an increasing convergence of media, telecom-
munications and cyberspace.
Indeed, with approximately 55 million Internet users and 132 million people with access to
cellphones, Bangladesh has emerged as a thriving hub of new media audience engagement in
South Asia (Table 26.2). The recent trends show that approximately 90 percent of Internet users
access the Internet through mobile phones, while the rest use broadband Internet from Internet
Service Providers (ISPs), Public Switched Telephone Networks (PSTN) and private wi-fi pro-
viders (WiMax). These trends contribute to the transformation of media distribution from a
single platform to multiple-platform-based mediation (Rahman, 2014). For example, now a days,

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 A. Rahman

Table 26.2 Telecommunication and ICT growth, 2012–2015

Year Internet subscribers Mobile phone access
(in millions)
Total Internet subscription Mobile Internet subscription
(in millions) (in millions)
2015 (October) 54.66 52.33 131.99
2014 (July) 39.353 37.846 116.871
2013 (June) 35.631 33.904 105.051
2012 (July) 29.415 27.786 94.714

Source: Based on BTRC (2015).

most television channels offer on-line news and live streaming services through their websites,
and some television programs can be seen on a cellphone screen through Internet Protocol tele-
vision (IPTV).The cultural industries in Bangladesh have already begun evolving into a complex
and dynamic media environment where various types of media are interdependent and engaged
in an intricate relationship with society and the polity in Bangladesh. Noticeably, the music
industry in Bangladesh is one of the most popular in South Asia and a major supplier of content
for broadcasting and streaming services. A growing number of audio-visual production houses
are strengthening the base of local television and radio production.While film is considered to be
one of the most popular television genres, the local film industry is becoming increasing reliant
on digital production (Haq, 2011b). However, digitization of broadcasting is still under progress.
The Internet is multiplying the circulation of media content through streaming services
such as YouTube, MP3-playing websites, online radio, etc. Cheap cellphone handsets are enab-
ling mobile radio and enhancing radio listenership. About 85.7 percent of listeners access radio
through their cellphone (ACNielsen, 2013). Facebook is adding a new user in Bangladesh every
20 seconds. On average there is a new mobile subscription activated in Bangladesh every two
seconds (Kemp, 2012). These numbers are being updated at breakneck speed. Online newspa-
pers and blog sites are allowing diaspora audiences to engage in local debates. With the growth
of Internet access, a range of multi-platform media development initiatives including rural
digital information centers, women’s empowerment through cellphones, efforts at localizing
global media messages, as well as movements to bolster civic engagement through blogging and
social media, have become visible.7 However, despite the profusion of media access, some major
trends are dominating the media landscape of Bangladesh and are worth addressing in greater
detail.

Major concerns regarding the media in Bangladesh

Concentration of media ownership
One of the most noticeable trends in Bangladesh’s mediascape is the upswing of private media
ownership with increasing political and corporate concentration. Such transformation is deeply
connected with the transformation of the state itself, from an ‘intermediate state’ to an ‘admin-
istrative state’ (Riaz, 2005), as well as from an authoritarian state to a neoliberal state. According
to Shoesmith and Genilo (2013), the media industry in Bangladesh is going through an expan-
sionary and dynamic transformation, in which market forces are replacing the state’s control
over media (see also Mahmud, 2013). Critical media scholars argue that the sudden growth of

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media in Bangladesh is an outcome of the post-Cold War transformation of global political

systems and the rise of a strong local comprador class in which the Bangladeshi state has played
a crucial role (Rahman and Alam, 2013, pp.291–294). Owing to the augmentation of the com-
prador class there has been a marked shift in ownership of television stations from the govern-
ment to private/political/commercial hands. Since the Bangladeshi government permitted the
operation of private satellite television channels a decade ago, the systematic involvement of
political and commercial elites has become apparent.Thus, the rise of a private television indus-
try in Bangladesh may signify independence from the government only on paper, while being
dominated in practice by the politico-business nexus (Andaleeb et al., 2012, p.76).
Licensing television channels has become a power play for every political regime that is
reflected in the increased rate of approval for new television channels before each national
election (Figure 26.1). Following this trend, the political licensing of television channels has
created a political concentration of television ownership. Except for a few, most of the owners
of television channels are connected to one of the main political parties – either the Bangladesh
Nationalist Party (BNP) or the Awami League.8 Khan (2013) demonstrates that the entire licens-
ing process of private television is enveloped by a strong and vivid system of crony capitalism, in
which only those who are very close to the chief of the ruling party or government are provided
with private television licenses. Critics worry that some television channel owners not only use
their political affiliation to get permission for television channels but also exploit the channels
to legitimize political manipulation and to increase their personal or company assets (Rahman
and Alam, 2013, p.301), turning the channels into ‘business-lobbying-corruption-powerhouses’
(Rahman, 2009, p.1). Such concentration is dangerous for democratic practices and diversity of
voices and poses a continuous threat to the professional freedom of television journalists.
In the case of print media, the concentration of ownership is dominated by commercial
powers rather than by direct political leaders. However, indirect political influence is also extant
as the owners tend to be businessmen-cum-politicians. In 1997, the government disbanded the
state-controlled trust, closing all state-owned newspapers and ending decades-long government
ownership in the print media sector. Mahmud shows that the entrance of business conglomera-
tions into print media since the 1990s may appear as the depoliticization of state ownership but
it is actually a form of ‘corpo-politicization’ (Mahmud, 2013, p.44). As a result, most of the dom-
inant newspapers in both Bengali and English are now owned by corporations, such as Prothom
Alo (‘The First Light’) and the Daily Star (Transcom group), Jugantor (Jamuna Group), Samakal
(Ha-meem Group), Kaler Kontho (‘The Voice of Time’; Basundhara Group), The Independent and
Dainik Muktakantha (‘The Free Voice’; BEXIMCO group). Transcom Group also owns the FM
radio station ABC Radio.

Political instrumentalization of news broadcasting

Bangladesh has an enduring history of political intolerance that shatters press freedom (Ahmed,
2009). The major political issue that threatens to destabilize Bangladesh is political divisiveness,
bitter acrimony and a vendetta between the ruling and opposition parties that often paralyzes
parliament. Critics worry that the antagonism between the main parties – the Awami League
and the BNP – reflects personal animosity between leaders rather than substantial ideological
differences (BBC Media Action, 2012, p.9). As a corollary, this has led to the politicization of
the administration and polarization of most journalistic staff along party lines, at a huge cost
to the public service (Khan, 2008, p.102). BTV is a public information service, but at the same
time it serves the purposes of the incumbent government, as it is known for its structural bias
toward ruling parties. Golam Rahman (2012) discusses how the political culture has disabled

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several areas of BTV, impeding its true capacity to serve the public, a problem manifest in: a lack
of credibility, a lack of reporting capacity, a lack of criticism of the government, a lack of rural
participation, greediness for profit and, most of all, a lack of sincere soul-searching as a public
media institution. BTV represents a trend of the political instrumentalization of public media
that has been normalized and naturalized in the newsroom through routine daily practices over
the course of decades. It appears that democratization of the political system, in this case, did
not change the colonial and autocratic political culture that viewed public media as a venue for
propaganda, but rather granted political legitimacy to effect this more systematically, routinely
and efficiently (Rahman, 2014).
Ironically, political instrumentalization is also evident in private television channels resulting
from the owners’ political affiliation. Television channels provide soundbites by political figures
to grab the attention of citizens; however, the uncritical nature of political news analysis depo-
liticizes the public’s awareness. Similar trends are visible across television talk shows, which are
now a very popular genre. As of January 2014 there were 51 television talk shows being aired
on various television channels.9 Rahman and Marjan (2013) found that urban audiences watch
talk shows to gratify their need for information regarding the current political turmoil that the
news cannot explain in detail due to its time constraints. However, the most popular talk shows
such as Ajker Bangladesh (Independent TV), Ekattor Journal (Ektattor TV), Tritio Matra (Channel
I), Our Democracy (RTV) and Sompadokiyo (Somoy TV) primarily reflect the agendas of the
dominant political parties.

Commercialization and market-orientation

Critical scholars argue that advertising-based financing or commercialization of the media
serves as a means of reconstituting class power, with profound political and ideological implica-
tions (Zhao, 1998). In the context of Bangladesh, Rahman (2009) argues that the trends toward
market-orientation and politicization in news production have undercut the independence and
impartiality of the media, and that the increasing commercialization of the media has affected
the structure, content and process of news production, particularly in Bangladeshi private televi-
sion. The presentation of television news is increasingly becoming market-oriented, resulting in
a loss of credibility among the urban audience especially in their perceived loss of independence
and objectivity (Andaleeb and Rahman, 2014). The commercialization of news poses a threat
to journalistic practices similar to that once sanctioned by the authoritarian regimes, thus the
potential of the television-mediated public sphere in democratic governance is being destroyed
(Rahman, A., 2012). The commodification of television news through ‘corporate branding’ and
‘media–advertiser joint ventures’ that privileges market-oriented discourses over public dis-
courses legitimizes the symbolic power of local and transnational market forces in collaboration
with the political elites.10
State media is also becoming increasingly reliant on advertising. Aiming to compete with pri-
vate television channels for revenue, BTV uses its superior access to audiences (BTV has by far
the greatest reach) to charge the highest rate for advertising (up to Tk 90,000 = US$1,160 per
minute) during the news, compared to the top-ranked private television channel, ATN Bangla.
Until the 1990s, BTV was heavily reliant on importing foreign programs to feed its transmission
hours (Riaz, 1993b). Although the growth of domestic production houses and increasing popu-
larity of local artists have enabled BTV to reduce its dependency on foreign programs, the reliance
on advertising remains vital, becoming the core of its economic production. BTV, fully funded
by public sources yet profiteering from self-subordination to the market, epitomizes a reinforced
ideological contradiction facing public media in the neoliberal era (Rahman, 2014, p.20).

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Market-oriented journalism is also rampant across print media outlets.The pre-corporatization

stage of print journalism in the post-authoritarian era was a transient but important phase. Ajker
Kagoj (‘Today’s Paper’) and later Daily Bhorer Kagoj (‘The Paper of the Dawn’) were able to gain
popularity among the emerging middle-class and youth audiences due to their objective journal-
ism (Haq, 2011a, p.201). With the arrival of new corporate-owned newspapers (such as Prothom
Alo and the Daily Star), objective journalism has turned into market-leaning journalism that pro-
tects the interests of capital and profit, and the interests of the mother company (such as Transcom
in this case) and the private sector in general (Haq, 2011a, pp.201–202, citing Newton, 2003,
pp.31–32). Although the change in the political system provided some opportunity for print
media to bypass the state’s authority and control, in practice, market-orientation and ownership
concentration have become ‘new masters’ that delimit freedom of the press (Mahmud, 2013,
p.36). Yet, the print media in Bangladesh enjoys greater freedom in comparison to electronic
media. Research shows that newspapers play a powerful agenda-setting role (i.e., on environ-
mental issues), but this agenda is often heavily influenced by government, local and international
non-governmental organizations and agencies, civil society and experts (Reza and Haque, 2010).

Struggles for journalistic autonomy

Despite the growth of media outlets, journalism as a profession in Bangladesh remains an uncer-
tain and volatile one. With little job security, unequal pay and the exploitative hierarchy of
authority, media workers in both electronic and print media continuously struggle to survive.
While the media industry reflects a staggering degree of political and commercial amenabil-
ity, media outlets enjoy relative autonomy to engage in strong competition to grab a share of
the market and influence. As a result, journalism has become a well-paid profession for some
higher-ranking journalists. However, for the bottom-liners it remains a highly unstable and
low-income occupation, which makes them vulnerable to political and economic influences.
Making things worse, there is no wage board for the electronic media. Most of the television
channels in Bangladesh are engaged in a discreet competition to hire star journalists from other
channels, rendering the industry a relentless challenge for emerging journalists. In addition, a
culture of frequent television channel closures makes journalists fearful and encourages them to
conform to ruling political regimes.11
Print media too, has become a hybrid instrument of political weaponry and business interests.
The instrumentalization of newspapers by businessmen-cum-politicians suggests that journal-
istic autonomy will be limited and the press will serve more to please their owners and adver-
tisers than to become a platform for debates on national issues ensuring public participation
(Mahmud, 2013, pp.50–51). There is evidence that media often kill the news if it goes against
their major advertisers/sponsors’ and owners’ interests. Some journalists admit that hiding the
corruption and maleficence of mobile operators and real estate agencies has become pervasive
among both print and electronic media. Media are interested in investigative reporting mostly
if it helps to take down their opponents. Besides, cable operators frequently misuse their power
to rank the television channels. It is ironic that the television ranking points system used by
advertisers is determined by 260 monitors in a country with millions of viewers (Amin, 2014).
Journalists in Bangladesh operate within such perilous environments.
Historically, journalism in Bangladesh is not only a challenging profession but a sacrifi-
cial one that limits freedom of the press (Rahman, 2007). Freedom of the press is afforded
by Bangladesh’s constitution in Article 39(1); however, Article 39(2), which allows ‘reasonable
restrictions’ for security, decency, morality, defamation and other criteria, weakens this free-
dom. Over recent decades, the nation has also adopted laws that inhibit press freedom, some of

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which carrying prison time for violations. Journalists’ work (including female journalists) is also
impeded by harassment from government and military officials, as well as others with political
goals (IWMF, 2011, p.220). The violence and the resulting self-censorship are encouraged by
the lack of effective investigations by law-enforcement authorities. Not surprisingly, the RSF
places Bangladesh 146th out of 180 countries in its 2014 World Press Freedom Index, two posi-
tions lower than the previous year (RSF, 2014).

The conundrum facing media policies

Media policy making in Bangladesh is one of the most contested and politically sensitive sites.
Around 50 laws and regulations currently govern the media, communication, advertisement
and entertainment industries in Bangladesh. More than 30 Acts have either direct or indirect
bearing on the installation, operation or broadcasting of audio-visual media, including BTV
and Bangladesh Betar (Reza, 2012b); however, due to broader social, political and economic
constraints, many of these policies are not fully functioning or are being misused for various rea-
sons. British colonial rule resulted in a top-down policy formulation. With the introduction of a
multi-stakeholder approach, the media policy-making processes in Bangladesh have apparently
become more inclusive and dynamic. However, the state’s authority over media regulation has
remained. The approval of the National Broadcast Policy 2014 (August 4, 2014) bears testimony
to this statement as it is facing a round of public criticism for being controlling rather than sup-
portive of press freedom (Daily Star, 2014; Prothom Alo, 2014).The approved draft of the National
Broadcast Policy 2014 grants the Ministry of Information full power and authority to decide
the television licensing criteria until an independent national broadcasting commission can be
created (the deadline for which is not specified in the approved draft).The policy draft shows no
clear intent to transform state-owned radio and television into fully autonomous public media.
The policy-making process itself was problematic (Haq, 2014b). Although the National
Broadcast Policy 2014 was formulated with the participation of various stakeholders, the final
draft ignored most of their suggestions. By participating in the policy-making process, civil
society members tacitly legitimized the government’s agenda, even though they had little
prospect to help shape it. Moreover, the general public was not considered as a stakeholder
in policy making, therefore multi-stakeholderism in this context offers merely an illusion of
participation rather than an actual shift in policy making. The lack of grass-roots participation
in the policy-making process reveals the absence of the public voice in the policy documents.
Compared to broadcast policy making, the CR Policy 2008 was more open and provided
opportunities for consultation, but ironically, the process excluded a most vital stakeholder, the
grass roots (Reza, 2012a). These findings suggest that pursuing free-standing policy reform is
not adequate to resist the threat of the unaccountable power of the politico-commercial nexus
in Bangladesh. Media policy reform, therefore, should be prioritized for the sake of democ-
ratizing communications while keeping progressive social change as a long-term goal. In this
context, Reza (2012b) demands a comprehensive media policy to coordinate all policies. Naser
and Aikat (2011) emphasize a need for a comprehensive code of ethics for Bangladeshi media.

Social media and political participation

Public engagement in Bangladesh, like elsewhere in South and East Asia, has a tendency to
resist state authoritarianism through creative and unpredictable demonstrations. The Shahbag
Movement (February 2013 in Dhaka) is a case in point, where several thousand protestors

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gathered to demand the execution of accused war criminals. Unlike the ‘Arab Spring’, the
protestors demanded transparency from the judicial authorities rather than challenging the
legitimacy of the political regime. Interestingly, this political protest was sparked and actively
organized by a secularist blogger/activist network. This shows that the new media has begun to
influence politics in Bangladesh. Indeed, the Internet has extended opportunities for the cyber
community through blogs in the Bangla language. There are plenty of examples that reveal that
bloggers are the most active community proactively responding to socio-economic and political
issues (Haq, 2013). In times of crises, such as during the BDR mutiny in 2009, blogging served
as a proxy source of information.Thus online communities develop a form of alternative citizen
journalism through blog sites and social networks that is hard for commercial or political powers
to control or censor. While the Shahbag Movement provides an example of how social media
has presented an unprecedented ability to draw the attention of the media beyond national
borders, it also signified the use of social media for propaganda and counter-propaganda across
various intellectual, political, cultural and religious groups (see Daily Star, 2013b). Challenging
powerful entities in Bangladesh can be dangerous, even for bloggers. Independent bloggers,
especially those covering the trials of former political leaders accused of war crimes during the
1971 Independence War, have been the targets of physical attacks since the Shahbag Movement
(see RSF, 2014). Between 2013 and 2015, six progressive bloggers and publishers were hacked to
death in the country, reportedly by radical Islamist groups, allegedly for ‘writings against Islam’
(Washington Post, 2015). Such incidents signal an increase of tension between extremist political
Islam and political secularism, leading to a confrontational new media culture.
The government is more inclined to control cyberspace by imposing laws rather than safe-
guarding it. Internet users have criticized the Online Media Policy (draft) of 2012 as repressive
of online citizen journalism (Haq, 2013). The Awami League government shut down access
to YouTube in Bangladesh on two separate political and religious grounds, once in 2009 for
a few days and again in 2012 for nine months. In 2010, the same government blocked access
to Facebook after satirical images of the Prophet Muhammad and the country’s leaders were
uploaded (BBC News, 2010). In November 2015, the government blocked Facebook, Messenger,
Viber,WhatsApp, Line and Tango after the country’s highest court upheld death penalties against
two top opposition leaders for committing war crimes during the country’s 1971 war of inde-
pendence, while the Facebook users continued to bypass ban by using proxy servers (DW, 2015).
While the blockades were lifted after a short period, these cases show that the new media have
become an important political factor in Bangladesh as the government has instigated surveillance
of Facebook, and other social networking sites, looking for blasphemous and subversive posts.

The issues of digital divides

Although the future potential of Internet blogging and social networking for civic engagement
cannot be overlooked, it is important to keep in mind that online political debates mostly reflect
the voice of the urban, educated, male and relatively youthful portion of the demography who
are privileged with Internet access and computer literacy (A. Rahman, 2012). The digital div-
ide thus plays an active role in re-segregating the lower classes by limiting their participation in
public discourses. As of 2013, 25 percent of households in Bangladesh do not have electricity
and 20 percent of the entire population have no access to any type of media. Many Bangladeshi
families still cannot afford a television and an hour’s worth of Internet access in an Internet café
in Bangladesh costs the equivalent of 70 percent of the average daily income. This puts the Web
well beyond the means of most citizens, especially in rural areas where nearly three-quarters of
the population live (Kemp, 2012; ACNielsen, 2013). As long as 3G bandwidth remains expensive

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and beyond the reach of ordinary people, the digitization of broadcasting will only further
enrich those who can pay for it.The digitization of terrestrial television channel BTV, similar to
the problems faced by Prasar Bharati in India, may not bring benefits for multiple public groups,
as a vast proportion of the rural population who are living below the poverty line will not be
able to afford a set-top box device required to access digital terrestrial television. This means,
on the one hand, that the nature of digital inclusion brings new hope for new media to reach
a broader public and enhance the possibility for interactive media. On the other hand, it also
increases digital exclusion creating new social relations with disadvantaged groups.
In line with the World Summit on the Information Society’s Declaration and Plan of Action,
the present Awami League government is actively promoting a variety of ‘pro-poor’ public ser-
vice initiatives under the ‘Digital Bangladesh’ project along with the ‘Access to Information’
(A2i) program. The initiatives of ‘Digital Bangladesh’ as a discursive construct promote the
interests of private capital in the information sector. Critics argue that ‘Digital Bangladesh as
the Bangladeshi version of information society may be seen as a move toward transforming
Bangladesh into a neoliberal capitalist society’ (Bhuiyan, 2014).Very soon, Bangladesh will sur-
pass the bandwidth limit but unless the socio-economic capacity of rural populations improves,
the cost of bandwidth will create new forms of digital exclusion for the public in the upcoming
era of digital broadcasting, including all types of public broadcasting.

Conclusion
Drawing on the above discussions, this chapter suggests that in the era of economic globalization the
media has emerged as an influential factor in the politics, history and culture of Bangladesh. However,
the real influence of the media is being highly contested by local, national as well as global forces.
The growth of media platforms and their profuse means of engaging audiences do not neces-
sarily indicate the democratizing potential of the media. They rather attest to a tectonic shift of
control from the state to private hands, in which political and commercial concentration are
replacing old forms of authoritarianism with political instrumentalization and market-orientation.
The chapter also demonstrates that the democratization of the political system has not democ-
ratized its media systems to the full extent. While new avenues of public participation are open-
ing up, new mechanisms of control and self-censorship are also being introduced. Despite the
proliferation of media outlets, journalism remains an uncertain and hazardous occupation. As
the advent of new media is providing new platforms for public debate, it also generates further
tension between state regulation and press freedom. The introduction of a multi-stakeholder
approach has forged new grounds for media policy making in Bangladesh. However, it shows
close ideological conformity to the centers of power rather than giving a voice to the grass roots.
The media ecology is inflating but it is still divided by class inequalities that impede the media’s
ability to address and engage multiple publics. Indeed, the future of media in Bangladesh is now
largely dependent on its democratization and public-oriented policy reform emanating from
the constant struggles that are posed by the peripheral status of the country in the world system.

Notes
1 See Khan (2008, p.103), Mahmud (2013). Also see Riaz (1989).
2 Riaz (1993a) demonstrates that the rise of a military-bureaucratic oligarchy (throughout the 1970s
to the early 1980s) in Bangladesh was not a sudden response to the failure of political regimes, but an
integral part of capitalist development. Riaz eruditely goes on to argue, ‘The policies pursued by the
military regimes consolidated the power and authority of the military-bureaucratic oligarchy as the cen-
tral institution within the state and bred a class of “lumpen capitalist”’ (Riaz, 1993a, abstract).

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3 See further discussion in Rahman and Alam (2013, pp.295–296).

4 This includes BTV (terrestrial), BTV World (satellite) and Sangshad TV (Parliament TV; terrestrial).
The present Awami League government is considering creating another terrestrial television, HDTV
(Human Development TV) (Bangladesh. Access to Information, 2012).
5 Source: BTV Website (2014).
6 Fahmidul Haq, August 7, 2014, personal communication.
7 Over the past decade, European donor agencies and media development organizations have recog-
nized the potentials of multi-platform strategies to deliver a public service to the target audiences in
the developing regions. For example, with DFID funding, BBC Media Action uses television (talk
show: Bangladesh Sanglap) and an interactive English learning website (BBC Janala), as well as mobile,
social media and newspaper platforms (BBC Media Action, 2012).
8 For a detailed discussion, see Rahman (2009), Khan (2013), Rahman and Alam (2013, p.301), Shoesmith
et al. (2013, pp.243–244).
9 Interview with Sanjib Saha, Head of Research, BBC Media Action, Dhaka, January 6, 2014.
10 Corporate branding is a more profitable and all-encompassing marketing technique (branding a televi-
sion program with the name/logo/slogan/short jingle and/or product/service/image of any sponsor-
ing corporation) that was introduced first by ATN Bangla in 1997, and later adopted and modified by
most of the private television channels in Bangladesh. In most cases, the logo of corporate brands/spon-
sors appears larger than the logo of the host television channel itself (see Rahman, 2009, 2012, 2014).
11 Under the BNP regime (2001–2006), the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission
(BTRC) allocated broadcasting frequency to ten TV channels, of which six were shut down later by
the Awami League-led government (2008–2013). See Haq (2014b), see also A. Rahman (2012).

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 27
THE EDUCATION SYSTEM
Manzoor Ahmed

The education system in Bangladesh consists of some 150,000 institutions, about 40 million
students and almost a million teachers. Primary- and secondary-level institutions naturally form
the bulk of the system, with about 19 million students in primary education including madrasas
and non-formal programmes, and 12 million students at the secondary level including recog-
nized madrasas in 2012 (BANBEIS, 2013).
Participation in education has expanded remarkably since the 1990s. At the primary level,
close to universal initial enrolment has been achieved, though about a third of those enrolled
drop out before completing the primary stage. Gender equality in enrolment at the primary
and secondary levels is another accomplishment of the last two decades. In spite of the expan-
sion, overall enrolment ratios remain low at the secondary (about 50 per cent of the relevant age
group) and tertiary level (under 10 per cent). Effective participation measured by completion of
a stage of education and acceptable learning achievements of students is much lower than the
enrolment rates may suggest (Bangladesh. MoPME, 2014).
The 1998 Human Development in South Asia Report applauded ‘conscious government
policy’ in Bangladesh that helped accelerate progress in basic education, achievement of ‘near
gender parity in primary enrolment’ and a ‘dynamic role of many NGOs, grassroots community
organisations, and institutions of civil society’ (Huq and Huq, 1998, pp.57–58).The report fore-
saw a ‘major breakthrough in the field of education’ if the pace of progress could be maintained
(ibid., p.59). Has this optimism been borne out?
Within the space of this short chapter, an overview of the size and growth of the education
system will be provided, followed by a brief discussion of the political economy of educational
policy making. Recent policy initiatives and identified priorities in education will also be pre-
sented. The chapter will be concluded by indicating the challenges in pursuing the identified
policy priorities.

An overview of the system and its growth

A critical look at the recent past shows that the good beginning made in the early 1990s kept
pace with the demand for quantitative expansion of the system (Table 27.1). The promise of a
major breakthrough in respect of quality of education, equitable participation and mobilizing
and using adequate resources effectively, however, has not been fulfilled.

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Table 27.1 Growth of the education system, 1995–2012

Level of education Institutions Enrolment total Enrolment female Teachers total Teachers female
and year (,000) (,000) (,000) (,000)
Primary education (I–V)a
1995 78,094 17,134 8,190 (47%) 319 –e
2012 104,107 19,003 9,504 (50%) 450 262 (58%)
School education (VI–X)b
1995 12,012 5,115 2,403 (47%) 140 19.4 (14%)
2012 19,208 7,937 4,229 (53%) 221 53.9 (24%)
Public vocational-technical (IX–XIV)c
1995 507 59 9.4 4.3 0.5 (11%)
2012 3,327 608 165 (24%) 26.3 5.1 (24%)
College (XI–XVII)
1995 1,274 1,273 425 34.9 6.5 (20%)
2012 3,547 3,094 1,385 95.6 21.1 (22%)
Madrasa (VI–XVIII)d
1995 5,997 1,817 554 (30%) 85.4 1.5 (17%)
2012 9,441 3,904 2,020 (53%) 140.0 15.3 (11%)
Public university (XIII–XVIII)
1995 27 72.9 16.9 (23%) 4.5 0.7 (15%)
2012 34 316 108 (34%) 10.0 1.9 (19%)
Private university (XIII–XVIII)
1995 11 – – – –
2012 52 597 179 (30%) 20.6 4.7 (23%)

Source: Compiled from data tables of Bangladesh Bureau of Educational Information and Statistics (www.
banbeis.gov.bd).
Notes:
a
Primary education data include statistics for ibtedayee (primary-level madrasa education recognized
and assisted financially by government), but include a partial count through an annual primary school
census of private, for-profit kindergartens and primary schools and NGO-run non-formal primary
education centres.
b
School education data do not include a relatively small number of private English-medium schools
preparing students for overseas secondary education certification.
c
Since 1995, vocational secondary education institutions have been started with government assistance,
which have increased public-sector institutions and enrolment in vocational/technical education.
d
Madrasa data do not include quomi madrasas (indigenous, faith-based institutions on which the
government has no data and no regulatory control).
e
‘–’ indicates non-availability of reliable statistics.

The record of impressive expansion of the system as shown in Table 27.1 points to several
special features of the system that suggest important policy and operational opportunities and
challenges.

1 At the primary level, grades 1 to 5, the growth of enrolment slowed down compared to earl-
ier years, because access has reached close to 100 per cent as indicated by a net rate of enrol-
ment of 97 per cent in 2012 (Bangladesh. DPE, 2013). The slowing down of the population
growth rate from around 2.5 per cent around 1990 to about 1.5 per cent in the mid-2000s

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 M. Ahmed

has resulted in a decline in the growth rate of children seeking entry to primary school. It is,
therefore, now possible to pay attention to improvement in the quality of the system rather
than expanding services to meet demand (Ahmed, 2011, p.4).
2 The growth of girls’ enrolment has been rapid since the 1990s, resulting in Bangladesh
achieving the internationally set 2015 Millennium Development Goal and the Education
for All (EFA) goal for gender equality in educational opportunities ahead of the target date.
There are, of course, still challenges regarding completion of the primary cycle by those
enrolled and learning outcomes for both boys and girls (Bangladesh. MoPME, 2014).
3 Madrasa education has grown more rapidly than general secondary education since the 1990s.
As Table 27.1 shows, between 1995 and 2012, enrolment in madrasas at the secondary-level
institutions has increased by 2.2 times (excluding the quomi institutions), whereas enrolment
in secular institutions has increased by 1.7 times in the same period. Interestingly, increase
in girls’ enrolment has kept pace with growth in girls’ entry to general secondary schools;
in both cases, girls surpassed boys in claiming their place in secondary-level institutions.
However, the proportion of female teachers in madrasas remains far behind that in the gen-
eral stream.The enrolment data for madrasas do not include quomi madrasas, as noted above,
which are believed to serve a population that may be counted in double digits in term of
percentage of youth population.1
4 The growth of faith-based institutions and their place in the education system remains a
sensitive political and policy issue on which consensus appears to be hard to come by, as
discussed below.
5 Public provision in formal technical/vocational education has shown a growth spurt since
1995, mainly because of the introduction of a vocational and technical stream in secondary
and higher secondary education. Having substantially higher numbers and proportions of
students in vocational and technical training courses at the post-primary level is the conven-
tional policy prescription. Whether the model of vocationalization of secondary education
followed in Bangladesh meets the demand from the job market and responds to other skills
development needs remains a matter of debate, as discussed below.
6 Tertiary education has also witnessed large growth displaying certain specific characteristics.
Three-quarters of the tertiary students are enrolled in colleges under the academic manage-
ment of the National University, the affiliating body for the colleges. The graduates of these
colleges at Bachelors and Masters level constitute the bedrock of the higher-level human
resources, supplying the overwhelming proportion of the higher-skill workforce in the public
and private sectors, most notably the teaching personnel for primary and secondary educa-
tion. For the ‘university’ proper, the rapid rise of private universities has been a new phenom-
enon with important consequences for quality, relevance and equity in university education.

Not fully evident from the statistics of growth discussed above is the quality dimension of
the system, and the outcome and relevance of learning for students, as discussed further below.
The sketch of the size and growth of the education system, in their trends and characteristics,
reflects historical antecedents and conditions as well as the political dynamics of policy making
and priority setting in educational development.These influences continue to determine think-
ing and action about current and future development in education.

The political economy of education policy making

Since the birth of Bangladesh, several national education commissions and committees have
been appointed at various times to formulate education policies and priorities in line with

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national goals and aspirations. Beginning from the Qudrat-e-Khuda Education Commission
report of 1974, at least half-a-dozen such initiatives were taken. These reports agreed largely on
the diagnosis of problems and challenges, and the recommendations also had many common
elements. The most important and ironic common feature of the reports is that few substantive
recommendations of any of the reports have been implemented due to lack of political resolve
and absence of continuity in policy making (Ahmed et al., 2005). A new education policy was
adopted in 2010. Whether the 2010 education policy will have a different outcome through
a systematic and serious process of implementation and monitoring of this implementation is
still to be seen.
As a nation that has to rely primarily on its human resources to fulfil its vision of progress
and development, the deficiencies in education constitute a critical risk for all its development
endeavours. At least four major trends or continuing concerns that characterize the devel-
opment of education have emerged. The continuing unresolved issues, as elaborated below,
are: (1) an ambivalence about how the state’s role and responsibility for fulfilling the right to
basic education of citizens should be exercised; (2) how to move the system of primary and
secondary education, which constitute the foundation of the national system, away from a pat-
tern of low investment and low performance; (3) deficiencies in developing and implementing
workable strategies for literacy, lifelong learning and building skills and capabilities of people
related to work, citizenship and personal fulfilment; and (4) problems of establishing ownership,
continuity and consensus building in policy, strategy and priority (Bangladesh. MoPME, 2014).
Two other issues noted in relation to the growth of the education system are: (5) the policy
dilemmas posed by the place of madrasa education in the education system, and (6) balancing
quality and relevance in tertiary education with the social demand for its expansion.

Role of state and other actors

A unitary and administrative view of state responsibility and obligation has guided official
thinking. A statist mindset is reflected in various education policy statements, including the lat-
est one adopted in 2010. It says: ‘The process of nationalization of primary education should
continue. The responsibility for primary education cannot be transferred to the private sector
or NGOs.’ However, the policy ambiguously adds that a non-governmental organization or an
individual can run a primary school subject to the approval of authorities and state regulations
(Bangladesh. Ministry of Education, 2010, p.12).
A recent decision (January 2013) to nationalize the non-government primary schools sig-
nals a particular interpretation of the state role – central government control of the system,
rather than local government and community authority and accountability in education. It even
ignores the constitutional provision regarding local government, which requires that public
services should be planned and managed by elected representatives of the people at every level
of administration (Article 59, constitution of Bangladesh). The ‘nationalization’ approach was
first initiated in 1974, when the then existing primary schools, run by local school-managing
committees with oversight and financial support from a district primary education board, were
brought under the central government through the Primary Education Takeover Act 1974.This
well-intentioned move to enhance state support for basic education represented a bureaucratic
view of school management, by equating improvement of status and remuneration of teachers
with them being designated as central government employees within the civil service structure.
It also opens a Pandora’s box – should the ibtedayee madrasas, secondary schools at lower and
higher levels and all degree colleges, all of which receive substantial government subsidy cover-
ing their teachers’ salaries, also be nationalized? It is only a matter of time before the teachers’

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 M. Ahmed

unions take to the streets with this demand. And what exactly does this achieve for quality of
teaching and learning, and students’ learning outcomes?
The state role is equated with central government control for systems of education and other
services for the population of 160 million that makes Bangladesh the seventh most populous
country in the world. A unitary system of governance and public administration has kept the
spheres of activity limited for local government bodies that exist now, such as Union Councils
with an elected body for a collection of villages, and Upazila (sub-district) Councils, about 500
in total, with an elected body consisting of a number of unions. The local government law also
provides for elected District Councils, 64 in all for the country, but the government has stalled
on establishing them, because members of parliament and the central bureaucracy look upon
this as undermining their authority and influence (Ahmed et al., 2013).

A low-cost and low-yield system

Bangladesh has one of the lowest-cost education systems, even compared to other least devel-
oped countries. This is reflected in the fairly extensive coverage of basic education, including
primary education and literacy programmes, achieved with the lowest ratio of GNP (around 2
per cent in recent years) devoted to education in the South Asia region and one of the lowest
among all developing countries. Per student primary education public expenditure is about
US$50. The low per capita and total cost is no reason for satisfaction, because educational qual-
ity – measured in terms of learning outcome, the pedagogic process and essential inputs – is
clearly the victim of this situation (Bangladesh. MoPME, 2014).
Quality improvement, desperately needed at all levels of education, will require additional
resources. It is in this context that civil society bodies and professional circles raised the demand
to increase the share of GDP for education allocated in the government budget to 6 per cent
in the next five to seven years, with commensurate increase in the education share of the gov-
ernment budget. Education finance arrangements reinforce the pattern of inequity in the edu-
cation system. It may be argued that primary education expenditures are widely distributed,
but effective spending, counting who actually completes the primary stage, is far from equitable
(Ahmed, 2011, p.25).

Workable strategies for literacy, skills development and lifelong learning

Resource limitations and lack of appreciation of and commitment to lifelong learning among
decision makers prompted adoption of a conventional ‘alphabetization’ focused approach to lit-
eracy. In the late 1990s, the Directorate of Non-formal Education (DNFE), under the Division,
now a separate Ministry, of Primary and Mass Education (MOPME), initiated a literacy cam-
paign called the Total Literacy Movement (TLM). The TLM target was to reach the population
in the age range of 11 to 45 years and thus raise the adult literacy rate from 35 per cent in
the mid-1990s to 62 per cent by 2000 through six-month-long literacy courses. According to
official statistics, the target was exceeded by offering a literacy course to 17 million youths and
adults.
However, independent surveys, such as the Education Watch Report 2002, showed that the
adult literacy rate in the country had improved somewhat in the previous decade to reach 41
per cent in the age group of 11 years and above. It was also found that TLM had made almost
no contribution to this improvement.The increase in literacy rate was achieved mainly through
the expansion of primary education (Ahmed et al., 2003).

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A related concern is the opportunity for training in employment-related work skills.

Opportunities are limited for technical and vocational education and training (TVET) for the
size of the population. TVET enrolment is estimated to be less than 2 per cent of post-primary
formal education enrolment. There is a wide array of informal skills development through
on-the-job experience and traditional apprenticeships that have no link with the formal training
system. Some informants were of the view that the national economy would come to a grind-
ing halt without the informal and traditional skills development network (Ahmed et al., 2005).
A vocational-technical stream in formal secondary education after grade 8, introduced in
the mid-1990s, runs counter to lessons from international experience. The general lesson is
that ‘vocationalizing’ formal secondary schools raises the cost of the school without seeing
a corresponding benefit in skills development or better employment prospects for students.
International experience also suggests that the most useful vocational/occupational preparation
in the secondary school is building a sound foundation of communication skills, mathematics
and basic science, which makes young people trainable for the changeable employment market
(JBIC, 2002; Ahmed et al., 2013).
The key question in this area is: how will the workable strategies linking literacy, lifelong
learning and skills development be put into effect? The first requirement logically is to recog-
nize at the policy-making level that this is a problem area that has to be given a high level of
attention. This recognition has to be followed by appropriate policy development efforts, con-
sensus building and continuity in pursuit of policy objectives (Ahmed et al., 2013).

Policy ownership, continuity and consensus building

The continuing concerns and problem areas in educational development and difficulties of
finding effective resolutions point to dilemmas in policy development, policy ownership, build-
ing consensus on key objectives and strategies and their effective implementation.
The difficulties in consensus building are rooted in the socio-economic divisions, power
structure and political dynamics that have resulted in the development and coexistence of three
parallel educational streams – vernacular general education, the religion-based madrasas and the
English-medium schools. The three streams are patronized respectively by lower-middle- and
middle-class families, children of poor families (with provision for food and accommodation in
the quomi madrasas) and more affluent families in urban areas (IGS, 2012).
Political divisiveness has been compounded by the bureaucracy and the teachers’ unions
that have emerged as powerful interest groups as public employees since the nationalization of
primary schools in 1974. They have resisted reforms that could lead to greater accountability,
enforcement of performance criteria and community oversight (IGS, 2012, p.53).

The madrasa question

The patronization of madrasa education by its clientele, and public financial support for it,
clearly indicates a significant social demand for the faith-based educational provisions that span
the entire spectrum from pre-school to the university level. Two distinct streams of madrasa
education exist – a government-assisted programme that combines traditional religion-based
curricular content with languages, science and maths, borrowed at least partially from the secu-
lar system, and the quomi system (grouped under several federations of such madrasas) with a
strictly Islamic religion-centred traditional curriculum. Both had their origin in the subcontin-
ent under British colonial rule (ADB, 2011).

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 M. Ahmed

At the time of independence, a strong social demand for madrasa education did not exist
in Bangladesh, as indicated by the fact that a relatively small number of institutions in either
stream catered to a small clientele.The Qudrat-e-Khuda Commission report on education pol-
icy for the new country looked upon the madrasas as the provider of occupational education
for people who would serve as functionaries for religion-related public services: for example,
as imams and muezzins of mosques, registrars of Muslim marriages and teachers for children’s
religious instruction. It did not look upon madrasas as a parallel system of education comparable
to the secular system (Bangladesh. Ministry of Education, 1974).
With the political upheaval of 1974, when the founding father of the nation, Sheikh Mujibur
Rahman, was assassinated, the military rulers who assumed power sought legitimacy for their rule
by appealing to popular religious sentiments. The two military rulers, Generals Ziaur Rahman
and H. M. Ershad, who ruled from 1975 to 1990, changed the secular character of the national
constitution and encouraged madrasa education by offering generous public grants and allowing
unrestricted donations for quomi madrasas from Middle Eastern countries. The trend set by the
military rulers continued, even after democracy was restored in 1990, both in according a special
status to Islam in the constitution and in patronizing madrasas. The political parties, even those
that stood for a secular and progressive world view, found it difficult to overturn the changes
brought about by the authoritarian rulers, as reflected in the continuing growth of madrasas.
It has been difficult to have a rational discourse on the place of religion-based education,
especially its place as a parallel system, supported by public funds. Even if it is agreed that social
demand for faith-based education justified public funding of such institutions, this still begs
the questions: (1) to what extent these should be promoted and expanded with public support
parallel to the secular system, and (2) how the state should fulfil its obligation to protect the
interest of the students in respect of ensuring a relevant and sound education for life and liveli-
hood. Reluctance to have an open dialogue on these questions means that policies and actions
remain ambiguous, and the issues are shoved under the carpet, without an honest effort to reach
a resolution or consensus.

Tertiary education
Historically, the University of Dhaka, established in 1921, and the degree colleges in the old
district centres of the eastern part of Bengal, many dating back to the nineteenth century, had
earned a reputation for academic standards and centres of intellectual pursuit. A massive expan-
sion of the system and the demands of time have altered the character of higher education over
the last half-century. However, in spite of a threefold increase in enrolment since 1995, par-
ticipation by 43 out of every 1,000 persons in today’s ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘information
society’ can be considered meagre.
An expansionist approach has been followed by the government, particularly in the sphere
of degree colleges under the National University and in liberally approving charters for private
universities. The quality standards set for degree colleges and the requirements prescribed by
the private university law adopted in 1992 and amended in 2010 have been honoured more
in their breach. Rapid growth and the absence of effective self-regulation or regulation by the
University Grants Commission, the statutory regulatory agency, have raised concerns about
the quality of both public and private universities, and protecting students from unscrupulous
‘entrepreneurship’ (Ahmed, 2011).
While the need for further growth in tertiary education is not in dispute, the overwhelming
challenge is to establish and maintain quality standards as the expansion takes place. An observa-
tion by the University Grants Commission in 2006 still applies to the current situation:

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The public universities, except the top few, do not have the facilities needed for quality
teaching. The faculty is not up to an appropriate standard, and student quality is also
poor … A large number of private universities are operating in makeshift arrange-
ments … They have failed to meet the minimum requirements of physical infrastruc-
ture, fulltime qualified faculty, libraries, teaching aids and other facilities … National
university colleges are even worse.Teaching quality is generally unsatisfactory. Logistics
and facilities are also poor. In Bangladesh the higher education institutions and the
programmes they offer largely operate without any sustained and periodic critical
review that is needed for quality maintenance and enhancement.
(UGC, 2006, p.14)

Improvement of quality in the colleges is critical for reversing the decline in the entire edu-
cation system including universities, which have to draw students from the school system. The
need has been expressed in the 2010 Education Policy for a strong and autonomous body,
replacing the weak University Grants Commission for higher education coordination, serving
national development needs, and setting and enforcing standards in higher education (UGC,
2006; Ahmed, 2011).

Major recent policy and reform initiatives in education

The new government in 2009 received a strong mandate for an agenda of political and eco-
nomic change outlined in Vision 2021 – a vision for development and change in Bangladesh by
its fiftieth anniversary. The government also pledged a new education policy, adopted in 2010,
befitting the new vision. A National Skill Development Policy (NSDP) was also adopted in
2011, recognizing the need for skills and capability enhancement of the then workforce.

Vision 2021
Vision 2021 reflected the political commitment of the government regarding education and
enhancement of the skills and capabilities of people, some of which were expressed in the
National Education Policy adopted in 2010 and the Sixth Five Year Development Plan.
The Vision statement anticipated achievement of universal primary education, extending
this stage to grade 8, elimination of illiteracy, creating a new generation skilled in and equipped
with technical and scientific knowledge, better remunerations for teachers and overall improve-
ment of quality and equity in education. It also promised the formulation of an education pol-
icy fit for the contemporary age. Emphasis is placed on building ‘Digital Bangladesh’ through
widespread use of digital technology for information and communications to promote access
to information and knowledge, improve governance and exploit it for educational develop-
ment. The ten-year perspective plan (2011–2021), which overlaps with the current Sixth Five
Year Plan and the future Seventh Plan, elaborates on the content and strategies for Vision 2021
(Bangladesh. Planning Commission, 2010, 2011).

National Education Policy 2010

The Education Policy, approved by the national parliament in 2010, provided a framework
for fulfilling the role of the educational system in the nation’s human resource development
(Bangladesh. Ministry of Education, 2010). The key relevant features include:

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 M. Ahmed

Universal education up to grade 8: One year of pre-primary education and primary education
(of five years at present) extended to grade 8 should become universal within the next decade.
The historically evolved reality of the diversity of provision in primary and secondary educa-
tion – government, government-assisted, NGO and private-sector schools, and the madrasa – is
recognized. It is agreed that this diversity may continue, but all institutions will have to fol-
low a common core curriculum and adopt minimum common standards regarding learning
provisions.
Multiple delivery modes with common core curriculum and standards: The common core curric-
ulum for all types of secondary-level institutions (including madrasas) will include Bangla,
English, mathematics, science, Bangladesh studies and IT, and will be complemented by
additional subjects pertinent for each major stream – general, vocational and madrasa. In
addition to the vocational stream in schools, there would be various forms of skill training
activities according to graded national skill standards designed to meet skill needs in domes-
tic and overseas employment markets. Instruction in science and IT would be given special
attention.
Literacy and non-formal education: A literacy programme to eliminate adult illiteracy by 2014
was proposed (but clearly not going to be achieved). Non-formal education is seen as a means
of providing a second chance to those who drop out of formal schools, complementing the
‘literacy campaign’.
Quality improvement in tertiary education: Tertiary education institutions, both public and pri-
vate, would be encouraged to take responsibility to establish and maintain quality standards
within an agreed framework. A four-year degree programme should be an acceptable higher
education qualification for most professional-level occupations except for those aiming for
teaching, research and other jobs that call for specialized expertise. An English course should
be compulsory for all degree students. Various quality-enhancing investments in facilities and
teacher upgrading are proposed. Pedagogic technology such as the Internet and educational
television channels should be supported.
Student assessment to discourage rote learning: Assessment of learners’ achievement should be
based on public examinations and continuous evaluation by teachers, which should aim at
assessing cognitive, affective and reasoning domains.
Teachers’ status, incentives and training: Teachers’ recruitment, training, professional support
and remuneration should be key elements of the strategy for improving quality in education.
A Teacher Recruitment and Development Commission should be established to recruit teach-
ers and support their professional development.
Governance and management measures: A consolidated education law should be enacted pro-
viding a legal framework for educational governance and management in line with the purposes
of the new policy. A permanent education commission is proposed to guide and oversee imple-
mentation of the education policy.
It can be seen that the policy recommendations are in the form of normative goals or pref-
erences expressed in general terms. Implementation of the policy will require establishment of
mechanisms and processes, preparation of phased operational plans and reconciliation of differ-
ing views, and making choices among options on certain issues.

The Sixth Five Year Plan

The Sixth Five Year National Development Plan (2011–2015) is expected to be a mechanism for
implementing the plan and programme of the government with provision for adequate resources,
appropriate coordination, and necessary monitoring and adjustments of plans as needed.

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It is said in the plan document that

in a market economy like Bangladesh where the bulk of the economy is privately
owned and managed, the role of planning is essentially indicative in nature … focus of
the plans [being] on strategies, policies and institutions to help guide the private sector
in helping Bangladesh achieve the goals set in Vision 2021.

A balance between incentives to the private sector and instituting regulatory policies for safe-
guarding the public interest is seen as ‘a major guiding principle of the policy and institutional
framework of the Sixth and the Seventh plans’ (Bangladesh, Planning Commission, 2011, p.8).

National Skill Development Policy

An NSDP received government approval in 2011. This policy attempts to address the issues
related to technical and vocational education and training in the country and proposes to
strengthen the Bangladesh Technical Education Board as a quality assurance mechanism. A new
Skill Development Council headed by the prime minister is also intended to consider strategic
approaches in the medium term coinciding with the sixth plan. The policy aims to address
critical issues including provision of demand-driven, flexible and responsive training provision;
nationally recognized qualifications; competency-based training; quality assurance; accurate
skills and labour-market data; and competent TVET instructors and managers. A key element of
the policy is the engagement of industry through the establishment of Industry Skills Councils
(Bangladesh. Ministry of Education, 2011).
The key features of these major policy statements and how these may shape achievement of
EFA 2015 goals and the post-2015 education agenda need the continuing attention of policy
makers and civil society stakeholders in national education and skills development.

Looking ahead
The new Education Policy adopted in 2010, the Sixth Five Year Development Plan (2011–2015)
and Vision 2021, including the vision for Digital Bangladesh proposed by the government, pre-
sent both opportunities and challenges. There is a general agreement (see, e.g., Ahmed et al.,
2011; Bangladesh. MoPME, 2014), that:

1 Basic education provision including primary education must be inclusive and responsive to
learners’ circumstances, with affirmative action to serve the highly deprived and poor groups
and areas. The low quality that characterizes much of the system now, along with large vari-
ations in quality, and the consequent serious inequity must be reversed. Universal primary
education of eight-year duration, as recommended in the education policy, is achievable and
must be achieved without delay.
2 The diversity in delivery modes that has arisen historically (such as government primary
schools, madrasas, second-chance non-formal primary education and private proprietary
schools) may continue to a degree, but a unified national system (not necessarily uniform),
with common core curricula and standards for provisions that allow a broadly common edu-
cational experience for all children of Bangladesh, has to be established. Pre-school educa-
tion of acceptable quality also has to be a key component of the unified system, especially to
ensure school readiness for first-generation learners and children subject to poverty, special
needs and other disadvantages.

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3 The system cannot achieve its goals with the current numbers of teachers, methods of their
professional preparation and the level of salary and incentives. New thinking about teachers
and pedagogy is needed. The class size should be manageable and effective learning time
(contact hours) raised to the international average of around 1,000 hours in a year. Bold
and creative measures are needed to attract talented and inspired young people to teaching,
keep them in the profession and create a critical mass of talented teachers in the education
system.
4 Substantially greater resources are needed to ensure minimum acceptable levels of quality
with equity. More resources are needed at the school level along with greater discretion with
accountability in their use. The question of affordability must be turned around to ask: Can
we afford not to make the necessary investment in education with quality and equity?
5 Effective governance and management are essential, both at central and school levels.
A result-focused system requires meaningful decentralization in planning and resource man-
agement, recognizing the need for professionalism and capacity building, especially at school,
upazila and district levels. Structural and legal changes for this purpose will require national
political resolve at the top.

How these policy priorities are elaborated into operational plans and actions and to what extent
these are implemented effectively will determine whether the promise of education and devel-
opment will be fulfilled.

Note
1 As reported in the Daily Star (2014), ‘More than a million students study at approximately 25,000
Qawmi madrasas which mainly survive on private donations. This is an uncharted territory with no
government monitoring, supervision or support.’

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Asian Development Bank and Government of Bangladesh). Dhaka: Asian Development Bank.
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in Bangladesh: Overcoming Hurdles to Equity with Quality. Dhaka: BRAC University Press and University
Press Limited.
Ahmed, M. (2013) The Post-2015 MDG and EFA Agenda and the National Discourse about Goals and
Targets: A Case Study of Bangladesh. NORRAG Working Paper No. 5. Geneva: Graduate Institute of
International Education and Development Studies (IHEID).
Ahmed, M., Ali, K. S. and Khan, K. K. (2005) Bangladesh Education Sector Mapping. Dhaka: Institute of
Educational Development, BRAC University.
Ahmed, M., Hossain, A. and Kalam, M. A. (2011) Crossing the Hurdles to Equity with Quality: Policy
and Strategy Priorities. In: Ahmed, M. (ed.). Education in Bangladesh: Overcoming Hurdles to Equity with
Quality. Dhaka: BRAC University Press and University Press Limited.
Ahmed, M., Hossain, A., Kalam, A. and Ahmed, S. (2013) Skills Development in Bangladesh: Enhancing the
Youth Skills Profile. Education Watch 2011–12. Dhaka: Campaign for Popular Education.
Ahmed, M., Nath, S. R., and Ahmed, K. S. (2003) Literacy in Bangladesh: Need for a New Vision. Education
Watch Report 2002. Dhaka: Campaign for Popular Education.
BANBEIS. (2013) Basic Education Statistics 2012. Dhaka: Bangladesh Bureau of Educational Information
and Statistics.
Bangladesh. Directorate of Primary Education (DPE). (2013) Annual Sector Performance Report 2013. Dhaka:
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Bangladesh. Ministry of Education. (2010) National Education Policy 2010. Dhaka: Ministry of Education.
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2021 a Reality. Dhaka: Planning Commission.
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Institute of Governance Studies (IGS). (2012) Policy, Influence, Ownership: The State of Governance in
Bangladesh, Report 2010–11. Dhaka: Institute of Governance Studies, BRAC University.
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 28
PUBLIC HEALTH
Arafat Kabir

Bangladesh has experienced a silent revolution in public health. Maternal mortality has been cut
by 75 percent since 1980, infant mortality has halved since 1990, and the total fertility rate has
fallen to 2.2 in 2012 (UNICEF, n.d.a) from about 7 in the 1970s (United States. Department
of Commerce Economics and Statistics Administration, 1993). Such a level of achievement in
reducing child and maternal mortality has had barely any precedent in modern history, except
that of the Japanese attainments during the nineteenth-century Meiji restoration (The Economist,
2012). In 2010, the United Nations recognized Bangladesh’s extraordinary progress toward
achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the reduction of child and maternal
mortality (Chowdhury et al., 2013).
In addition, Bangladesh has recently been applauded as an example of ‘good health at low
cost’ (Koehlmoos et al., 2011). It is noteworthy that these achievements have been made des-
pite the fact that Bangladesh spends less on health care than several of its neighboring countries
(World Bank, n.d.a). Many regard Bangladesh’s high aschievement versus low input (Table 28.1)
as ‘one of the great mysteries of global health’ (Das and Horton, 2013, p.1681).
But where does this mystery come from? Understandably, these intriguing achievements did
not happen overnight. In fact, they have been the culmination of several complementary factors
that have helped transform Bangladesh’s public health system.
A social mobilization and civil dynamism ensued after the birth of the nation, thanks to
the surge of nationalism that swept through the nation in the early 1970s (Chowdhury et al.,
2013, p.1734). Realizing its own limitation in delivering health services to a massive population,
the government undertook a pro-equity and pluralistic approach that spurred the growth of
non-governmental organizations (NGOs). A public–private partnership in health care ultim-
ately led Bangladesh to experiment with innovative ideas in the delivery of health care that later
proved not only highly successful but also a model for other countries. The spread of NGOs
in turn facilitated female workers’ inclusion in the health sector on a mass scale, which in fact
boosted women’s participation in an array of health-care programs: family planning, immuniza-
tion, oral rehydration therapy, and others. Bangladesh nurtured a world-class research institution,
the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b) that continues
to help shape the government’s policy on health-related issues. Despite being an impoverished
nation, Bangladesh continues to punch above its own weight. Bangladesh has developed a

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 newgenrtpdf
Table 28.1 Health system indicators in South Asia

Country Total population Inputs Health outputs

(million)
Health Health Doctors/1,000 Nurses and Expanded Program Diarrheal Skilled Facility delivery
expenditure expenditure per population midwives/1,000 on Immunization episodes of attendance at (%)
(% GDP) capita (US$) population (EPI) (%) children under delivery (%)
5 that received
oral rehydration
therapy (%)
Bangladesh 156.6 3.6 26 0.4 0.2 82 78 32 28.8
India 1,252 4 61 0.7 1.7 47.3 26 52 46.9
Nepal 27.8 5.5 36 n.a. n.a. 82.8 39 36 35.3
Pakistan 182.1 3.1 39 0.8 0.6 44 38 43 41
Sri Lanka 20.48 3.1 89 0.7 1.6 64 50 99 98.2

Sources: Compiled by author. ‘Skilled attendance’, ‘facility delivery’ are extracted from UNICEF (n.d.a). ‘Diarrheal episodes’ from UNICEF (2014a). ‘Health
expenditure’ from World Bank (n.d.b). ‘Total population’ is from World Bank (n.d.c). Physician data are from World Bank (n.d.d). Nurse data are from World Bank
(n.d.e). ‘EPI’ from Chowdhury et al. (2013, p.1739).
Notes: Data for doctors/1,000 for Bangladesh and India are from 2011 and those of Nepal and Pakistan are from 2010. Data for nurses/midwives for Bangladesh and
India are from 2011 and those of Pakistan and Sri Lanka are from 2010.
 A. Kabir

natural disaster intervention policy that has seen a substantial reduction of health consequences
of floods and cyclones in the past four decades (Cash et al., 2013, p.2094).
Bangladesh’s remarkable success in public health can, therefore, be regarded as a product of
four fundamental components: equity, pluralism, innovation, and resilience.

Equity
Equity gain in some of the health indicators stipulated in the MDGs has set Bangladesh apart
from its neighbors. A somewhat pro-equity approach to address health issues – for example,
child and maternal mortality rates, family planning, vaccination, and diseases like tubercu-
losis and dehydration – has significantly improved Bangladesh’s overall health landscape. This
achievement has been further complemented by the combined effort of the government and
NGOs to improve the socio-economic conditions of Bangladesh.
Bangladesh’s success has been driven by its flexible policy-making process that takes into
account the lessons learned from what can be characterized as Bangladesh’s ‘trial-and-error’
approach. Many of Bangladesh’s highly successful projects have commenced as pilot programs
encompassing a small sample population, which have later been developed into national-level
programs. Child immunization is one such area where Bangladesh has gained absolute coverage
over the years. Bangladesh started to implement its Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI) in
the late 1970s (Khan and Yoder, 1998). Soon the country ramped up its effort to cover the entire
population as part of Bangladesh’s commitment to a UN-supported program (Khan and Yoder,
1998). At the same time, the government, in partnerships with the NGOs, donors, and other
non-state actors, endeavored to build infrastructure, develop human resources, and launch edu-
cational and awareness campaign (Adams, Rabbani et al., 2013, pp.2031). Dispatching a legion of
health workers who visit door-to-door to increase people’s participation, in particular, has been
a game changer. These health workers generally work in the vicinity of their native place since
people in a conservative society like Bangladesh tend to be more receptive to those they can
associate with than to complete strangers. Thus the idea of deploying female health workers was
mooted. Female workers can reach out to a large population who previously remained out of con-
tact: women. These interventions in the achievement of a common target made Bangladesh post
spectacular gains at the turn of the new century (Adams, Rabbani et al., 2013, pp.2027–2037). In
2010, Bangladesh received a UN award (Bangladesh Planning Commission, 2013) for cutting the
child mortality rate by two-thirds well before the time frame set by the MDGs. It has been possible
chiefly because of Bangladesh’s superior performance in immunization including polio vaccin-
ation (Figure 28.1) and vitamin A supplementation program (Bangladesh. Planning Commission,
2013). Bangladesh’s success is not limited to devising and implementing action plans to mitigate
health problems. Bangladesh has continued to sustain its achievement. On National Immunization
Day in 2012, some 600,000 voluntary health workers were assembled at over 140,000 sites across
the country with the aim to provide polio vaccines and vitamin A capsules to 24 million children
(Adams, Rabbani et al., 2013, p.2032). This has all been done with a hierarchy of agencies where
different ministries, NGOs, and non-state actors assume their respective roles.
In a similar vein, Bangladesh’s family planning program has produced remarkable success
(ibid.). The fertility rate among women plunged to 2.5 in 2010 from the 6.3 that was the case
in the early 1970s (ibid.). At one point, this program was so successful that nearly every woman
was approached by a family welfare assistant (ibid.). Men were given family planning informa-
tion, including the usage of contraceptives, by male workers. In short, Bangladesh has attempted
to provide some of its health intervention programs in such a way that people regardless of sex,
income, social background, etc. can enjoy access to it.

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100
90
80
70
60
50
40
Bangladesh
30
Southeast Asia
20
10
0
1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015

Figure 28.1 Bangladesh’s immunization coverage (polio among one-year-olds) (source: WHO, n.d.a)
Note: Countries in Southeast Asia under WHO’s classification are: Bangladesh, Bhutan, Democratic
Republic of Korea, India, Indonesia, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Timor Leste.
See: www.who.int/about/regions/searo/en.

An equitable outcome in different health interventions has been complemented by

Bangladesh’s simultaneous improvement of its socio-economic indicators. Bangladesh has
placed a premium on women’s empowerment by extending free education, microfinance, and
employment. Despite the fact that primary education was made free for children in 1990, girls
were still lagging behind. With the objective of increasing girls’ enrollment in primary edu-
cation, the government introduced a Food for Education program targeting those from poor
families. Contingent upon several conditions, a stipend program for secondary-level female
students in rural areas was introduced. These measures progressively helped increase the rate of
female primary and secondary school enrollment (World Bank, n.d.f). A non-formal education
program spearheaded by NGOs and supported by donors has also helped spread education
among disadvantaged groups. An increasing education rate among female students has helped
curb early marriage rates. Women were thus given the opportunity to change their financial
situation.
Following the success of the Grameen Bank, many NGOs started to distribute microfinance
among eligible women.The government created quotas for women in jobs to guarantee a min-
imum representation of women across different sectors. A thriving ready-made garment indus-
try also helped integrate them into the mainstream economic workforce. As a result, Bangladesh
has significantly improved gender-based inequalities and women are gaining a voice in deciding
their fate. The overall improvement in social and economic conditions can be traced to the
equitable gain in the health sector, albeit the causal link between the two has yet to be demon-
strated empirically (Sen, 2013, p.1966).

Pluralism
A pluralistic approach is the bedrock of Bangladesh’s health care system. Realizing its limita-
tion in providing state provisions, the government encouraged the private sector and NGOs to

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come forward to serve disadvantaged people. Over the years, the activities of the public, private,
and NGO sectors have converged, giving birth to a pluralistic health care system in Bangladesh.
In theory, pluralism in health means a presence of different stakeholders that work in dif-
ferent ways to fulfill one goal: providing health care. In practice, a pluralistic system recognizes
different actors with their defined responsibilities. A pluralistic health system helps check over-
arching governmental policymaking as the non-state actors are given the authority to shape
how the health sector will function. In short, a pluralistic health care system allows a coexistence
of a moderate level of state-centricity and laissez-faire approach by the private sector (Ahmed
et al., 2013, p.1747).
The Bangladesh health care system displays both theoretical and practical characteristics of
pluralism. A number of agencies overseen by of the central government are responsible for pro-
viding basic to tertiary-level health care.These agencies, in consultation with other stakeholders,
craft and implement health policies. However, this process is not always smooth, partly due to
bureaucratic constraints, and partly due to the inconsistency of pursuing a set of policies arising
from a new government. Then come the private-sector actors, including for-profit hospitals,
clinics, or even frontline providers. Recently, Bangladesh has seen a boost in investment in
private medical care. Private clinics, diagnostic centers, and tertiary-level hospitals target the
affluent class. Poor people can rarely afford the cost of high-end health care. With the aim of
meeting the health care of extremely poor and disadvantaged people, NGOs in Bangladesh have
made a significant contribution. Both government policies and a flow of foreign donations have
helped spur the NGO sector in Bangladesh. Donors prefer NGOs to government to channel
their investment to the poor people. Thanks to their efficiency, NGOs have become a critically
important component of Bangladesh’s health care systems. Lastly, the donor community plays an
important role. They provide the technical know-how to help the government create its policy.
Harnessing pluralism, Bangladesh has achieved some of its remarkable successes in the health
sector. The fight against tuberculosis is chief among them. In the mid-1980s BRAC started
a community-based pilot program to detect and treat tuberculosis patients. Japan’s Research
Institute of Tuberculosis provided technical assistance. The government, under its National
Tuberculosis Program, offered logistical support including laboratories, health centers, and doc-
tors.The entire program was executed in a very systematic way. BRAC’s legion of health work-
ers made door-to-door visits and pre-screened and had those with suggestive symptoms like
cough persisting more than three weeks to bring a sample of sputum to a nearby collection
and smear center. If tested positive, the health workers communicated with the concerned
parties to instruct them how to proceed with the six-month-long medication course. With a
view to curbing the drop-out rates, BRAC introduced a novel measure requiring all intended
recipients of treatment to pay a bond of US$3 that would be returned upon successful com-
pletion of the treatment. In addition, every health worker would receive a benefit of US$6 for
their help in bringing a patient to complete the full course of treatment. This entire mechan-
ism registered a soaring treatment completion rate that became one of the best-performing
tuberculosis treatment programs in the world (Ahmed et al., 2013, p.1752). The government
adopted the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended Directly Observed Treatment,
Short Course (DOTS) program in 1993. Together with BRAC, the government was able to
scale up the community-based DOTS program to all sub-district areas by 1998 and to all
metropolitan areas by 2007. Meanwhile, the Global Funds for Aids, Tuberculosis, and Malaria,
created in 2003, replaced previous funding mechanisms for Bangladesh’s tuberculosis program,
which helped Bangladesh expand its existing program. Bangladesh has been able to maintain a
90 percent treatment completion rate since 2005 (Bangladesh. Directorate General of Health
Services, 2013).

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Table 28.2 Development and health system output index in South Asia

Development index Health output

Gross national Poverty Enrollment Life Infant Under-5 Access to
product per (% of in primary expectancy at mortality/1,000 mortality improved
capita (US$) population) education birth births sanitation
(%) (% of
population)
Bangladesh 1,010 31.5 114 70.3 33 41 57
India 1,570 21.9 113 66.2 44 56 36
Nepal 730 25.2 135 68 34 42 37
Pakistan 1,360 12.4 93 66.4 69 86 48
Sri Lanka 3,170 6.7 98 74.1 8 10 92

Sources: Compiled by author. ‘Life expectancy’, ‘Infant mortality’, ‘Under-5 mortality’ are extracted from
UNICEF (n.d.a). Sanitation data are from World Bank (n.d.g). The rest of the data are extracted
from World Bank (n.d.h).

Bangladesh’s sustained pluralistic approach is not limited to fighting tuberculosis. NGOs and
non-state actors have greatly collaborated with the government to achieve a collective gain in
overall health coverage (Table 28.2).
For instance, NGOs have reached out to the rural people to help them access hygienic sani-
tation. On the other side, government agencies have launched a nationwide awareness campaign
to educate people about the importance and ways to make the best use of a safe sanitary system.
As a consequence, rural Bangladeshis have quickly turned to safe sanitation, which has helped
decrease the incidence of water-borne diseases. A pluralistic approach has enabled private and
non-state actors to shoulder burdens from the government, which has paved the way for a faster
health transition for Bangladesh.

Innovation
Innovation in Bangladesh’s health sector has come in two broad ways: institutional and oper-
ational. Bangladesh has nurtured some of the world’s largest NGOs and most dynamic research
institutions. These institutions have continued to produce bold solutions to some of the most
intractable health puzzles for Bangladesh, which in turn paved the way for other countries to
tackle their own problems. Together with these institutions, the Bangladeshi government has
been able to ramp up its efforts to improve the overall public health scenario. For instance, the
icddr,b has developed oral rehydration therapy that came to revolutionize the treatment of
dehydration. However, it has been the close partnership between the government and BRAC –
the world’s largest NGO – that has helped mothers across the country learn how to make the
therapeutic solution. This partnership has been so fruitful that today almost every Bangladeshi
woman knows how to prepare oral rehydration saline (Abed, 2013, p.2048). One name that
has come to represent development activities in Bangladesh is Grameen. Inspired by its tre-
mendous success in pioneering microfinance, Grameen has instituted a number of sustainable
solutions to shoulder the government’s task of providing health care. Grameen in concert with
a number of multinational companies have attempted to experiment in health-related social
business in Bangladesh. With the aim of combating malnutrition in rural areas, Grameen and
Danone undertook a joint venture producing and distributing a special yogurt, which the

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producers named ‘fortified yogurt’, that is, full of nutritional ingredients. Yogurt is a popular
dairy item among Bangladeshis. In a similar vein, Grameen’s social business is experiment-
ing with mosquito-repellent nets and water treatment in arsenic-contaminated regions (Yunus
Center, n.d.). Like BRAC and Grameen, other institutions are contributing to the health
sector of Bangladesh. Gonoshathya Kendra has been the pioneer in deploying village-based
para-professionals and in developing Bangladesh’s drug policy (Chowdhury et al., 2013, p.1741).
Bangladesh Diabetic Samity (BADAS) has become a trusted name among diabetes patients
in Bangladesh. BADAS runs a chain of hospitals and clinics across Bangladesh that provide
low-cost health care to people. In addition to these institutions, other NGOs like the Bangladesh
Association for Voluntary Sterilization and the Family Planning Association of Bangladesh con-
tinue to contribute to their respective areas of work.
Apart from this, policy innovations have helped transform Bangladesh’s health landscape.The
National Drug Policy put into effect in 1982 is a testament to this. The policy allowed local
pharmaceutical companies to acquire essential materials for producing drugs at home. Thanks
to this, Bangladesh became the first low-income country to develop a domestic pharmaceutical
industry. Today, it not only provides 95 percent (Bangladesh Pharmaceutical Society, n.d.) of
the total local medical need, but also exports generic drugs to as many as 107 countries across
the globe (Dhaka Tribune, 2015). Bangladesh has been prompt in adopting new policies too.
The country has been one of the early respondents to a WHO-sponsored drug policy that the
organization was encouraging other countries to adopt.
In case of operations, Bangladesh has developed and implemented a number of innova-
tive health care delivery systems. Bangladesh has trialed and subsequently devised an effica-
cious community-based approach. Thanks to it, Bangladesh has been able to weather the likely
adverse outcome of a dearth of health care professionals (Table 28.1) in the public sector,
which is only 0.58 per 1,000 people, compared to the WHO-recommended 2.28. Bangladesh
has become the first country to produce a cadre of frontline community health workers. The
number of community health workers provided by the non-state organizations has long out-
matched those of the public sector. Estimates show that Bangladesh had a total of 219,000 com-
munity health workers in 2011–2012, of which 56,000 came from the public sector (Arifeen
et al., 2013, p.2014). Community health workers have been the pillar of Bangladesh’s outreach
program to communities. Working as a bridge between poor households and facility-based
care, these workers visit door-to-door on a regular basis to motivate, raise awareness and dis-
seminate a wide range of health interventions such as oral rehydration therapy, immuniza-
tion, and family planning. NGOs are taking the community health services to the next level
by preparing the workers as direct providers of care. BRAC has ramped up its antenatal care
through community health workers. Bangladesh’s success is not limited to dispatching a troop
of community-based workers. Rather it has targeted a specific group with specific needs.When
it comes to family planning, female health workers reach women to help them understand the
benefit of the program. Likewise, Bangladesh has been able to make tuberculosis history by
targeting the affected people and then providing them with proper treatment. Bangladesh’s suc-
cess in community-based health care has been replicated by many countries. This has come to
complement Bangladesh’s commitment to a sustainable culture of innovation.

Resilience
Bangladesh is one of the world’s most natural-disaster-prone countries. Since 1970 Bangladesh
has experienced six major floods and five cyclones, two of which were among the worst in
the twentieth century. The Great Bhola Cyclone in 1970, a category-3 storm (United States.

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NASA, 2007a), claimed more than 500,000 lives (United States. NOAA, 2007). In contrast,
only around 3,400 people died in the category-4 (United States. NASA, 2007b) Cyclone Sidr
in 2007, one of the deadliest of its kind. Although it is not feasible to compare the effects of
natural disasters, the significant reduction in the mortality rate portrays a quintessential feature
of the Bangladeshi people: resilience.
Over the years, Bangladesh has developed a structured disaster management plan that specif-
ically focuses on the greatest cause of fatality and morbidity. First, an improved communication
system is crucial in ensuring people’s best preparation during a natural phenomenon. Previously,
people were left vulnerable to disasters like cyclones due to lack of communication. Bangladesh
has displayed a high level of adaptability in incorporating existing technologies, such as radio,
television, and telecommunications, to reach out to people. In 2007, Bangladesh utilized satellite
imagery to learn the severity of the storm and cellphones to make people aware of the potential
hazards (Cash et al., 2013, p.2098).
Second, Bangladesh has developed new types of cyclone shelters in which people informed
of an imminent natural disaster can take refuge. Recently, architects have been experimenting
with a safe, low-cost house, labeled a ‘Disaster Resilient Habitat’, that can resist cyclones (Cash
et al., 2013, p.2097). Third, several innovative interventions like potable water, preserving dry
foods dug into the ground so that people can use them later, help to mitigate the after-effects of
floods and cyclones, such as diarrhea and cholera. In 2004, scientists at icddr,b developed a mix-
ture of alum potash, bleaching powder, and lime, popularly known as Siraj mixture, to decon-
taminate water in a disaster-hit area to prevent water-borne diseases. A packet of Siraj mix that
costs only US$0.05 is sufficient to purify a water container typically used in rural Bangladesh
(Cash et al., 2013, p.2098). Fourth, a combined intervention program by government agencies,
NGOs, and local actors in the aftermath of a disaster aims at monitoring the overall health
conditions of the affected people. They also provide medical and logistical assistance to people
to help them get back to normalcy as soon as possible.
Over the course of time, Bangladeshi people have learned how to deal with the natural
disasters that are inflicted upon them from time to time. A realistic approach to mitigate the
health-related hazards has seen a 100-fold reduction in the death rate since 1970. Bangladesh’s
resilience has, hence, become the country’s biggest strength.

Challenges
Despite successes, danger lies in the Bangladeshi health care system. Bangladesh’s overall
health care system is not built upon a strong foundation, although it serves a population of
160 million.

A total of 536 public hospitals with 37,387 beds provide inpatient care services in
Bangladesh for a population of 160 million … Of 64 districts, 59 have a hospital with
secondary level health care. However, these hospitals have limited specialists, diagnos-
tic and laboratory services. In addition, there are nine general hospitals with 100–250
bed capacity each.
(Islam and Biswas, 2014, p.369)

These statistics reveal that the country is far behind other countries. Researchers in public
health have noted that ‘while Bangladesh has only 0.4 bed per 1,000 population, Ghana has
0.9 bed per 1,000 population. Similarly Kenya at the same level of economic development as
Bangladesh has 35% higher number of hospital beds than Bangladesh’ (Islam and Biswas, 2014,

359
 A. Kabir

p.369). There is a dearth of credentialed health care professionals in Bangladesh – only 0.4 doc-
tors and 0.2 nurses for every 1,000 people (Table 28.1), nowhere near what the WHO recom-
mends. Additionally, the health care experts and doctors are largely concentrated in urban areas.
The disparity, both in terms of region and economic strata, is striking.

[The] poor and the disadvantaged groups still have significantly less access to health
care services than the rich and the privileged. For example, only 8% of pregnant
women from the poorest income quintile deliver their babies at any health centre or
clinic compared to 53% pregnant women from the richest income quintile.
(Islam and Biswas, 2014, p.371)

In a similar vein, despite the overall success in reducing the mortality rate, there is a wide vari-
ation by socio-economic status: a low of 43 per 1,000 live births among the richest income
quintile, while over 85 per 1,000 live births among the poorest income quintile (Islam and
Biswas, 2014, p.371). Rural people rushing to the cities with a view to receiving better treat-
ment often find themselves in a predicament because of the widespread practice of dualism by
the doctors (Ahmed et al., 2013, p.2049). Dualism is when doctors moonlight in public hospitals
in the morning and carry on their private practice in the afternoon. The increasing prevalence
of such a practice is reducing equity of access. The same is caused by the mushrooming of pri-
vate for-profit hospitals in Bangladesh, although they are shouldering the daunting tasks of the
government to provide health care to the public. Estimates suggest that at present such hospitals
comprise 80 percent of the more than 3,500 hospitals in Bangladesh and they are on the rise
(Huque et al., 2012, pp.25–32). On the contrary, growth in the public-sector services is lacklus-
ter.The government’s capability to extend its service is evidently restrained by limited resources.
Bangladesh currently spends a mere US$32 per head on health and the share of GDP expend-
iture on public health is falling (World Bank, n.d.j). The privatization of health care financing,
especially through out-of-pocket expenditure, is surging.1 It is a matter of regret that approxi-
mately 4–5 million people are being reduced to poverty each year due to their inability to bear
health care costs (Adams, Ahmed et al., 2013, pp.2105).
In addition to these overarching challenges, the country is also facing a number of pressing
sectorial challenges that warrant urgent attention lest these pose a greater threat to Bangladesh.
Some of these are briefly outlined below.

Arsenic
Until the mid-twentieth century, the rural population in Bangladesh largely relied on surface
water and shallow wells for water supply (Edmunds et al., 2015). The dynamics have rapidly
changed since the introduction of hand-pumped tube wells in the 1960s. Access to bacteria-free,
safe drinking water encouraged people to permanently switch to tube wells. Estimates show
that only 10 percent of the tube wells were installed by government agencies as well as NGOs;
the rest are privately owned. Heavy dependence on tube-well water helped Bangladesh curb the
number of infant and neonatal deaths caused by water-borne diseases. An epidemic outbreak
of cholera, too, was prevented. A UNICEF report shows that 97 percent of the population had
access to safe drinking water in the late 1990s (UNICEF, 1998).
Unfortunately, that success was badly affected by the government’s tardiness in address-
ing arsenic contamination of groundwater. Arsenic is a natural element found in the earth’s
crust. According to the WHO’s standard for Bangladesh, one liter of water with a trace of
50 µg of arsenic is considered arsenic-contaminated. Chronic exposure to arsenic can lead

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to adverse health effects including skin lesions, cardio-vascular diseases, hypertension, and
diabetes. Worse, arsenic is a known carcinogen. According to one study, about 35–70 million
people out of a population of 160 million have been exposed to arsenic through drinking
water (Flanagan et al., 2012). The government formulated a plan to mitigate the problem in
2004, but its lackluster implementation has left the problem largely untreated. Several studies
conducted on arsenic have pointed to a lack of coordination between stakeholders as being
one of the major setbacks. In addition, government agencies’ reluctance to realize the scale
of the problem and subsequently address it has been another setback. Since arsenic contam-
ination is a public health issue, the government should hold itself responsible for mitigating
the problem.
Arsenic-contaminated water is no new phenomenon. Countries like Taiwan, Argentina, and
Chile have faced and solved it. Bangladesh could completely eliminate the problem by 2030 if
the government were willing to invest a small portion of national GDP in providing pipeline
water supplies as well as monitoring arsenic levels across the country (Flanagan et al., 2012).

Poor health care for slum dwellers

In the past 40 years, Bangladesh has seen an exponential influx of people to urban areas with
the increase of economic activities.The so-called ‘arrival cities’, already overwhelmed by a mas-
sive population, struggle to accommodate the new urbanites (Garner, 2011). As a result, many
people find shelter in the slums mushrooming here and there, especially on the edges of big
cities like Dhaka and Chittagong. A slum-mapping project in 2005 registered more than 9,048
slums across the nation, 55 percent of which are in Dhaka (CUS and NIPORT, 2006, p.11).
Basic amenities like housing, water, vaccination, sanitation, and electricity are rare in urban
slums. Overcrowding, together with unhygienic living conditions, exacerbates overall health
problems in slums. Reported cases of diseases like tuberculosis, dengue fever, and hepatitis B
among slum dwellers are more prevalent than in rural areas (BRAC, n.d.; Joncker, 2009). Due
to lack of proper care, many women living in slums die during pregnancy and childbirth (Afsana
and Wahid, 2013, p.2050). In comparison with rural areas, the mortality rate of children under
five years of age is almost double (ibid.).
The abysmal health conditions present in the slum areas can be significantly improved.
Strategies should be crafted for specific target groups. For instance, primary health care clinics
available in slums barely reach working women due to timing conflicts.The government should
step in with a solid commitment to tackle these unresolved issues. Various NGOs have been
working on devising innovative solutions to bring health care to the doorsteps of these people.
A new model of sanitary latrines, a sewage system, and water supply has been introduced in
many slums. In order to spread and sustain existing solutions like these and to encourage new
ones to improve slum people’s lives, the government should assume its leadership role. A health
care strategy for the urban population formulated in 2011 has yet to be endorsed by the gov-
ernment (Afsana and Wahid, 2013, p.2050).

Changing demographic
The landscape of global and national demography and epidemiology is changing. Attention
is being shifted from infectious to non-communicable diseases (Streatfield and Karar, 2008,
pp.261–272). Progressive population aging too is a matter of concern. The consequences of
apathy in regard to physical exercise, lack of balanced diet, and gradual shrinkage of green spaces
in urbanized areas are becoming increasingly visible. Obesity among adults is on the rise. A study

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 A. Kabir

conducted by the University of Washington shows that adult obesity or overweight (overweight
is defined as having a body mass index (BMI), or weight-to-height ratio, greater than or equal to
25 and lower than 30, while obesity is defined as having a BMI equal to or greater than 30) has
increased to 17 percent in 2013 from a mere 7 percent in the early 1980s, (icddr,b, n.d.). The
obesity rate among children, however, remains the same at 4 percent (ibid.). But there is nothing
to take pride in since among all the regions, South Asia has the lowest rate of child obesity preva-
lence, which is 6 percent (ibid.).

Rise of non-communicable diseases

High blood pressure is another concern for Bangladesh. A recent survey (Bangladesh.
NIPORT, 2013) reveals that 46 percent of the male and 60 percent of the female popu-
lation older than 35 have high blood pressure. One-third of the population has glucose
intolerance – i.e., can be classified as either diabetic or pre-diabetic (ibid.). The reported
level of chronic kidney disease (CKD) is alarmingly high. During the last ten years, the
number of private clinics offering specialized treatment for kidney disease has multiplied.
Yet this remains largely under-studied. One of the few studies (Anand et al., 2014) sug-
gests that roughly one in five urban middle-income Bangladeshis has CKD. Like the case
of arsenic-contaminated drinking water, the government has yet to step up and adopt any
combined initiatives to address this.

Unregulated drug market

The easy availability and widespread use of over-the-counter drugs are a common practice
across Bangladesh (Babu, 2007). An unregulated drug market is further exacerbating the situ-
ation (Ahmed et al., 2013, pp.1750–1751). Bangladesh has become a pharmaceutical products
exporting country within a very short span of time, a significant accomplishment by any
standards; but unfortunately, this has made low-cost, low-quality drugs easily available and
often sold without any supervision. This, in turn, is giving rise to widespread substance abuse
(WHO, n.d.b). Worse, the government’s capability to oversee more than 70,000 unlicensed
drugstores nationwide is frustratingly limited (Ahmed et al., 2013, p.1751). People attempt
to self-medicate by merely consulting with unqualified quacks or salespersons in any drug-
store. The situation has worsened due to fierce marketing promotions by the pharmaceutical
companies (ibid.).

Climate change
Some of the biggest threats that will continue to affect Bangladesh in the years ahead arise from
climate change. Bangladesh is one of the countries most vulnerable to global warming. Most
of Bangladesh’s land-mass is within three meters of sea level. As a result, the entire country is
extremely vulnerable to rising sea levels. As it is now, Bangladeshis living in the coastal areas
are facing shortages of pure drinkable water as saltwater is slowly poisoning the groundwater
aquifers (Adams, Ahmed et al., 2013, p.2104) and the soil in which they grow vegetables (Harris,
2014). Worse, high salinity in drinking water is linked to pre-eclampsia and gestational hyper-
tension (Uddin et al., 2011, p.620). Among the other tolls that climate change has taken are
reduced river flow, drying-up rivers, a marked shift in the timing of the monsoon season, and
increase in the average temperature. This all has a detrimental impact on water supply and food
security, and thus threatens public health (Khan et al., 2011, pp.1328–1332).

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Conclusion
Notwithstanding a host of impediments, Bangladesh has been able to address the first-generation
health issues. In doing so, Bangladesh has not only outperformed many countries with simi-
lar socio-economic conditions, but also contravened a long-held notion that public health
improvement is a binary function of reducing poverty and investments. Yet there is no room
for complacency for a country with a frail health care system. Bangladesh’s health care sys-
tem has evolved, in principle, to tackle the wave of first-generation challenges that are largely
the by-products of poverty: infectious, nutritional, and maternity-related diseases (Chowdhury
et al., 2013, p.1743). Bangladesh needs to turn its attention toward post-MDG agendas in order
to sustain the achievements it has made in the health sector over the past four decades. This
is no easy task. A comprehensive health policy needs to be crafted in close consultation with
partners like NGOs, donors, and other actors. New parameters like climate change, industrial
pollution, and food quality are to be incorporated in policymaking. Bangladesh is at high risk of
earthquake as the country lies on two major tectonic faultlines. Much has been talked about, but
no significant contingency plan has been made in case of a strong tremor. In addition, a com-
prehensive financial strategy is to be adopted since inequity is on the rise due to the unregu-
lated health care costs in practice. At the same time, Bangladesh is required to concentrate on
further improving its existing health system as it lays the premise on which Bangladesh can
move forward. A recent survey conducted on the public, private, and NGO-run hospitals and
clinics has revealed a frustrating situation. Of those surveyed, 74 percent of facilities lack some
fundamental medical equipment. Very few facilities are committed to protect the privacy and
safety of patient health information. Many analysts opine that the quality of health service has
failed to catch up with overall infrastructural development in Bangladesh (Prothom Alo, 2015).
Two reasons behind the deteriorating health service can be attributed to Bangladesh’s rampant
corruption and political volatility. Reports suggest that doctors and patients alike offer bribes to
achieve their ends: promotion for public-sector doctors, and better services for patients (Daily
Star, 2014). Worse, doctors often delay the treatment process and public-sector doctors refer
patients to private diagnostic centers or clinics where the doctors can receive a commission as
a token of gratitude. Persistent political instability further deepens the problems that exist in
Bangladesh’s health care system. The decision-making process is often clouded by competing
political considerations. Even if one decision is taken, the chance of its materialization remains
in question. Health experts believe that decentralization of the Health Ministry can be a good
start. Needless to say, concerted efforts need to be initiated to revamp Bangladesh’s health care
system. Bangladesh has the leverage to make it happen should the country capitalize on its pre-
vious successes and lessons from the past.

Note
1 Definition: ‘Out of pocket expenditure is any direct outlay by households, including gratuities and
in-kind payments, to health practitioners and suppliers of pharmaceuticals, therapeutic appliances, and
other goods and services whose primary intent is to contribute to the restoration or enhancement of
the health status of individuals or population groups. It is a part of private health expenditure’ (World
Bank, n.d.k).

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 PART VI

Security and external relations

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 29
FOREIGN POLICY
Imtiaz Ahmed

Heraclitus of Ephesus (c.535–c.475 bc e) is on the record as saying that ‘No man ever steps in
the same river twice’ and that ‘Everything flows, everything changes’.The message remains true
not only with respect to the materiality of the world but also with respect to ideas, institutions,
perspectives and policies. The foreign policy of Bangladesh, now with more than 40 years’
experience, is no exception and is, indeed, an interesting case to consider, particularly on the
issue of change. Policies do not unfold in a vacuum; neither does change take place on its own.
Rather, compulsions, disciplinary training, social motives, elite perspectives, class compositions,
possible choices, even ingenuity, all tend to work toward framing policies. A closer look at
Bangladesh foreign policy, which has gone through several phases since the time of the country’s
independence, makes this clear.

Diplomacy of recognition
The first phase of Bangladesh foreign policy could be referred to as the diplomacy of recognition,
which included the policy of bringing back Bangladeshis stranded in Pakistan as a result of the
break-up of the latter. There were several countries that did not recognize Bangladesh at the
initial stage of its independence in December 1971. The United States, China and some Arab
countries tilted toward Pakistan during the liberation struggle of Bangladesh (March–December
1971) and more particularly during the Indo-Pakistan War in December 1971. One of the first
foreign policy challenges that Bangladesh faced was to change the position of those who had
favored Pakistan and have them recognize and support the newly independent country.This was
also the time of the ‘Cold War’, which further complicated Bangladesh’s position internationally,
as it meant that ‘if you are not with us, then you are against us’. Bangladesh’s economy was tied
to that of the United States, and it was desperate to reconcile its relationship with the latter.The
United States’ recognition came in April 1972, but Bangladesh had to wait to get recognition
from the rest of those who had sided with Pakistan.
This came about in 1974 when Pakistan was hosting the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation
Conference (OIC) in Lahore in February 1974. It was becoming extremely difficult for the
OIC not to invite Bangladesh, which was then the second largest Muslim-populated country
in the world after Indonesia. Several key leaders of the OIC came to Dhaka and pressed Sheikh

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Mujibur Rahman to join the Conference, which he gladly did. By joining the conference,
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman not only got the recognition of the Arab countries but also managed
to get Pakistan’s recognition. Critics point out that India did not take this development in good
spirit, and soon after this the relationship between Bangladesh and India began to falter. The
issue of enclaves, for instance, may be cited as a case in point.
Bangladesh and India have as many as 225 enclaves.1 Some 119 are exchangeable Indian
enclaves in Bangladesh (totaling 17,157.72 acres) and 11 non-exchangeable enclaves (total-
ing 3,799.35 acres) – non-exchangeable because India has no control over or access to them.
Bangladeshi enclaves in India total 95, of which 72 (totaling 7,160.85 acres) are exchange-
able and some 5,128.52 acres are non-exchangeable. In May 1974 both countries agreed
to exchange enclaves and also agreed to allow the people residing in the enclaves to either
stay where they are or move to their parent country. While Bangladesh enacted legislation
to actualize the May 1974 Agreement in November of the same year, India is yet to do the
same even after a lapse of over 40 years! Critics, such as Sumanta Banerjee, maintain that
‘there is a feeling in Dhaka that India is reluctant to exchange the enclaves because it would
lose around 10 lakh acres of land to Bangladesh’ (Banerjee, 2001). By delaying the process
of ratification and implementation, why is India contributing to such suspicions? Moreover,
why did India request a change of the text of the May 1974 Agreement after Bangladesh had
ratified the Agreement in the parliament and that again barely five days before the deadline
(December 31, 1974) for the signing of the relevant maps in respect of ‘areas already demar-
cated’ and, interestingly, with a plea to do away with a firm deadline and have it postponed
until the Agreement ‘has been ratified by the two Governments’? (For a closer exposition,
see Bhasin, 2003, pp.1889–1901.) This in fact had the effect of postponing the exchange of
‘territories in adverse possession in areas already demarcated in respect of which boundary
strip maps are already prepared’ for an indefinite period, which in turn contributed to suspi-
cions in the minds of the Bangladeshis. It may be mentioned that the May 1974 Agreement
clearly distinguished between the ‘already demarcated’ and ‘still to be demarcated’ areas and
made it clear that the latter would not pose an obstacle to the exchange of enclaves ‘in areas
already demarcated’. What made India revise the original text then? With no official explan-
ation as such, the reluctance to forfeit 10 lakh acres of territory, as critics pointed out, may
indeed be the reason. This incidentally is also the perception of many Indians, particularly
those residing in Assam. But this is far from true, as Rukmini Das and Deepak Raju (2013)
have pointed out:

If one were to compare the area of land that India receives in this exchange to what
India gives away, the former falls short of the latter by 10,000 acres. While it may
appear like a net loss of territory, such loss is illusory. What we lose are enclaves we
cannot access, govern or use in any way without the consent of Bangladesh. The
enclaves surrounded by Bangladeshi territory were never part of any political cam-
paigns, never on the agenda for development or reforms of any kind. In fact, except on
paper, mainland India would never know the loss of those territories.

This request for an amendment to the May 1974 Agreement by India at the last minute and
that after Bangladesh had ratified it in its parliament did not go well with Sheikh Mujib. In fact,
sources close to him opined that Mujib lost interest in developing further Bangladesh’s rela-
tionship with India following this incident. This issue was resolved following the visit of India’s
prime minister, Narendra Modi, to Dhaka and the signing of the border agreement between
Bangladesh and India in June 2015.

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 Foreign policy

Economic diplomacy
Practically, the diplomacy of recognition ended in 1974, particularly following Pakistan’s rec-
ognition of Bangladesh. This gave way to a newer phase in foreign policy, which could be
best referred to as economic diplomacy. There were good reasons for this. Apart from the slow
pace of the post-war rehabilitation and reconstruction, mainly for the want of resources
and misgovernance, Bangladesh faced two massive floods in consecutive years, 1973 and
1974, which not only led to famine at home but also created conditions for seeking a larger
amount of foreign aid. Although the lack of entitlement, to follow Amartya Sen, is blamed
for the famine, there was also the issue of ‘bureaucratic muddle’ contributing to it. This
refers to the export of some 60,000 bales of jute to Cuba, which violated the conditions of
US food aid under PL 480 Title I. Receiving food under the latter disallows the receiving
country from trading with the United States’ ‘enemies’, which then included Cuba. But
food was desperately required following the unprecedented floods. After the United States
stopped the flow it took some time for the required food to reach Bangladesh, via Russia. In
the meantime, thousands died of starvation. The ensuing economic crisis made it clear that
Bangladesh could not do without the support of the West, and so catering to the interests of
the West in the hope of receiving food and non-food aid from the West became a corner-
stone of Bangladeshi foreign policy. Following the changeover of the government in 1975
the shift to economic diplomacy, particularly in cementing the relationship with the Western
economies, gained further momentum.
Globalization, however, brought newer dynamics to Bangladeshi foreign policy. Bangladesh’s
clothing industry, for instance, has progressed well, mainly because of the relatively cheap labor
and the ingenuity of some local manufacturers. This has contributed to a situation where our
capitalists and workers are structurally tied up with the economies of the developed West and
therefore ought to be more attentive about developments there, including the growth of the
economy or lack of it or even who is in charge of the government. Now since the meltdown
in the US economy there are regular discussions as to what impact it would have on the
Bangladeshi economy. There is actually a possibility of gaining from the crisis. The reasons are
not far-fetched. Traditionally, products from Bangladesh abroad have catered to middle- and
low-income groups and since the US government is pledged to support the people of ‘Main
Street’ in contradistinction to the bosses of ‘Wall Street’, there is now a possibility that the mid-
dle class in the United States would directly benefit from such a policy and therefore would
be able to afford goods imported from Bangladesh. This certainly would range from textile
goods to pharmaceutical products. Now the challenge lies with Bangladesh to deliver the
goods and broaden its market. In fact, in garment exports alone the turnover in 2013 passed
the US$15 billion mark, which is no mean achievement on the part of Bangladesh. Bangladesh
has emerged as the third largest garment producer in the world in 2011 after China and the
EU collective.

Energy diplomacy
Taking economic potential further would require resolving the deficit in the energy sector.
Or, to put it differently, Bangladesh must embark upon a new phase in its foreign policy, that
is, start pursuing energy diplomacy creatively. In addition to economic meltdown, the developed
economies are facing a global energy crisis, particularly against the backdrop of the United
States’ and West’s military involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan and more recently Libya and Syria.
This is bound to have a short- if not a long-term impact on both developed and less developed

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economies (Stiglitz and Bilmes, 2008), including Bangladesh, unless creative policy initiatives
are undertaken to overcome them.
The skyrocketing of oil prices from US$3 per barrel in 1970 to a record high of US$147.27
in mid-July 2008 and then scaling down to US$95.96 in 2014, with possibilities of a fur-
ther rise against the backdrop of another war in the Middle East region, only indicates that
the energy crisis is far from over and will not be solved unless and until alternative energy
resources are found. If Bangladesh is to go beyond its current economic growth of over
6 percent and reach the not so implausible growth of 10 percent in less than a decade’s time,
then it needs to resolve its energy requirements on a priority basis. And here Bangladesh
needs to think beyond oil and coal, and keep all options, including civilian nuclear power,
open. This would require investment in knowledge creation, language competence, sophis-
ticated dialoguing and expertise in drafting agreements at both bilateral and international
levels. Any lethargy or slippage in what would be protracted external maneuverings is bound
to cost Bangladesh dearly. There have been some policy initiatives in this sector. Noteworthy
is the signing of an agreement with India where the latter would supply 250 MW of elec-
tricity to Bangladesh from the Indian grid. Second, on the issue of the maritime boundary,
which has energy security implications, Bangladesh has resolved its claims with India and
Myanmar, paving the way for a long-term use of maritime resources. And third, Bangladesh
has signed a memorandum of understanding with Russia to build a civilian nuclear reactor.
But globalization is inviting policy initiatives in other areas as well.
There has been some realization in India that if development in the north-east region
were to be expedited and made meaningful then it would require active support from
Bangladesh. In this regard, the two countries, following Sheikh Hasina’s visit to Delhi in
January 2010, signed a 50-clause agreement, which resulted in India providing a US$1 bil-
lion loan to Bangladesh for infrastructural development; removal of tariff and non-tariff
barriers by India and reduction of ‘tariff lines’, which since 2011 have come down to 25,
consisting mainly of tobacco and alcohol; resolving the border disputes in the light of the
1974 Land Boundary Agreement; operationalizing connectivity between Bangladesh, India,
Nepal and Bhutan; sharing of rivers, and many more. Following the agreement there have
been some improvements in trade figures. In fact, the two-way trade during the fiscal year
2012–2013 between Bangladesh and India reached almost US$5.7 billion, of which India’s
export to Bangladesh totaled US$5.13 billion and Bangladesh’s export to India reached
US$563.9 million, an increase of 35.4 percent and 13.15 percent respectively over the pre-
vious year (Saleh, 2013, p.6). Such trade concessions seem to have benefited India more than
Bangladesh but the goal has been mainly to foster a win–win relationship, with the objective
of having Bangladesh at India’s side in the latter’s quest to develop the north-east. And there
are good reasons for this.
Few will deny the fact that globalization has made a difference to China, indeed, to a point
that it had contributed to a 10 percent GDP growth for many years. But more importantly,
when it comes to South Asia, China has emerged as the largest trading partner not only of
Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka but also of India, although the political relation-
ship between India and China remains far from cordial. China, for instance, took its territorial
dispute with India to the Asian Development Bank where it blocked an application by India
for a loan that included development projects in India’s north-east state of Arunachal Pradesh.
China, in fact, claims the latter as part of its own territory and refers to it as ‘Southern Tibet’
(Pant, 2010, pp.95–96). What is worrying for India is the marginalization and alienation of the
north-east and the impact that China’s development could have on the region; as one critic
pointed out,

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The development of infrastructure by China in its border regions with India has been
so rapid and effective and the Indian response so lackadaisical that the Indian Member
of Parliament from Arunachal Pradesh was forced to suggest, in sheer exasperation,
that the government should allow Arunachal to get a rail link from China as, even sixty
years after independence, India has failed to connect this state to the nation’s mainland.
(Pant, 2010, p.98)

In fact, before work began in September 2010 to extend the world’s highest railway line onwards
from the Tibetan capital Lhasa west to the second-largest city, Xigaze, near the Nepalese border,
China had already announced another rail extension east to Nyingchi, less than 50 km from the
Line of Actual Control in Arunachal Pradesh (International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2011,
p.212). India could respond only by deploying two additional army divisions, heavy tanks and
ramping up its air power in the region (Pant, 2010, p.99), a far cry from the kind of develop-
ment that is required to assuage the sub-nationalist aspirations among the people of north-east
India. This is where globalization and Bangladesh come in. If China could end up as one of
the largest trading partners of both Bangladesh and India, then there is no reason for the three
countries not to join hands and work for a win–win outcome in the region. At this stage, how-
ever, India is keen to solicit a newer positive relationship with Bangladesh that would come to
its aid in developing the north-east, indeed, with an eye to offsetting China’s influence there.
But this hopefully would change soon and policy makers in both Delhi and Beijing would see
merit in the three countries working together. And this is more likely with Narendra Modi in
power now, particularly in the context of the importance he has given to India’s development
and cementing better relationships with neighboring countries.
But globalization ought not to be measured in statist terms alone. In contemporary times,
among the many ironies that have found acceptance in our lives, the most outrageous is the simul-
taneity of war and rehabilitation. Apart from highlighting the futility of both it constitutes a sheer
drainage of resources. But then contradictions of this kind also create opportunities for many. If
the private US army, Blackwater, is super-profiting from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (Scahill,
2008) then there is money to be made from rehabilitation work as well, and this is precisely what
BRAC, a Bangladeshi NGO, is engaged in, albeit on a modest scale, in war-torn Afghanistan. But
skill in rehabilitation work and disaster management does not come naturally; it is an outcome
of years of experience, and BRAC is a proven institution. Non-governmental foreign policy initiatives,
particularly for want of state sponsorship and regulations, are nonetheless susceptible to hazards
and limitations. Killings and kidnappings of BRAC officials in Afghanistan are cases in point. Not
that this should provide reasons for postponement of such ventures, but it is a clear indication
that non-governmental foreign policy initiatives are no less vital than governmental initiatives
and therefore demands creating newer structures and space for maneuverability. Take the case of
Grameen Bank, for instance. That Professor Yunus has become Bangladesh’s global ambassador
can easily be judged from the number of foreign dignitaries he meets and international awards he
receives every year. Sadly there is no mechanism to honor such persons on a regular basis and put
them to use for the service of the country. Indeed, much to his credit, microcredit is now a global
product of which Bangladesh can surely be proud, and there is no reason why this expertise can-
not be made into an exportable item for the benefit of Bangladesh and the world.

Climate diplomacy
Choices in foreign policy are often limited by constraints and compulsions. One area that could
be highlighted in this regard is the environment and the dire conditions of marginalized people.

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Bangladesh is already at the top of the Global Climate Risk Index. The international NGO,
Germanwatch, prepared the index of 170 countries and Bangladesh tops the list with a death
toll of 4,729 in 2007 due to natural calamities, with an additional absolute loss of property
worth more than US$10 billion (Daily Star, 2008). But among the population it is the margin-
alized who suffer the most from global warming, floods, cyclones, droughts and now tsunamis.
This would be a challenge that could only be met with regional and global efforts and therefore
climate diplomacy is bound to emerge in the priority list of Bangladesh’s foreign policy agenda.
Bangladesh did end up playing an active role at the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit, par-
ticularly in bringing about a compromise among the key global actors. It may be mentioned
that although China and India are at loggerheads when it comes to territorial claims, the two
countries have no problem in working together on climate change, often to the detriment of
disaster-prone countries of the region, including Bangladesh, Nepal and the Maldives. A cre-
ative effort, therefore, is required for Bangladesh to reap benefits from climate diplomacy.

Cultural diplomacy
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (2004, pp.210–217) have referred to the process of
post-territoriality or reterritorialization as giving rise to a simultaneous process of reterrito-
rialization, although the latter remains substantially different from the previous territoriality.
Indeed, a territorial meaning of Bangladesh has become less relevant and the meaning that now
has greater appeal is more demographic and cultural, which is inclusive of Bangladeshis living
abroad. Indeed, given its civilizational and social links, Bangladesh is readily taken to be sympa-
thizing with or even supporting the Islamic cause in the Arab countries and elsewhere, which at
times creates the notion that it is ‘soft’ on the so-called ‘Muslim militants’ or ‘Islamic terrorists’.
This has particularly been the case with the United States in the post-9/11 period, the latter
even categorizing Bangladesh as ‘high risk’ in its global war on terrorism. If globalization has
deterritorialized Bangladesh, it has certainly also reterritorialized Bangladesh, albeit on a differ-
ent plane mixed with anguish and apprehension.
This brings us to the issue of Bangladesh requiring a foreign policy initiative best referred to
as cultural diplomacy.The Arab countries host around six million Bangladeshi expatriates, account-
ing for 75 percent of the country’s migrant workers. In the 2009–2010 fiscal year, Bangladesh
earned a remittance of US$10.99 billion, out of which the workers in the Gulf region, includ-
ing Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Libya and Iran sent
US$7.22 billion (Palma, 2011).The total remittances increased to US$14.22 in 2013–2014, again
the bulk of it coming from the Gulf region (Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics and Bangladesh
Bank, n.d.). But then this is also the region that caters to a precise Islamic mazhab (school of
thought), namely Hanbali or Salafi or, as some now prefer to call it, Wahhabism, which is rela-
tively more rigid or inversely less tolerant than the Hanafi mazhab or the Sufi tradition found in
South Asia and Bangladesh.There is no denying the fact that the power of petro-dollars and the
empowered status of some of the Arab countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, made the confluence
between the Bangladeshi diaspora and Wahhabism all the more easy if not deadly (Ahmed, 2009,
pp.4–7). It may be mentioned that there is a substantial difference between Wahhabism and
what Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab wrote and preached in his lifetime. In fact, the orthodox
ulama of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states have succeeded in reproducing and even exporting
their own brand of Islam, often, it seems, in the garb of Wahhabism. Only now, following 9/11
and the terrorist activities of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, is there a serious realization that things
have got out of hand. As King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia remarked: ‘Terrorism and criminality
would not have appeared … except for the absence of the principle of tolerance’ (cited in Lacey,

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2009, p.271) And since the bulk of the Bangladeshi diaspora are either unskilled or semi-skilled
with few having profound knowledge of Islam there is a tendency among them to fall for the
intolerant version found in the Arab countries and have it exported and reproduced at home.
This is why there has to be a substantial investment in matters of culture, or what Joseph Nye
called the use of ‘soft power’ (Nye, 1990a, 1990b, 2004; Keyman, 2010; Li, 2010).
Our strength, in fact, lies not in our being a homo politicus (political being) or homo economi-
cus (economic being) but in our being as homo culturicus (cultural being). To provide a regional
example, we have not fared well politically, our ‘democratic culture’ has been marred by vio-
lence and divisiveness, but when it comes to ‘cultural democracy’ we have fared much better
than many of the developed democratic societies of the world. Ghalib and Tagore are living
testimonies, as are Lata Mangeshkar, Monisha Koirala and Muttiah Muralitharan. More specif-
ically, Bangladeshi culture, rooted as it is in the Hanafi, Sufi, Bhakti and Baul traditions, not to
mention reproduced in the literary voices of Tagore, Nazrul, Jibananda Das, Shamsur Rahman
and countless more, can certainly be channeled for spreading tolerance not only at home but
also regionally and globally. This, of course, would require mainstreaming cultural diplomacy in
Bangladesh foreign policy.
A beginning could be made by sponsoring Bangladesh Parishod or a Bangladesh Cultural
Center in different cities of the world, albeit managed and run by a pool of officially sanctioned,
well-qualified members of the Bangladeshi diaspora. The post-globalization diaspora, in fact, is
qualitatively different from the old diaspora. The former is passionately attentive to whatever is
taking place in the motherland, from a game of cricket to the making of futchka and roshgollas,
from political rumors to the price of petrol. At the same time, however, they are well-versed in
the country of their residence, knowing well in many cases the personalities close to the gov-
ernment, opinion-making agencies and business houses. If managed efficiently, such councils
can become information-gathering/delivering bodies and informal lobbies, helping Bangladesh
to gain access to people and things, indeed, far more creatively than is possible on the part of
the formalized diplomatic missions. This would also be cost-effective as many a member of the
diaspora would be willing to invest both time and money in bettering the cause of the mother-
land and garnering a reputation both at home and abroad. Indeed, instances of this kind are
already there. Some major political parties have over the years managed to form international
wings, albeit mainly to serve partisan causes. In the age of globalization and post-territoriality
it is only prudent that the state make use of Bangladeshis, whether residing at home or abroad,
with greater efficiency and a spark of creativity.

Conclusion
In this age of globalization and technological connectivity, if foreign policy compulsions
are to be minimized and choices materialized then it is imperative that newer institutions
are built. Starting from its first diplomatic mission in Kolkata on April 18, 1971, Bangladesh
now has 52 missions abroad. These missions often become targets of criticism for want
of efficiency on the part of some officials. Once when transiting at Dubai airport I was
briefed by a host of presumably illegal migrants, jailed and deported from Saudi Arabia, on
the inefficiency of some officials at the Bangladeshi mission in Riyadh. In fact, several of
them complained that some of the officials, having gotten used to waking up and coming
to the office late, ended up addressing their problems around 1.00 p.m. when it was time for
them to have lunch in the prison. Charges of corruption were also raised, which included
stateless refugees from Myanmar – the Rohingyas – getting passports from Bangladesh
and giving a bad name to the country for their misdemeanors! And when misgovernance

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partners with polarized politics, where partisanship and not merit dictates key international
appointments, the combination could be deadly. This is as much an issue of quality as it
is an issue of institution building. It goes without saying that the parliamentary bodies in
foreign policy making need to be active and the standing committees if and when required
must call the concerned officials and make them accountable to public expenses and the
country’s foreign policy goals. Key foreign appointments could be made subject to parlia-
mentary sub-committee hearings as in the United States, to bring more efficiency to those
appointed to lead the country.
Second, the colonial legacy of having to run the foreign policy bureaucracy independently
of the public must come to an end. Even research institutions must cease to be at the mercy
of the government. Instead, it should raise its own funds, recruit scholars for particular projects
and build cells for independent and quality research, which the government would then have
the option to accept, modify, postpone or reject. More qualitative transformation has to come
by linking the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) with independent research and academic
centers, both formally and informally. Since officials of MOFA are transferred every three years
it is important that a permanent pool of researchers and scholars feeds them, and the most pro-
ductive and cost-effective way would be to link them up on a regular basis with such existing
institutions. In fact, it is the latter, with constant interactions with foreign policy researchers,
scholars and practitioners, both at home and abroad, which can build a culture of diplomacy. The
government of the day could then readily benefit from it. At the same time, to institutionalize
the role of culture or ‘soft power’ in foreign policy making it is important that a director general
of public diplomacy be appointed at the MOFA at the earliest.
Third, there is a tendency now to promote partisan officials and even appoint party cadres to
missions abroad, and this seldom on the basis of merit.This must stop as it is bound to encourage
sycophancy and patrimonialism, and promote mediocrity. In fact, the political interference in
appointments and promotions has been such that despite the mission having a regular proto-
col officer, the head of the mission keeps receiving ministers, member of parliaments and other
senior politicians of the ruling party at the airport, lest the latter be displeased with the former
and have him pay the price by transferring him from the post! Foreign policy in the age of glo-
balization cannot be carried out efficiently with de-professionalized bureaucrats.
Finally, a National Civil College (NCC), similar to the country’s well-reputed National
Defence College, needs to be built. Any promotion above joint secretary or, as in the case of
MOFA, director general would require passing out of the college, after having gone through an
intensive certificate program matching the respective bureaucracies and national requirements.
There is also a need for gendering foreign policy making given that women constitute more
than half the country’s population. A beginning could certainly be made in this regard by mak-
ing the NCC a gender-sensitive institution. The NCC could run mandatory training programs
for parliamentarians and other civil functionaries, including freshly appointed ambassadors. The
institute could also recruit researchers on both a short- and long-term basis for feeding the
senior-level student-bureaucrats and even the respective ministries. A Foreign Policy Archive
could also be housed in the NCC, which the public, as part of Right to Information, could
access regularly, while ‘secret and restricted documents’ could be made available to the public
after a lapse of 20 years.
Bangladeshi foreign policy began its journey over 40 years ago with the diplomacy of recog-
nition, which soon gave way to economic diplomacy. To make the latter meaningful, particularly
in the age of globalization, it is now important that Bangladesh embark upon a triadic foreign
policy formulation encompassing energy, climate and culture against the backdrop of creative

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institutional reforms and newer structures. This, indeed, has the potential of bringing benefits
not only to Bangladesh but also to the region.

Note

1 The Indo-Bangladeshi enclaves, also known as the chitmahals in Bengali, are the enclaves along the
Bangladesh–India border. According to a popular legend, the enclaves were used as stakes in card or
chess games between two regional kings, the Raja of Koch Bihar and the Maharaja of Rangpur, during
the Mughal era. The British colonial power did not change the status quo. As a result of 1947 partition
both India and Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) came to possess small pieces of land within their
respective territories that belonged to the other country.

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Li, M. (ed.). (2010) Soft Power: China’s Emerging Strategy in International Politics. Plymouth: Lexington Books.
Nye, J. S. (1990a) Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. New York: Basic Books, Inc.
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pp.95–96.
Saleh, M. H. (2013) Bangladesh–India Relations and Sub-regional Cooperation. Paper presented at the
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London: Penguin Books.

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 30
BANGLADESH AND ITS
NEIGHBORS
Mohammad Sajjadur Rahman

Bangladesh is South Asia’s youngest nation-state. This state has changed its political bound-
aries twice; over 40 years ago the area that is now Bangladesh was part of Pakistan. Around
68 years ago the same area belonged to the British Raj. It is therefore no surprise that
Bangladesh’s relations with its neighbors have been influenced by the nature of past events
and interactions. Besides, the Indo-centric South Asian sub-system has significantly shaped
the contemporary foreign policy behavior of Bangladesh. The country shares a 4,096-km-
long international border with India, the fifth longest land border in the world. The only
other bordering country is Myanmar, with which Bangladesh shares a 190-km-long
south-eastern border. Bangladesh’s southern oceanic frontier is also watched over by the
powerful navy of her western neighbor. Therefore, while Dhaka maintains good neighborly
relations with smaller South Asian states like Bhutan, Nepal, the Maldives and Sri Lanka,
her diplomatic endeavors within and beyond South Asia have been affected by the so-called
‘India factor’ to such an extent that one observer even proclaimed that Dhaka’s foreign
policy of the last four decades can be broadly categorized into two types: ‘pro-India’ and
‘anti-India’ (Chakma, 2012).

Bangladesh and India

The honeymoon and afterwards
Considered one of the first cases of humanitarian intervention in world politics, India’s military
support in the 1971 Liberation War was crucial for the emergence of Bangladesh as an inde-
pendent state. Moreover, India hosted about ten million refugees from East Pakistan during the
war and also provided much-needed aid for post-war reconstruction efforts. Therefore, India
was regarded as the ‘natural ally’ of Bangladesh. However, there is no denying that New Delhi’s
support for the Mukti Bahini (liberation forces) of East Pakistan was primarily dictated by ‘spe-
cific realpolitik calculations’ (Cordera, 2015). As a consequence of the 1971 war, while Pakistan’s
power and prestige was reduced considerably, India, on the other hand, appeared to have won
the strategic battle, thus enabling itself to become the regional hegemon in South Asia. Quite
understandably, on the Bangladeshi side, there was no dearth of gratitude for India. The first
foreign minister, Abdus Samad Azad, stated:

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the frontiers between the independent sovereign People’s Republic of Bangladesh and
India are just healed scars of the events of 1947 and there do not exist any frontiers in
the hearts of the people of Bangladesh and the greater people of India.
(Chowdhury, 1980)

Few could imagine then how such euphoria would end up in profound distrust between these
two nations within just a short span of time.
With hindsight, one may argue that the tragic and bloody experience of the 1971 war has
essentially molded the framework through which Bangladesh has often determined the course
of her relations with both India and Pakistan. Ardent observers of the 1970s would admit that
anti-Indianism was not an uncommon phenomenon at that time, something that Bangladesh
inherited from the Pakistan period. Even the nascent army of Bangladesh was not free from
anti-Indian perceptions. But such perceptions surfaced largely because of the mishandling of
certain sensitive issues. For instance, the Mukti Bahini strongly resented the way the Provisional
Government of Bangladesh handled the surrender ceremony of the Pakistani Army. The lat-
ter was to surrender to the joint command of the Indo-Bangladesh Forces on December 16,
1971. However, the Commander of the Bangladesh Liberation Forces, Colonel Osmani, was
absent from the ceremony and the media portrayed the entire conflict as a war between India
and Pakistan. Many in Bangladesh still consider that although India intervened in the war at
the eleventh hour, by dictating the surrender ceremony, India actually denied due credit to the
Mukti Bahini’s role in the nine-month-long war. Furthermore, it was reported that the Indian
forces had taken away most of the surrendered arms and ammunitions to which Bangladesh’s
new army had the rightful claim. The strained situation worsened as it was contended that a
number of Bangladeshi Army personnel were imprisoned by the ‘pro-Indian regime’ for con-
testing the looting. India eventually court-martialed a number of its military officers, confirm-
ing their guilt (Lifschultz, 1989). These incidents affected the Bangladeshi Army’s perception
of India from a very early stage. Anti-Indianism grew even stronger when a paramilitary force,
Jatiya Rakhkhi Bahini (national militia), was created with active Indian support. This osten-
sibly led many officers to believe that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was less interested in building
an organized army capable of challenging potential threats emanating from India. In addition
to this, repatriated Bengali army personnel from Pakistan were inducted into the Bangladeshi
Army, some of whom purportedly carried the ‘political values and ideology of Pakistan army’
(Mohsin, 1992) and deemed India to be an eternal adversary.
Unsurprisingly, it is now widely believed that ‘seeds of discord’ were actually sown during
the ‘honeymoon period’ of the Indo-Bangladeshi relationship and one of the very first issues of
disputation was linked with the signing of the ‘Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Peace’ on
March 19, 1972, which was based on the model of the Indo-Soviet treaty of 1971. Proponents
argued that the treaty would provide a security umbrella for the infant state and, more import-
antly, it would demonstrate Bangladesh’s treaty-making rights as a sovereign state. Critics, how-
ever, argued that the various clauses of the treaty effectively undermined Bangladesh’s options
vis-à-vis India and it was alleged that officials responsible for external relations in Dhaka had
no prior knowledge of the signing of the treaty. Therefore, instead of fostering friendship, the
treaty in fact came to be regarded as a symbol of Indian dominance and an embarrassment for
the Awami League (AL). After 25 years, in 1996, when the treaty lapsed, there was a complete
lack of interest from either Dhaka or Delhi in making any extension to the treaty.
The issues regarding demarcation of borders and exchange of enclaves also became conten-
tious when India failed to ratify the Land Boundary Agreement (also known as the Indira–Mujib
agreement) signed on May 16, 1974 between Indira Gandhi and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

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 M. S. Rahman

India’s border with northern Bangladesh has been seen as a classic example of cartographic
anomaly. Ever since the Partition of 1947, there have been a total of 162 enclaves on either
side of the border that belong to the other side. Interestingly, these territories also include
the world’s only ‘counter-counter-enclave’. Historians claim that these parcels of land were
carved out as a result of eighteenth-century treaties between the Maharajah of Cooch Behar
and the Mughal Empire. The Indira–Mujib agreement envisaged that these enclaves should be
exchanged expeditiously. In accordance with the agreement, Bangladesh ratified the agreement
almost immediately and handed over the Berubari enclave to India. However, India suddenly
changed its position and argued that the treaty could not be ratified without completing the
demarcation of the boundary. Furthermore, India’s internal legal battles also blocked the transfer
of Tin Bigha to Bangladesh. As a consequence of India’s non-reciprocal position, thousands of
inhabitants of the 162 enclaves effectively remained ‘stateless’, living on patches of land without
schools, hospitals or courts for decades.

The widening of the cracks

With the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman on August 15, 1975, Dhaka’s foreign pol-
icy shift toward anti-Indianism became irreversible. The new regime in Dhaka actively began
to establish extra-regional linkages, particularly with China and the Middle Eastern states, as
a countervailing weight to ease New Delhi’s ‘domination’. President Zia made it quite clear
that Bangladesh no longer belonged to the Indo-Soviet axis. When some pro-Mujib groups
took shelter in India and frequently carried out cross-border raids, Zia’s regime became con-
vinced that India would not support any government in Dhaka other than that of the AL.
New Delhi also refused to hand over those ‘miscreants’ to Dhaka. The rise of an informal
Peking–Islamabad–Dhaka axis in this period (Nuruzzaman, 1991), on the other hand, raised
serious concerns in New Delhi, which perceived such a development as inimical to its security
interests.
The bilateral relations between India and Bangladesh also worsened in the post-Mujib
period as a consequence of increasing tension over the sharing of Ganges water and the Farakka
Barrage. Bangladesh had been complaining for several years that the disproportionate removal
of water at the Farakka barrage for about 28 years had adversely impacted upon not only the
agrarian economy, but also the environment at large. Besides, the quantity of Ganges water
released from the barrage was not sufficient for Bangladesh’s use during the dry season. The
environmental impacts of the barrage or of not getting a proper share of the international river
were devastating and Dhaka was ready to internationalize the disputed issues in an attempt
to win global support. President Zia took the Farakka issue to the OIC Foreign Ministers’
Conference in Istanbul in May 1976. The same issue was raised again in August and November
1976 at the Colombo Summit of the non-aligned countries and in the 31st Session of the UN
General Assembly respectively. China’s support toward Bangladesh’s stance on the Ganges water
issue also disappointed India.
It is during this post-1975 era that both the countries began to perceive each other pri-
marily through a security lens and pursued policies that ultimately destabilized peace. For
instance, while India began to assist Shanti Bahini guerillas in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT),
Bangladesh began to pool resources, with covert support from China and Pakistan, to transfer
arms to insurgent groups of north-east India (Bhaumik, 1996). Although the two countries had
signed a trade agreement in 1976 to improve economic relations and Prime Minister Morarji
Desai of India had signed an interim agreement at Farakka in 1977 (Pattanaik, 2012), the over-
all relationship remained antagonistic. Apart from the land-boundary disputes, Bangladesh and

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India also wrangled due to controversies over the sovereignty of the newly formed ‘South
Talpatty’ island at the mouth of the Hariya Bangha river, which flows through the Sundarbans
and forms the border between Bangladesh and India. India called it New Moore Island and the
West Bengal government named it ‘Purbasha’. India rejected Bangladesh’s proposal to carry out
a joint survey to determine ownership on the ground that the survey was intended to jeopardize
India’s claim over the island.
The second military regime of General H. M. Ershad followed a similar approach vis-à-vis
India to that of his predecessor. Bilateral relations somewhat improved when the two coun-
tries signed a memorandum of understanding on water sharing at Farakka in 1982 and again in
1985. Another critical issue of this period was the Assam agitation against Bangladeshi immi-
grants. India had complained that illegal immigrants from Bangladesh had been responsible not
only for socio-economic problems but also political tension among the Indian states bordering
Bangladesh, and in 1986, New Delhi decided to erect barbed-wire fencing along the border
of the two countries. However, the US$4 billion fence failed to curtail the illegal cross-border
trade, a major issue that further strained the relations between Bangladesh and India.The mobil-
ization of border forces on both sides and border killings became a regular occurrence.
Although the advent of democratic governance in Bangladesh ushered in new hope for a
de-escalation in tension, the emergence of the ‘India factor’ in the electoral politics of Bangladesh
became a major impediment to any breakthrough. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP)
led by Begum Khaleda Zia formed the first democratic government in 1991 after 16 years of
military and quasi-military rule. Although high-level visits took place during the BNP regime
and the Tin Bigha Corridor was finally leased to Bangladesh on June 26, 1992, tension was
mounting as New Delhi could not trust Begum Zia’s proclamation that Dhaka would not
allow its territory to be used against India. Dhaka raised the Ganges water issue again in 1993
at the Commonwealth Summit and later in 1995 at the UN General Assembly. The anti-Indian
sentiment further intensified in Bangladesh when the Babri Mosque was demolished in India.
When the AL returned to power in 1996, Bangladesh–India relations improved considerably.
After decades of mistrust and suspicion, the two nations recognized the need for reviving mean-
ingful contacts in order to settle contentious issues. After years of negotiations the two countries
finally signed the 30-year water-sharing agreement for the Ganges in December 1996. A peace
accord was also signed in 1997 between the government of Bangladesh and the Parbatya
Chattagram Jana Sanghati Samity (PCJSS), the political organization that controlled the Shanti
Bahini militia in the CHT region. It was an open secret that the accord had New Delhi’s bless-
ing. It facilitated the return of the Chakma refugees to Bangladesh. Some scholars maintain that
the ‘positive’ change in New Delhi’s attitude was actually facilitated by the ‘Gujral Doctrine’, a
policy based on non-reciprocity. However, since the AL was leading a fragile coalition govern-
ment in Dhaka, there was little hope for any breakthrough in Bangladesh’s relations with India.
Furthermore, when the BJP (Bharatiya Jananata Party)-led government assumed power in 1998,
the steady progress made in bilateral relations was somewhat thwarted as the ruling party in
New Delhi took an avid interest in characterizing and turning the issue of Bangladeshi illegal
migrants in India into a communal problem. The BJP vigorously propagated the claim that the
influx of illegal ‘Muslim’ Bangladeshis into India was the result of the Congress party’s ‘vote
bank’ politics and argued that the phenomenon would fundamentally alter the demographics of
the bordering states of ‘Hindu’ India (Singh, 2009). A major low in India–Bangladesh relations
occurred in April 2001 when at least 19 Indian BSF (Border Security Force) personnel were
killed in clashes between the border troops of both countries.
In the post-9/11 period, the BJP regime repeatedly alleged that the Pakistani ISI and
al-Qaeda were using Bangladeshi territory for anti-Indian activities, thus adding new

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dimensions to New Delhi’s approach to understanding and dealing with Bangladesh (Jones,
2009). The BNP returned to power in Dhaka by winning the 2001 general elections and dur-
ing this period, the two countries continued accusing each other of non-cooperation. However,
bilateral relations began to transform substantially during the caretaker government regime in
Dhaka in the 2006–2008 period.The Bangladesh military, for the first time in its history, invited
Indian soldiers who participated in the 1971 war to jointly celebrate victory day in Dhaka. The
‘Moitree Express’ – the Dhaka–Kolkata train service – was revived during this period and the
‘India–Bangladesh Chamber of Commerce and Industries’ was also set up in 2007.

Post-2008: embracing India?

The landslide victory of the AL in the December 2008 elections was hailed by New Delhi as a
historic opportunity to take bilateral relations to a higher plane.As prime minister, Sheikh Hasina
clearly preferred the India-positive policy and signaled that the AL government would extend
security cooperation to India. Dhaka took action against various Islamist groups and handed
over two Laskar-e-Toiba members of Indian origin who had been operating from Bangladesh.
For its part, the Bangladeshi authorities handed over ULFA (United Liberation Front of Assam)
foreign secretary Sashadhar Choudhury and finance secretary Chitraban Hazarika to Indian
security forces. Later, Dhaka also handed over Arabinda Rajkhowa, the ULFA chairman, along
with his associates to the Assam police. Such gestures and actions from Dhaka enormously
impacted New Delhi’s counter-insurgency efforts in its north-east region. Sheikh Hasina’s visit
to New Delhi on January 10, 2010 resulted in the signing of a 51-point joint communi-
qué that envisioned future directions for the bilateral relationship. Three agreements on secur-
ity cooperation were signed: (1) Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters; (2) Transfer of
Sentenced Persons; and (3) Combating International Terrorism, Organized Crime, and Illicit
Drug Trafficking.The new mood for security cooperation clearly demonstrated that Dhaka had
effectively abandoned the equipoising strategy of the previous periods. The Indian government
also announced a US$1 billion line of credit for the development of Bangladesh’s road and rail
infrastructure, and signed a memorandum of understanding on power imports.
In September 2011, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh paid a return visit to Dhaka,
prompting a tsunami of expectations. One of the most important outcomes of that visit was the
signing of a protocol to the 1974 Land Boundary Agreement that aimed to address all outstand-
ing land-boundary issues and provide a final settlement to the boundary disputes. However,
the much-expected agreement on the sharing of Teesta water could not be signed at the time
of Manmohan’s visit due to the last-minute opposition of Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister
of India’s West Bengal state. Of late, Bangladesh has also acknowledged that Dhaka needs to
engage more with the bordering Indian provinces in order to reach agreements on the sharing
of common river waters and other border-related issues. In the last few years, Bangladesh has
also expressed concerns over the Indian plan to build a dam at a point called Tipaimukh on
the river Barak. Although Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asserted that India would not do
anything to harm Bangladesh, environmental groups are still skeptical about India’s true inten-
tions. Dhaka is also very concerned about the Indian project for interlinking rivers that would
transfer surplus water from the Brahmaputra–Ganga basin and divert it to rivers in the states of
Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil
Nadu through canals. If implemented, Dhaka claims, the project would have an adverse impact
on Bangladesh’s rivers, agriculture and ecology (Bhattacharjee, 2012).
India and Bangladesh had disputed maritime borders for decades, and in 2009, Dhaka
decided to pursue international arbitration at the Permanent Court of Arbitration under the

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terms of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).The tribunal ruled
in favor of Bangladesh and awarded it nearly 80 percent of an area sprawling over 25,000 km2
(The Diplomat, 2014). By bringing to a close a long-pending issue, both countries are now
expected to explore economic benefits in the Bay of Bengal region.
Another major sticking point for the Bangladesh–India relationship has been the enormous
trade imbalance. The growing bilateral trade deficit with India has risen from US$774 million
in FY 2000, to US$1,933 million in FY 2005 and US$2,910 million in FY 2010 (Rahman,
2011). If informal trade is taken into consideration, then the actual deficit would be significantly
higher. The existence of non-tariff barriers on Bangladeshi imports is largely responsible for
the imbalance and Dhaka has been consistently demanding from India the facilitation of wider
market access and investment. However, apart from allowing duty-free access to 46 Bangladeshi
textile items and extending credit lines, India has recently implemented a number of infrastruc-
tural projects to improve connectivity in the bordering states.
India’s decision to stand by the ruling AL during the controversial election of 2014 (Riaz,
2014a) has certainly baffled those analysts who maintain that India’s foreign policy has gradually
shifted from conflicting ideological stances toward pragmatism. Despite international calls for
an inclusive election in Bangladesh, New Delhi emphatically defended its favored AL regime
in an attempt to secure the continuance of the politico-security arrangements. It appeared
that New Delhi felt uneasy about the possible regime change in Dhaka and a likely victory of
the BNP-led coalition, which included Islamist parties like Jamaat-e-Islami. Moreover, India
deemed international concerns over the election in Bangladesh as a challenge to its own ver-
sion of the Monroe Doctrine (Riaz, 2014b). Ultimately, the general election was boycotted by
the BNP and the rest of the opposition, and as a result the AL and its allies control all the seats
of the current parliament. It is now generally accepted that the special relationship between
the AL and the Congress Party has to some extent endangered the state-to-state relationship.
Therefore, when the BJP came to power in 2014, there was speculation that Prime Minister
Modi would emphasize the importance of bipartisan support in New Delhi’s foreign policy.
During his two-day state visit to Dhaka in June 2015, the new Indian prime minister scored
a number of strategic triumphs. India secured its access to Bangladeshi seaports, which is very
significant from a strategic point of view. It was during this visit that India agreed to increase its
power export to 1,100 MW from the current 500 MW. India also granted a fresh US$2 billion
soft loan to Bangladesh for use in connectivity projects. Dhaka also offered a special economic
zone in Bangladesh exclusively to Indian investors. Agreements were signed covering bus routes
across the border and investments in the energy sector. One of the most significant aspects of the
visit was Prime Minister Modi’s decision to meet with Begum Khaleda Zia amidst speculation
that the meeting would not be scheduled. The leadership of the BNP even proclaimed that the
party is not anti-India (BDNews24, 2015). This is arguably the very first time in the history of
bilateral relations that both major parties in Bangladesh expressed unprecedented eagerness to
be in New Delhi’s good books. Although no deal was signed on the Teesta water sharing, the
BJP leader said that such issues should be resolved from ‘humanitarian perspectives’. It is specu-
lated that Dhaka is willing to sign a transit treaty, a long-demanded facility that would enable
mainland India to connect with its remote north-east region, if New Delhi can deliver a treaty
on the sharing of Teesta water. However, apart from security concerns, there are also doubts as
to whether Bangladesh’s infrastructure would be able to handle such transit facilities.
After decades of dithering and drama, India and Bangladesh finally reached an agreement
on the land boundary during Modi’s visit that would enable a swap of the disputed enclaves.
The ‘stateless’ inhabitants of the enclaves will now have the option to choose their citizenship
for the first time. Although Modi declared that the agreement on the enclaves was comparable

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in importance to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the reality is that India has been actively
raising a fortified fence along much of the border in an attempt to contain the infiltration of
Bangladeshi economic migrants and militant groups. About 1,000 Bangladeshi nationals have
been killed by the Indian BSF over the last decade, many of them when they crossed into
Indian territory for cattle rustling or other smuggling activities. Human Rights Watch (HRW),
an international human rights organization, has repeatedly called upon the Indian government
to investigate and prosecute those responsible in the security forces for human rights violations
(HRW, 2010).
It can safely be said that New Delhi is not seen as neutral when it comes to designing
Bangladesh policy and anti-Indian feeling has heightened in recent times due to India’s overt
prying into Bangladesh’s domestic politics (Anik, 2014). On the other hand, Dhaka’s regimes,
over the years, have exploited the instruments of foreign policy for furthering group interests
rather than the national interest. It is also worth mentioning that by employing the rhetoric of
‘connectivity’, India has effectively secured its strategic goals vis-à-vis north-east India.

Bangladesh and Pakistan: memory rules

It is quite interesting to note that even after the emergence of independent Bangladesh on
December 16, 1971, Islamabad pretended that there was no war or no liberation of Bangladesh.
On December 20, 1971, President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan declared that: ‘We will
continue to fight for the honor and integrity of Pakistan. East Pakistan is an inseparable and
unseverable part of Pakistan’ (Daily Star, 2014). Remarkably, the 1973 constitution of Pakistan
nonchalantly referred to Bangladesh as part of Pakistan by stating: ‘The constitution shall be
appropriately amended to so as to enable the people of the province of East Pakistan, as for-
eign aggression in that province and its effects are eliminated, to be represented in the affairs
of the federation’ (Ahmed, 2008). Predictably, the bilateral relationship between Bangladesh
and Pakistan has been dictated by the legacy of 1971 war. In addition, Bangladesh was widely
recognized to be affiliated with the Indo-Soviet axis up until 1975, whereas Pakistan was an
undeviating ally of the United States.
Dhaka’s preliminary challenges in regard to normalizing relations with Islamabad revolved
around four particular issues: Pakistan’s recognition of Bangladesh; resolving the prisoner of
war (POW) impasse; repatriating the nationals of both sides stranded in each other’s territory;
and convincing Pakistan to reach an agreement on the sharing of assets and liabilities between
the successor states. Pakistan demanded an unconditional release of all POWs, including those
Dhaka wanted to try for war crimes. Bangladesh, on the other hand, declared that the issue of
war crimes trial is non-negotiable and Dhaka even refused to be present in any meeting with
Pakistan prior to recognition. However, the deadlock was broken when India and Pakistan
signed a tripartite agreement regarding repatriation under which both New Delhi and Dhaka
agreed to the release of all but 195 Pakistani POWs. Pakistan also agreed to the repatriation
of the Bengalis and non-Bengalis and ‘implicitly’ recognized the sovereignty of Bangladesh.
This agreement, however, is widely considered to be a diplomatic triumph of Islamabad since
Dhaka had to make serious compromises on a number of issues (Jahan, 1973). For instance,
both India and Bangladesh gave up their earlier ‘recognition first’ demand. In effect, they agreed
to release the POWs even before Pakistan recognized Bangladesh. Moreover, instead of trying
1,500 POWs for war crimes, Bangladesh moderated its earlier stance and agreed to try only
195 POWs.
It is widely believed that the leaders of the Muslim countries persuaded both Bhutto and
Mujib to come to terms, preferably before the Islamic Summit, which was scheduled to be

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held in Lahore on February 22–24, 1974 (Maniruzzaman, 1975). Pakistan ultimately extended
recognition to Bangladesh on February 22, 1974 and Mujib attended the summit conference.
After mutual recognition, a tripartite conference involving Bangladesh, India and Pakistan was
held in New Delhi on April 9, 1974 and an agreement was signed on the following day. This
was a spectacular development because according to the agreement Bangladesh had decided to
grant clemency to 195 POWs in the interest of reconciliation and durable peace in the sub-
continent and Pakistan expressed its profound regret at any crimes that its forces might have
committed. On June 28, Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto paid an official visit to
Dhaka. However, the talks between Bhutto and Mujib failed as Bhutto refused to discuss the
division of assets between the two countries or repatriating 300,000 Biharis who had opted
for Pakistan.
The bilateral relations between Pakistan and Bangladesh entered a new phase after the August
coup of 1975. Pakistan was the first country to recognize the new government of Bangladesh
and, as a goodwill gesture, decided to provide 50,000 tons of rice and 15 million yards of cloth.
In April 1976, two formal agreements relating to trade and shipping were also signed between
the two countries. During the military regimes of 1976–1990, Dhaka expressed its eagerness to
develop both political and commercial relations with Islamabad. However, the high-level visits
from both parties failed to address the outstanding disputes, particularly the demand for the
repatriation of Biharis.
The Bangladeshi government, over the years, has repeatedly asked Pakistan to tender an
apology for the crimes committed by its army during the Liberation War. Back in July 1972, the
government of Pakistan set up a commission, chaired by the Chief Justice Hamoodur Rahman,
to undertake a complete evaluation report of the circumstances surrounding the atrocities com-
mitted in the war of 1971. The report, declassified only in August 2000, clearly mentioned the
senseless atrocities committed by army personnel and called for their trial. The issue of apology
floated up during the Hasina regime of 1996–2000. The relationship reached an all-time low
in September 2000 when President Pervez Musharraf canceled a planned meeting with the
Bangladeshi leader in New York in response to the critical remarks by Sheikh Hasina at the UN
General Assembly on taking action against undemocratic changes of government. Moreover,
Dhaka threatened to expel Pakistan’s deputy high commissioner for his ‘derogatory remarks’
on the Liberation War and, to ward off any crisis, Islamabad withdrew the diplomat (Gupta and
Chanda, 2002).
It is generally accepted that Dhaka’s relationship with Islamabad improves considerably
whenever the BNP forms the government. The visit of President Musharraf to Dhaka at the
end of July 2002 was considered an important event for improving the bilateral relationship.
During his visit, Musharraf expressed his ‘regret’ over the ‘1971 events’ (sic). Critics, how-
ever, characterized it as a cosmetic gesture aimed at distracting the scandalous crimes of 1971
and stressed that Bangladesh had been demanding an ‘apology’, not ‘regret’. Nevertheless, the
expression of regret by a Pakistani president, who also happened to be the chief of army staff,
was quite a significant move. Prime Minister Khaleda Zia also thanked the president by say-
ing that his ‘candid expression’ will help mitigate the old wounds (Habib, 2002). Noticeably,
at about the same time, 51 civil society organizations in Pakistan voiced their apology for all
the atrocities and excesses committed against civilians in East Pakistan during the war of 1971
(Noor, 2005). Although Begum Zia’s official visit to Pakistan in February 2006 signaled a new
beginning in establishing a viable relationship, the anti-Pakistan mood lingered on as an integral
part of Bangladesh’s political discourse.
The relationship between Dhaka and Islamabad entered yet another turbulent phase in the
post-2008 period when the AL returned to power. The formation of the International Crimes

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Tribunal by the government of Bangladesh to try to prosecute Bangladeshi individuals for

crimes committed in the 1971 war stimulated public memory and the subsequent Shahbag
Movement augmented anti-Pakistani feelings. On December 2013, Pakistan’s national assembly
passed a resolution (Chowdhury, 2013) that condemned the execution of Abdul Quader Mollah
who was convicted by Dhaka’s court for crimes against humanity. Mollah was the former assis-
tant secretary general of Bangladesh’s Jamaat-e-Islami. In response to Pakistan’s unprecedented
reaction, Bangladesh’s Foreign Ministry summoned Pakistan’s high commissioner and handed
him a protest note against the resolution. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina slammed Pakistan
and said: ‘By passing the resolution at the National Assembly, Pakistan has proved that it never
accepted the victory of Bangladesh in the Liberation War of 1971’ (The Times of India, 2013).
Evidently, Bangladesh’s relations with Pakistan continues to be affected by its historical legacy
and it is therefore quite certain that without an unconditional public apology from Pakistan, the
future of the bilateral relationship will remain bleak.

Bangladesh and Myanmar: new challenges

Myanmar accorded recognition to Bangladesh on January 13, 1972 and only three months
later, in May 1972, the then Bangladesh foreign minister visited Myanmar. Following the
visit, a joint communiqué was issued instantaneously from Dhaka and Yangon that affirmed
serious intent to maintain close ties and develop bilateral relations on the basis of peace-
ful coexistence, non-alignment and mutual respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity
and national dignity. Between 1972 and 1985, the two states signed three crucial agree-
ments: (1) General Trade Agreement (1973), (2) Repatriation of Refugee Agreement (1978)
and (3) Land Boundary Agreement (1979). In 1985, the two countries authenticated the for-
mal demarcation of 123 miles of common land boundary, considered as a constructive step
toward mutual cooperation. The visit of Prime Minister General Than Shaw to Bangladesh
in December 2002 and the subsequent visit of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Begum Khaleda
Zia to Myanmar in March 2003 were critical in diversifying the Bangladesh–Myanmar rela-
tionship.Trade and economic relations of the two countries have now become much stronger
after the visit of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to Myanmar on December 2011. However,
every so often, border tensions have flared between the neighbors and the Rohingya refu-
gee crisis in particular has become a major irritant for Bangladesh. The Myanmar govern-
ment alleges that the Muslim Rohingyas of the border state of Rakhine are in fact illegal
Bangladeshi immigrants. Myanmar also accuses Bangladesh of harboring Rohingya separa-
tists associated with radical Islamists. In response, Dhaka has consistently denied such claims.
Apart from the refugee crisis, Bangladesh is also very concerned about the illicit trading of
drugs and weapons along the border areas, which is creating serious security threats for both
countries.
Despite the recent spate of unrest, both Bangladesh and Myanmar have been able to peacefully
resolve age-old disputes over the maritime boundary. On March 14, 2012, the Hamburg-based
ITLOS (Law of the Sea Tribunal) delivered a historic judgment on delimitation of all the
maritime zones that Bangladesh and Myanmar are entitled to in a fair and equitable manner
(Faruque, 2013). The judgment has been hailed by Dhaka as a victory for Bangladesh and a
settled and demarcated zone has certainly opened up endless possibilities for exploring mineral
resources in the Bay of Bengal. Bangladesh also acknowledges Myanmar’s growing strategic
importance as a gateway to China and Southeast Asia and as a future supplier of natural gas, and
is willing to build a favorable relationship (Amin, 2014).

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Concluding remarks
Bangladesh had an innovative vision regarding its neighboring countries manifested in its
initiative toward the establishment of the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation
(SAARC) almost 30 years ago.Yet, despite holding several top-level summits and meetings, the
organization has largely failed to materialize the dream of building a South Asian community.
Nonetheless, Dhaka is rediscovering the geostrategic importance of Bangladesh and refocus-
ing on the possibilities of emerging as a regional hub connecting South and Southeast Asia.
Therefore, mutual cooperation between India and Bangladesh and other neighbors is essential
for exploiting the current geopolitical realities.

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 31
BANGLADESH AND THE
GREAT POWERS
Lailufar Yasmin

Bangladesh stands as the only ‘successful case of secession’ during the Cold War period, yet its
liberation was hardly marked (Buchanan and Moore, 2003). Following the Kautilyan dictum,
my enemy’s enemy is my friend, both Pakistan and India were busy seeking alliances with the
superpowers, the United States and the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), to
create their own weight in the subcontinent and thereby control the course of the ‘Bangladesh
Crisis’.
In the last 44 years, Bangladesh has come a long way. Its relationship with the great pow-
ers has gone through major transformations, owing to the needs of the changing international
reality. A country that was initially labeled as the ‘basket case’ of South Asia by an American
policy maker (Wahid and Hannah, 2014), often wrongly attributed to the US Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger, has emerged as a key player in its regional and extra-regional settings on its
own strength.This chapter argues that Bangladesh’s strategic importance is on the rise in an age
that has seen the return of geopolitics. An analysis of Bangladesh’s relationship with the United
States, Russia (the successor state of the USSR), China and major economic powers such as
Japan and the European Union would enumerate how Bangladesh is increasingly turning into
a destination for big powers in its own right.

Bangladesh–US relations
Bangladesh stands as a key state in America’s new Asia-Pacific vision. With Bangladesh’s emer-
ging strategic importance due to its connectivity with Southeast Asia via Myanmar, thereby
closing the geographic proximity to China, US interest in Bangladesh has significantly increased
in recent times, although bilateral relations remain strained.

Political relations
The beginning of Bangladesh–US relations can be viewed as a perfect manifestation of
Bismarck’s dictum – in politics, there are no permanent friends or foes, only permanent inter-
ests – as overt American support for Pakistan against the Liberation War of Bangladesh did not
delay its according formal recognition to Bangladesh in April 1972. American recognition of
Bangladesh, however, was contingent upon its relationship with Pakistan and China and the

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withdrawal of Indian troops from Bangladesh (Nair, 2008, p.59). It has been contended that the
American decision to support Pakistan during the Bangladesh crisis was motivated by global
geopolitical calculations (Halim, 2002, p.583), while the early recognition was motivated by the
desire to curb Soviet influence in the region (Chowdhury et al., 1998, p.221). For Bangladesh,
a country desperately needing economic assistance that could not be fulfilled sufficiently by
the Indo-Soviet axis, the United States emerged as a durable source providing humanitarian
assistance to Bangladesh before according formal recognition.
Political relations between the two countries have been marked by high-level bilateral vis-
its, with Colin Powell being the first US Secretary of State to visit Bangladesh in 2003 and
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visiting in 2012. The first US president to visit Bangladesh
was President Bill Clinton in 2000. On Bangladesh’s side, all heads of the government have
visited the United States.
Bangladesh–US political relations have been enriched by the convergence of mutual inter-
ests and benefits. While the US Naval Task Force assisted Bangladesh after the 1991 cyclone
and Bangladesh often receives donations after being hit by natural calamities, Bangladesh
offered donations and rescuers after the United States was hit by its third most-devastating
hurricane, Katrina, owing to Bangladesh’s long experience in dealing with natural disasters.
Bilateral relations further solidified with Bangladesh’s participation in the 1991 Gulf War
and in UN Peacekeeping Operations (UNPKOs). As Bangladesh stands as the second largest
troop-contributing country in UNPKOs, the United States actively supports Bangladesh’s
participation by providing economic assistance to the Bangladesh Institute of Peace Support
Operations and Training (BIPSOT) and Bangladesh Armed Forces.
The outstanding issue affecting bilateral political relations surrounds the acceptability of
the January 5 national poll. As Bangladesh went ahead with an apparent one-party national
election, high-level diplomatic efforts were made by the United States to bring all the political
stakeholders to participate in the election. While consecutive US Secretaries of State Hillary
Clinton and John Kerry suggested resolving the internal political crisis amicably, as the election
loomed Ambassador Dan Mozena took significant steps to mend the tense political situation
and attempted to bring all the political parties back to the discussion for holding an all-inclusive
national election. However, although these efforts did not succeed, the current American pos-
ition supporting a fresh poll has been restated by the ambassador-designate Bernicat before the
US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in July 2014, calling the January 5 poll ‘undeniably
flawed’ (Daily Star, 2014a).

Economic and trade relations

Bangladesh–US bilateral economic relations, which were marked by aid and remittances sent
from the United States until the early 1990s, have traversed into trade relations where the
American aid is tiny compared to Bangladeshi goods sold in the US market (United States.
US Chamber of Commerce, 2013). Bangladesh stands as the fifty-eighth largest goods trad-
ing partner of the United States, with bilateral trade amounting to US$6.1 billion during
calendar year 2013. US exports to Bangladesh in 2013 were US$712 million, up 41.9 percent
(US$210 million) from that of 2012 (United States. US Embassy, 2014). However, the trade
imbalance between the two countries stands at US$4,647 million in America’s favor. US food
aid to Bangladesh is provided under Titles I, II and III of PL 480 (congressional ‘food-for-peace’
legislation). The United States provided US$5.7 billion in food and development assistance to
Bangladesh until 2011, and has decided to offer another US$1 billion for a period of five years

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from 2012 to alleviate poverty and malnutrition as well as to carry out research on facing the
challenges of climate change (Reuters, 2012).
The Rana Plaza disaster in April 2013 cast serious doubt on the safety network available
for Bangladeshi workers in the ready-made garments (RMG) sector internationally. While the
US Labor Department granted US$2.5 million as a safety grant to Bangladeshi factories (BBC
News, 2013), America suspended Bangladesh’s Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) ben-
efits effective from July 1, 2013 due to the latter’s failure to ‘meet the statutory GSP country
eligibility criterion related to workers rights’ (United States. Office of the United States Trade
Representative, 2013). Although the suspension affected only 1 percent of Bangladesh’s five
billion exports to the US market, it had a negative impact on its image as well as sending a
negative message to the European market where Bangladesh enjoyed duty waivers in the case of
certain products (Rafferty, 2013). As a result, restoring the GSP facility from the United States
has emerged as a question of restoring Bangladesh’s image and, consequently, stands as a thorny
issue in bilateral relations.
Bangladesh and the United States signed a Trade and Investment Cooperation Forum
Agreement (TICFA) in November 2013 to bolster economic relations through a formal mech-
anism (Hasib, 2013). However, the first meeting of the TICFA between the two countries, held
in April 2014, failed to meet expectations. Bangladesh’s major concern to ensure the duty-free
access of its apparel to the US market was not heeded, while the US concern to form two com-
mittees on labor and women’s issues was not conceded by Bangladesh (New Age, 2014a).

Strategic relations
Bangladesh’s value to the United States centers on two aspects – its demography and location.
9/11 has redefined American relations with the Muslim-majority countries and so has had a
profound impact on Bangladesh–US strategic relations. The American effort is demonstrated
in providing economic assistance to curb Islamic extremism in Bangladesh and in fostering
American aid in the education sector. The number of American programs facilitating know-
ledge about America and student exchange programs has increased significantly, specifically
since 9/11. As a part of the American counter-terrorism effort, the US Agency for International
Development (USAID) has been working with the British government development organ-
ization Department for International Development (DFID) on a ‘curriculum development
program’ for madrasa education with the Bangladesh government. Similarly, the US embassy
is actively assisting to modernize different features of madrasa education through educational
assistance (connect-bangladesh.org, 2007).
Bangladesh and the United States have generally enjoyed a strong defense relationship in
various areas such as providing training to the members of the Bangladeshi armed forces, joint
military exercises, sending in the US voluntary Peace Corps, among others. Bilateral defense
relations reached a new high with the initiation of the US–Bangladesh Partnership Dialogue
in 2012 with an aim to advance bilateral, regional and global shared objectives and cooperative
frameworks. The second Partnership Dialogue held in May 2013 concentrated on ‘democracy
and governance, trade and investment, security cooperation and regional integration’ (United
States. US Department of State, n.d.). The overture of the third Partnership Dialogue held in
April 2014 concentrated principally on bilateral security issues including maritime security,
counter-terrorism, disaster risk management, law enforcement, non-proliferation, peacekeep-
ing, joint military exercises and exchanges (Financial Express, 2014). Bangladesh has not signed
either the SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement) or the HANA (Humanitarian Assistance Need
Assessment) with the United States. Defense cooperation between the two countries, however,

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remains strong, which is demonstrated by carrying out US–Bangladesh joint military and naval
exercises periodically. The United States has contributed to strengthening Bangladesh’s mari-
time security by donating 16 vessels, the largest of its kind by the US Navy to any nation, which
enhanced the Bangladeshi Navy’s counter-terrorism capabilities, and transferring the US coast
guard cutter Xavier to Bangladesh. America contributed US$2.5 million in defense assistance to
Bangladesh in 2014 (New Age, 2014b). The two countries have also initiated security dialogue
and military planning talks in 2012 to be held as regular annual events specifically to strengthen
the growing defense relationship.
The US Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Tom Kelly’s much-quoted statement summa-
rizes Bangladesh’s emerging strategic importance to America:

In a broader perspective US values Bangladesh’s geographical location. It sees an

important role for Bangladesh in the overall security context of the Middle East, and
Indian-Pacific-Oceans region. This is why US wants Bangladesh by its side in its stra-
tegic pursuits.
(Imam, 2014)

Bangladesh’s possibility to offer an Indo-Pacific corridor has elevated its geostrategic sig-
nificance to the United States that was underscored by important policy makers other than
Tom Kelly. Bangladesh’s elevated geostrategic importance to America became a cause for
concern in India, aptly manifested in the media frenzy that ensued. Indian concerns were
raised after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to Bangladesh regarding a possible
American intention to set up a naval base at Chittagong to station its seventh fleet (Hussain,
2012). While this report proved to be untrue, American interest lies in the fact that with
the Bangladesh–China–India–Myanmar (BCIM) corridor, the Bay of Bengal would emerge
as a key geostrategic location providing easy access to Chinese goods in the Indian Ocean
(Rahman, 2014).

Dissonance and convergence in bilateral relations

While Bangladesh’s strategic importance is on the rise, Bangladesh–US relations have been
significantly affected not only by the January 5 poll, but also by the handling of the Yunus affair.
The present government’s spat with the country’s sole Nobel Laureate, Professor Muhammad
Yunus, started in 2010 and subsequently led to the removal of Yunus from the post of man-
aging director of the Grameen Bank. The United States has expressed its repeated concerns
regarding the Bangladeshi government’s dealing with the Grameen Bank and Professor Yunus,
as articulated by top US officials such as Hillary Clinton and the US Assistant Secretary
of State (South and Central Asia) Nisha Desai Biswal. The divergence in US–Bangladesh
relations became explicit once again with Bangladesh’s abstention from the UN General
Assembly vote on the Crimea issue, which was not well received by America (BDNews24,
2014a).
In the wake of America’s pivot to Asia, Bangladesh stands as a key strategic state for
America despite lukewarm bilateral relations. It is Bangladesh’s location that enhances the
American effort to bring it within the Indo-American fold to counter China’s influence
in Asia (Bhadrakumar, 2012). However, as bilateral relations remain quite ambivalent at the
moment, Bangladesh seems to be looking for non-Western partners in carrying forward its
goals and objectives, as can be seen in developing stronger relations with China, Russia and
Japan, discussed hereafter.

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Bangladesh–China relations: pragmatism prevails

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s statement after her latest visit to China aptly summarizes the
past and present of Bangladesh–China relations: ‘China perhaps did not support Bangladesh’s
1971 Liberation War due to the perspective of world politics at that time’ (Deccan Chronicle,
2014). China, an ally of Pakistan, was not favorable to Bangladesh independence. However, the
bilateral relationship has been transformed with the changing international reality where both
the ‘India factor’ and Bangladesh’s location significantly elevate Bangladesh’s strategic import-
ance to China’s global power calculation – the ‘Chinese Dream’ (Zhongguo meng). China and
Bangladesh are keen to promote bilateral relations from merely an ‘economic partnership’ to a
‘strategic partnership’ by defining the core principles of bilateralism – mutual respect, equality
and non-interference in domestic affairs (Prothom Alo, 2014).

Historical overcast: the post-independence regime

China received P-5 status at the UN Security Council after remaining excluded from the UN
body for 22 years. Within ten months, it had cast its first veto on the admission of Bangladesh
to the United Nations on August 25, 1972 (Time, 1972). The deterioration of China–India rela-
tions and consequently the strengthening of China–Pakistan relations with China’s reappearance
on the international diplomatic scene had determined its Bangladesh policy at the very onset
of the Bangladesh crisis (Farooq, 2010). China closed its embassy at Dhaka in the immediate
aftermath of Bangladesh’s independence and diplomatic relations were at a standstill. Diplomatic
relations did not resume despite the Bangladeshi government’s ‘quiet diplomacy’ (Ahmed, 1994,
p.433) carried out through informal channels. Several developments in 1974 saw a thaw in
China–Bangladesh relations: Pakistan’s recognition of Bangladesh on February 22 and Sheikh
Mujib’s visit to Lahore to participate in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC, formerly
Organisation of Islamic Countries) summit (February 22–24) and the signing of the Tripartite
Pact between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh on April 9. China–Bangladesh contacts began on an
unofficial level and culminated in China’s refraining from the use of veto in Bangladesh’s accept-
ance as a UN member on September 17, 1974. China accorded formal recognition to Bangladesh
on October 4, 1975, followed by a joint communiqué to establish diplomatic relations.

Bangladesh–China discover each other

The post-1975 military regimes sought to build strong ties with China to offset the influence of
the ‘India factor’ in Bangladesh’s internal and external relations. The Mujib regime’s closer ties
with the Indo-Soviet axis needed to be countered by finding new friends by successive regimes
and relations with China were cultivated keeping this strategic need in mind. Bangladesh formally
articulated a ‘Look East’ policy in 2002 to connect with its eastern neighbors, which has turned
out to be a strong pillar of its foreign policy ever since.While India remains a constant irritant on
its western border, more recently China has aimed for easy access to the Indian Ocean in its south
where Bangladesh can provide much-needed connectivity through the Bay of Bengal. As China
looks south and Bangladesh looks east, the strategic interest of both converges conveniently.

Economic ties: a comprehensive framework of relationship

As Bangladesh–China embarked upon solidifying bilateral relations, the initial strategy was to
strengthen economic ties in the forms of economic and military assistance and trade relations.

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The year 2005 was when China emerged as Bangladesh’s top import source, surpassing India
for the first time (Aneja, 2006, p.6) and overriding long Indian dominance in this area. While
India’s geographic contiguity accorded it a natural advantage in trade with Bangladesh, China’s
emergence as Bangladesh’s biggest trading partner highlights both economic and strategic con-
siderations on Bangladesh’s part (Sahoo, 2013). Bangladesh’s exports to China amounted to
US$458.12 million and imports from China totaled US$6324 million in the 2012–2013 fiscal
year (Bangladesh. Dhaka Chamber of Commerce and Industries, n.d.). Despite Bangladesh
receiving duty-free access to the Chinese market for a number of goods under the Bangkok
Agreement, known as the Asia Pacific Trade Agreement (APTA) at present, the trade imbal-
ance weighs heavily in favor of China. To curb the huge trade deficit between the two coun-
tries, China is considering expanding its preferential trading arrangement with Bangladesh that
would cover almost 95 percent of Bangladeshi products, including a visa simplification process
to foster bilateral trade.The trade deficit with China has narrowed by 22.57 percent to US$3.56
billion in the first eight months of the current fiscal year (2013–2014) (China.org.cn, 2014).
Although the two countries do not have a Free Trade Area (FTA), they have granted each other
Most Favored Nation (MFN) status in 1984 (Sahoo and Taneja, 2010). China’s Outward Direct
Investment (ODI), often perceived as a ‘mutually beneficial cooperation’ scheme for both the
donor and the receiver, has continued an upward flow (Brunjes et al., 2013, p.9) that has contrib-
uted to infrastructural developments in Bangladesh. China has provided development assistance
and project loans for six ‘friendship’ bridges and the Bangladesh–China Friendship Conference
Center. A deal has been signed to construct a seventh ‘friendship’ bridge, while consultations are
taking place for the construction of an eighth ‘friendship’ bridge. Foreign aid disbursement to
Bangladesh is on the rise (Khatun, 2013), where China’s accumulated aid to Bangladesh reached
US$1 billion at the end of 2013 (Jun, 2014). Bangladesh–China’s economic relationship has not
only expanded to cover a wide range of areas over the years, but also has entered onto an irre-
versible course.

Strategic cogitations: ties that bind

China is set to revive the ancient ‘silk route’ where Bangladesh is strategically considered as an
‘economic corridor’ to South Asia. The new mantra of connectivity manifested by China’s ‘go
out’ (zhouchuqu) policy has taken bilateral relations to a new level. China is assisting Bangladesh
in developing the container facility at the Chittagong Port, the Golden Gate of Bangladesh, a
move termed as China’s attempt to secure a ‘pearl’ in its ‘string of pearls’ strategy (The Economist,
2013). Talks are under way regarding possible Chinese assistance in building Bangladesh’s first
deep sea port at Sonadia, off the Kutubdia coast, that may emerge as the main economic hub
for India’s north-east, Nepal and Bhutan, along with providing access for China’s land-locked
Yunnan province to the Indian Ocean via the Bay of Bengal (New Age, 2014c).
Originally known as the ‘Kunming Initiative’, China’s proposal to connect its Yunnan prov-
ince with Bangladesh through Myanmar has the potential to connect Bangladesh with Southeast
Asia through a road link. As China values Bangladesh as a strategic connecting point wedged
between South and Southeast Asia, the proposed road link would provide Bangladesh with
much-needed access to its Southeast Asian neighbors. Subsequently, in the form of a BCIM
corridor, Bangladesh and Myanmar are advancing with the proposed road link.
Strategic partnership between the two countries initially began with the Soviet Union’s
refusal to supply spare parts to Bangladesh’s Soviet purchases in the aftermath of polit-
ical changes in August 1975. China quickly filled the vacuum and supplied 78 percent of
Bangladesh’s arms imports from 1975 to 1979 (Mishra, 2004, p.112). The China–Bangladesh

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Defense Co-operation Agreement was signed in 2002. Since then, China has become the big-
gest source of arms in Bangladesh’s defense sector and supplied 82 percent of Bangladesh’s arms
imports between 2009 to 2013, Bangladesh being the second largest country worldwide that
receives Chinese weapons (Asian Defence News, 2014). The Chinese method of selling cheap
arms through credit and soft loans has made it an easy source for Bangladesh to procure arms.
Bangladesh has signed a deal with China to purchase two Ming-class submarines to be procured
by 2019. Bangladesh has partaken in a naval exercise in April 2014 in China with Indian and
Pakistani naval forces, the first of its kind.
On Bangladesh’s initiative, China has joined as an observer in the South Asian Association for
Regional Co-operation (SAARC) in 2005, supported by most of the member states, although
much to India’s consternation. China’s bid to become a full member of SAARC, however, has
been blocked by India (Kasturi, 2014).

Emerging Bangladesh–China axis

The strengthening of Bangladesh–China relations has started to draw attention in different
quarters (Sitaraman, 2013).With China gaining strategic depth in South Asia via Bangladesh and
thereby challenging India’s ‘sphere of influence’, the worry is about the possibility of turning
the Chittagong port into the ‘Gwader East’ and sealing China’s strategic foothold in South Asia
(Miller, 2014). Bangladesh, in turn, has downplayed its strategic partnership with the United
States in an effort not to undermine its relationship with China. Bangladesh–China relations
thus have solidified, keeping in mind contemporary strategic calculations.

Bangladesh–Russia relations: déjà vu?

The Russian ambassador to Bangladesh, Alexander A. Nikolaev, has recently declared, ‘Russia is
coming back to Bangladesh, “seriously” and “for long time”’ (Hasib, 2014a). Nikolaev’s ebulli-
ent comment once again reflects the increasing geostrategic significance of Bangladesh to the
global powers. Although the bilateral relationship suffered a setback in the past, Russia needs
Bangladesh more than ever in the contemporary global and regional power shifts.

Historical overtures: Bangladesh–USSR relations

The Soviet Union’s support in Bangladesh’s Liberation War was often construed as Bangladesh
going to the fold of the Indo-Soviet sphere of influence (Chowdhury et al., 1998) as part
of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s ‘system of collective security in Asia’ declared in
1969 (Noorani, 1979–1980). Bangladesh was formally recognized by the Soviet Union on
January 25, 1972. Bangladesh’s gratitude for Soviet support was manifested in carrying out
the first state visit of Bangladesh’s prime minister to the Soviet Union in March 1972, albeit
the promise of meager economic assistance on the trip limited Bangladesh’s euphoria. The
Soviet pledge of economic assistance proved to be insufficient for Bangladesh’s war-ravaged
economy (Chowdhury et al., 1998, p.221), although it provided assistance in mine-sweeping
activities in the two sea ports of Bangladesh in the immediate aftermath of independence
(Rashid, 2013). Moreover, the Soviet attempts to bring Bangladesh into the socialist fold
irked the Bangladeshi establishment and led to the recalling of Soviet ambassador V. F. Popov
before the first general election in Bangladesh in March 1973 (Halim, 2002, p.585). The rela-
tionship deteriorated further after changes in the political scenario in Bangladesh in 1975.
Bangladesh took a firm position regarding Soviet roles in two key international events that

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took place in the late 1970s. Bangladesh condemned Soviet-supported Vietnam’s occupation
of Cambodia (1978–1992) (Marxists Internet Archive, n.d., 7). Similarly, Bangladesh joined
hands with the Islamic countries to condemn the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979
(Rahman, 2010, p.6).
The 1980s saw bilateral relations reaching a low point with the Soviet Union attempting to
open a consular office at Chittagong in December 1983 without appropriate permission from
the Bangladesh government, which resulted in Bangladesh ousting several Soviet diplomats
(Halim, 2002, p.585).

Bangladesh–Russia rapprochement
Bilateral relations started to warm between the two countries during the latter part of the 1990s
when the Bangladesh government purchased eight MiG-29 jet fighters at a cost of US$124 mil-
lion from Russia amidst much national and international controversy (F-16.net, 1999). A graft
case was filed for the purchase of the MiG-29s and the next government in power decided
to jettison the planes due to the high maintenance cost (Moscow Times, 2002), a situation that
brought rancor to bilateral relations. Russia extended assistance in the energy sector offering
modernization plans to the existing power plants, originally built by the Soviet Union, and con-
structing similar ones since 2008 (Nikolaev, 2013). Petrobangla and Russia’s Gazprom company
signed a US$193.5 million agreement in 2012 for drilling ten gas wells in Bangladesh (Rashid,
2013). Russia–Bangladesh trade has surpassed US$700 million in 2012, although the trade bal-
ance is tilted to Russia. Russia aims to increase bilateral trade to US$1 billion in a few years
by increasing cooperation between the business communities of the two countries (Financial
Express, 2013).
Bangladesh–Russia relations have reached at a new level since Prime Minister Sheikh
Hasina’s visit to Russia in January 2013, which was the first of its kind by a Bangladeshi head
of government. During the visit, Bangladesh signed its largest arms deal to date with Russia
in which the latter would provide Bangladesh US$1 billion to purchase Russian weap-
ons and military technology (Defense News, 2013) and US$2 billion as a loan to construct
Bangladesh’s first nuclear power plant with a capacity of 1,000 MW. The Russian ambassador
to Bangladesh confirmed that the stakeholders in Bangladesh’s politics have broadly agreed
on the Russian project (BDNews24, 2014b). It was a pragmatic effort keeping in mind the
MiG-29 fiasco so that any political changes in Bangladesh do not derail the Rooppur power
project. In an effort to strengthen bilateral relations further and facilitate a possible visit of
Russian President Vladimir Putin to Bangladesh, the latter provided its initial support to
the first-round voting for Russia over the United Arab Emirates at the World Expo 2020.
Bangladesh is one of the 58 countries that abstained from voting on the Crimea referendum
in the UN General Assembly (Kabir, 2014) and is thereby following a policy of appeasement
toward Russia.
The changing geopolitical calculations and increasing Chinese collaboration with Bangladesh
have attracted Russian attention. The historic relationship between Russia and Bangladesh is
on the verge of a great revival owing to the changing geopolitical scenario. While Russia and
China have a strategic partnership globally, Russia’s regional policies with regard to the subcon-
tinent aim at containing China (Upadhyay, 2013) as Russia has a clear tilt toward India. While
some argue that Bangladesh perhaps is increasingly directing itself to the Russian fold (Rashid,
2014), comparable to the immediate post-independence scenario, Russia also needs a strategic
foothold in the subcontinent that Bangladesh fulfills in its own right.

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Bangladesh’s relations with the major economic powers

Bangladesh–Japan relations: emerging strategic concerns
Japan and Bangladesh have developed deep ties since the recognition of Bangladesh by Japan
on February 10, 1972. Over the years, Japan has emerged as the largest development partner
of Bangladesh (Hasib, 2014b) and a key state in Bangladesh’s ‘Look East’ policy. A culmin-
ation of this can be observed in the prime minister’s visit to Japan, forgoing an invitation to
the swearing-in ceremony of the newly elected Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in
May 2014.
Japan, an ‘aid great power’ (Yasutomo, 1989–1990), is generally driven by its own national
economic interest as well as the level of poverty in the recipient country in determining its
Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) for Asian countries (Tuman and Strand, 2006). For
Japan, Bangladesh’s importance as an ODA recipient primarily rests on humanitarian and eco-
nomic development grounds (Chowdhury, 2008, p.6). Bangladesh receives Japanese assistance
in the forms of grant, aid, technical assistance and soft loans, where the total grants and aid
reached US$11 billion in 2013 (Hasib, 2014b). While Japan’s ODA to Bangladesh concentrated
on rebuilding the war-ravaged country in the aftermath of independence, the very latest consid-
erations of ODA prioritize economic and political goals of poverty reduction, decentralization
and political stability in Bangladesh (Atahar, 2014, p.240). Japanese ODA is also considered an
important part of Japan’s ‘soft diplomacy’, a manifestation of which can be found in provid-
ing academic grants in Bangladesh and a growing number of Bangladeshi returnee scholars
from Japan. While Bangladesh is an important source of raw materials for Japan, Bangladesh
offers an important export market for Japanese goods (Rahman, 2005, p.42). Japan has granted
US$1.18 billion in its thirty-fifth ODA loan package for Bangladesh (Zaman, 2013) to develop
the latter’s energy, natural gas, electricity and infrastructural purposes for a period of the next
four to five years during the latest summit-level meeting in May 2014.
Japan–Bangladesh relations have strategic implications for the broader geopolitical scen-
ario. Although Japan is reluctant to pursue a hegemonic role on the global stage, it is pol-
itically interested to contribute to establishing peace and stability in South Asia. For Japan,
Bangladesh’s ‘lynchpin position’ in the Bay of Bengal and possible land-route connectivity
with Southeast Asia through Myanmar provides it with unique strategic value (Hasib, 2014b).
Therefore, through the proposed land connectivity, Bangladesh has the potential to offer the
Bay of Bengal as a gateway to the Indian Ocean to reduce dependency on the Pacific Ocean’s
vital sea lanes of communications. Moreover, it has been argued that given the nature of India’s
gigantism in South Asia and the ‘ambivalent’ Bangladesh–India relationship, Bangladesh should
cultivate the maritime significance of the Bay of Bengal to counter purported Indian suprem-
acy (Horimoto, 2011). Japan’s increasing assertiveness in the South Asian region is manifested
in its formulation of the Bay of Bengal Industrial Growth Belt (BIG-B) to explore the poten-
tial of the region.The bilateral relationship that started off in the economic field has thus diver-
sified into other areas where Bangladesh no longer remains only on the receiving end. With
the rise in Bangladesh’s geopolitical significance, Japan cannot afford to ignore the strategic
value that Bangladesh provides in the contemporary global setting.

Bangladesh and the European Union: democracy and trade issues

The European Community (EC) established diplomatic relations with Bangladesh in 1973,
which was followed by sending food aid to Bangladesh on an immediate basis.With the signing

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of the first formal agreement on the EC–Bangladesh Commercial Co-operation Agreement in

1976, the relationship between Bangladesh and the European Union solidified. For Bangladesh,
the EU stands as its largest single export market with more than half of the total export going
to EU markets. Bangladesh enjoys a trade surplus with the EU with exports of €8.5 billion as
opposed to €1.7 billion imports from the EU in 2011.
The EU relationship with Bangladesh is defined by the twin pillars of democracy–human
rights and trade and development (New Age, 2014d) with three focal areas of cooperation such
as human and social development, good governance, and human rights and economic and
trade development, and two non-focal areas such as environment and disaster management,
and food security and nutrition (European Union, n.d.) The Rana Plaza incident impacted
the EU’s policy to review safety standards of RMG workers as 60 percent of Bangladesh’s
RMG exports go to the EU. As a result, the EU launched a ‘sustainability compact pact’,
along with the International Labour Organization, to improve workers’ conditions including
promoting labor rights and factory safety issues (ILO Press Release, 2013). In a review of the
progress made in a year, the EU has concluded that although Bangladesh has achieved sig-
nificant progress to meet the criteria set by the sustainability pact, much work is needed in
this respect (Europa.eu, 2014). Bangladesh’s relationship with the EU was strained over the
issue of the January 5 polls when the EU’s high representative decided not to send observers,
the election not being credible and participatory. The EU parliament held debates on funda-
mental rights, democracy and human rights in Bangladesh in the aftermath of the election.
The EU reiterated its position in May 2014 by stating that the people of Bangladesh have
not been offered an opportunity to express their opinion in a democratic manner (Daily Star,
2014b). Bangladesh has strong bilateral relations with the EU member countries. However, as
the EU states do not have a common foreign policy, Bangladesh’s relationship with the EU is
centered on economic fields.

Conclusion
The preceding discussion on Bangladesh’s relations with the great powers enumerates the
key principles of its foreign policy – regional cooperation, bilateralism, the ‘look East’ policy
with emphasis on economic diplomacy, to name a few. However, internal political instability
has created scope for foreign diplomats to play a ‘political’ role since the 1990s. During each
crisis surrounding the transfer of power of political governments, groups of diplomats such
as the ‘Friends of Bangladesh’, comprising Australia, Canada, the EU, France, Italy, Germany,
Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US, the ‘Tuesday Group’ and
the ‘Coffee Club’ undertook activities to mediate political crisis. While the civil society con-
demned such actions, they also admitted that the political parties created an opportunity for
outsiders to meddle in Bangladesh’s internal issues. However, the Wall Street Journal has termed
Bangladesh the ‘standard bearer of South Asia’, a country that has moved from being a ‘basket
case’ to ‘a country that can teach a lesson or two to all other regional actors’ (Dhume, 2012).
From being a ‘victim of geography’, Bangladesh’s location acts now as a ‘geographic gift’, as
Ambassador Dan Mozena terms it (Steinbock, 2014), to make it the center of attention in the
Asian Century.
The present scenario quite resembles that of 1971 in the sense that Bangladesh is perhaps
distancing itself from the United States while strengthening its relationship mostly with China
(Chowdhury, 2014), along with Russia and Japan. As Asia is increasingly seen as an ‘interdepend-
ent geopolitical whole’ (Simón, 2013, p.345), Bangladesh’s locational reality has gradually trans-
formed it into a playing field of the global ‘great game’.

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 Bangladesh and the great powers

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 32
BORDERS, BOUNDARIES
AND STATELESSNESS
Bina D’Costa

Borders are powerful symbols of state power and they regulate the movement of people, com-
modities, capital and information between state territories. As such, they simultaneously func-
tion as barriers to and conduits of movement (Wilson and Donnan, 1998, p.22). But borders
have far more expansive roles in the contemporary world and in our daily lives. Boundaries,
however, express more than simple borders and at which ‘we end and they begin’; that is,
‘boundaries include symbolic and social dimensions associated with the border divisions that
appear on maps or, for that matter, other dividing lines that cannot be found on any map at all’
(Migdal, 2004, p.5). Extant studies on borders and boundaries suggest that state borders con-
struct and accentuate differences not only between states and ‘geographical spaces’, but also
between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. These analyses disregard the complexities that are reflected
within a territory, where people experience invisible boundaries imposed by states. Even with-
out crossing borders, people can be powerless, oppressed and disenfranchised, and communities
can be categorized as border communities. Departing from the conventional paradigm that
implicitly emphasizes territorial sovereignty and spatial politics as central to the conceptualiza-
tion of border communities, I focus on how communities conceptualize their own identities as
living in the margins or on the borders of societies and boundaries. The border communities,
therefore, are those who describe themselves as marginalized, whose community develop-
ment and advocacy efforts raise crucial questions about state borders and boundaries, and for
whom the idea of borders and boundaries holds critical political, socio-economic and legal
implications.
While acknowledging important political, social and legal distinctions between these groups,
and their lived experiences that are shaped by differences in their categorization, for the pur-
pose of this chapter it is useful to consider them somewhat collectively in the discussions of
Bangladeshi state’s discourses of borders and boundaries. The shared identities of Rohingyas
and Biharis are distinct from common ethnic and linguistic identities shared by the majority
Bengalis. Also, due to the unique conflict and post-conflict context, these communities require
regional and global political supports. The role of the government of Bangladesh and some
leading international and national organizations contributes to their predicament within the
national border. As a member of the international community, Bangladesh believes that it is
poor practice and detrimental for the ‘global image’ to send away refugees, but it is imperative
for state security. As such, in the early 1990s it did not turn away the boats carrying Rohingya

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refugees. However, Bangladesh increasingly became hostile to the Rohingyas arriving in later
years. The Bangladeshi media also portray the Rohingyas as extremists. Similarly, following the
war of 1971, the Bihari population in Bangladesh have experienced extreme hostility. Even
though they have no roots in modern Pakistan, the Biharis are called ‘stranded Pakistanis’ and
are forced to remain in camps. Tensions between Biharis, in particular the young men interned
in the camps and the Bengali population outside, have often sparked violence in camp sites.
Equally important in understanding the marginality of these communities is the notion of
‘statelessness’. A de jure or ‘legally stateless person’ is not considered as a national under the law
of any state and a de facto or ‘effectively stateless person’ retains the nationality of her/his state
but does not enjoy the protection of that state (1954 Stateless Persons Convention). A stateless
person is ‘not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law’:

Nationality is the legal bond between the State and the individual, which entitles indi-
viduals to the protection of a State and enables them to exercise a wide range of rights.
The causes of statelessness include: formation of new States/State succession; gaps in
nationality laws that allow for statelessness at birth or upon loss and deprivation, dis-
criminatory nationality laws or practice.
(Joint Hearing on Statelessness, the Office of the United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees, hereinafter, UNHCR, 2014)

Stateless persons are often not entitled to a wide range of basic human rights, namely economic,
social and political rights such as: education, employment, health care, social assistance, hous-
ing, freedom of movement, the right to liberty and the right to vote. Many stateless children
are denied access to education and health care. They are particularly vulnerable to exploitation
and abuse, including being trafficked, forced into hazardous labour and sexual exploitation
(UNHCR, 2014).
Bangladesh inherited the borders drawn as part of the partition of India in 1947 that bear the
marks of the various cartographic inconsistencies innate to South Asian borders (Chandran and
Rajamohan, 2007).These inconsistencies include arbitrariness. Even after 67 years of partition of
Bengal, and 43 years after the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent country, some of the
land borders between India and Bangladesh have remained contentious. At the Bangladesh–India
border during Partition, some families had their kitchens on one side and bedrooms on the other
(D’Costa, 2011). There were also 106 Indian enclaves and 92 Bangladeshi enclaves. Inside the
main part of Bangladesh, 102 of these are first-order Indian enclaves, while inside the main part
of India, 71 of these are Bangladeshi first-order enclaves. Further inside these enclaves are an add-
itional 24 second-order or counter-enclaves, 21 of which belong to Bangladeshi and the remain-
ing three to India, and one Indian counter-counter-enclave, called Dahala Khagrabari #51. In
September 2011, Prime Ministers Manmohan Singh of India and Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh
signed an accord on border demarcation. In November 2014, a Parliamentary Committee in
India approved a bill to give effect to the India–Bangladesh Land Boundary Agreement. This
approves India’s exchange of 111 enclaves measuring 17,160 acres to Bangladesh and receiving
51 enclaves covering 7,110 acres. Almost 51,000 people reside in these enclaves. The territories
involved in the exchange are in Assam, West Bengal, Meghalaya and Tripura. The people living
in these enclaves have remained in a condition that not only restricts their mobility but also
puts them in a questionable state of citizenship in the state-centric discourse. On 31 July, 2015
the stateless people of the exchanged enclaves finally received citizenship of their choice. While
none from the Bangladeshi enclaves within India opted for Bangladesh, 979 people from Indian
enclaves inside Bangladesh applied for Indian citizenship.

403
 B. D'Costa

Post-conflict Bangladesh and the stateless status of Biharis

The Bihari community living in Bangladesh has long been identified as a stateless community
that has been excluded from most narratives of borders. They are often called ‘Urdu-speakers’
or ‘stranded Pakistanis’ due to their strong demand for repatriation over the last three decades
(Paulsen, 2006). The Bangladeshi media also often describe the Biharis as Urdu-speakers despite
the fact that many of the post-1971 generation communicate in Bengali. Their identity concerns
are frequently discussed as a political challenge for post-conflict Bangladesh but not Pakistan.
However, for Biharis living in 66 camps across 13 districts in Bangladesh, this is not only a ques-
tion of nationality and citizenship. It is also about their right to a homeland, belonging and loyalty.
In the aftermath of Partition nearly one million refugees migrated to East Bengal and 95.9
per cent of them were Biharis from India (Whitaker, 1972). Many of these migrants experienced
communal violence in the Partition riots. Following the Partition riots, when many Bengali
Hindus left for India, both Biharis and Bengali Muslims who lived in East Pakistan appropriated
properties of the Hindus. Around this time, the relationship between Bihari refugees and Bengalis
was cordial. However, this changed with Jinnah’s declaration in 1948 that Urdu would be the
only official language of Pakistan. The gradual distance between East Pakistan and West Pakistan
following this declaration culminated in the birth of Bangladesh through a brutal conflict in
1971. A number of Biharis (D’Costa, 2011), mostly due to their common linguistic identity
with the Urdu-speakers of Pakistan, and an aversion towards secular Bengali nationalism and the
affinity of Bengali political elites with ‘Hindu’ India, sympathized with the Pakistani regime. Also,
ethnic similarities allowed access to preferential treatment by the Biharis in the East Pakistani
economy (Sen, 1999). In East Pakistan, the army had made a practice of appointing Biharis to
replace educated Hindus in many important administrative positions, as well as in railway work-
shops and jute mills. Biharis faced reprisals and in the period leading up to the Liberation War
(muktijudhyo) thousands of Biharis were killed during various incidents of political violence.
During the Liberation War of Bangladesh, Biharis were active in the East Pakistani Civil Armed
Forces (Razakars and Al-Shams) and were involved in an anti-independence role and perpetrated
violence against the Bengalis. Following the birth of Bangladesh, many of the Biharis were perse-
cuted because of their alleged involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity.Thousands
were arrested and many hundreds more were executed or simply disappeared. On 27 January 1972,
following the withdrawal of the Indian Army, Bihari enclaves in Mirpur and Mohammadpur were
attacked (D’Costa, 2011). Geoffrey Davis, an Australian physician who worked in Bangladesh with
the World Health Organization and International Planned Parenthood Federation and helped set
up ‘industrial scale procedures’ of abortion in the aftermath of the war, recalled in an interview
with me that, many Bihari women and girls were abducted and raped in retaliation for the war-
time sexual violence perpetrated against Bengali women.
Article 1, Clause 2, of the 1954 Stateless Persons Convention specifies that this Convention
shall not apply

(iii a) To persons with respect to whom there are serious reasons for considering
that: They have committed a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against
humanity, as defined in the international instruments drawn up to make provisions in
respect of such crimes.

Although recent advocacy and activism for prosecuting alleged war criminals in Bangladesh
has not visibly brought this up with regard to the Bihari citizenship debates, the risk remains.
The Bangladeshi government announced the Presidential Order 149 in 1972 as a step
towards rehabilitating the Biharis; 600,000 accepted this offer (Bangladesh. Ministry of Relief and

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Rehabilitation, 1982, p.3) while 539,669 registered with the ICRC to return to their country of
‘nationality’, Pakistan (South Asia Forum for Refugee Rights, 2001). From the beginning Pakistan
was unwilling to repatriate the Biharis. However, due to Bangladesh’s stipulation before establishing
a diplomatic relationship with Pakistan and both the 1973 New Delhi Agreement and the 1974
Simla Treaty, it agreed to admit some of the Biharis. The UNHCR helped to repatriate 108,750
Biharis by June 1974. Lack of funds forced the UNHCR to discontinue repatriation of the rest of
the Biharis.When Benazir Bhutto was in power, she refused to grant citizenship to nearly 100,000
Biharis who had moved to Pakistan illegally. Nawaz Sharif provided some of them with identity
cards in Punjab when he was in office. Following 9/11, and Pakistan’s role in the ‘Global War on
Terror’, it is highly unlikely that the remaining Biharis or ‘stranded Pakistanis’, especially the older
generation who did not want to become citizens of Bangladesh, would be granted citizenship in
Pakistan (for a detailed analysis of Bihari citizenship, see Sen, 1999, 2000; Siddiqi, 2013).
On 5 September 2007 there was an inter-ministerial decision by the Bangladeshi govern-
ment that, pending legal review, would grant the Biharis born after the time of independence in
Bangladesh, and who wish to become citizens, the right to be registered as voters and to receive
national identity cards.Through this measure, half of the stateless Biharis, hosted by Bangladesh for
36 years, found a remedy to their lack of an effective nationality. On 26 November 2007 the High
Court issued a ruling requiring the government and the Election Commission to show cause within
two weeks why the Urdu-speaking people living in different camps of the country, including the
‘Geneva Camp’, shall not be enrolled as voters. The court issued the rule on a writ petition filed
by seven Biharis living in Bangladesh. The petitioners stated that around 300,000 ‘Urdu-speaking
people’ have been living in Bangladesh (UNHCR estimate). Of them, about 200,000 people were
eligible to become voters. Barrister Rafiqul Islam Mian who took on their case stated that those
who were born after the liberation have already expressed their allegiance to Bangladesh by their
conduct and behaviour. He also said, ‘They have legal right to be the citizen of this country and
enrolled as voters to exercise their democratic rights in the country.’ A 2008 landmark High Court
decision recognized Biharis as Bangladeshi nationals. The Dhaka High Court ruling applies to
those who were minors when Bangladesh won independence in 1971 or were born afterwards.
In 2013, the Council on Minorities partnered with the international legal empowerment organ-
ization, Namati, to provide services to Biharis seeking citizenship documents, by training a corps
of local paralegals. As of June 2013, there are ten paralegals and three volunteers working across all
the camps in the country (Donovan, 2015) to support Biharis in need of citizenship documents.
But citizenship rights have yielded minimal gains. Though the Biharis are no longer directly tar-
geted for persecution because they were considered to be collaborators in the 1971 conflict, they
are still treated in a discriminatory and unequal way compared to other Bangladeshi citizens on
the grounds that they are viewed as either ‘non-citizens’ or disloyal people. Most still remain on
government-owned land, leaving them vulnerable to abuse and political manipulation. Long-term
solutions such as securing permanent land and rehabilitation with dignity are crucial for the Biharis.
While the citizenship status of most of the stateless Biharis, a linguistic minority in Bangladesh,
might be resolved in time, the deep-rooted sense of instability and the dilemma created due to
the fluidity of boundaries and borders will remain a challenge for their appropriate reintegra-
tion within Bangladeshi society.

Rohingya refugees/stateless people on the Burma–Bangladesh border1

According to the UNHCR, a refugee is someone who,
as a result of events occurring before 1 January 1951 and owing to well-founded fear
of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular

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social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable
or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of the govern-
ment; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former
habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwill-
ing to return to it.
(1951 Convention, Article 1A (2))

Barnett and Finnemore point out that this definition is narrow and limits the responsibilities of
states. They also argue that the UNHCR was created as a backward-looking organization with
no vision for future refugees (Barnett and Finnemore, 2004).2
Rohingyas remain one of the most persecuted and vulnerable communities in the world.
Derived from Rohang, the ancient name of Arakan, the Muslims of Burma’s west coast identify
themselves as Rohingya. Many members of the community in recent decades have preferred to
be labelled as Arakan Muslims. The widely accepted term for the Rohingya, in all formal and
most of the informal discussions on Burma, is ‘Bengali Muslims’. What is also perplexing is the
global media’s reporting about the Rohingya refugees.Virtually unnoticed by the media except
for the times when images of refugees in leaky boats are captured, the human rights activism of
Rohingyas has rarely been documented.
During 1991 and 1992, more than 270,000 Rohingya refugees crossed the border from
Burma.With them they brought their experiences of horrific violence, forced labour, rape, exe-
cutions and torture. Through the Burmese Citizenship Act 1982, Rohingyas have also become
stateless. This Act specifies 135 national races and excludes the Rohingyas (Lewa, 2003). As a
persecuted group, which shares a similar Muslim identity,3 Bangladesh initially welcomed the
refugees. It viewed the issue as a short-term problem and wanted to resolve it through bilateral
negotiations with Burma. Also, it was seen by the Bangladeshi government as a moral boost to
be offering assistance for once and not seeking it. Initially it welcomed the UNHCR, the Red
Cross and various other international agencies to assist the refugees. However, soon the massive
numbers created an economic nightmare for the already poor country. In recent years, public
support in Bangladesh has significantly decreased and has encouraged the subsequent govern-
ments to be less supportive of the Rohingyas. Burma’s propaganda suggesting that the fleeing
people were mostly ‘Islamic insurgents’ (Barnett, 2000; D’Costa, 2012) added to the anxiety
of the Bangladesh government. Following 9/11, Bangladesh argued that various Muslim ter-
rorist groups had been operating in the Rohingya camps. This accusation took attention away
from the inhumane living conditions of the Rohingyas in various camps by making them
a national security concern. The UNHCR viewed repatriation as the most logical response
and in many instances resorted to involuntary repatriation of the Rohingya refugees from
Bangladesh. Currently, there are 26,311 Rohingya refugees living in various camps in border
areas. Although the UNHCR is assisting 21,716 of the Rohingya refugees, the Bangladeshi gov-
ernment has repeatedly denied UNHCR requests to set up self-reliance activities both inside
and outside the camps.
The recent spate of violence erupted in mid-2012 with an allegation of the rape and
murder of Thida Htwe, a 27-year-old Rakhine woman, resident of Thabyaychaung village
in Ramee Township, Arakan State. The Rakhine/Buddhist mob retaliated by attacking a
bus and publicly lynching ten Muslim men. The subsequent sectarian violence claimed
at least 50 lives, left 2,500 charred houses and displaced 30,000 people. Some analysts
have speculated that the hardline faction of the military may have had something to do
with the recent spate of sectarian violence. The predominantly Muslim district of Nazir
in Sittwe was set ablaze. It was alleged that the police watched while members of an

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Arakanese paramilitary group known as Lun Htin carried out arson attacks in Bhumu,
near Maungdaw.
The military took administrative control of the region and on 10 June 2012 a state of emer-
gency was declared. On 19 June, the Kyaukphyu District Court convicted three men – Rawphi,
Khochi and Htet Htet. One of the suspects, Htet Htet, allegedly committed suicide in the
prison on 9 June and was given a posthumous conviction, while the other two were sentenced
to death.

Burma’s fractured narrative

A state that had gone through more than 60 years of conflict, during which more than 30
insurgent non-state armed groups have actively fought against the Burmese government, is
bound to have multi-layered internal divisions and security anxieties. The intense militarization
processes penetrated Burma’s everyday discourses including its social, economic, cultural and
political systems, norms and priorities. The Tatmadaw’s strategies in the guise of modernization,
articulated as ‘Burmanization’, was in effect a process of ‘homogenization’, forcing out people
whose appearance, religious belief, language and everyday practices reproduced their identity
as the ‘Other’ and, I would argue, the enemy within. By deceptively producing the Muslims as
the internal threat, the military regime sought to portray itself as the protector of its citizens.
Ironically, while some of the other undemocratic and authoritarian practices of the Tatmadaw
have been challenged, the regime has largely succeeded in wiping out the idea of including
Rohingyas in a multi-ethnic, heterogeneous national consciousness.
Through state-sponsored exclusion policies Rohingyas were made aliens in their own
land. The forced migration of Rohingyas that generated the recent crisis beginning in 1942
is well documented. We are also familiar with some of the key exclusion policies and strat-
egies that started with the military coup after which freedom of movement was restricted
in 1962; the promulgation of the Emergency Immigration Act designed to prevent people
entering from India, China and Bangladesh in 1974; the census programme, Nagamin, to
check identification cards and take action against illegal aliens in 1977; and finally the 1982
Citizenship Law following the 1978 exodus when many Rohingyas returned or attempted
to return to Burma.
The State Peace and Development Council repeatedly invokes its moral authority through
the lens of national security and state sovereignty in dealing with Rohingyas. There is of course
a historical context to it, which could perhaps be explained through the ‘good’ citizens model.
First, as the anti-Rohingya discourse indicates, a key source of anxiety had been the perceived
disloyalty to the idea of a Burmese statehood by Rohingyas, such as when the political elite
sought to be an independent state and made deals with the outgoing British Raj; when the
community was divided in its support of the local and national political shifts; and when the
armed resistance began.
Related to this, second, Rohingyas taking up arms have generated a different source of
anxiety under the pretext of the ‘war on terror’, even before 9/11, unlike other non-state
armed groups such as the KNLA (Karen National Liberation Army), which has roughly
3,000 or 4,000 troops, the Shan State Army (SSA–South), which has between 6,000 and
7,000 troops, and the Karenni Army, between 800 and 1,500 troops.The Chin National Front
has roughly 200 and the Arakan Liberation Army 100 troops. Thein Sein, Burma’s reformist
president, has signed several ceasefire agreements with a number of non-state armed groups.
On 13 January 2013, for example, the government signed an agreement with the Karen
National Union (KNU).

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The divided system in various ethnic states such as in the Karen State, Shan State and
Mon State in effect give the control to the Tatmadaw and those insurgency factions that
have entered into agreements with the Burmese state. All these non-state armed actors
claim to be the champions of their groups’ rights and hold the view that it is necessary
to take up arms against Burma. Similar to these groups, the Rohingya militant movement
also claims to be the sole protector of the Muslim Arakanese/Rohingyas. Unlike the other
armed groups, the sharp reactions to their claims also come from the various democratic
platforms of Burma.
One of the leading groups, the Arakan Rohingya National Organisation (ARNO), agreed
to ban all use of anti-personnel mines and victim-activated explosive devices and signed
the Geneva Call Deed of Commitment for Adherence to a Total Ban on Anti-personnel
Mines and for Cooperation in Mine Action (DoC) on 5 December 2003. A document that
was leaked in early 2012, dated 10 October 2002, claimed that the ARNO had links with
various terrorist networks. The ARNO was operating from Chittagong in Bangladesh and
allegedly had contacts with groups on the Thai–Burma border. The document noted that
the government of Bangladesh instructed the ARNO in May 2002 to move its bases from
south-eastern Bangladesh, following which 195 Arakan Army members turned themselves
in to the Burmese.
Over the last decade the ARNO has significantly weakened in numbers and leaned towards
moderate politics, unlike some of the other splinter groups that attracted the more radical/
extremist factions. For example, the RSO (Rohingya Solidarity Organisation) that broke away
from the Rohingya Patriotic Front in the 1980s and primarily operated across the border in
Bangladesh attracted a number of radical and militant Rohingya activists. The RSO’s links
with extremist groups in Bangladesh and associations with international terrorist networks have
been reported in the media, which has fuelled prejudice against all the Rohingyas. According
to reports, the Bangladeshi Army in a few major operations almost disbanded the RSO as early
as 2005. There are also a few small groups such as the Central Rohingya Jammatul Ulama, the
Ittehadul Mujahiddial, the Rohingya Islamic Liberation Organisation and the Arakan Rohingya
Islamic Front.These groups joined the Democratic Alliance of Burma in May 1992, which cur-
rently is virtually inactive.
The Burmese (and also Bangladeshi) authorities in reality take advantage of the global cli-
mate of fear and anxiety that has securitized the discourse of refugees, in particular Muslim
refugees. This ‘refugees as threat’ perception really matters when it comes to the Rohingyas
because discourse actually drives policies and public support for specific policies. Those who
remained in camps in Bangladesh are particularly vulnerable, since the barbed-wire camps have
their unique violent everyday narratives and, on top of that, the host communities from outside
perceive the camps as breeding grounds for militancy.
The misleading and prejudicial information fed by the hostile state and non-state actors and
the media in both Burma and Bangladesh has created an image of Rohingya militancy as a mas-
sive security threat that in reality is simply not accurate.
Third, the massive presence of the security sector in the North Arakan State has seen an
increase in sexual and gender-based violence. In particular, Nay-Sat Kut-kwey Ye (NaSaKa),
established in 1992, has systematically targeted the Rohingyas. NaSaKa members and soldiers
have targeted Rohingya girls and women and many of their attacks have been racially moti-
vated.Various human rights reports also note how race was one of the major instigators of sex-
ual violence against Rohingya women and children.
The strict licensing system to restrict movements, deportation and forced labour, land
grabbing and torture have made living conditions harsh for Rohingyas in their own

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homeland. Racial hatred has been a huge factor in the human rights abuses perpetrated
against them. During personal interviews conducted over the span of the last few years,
Rohingya refugees have talked about the use of derogatory and humiliating words by the
security forces. The more refined officials use newly accepted terms concealed beneath
other politically correct categories that accentuate differences such as culture, ethnicity
and religion.
A recent Irrawaddy report states that in 2009, in an open letter to other diplomats Burma’s
consul general in Hong Kong, who is now a UN ambassador, described the Rohingya as ‘ugly
as ogres’ and compared their ‘“dark brown” skin to that of the “fair and soft” ethnic Burmese
majority’ (Pittman, 2012).
What is really demoralizing for human rights activism is that Rohingyas are despised
by members of ethnic communities that have been oppressed for decades by the military
regimes. The Irrawaddy report cites Ko Ko Gyi, a prominent former political prisoner. He
notes that the Rohingya should not be mistreated, but stressed that they were not an ethnic
group of Burma. There are numerous political/human rights/women’s groups and activ-
ists who firmly believe that Rohingyas do not belong to their Burma. Burmese women’s
networks, for example, which are champions of human rights and gender-sensitive strat-
egies, often deliberately exclude Rohingya women’s rights activists following obstruction
by particular Rakhine women’s rights groups. Following my question to activists on the
Thai–Burma border about why Rohingya activists were not included in their programmes,
one of the most common responses I heard was that it was an internal issue that needed to
be resolved by Rakhine and Rohingya leadership first. The lack of political will, for a variety
of reasons, and also, to some extent, the capacity of other ethnic groups to intervene had also
compounded the problem.
All these events took place just when Aung San Suu Kyi was about to leave the country
after more than two decades for her Europe tour on 13 June 2012. Some even criticized her
for leaving Burma during such a sensitive period. Suu Kyi, during her trip to Thailand and
Europe, has stressed that the rule of law is necessary to bring stability in Burma. Responding
to a question on the citizenship issue of Rohingyas at the Oslo Forum, Suu Kyi pointed
out that

We are not certain exactly what the requirements of citizenship law are … If we were
very clear as to who are the citizens of the country under the citizenship law and who
qualify, then there wouldn’t be this problem … We have to have rule of law, and we
have to know what the law is. We have to make sure that it is properly implemented.
(Latt, 2012)

The citizenship question and boundary politics remain at the core of Rohingya persecution,
statelessness and insecurity. Sadly, the winds of change in Burma do not automatically signal a
change in the question of legality and illegality for Rohingyas. Their lack of bargaining power
and the deep resentment and racist attitude of various key stakeholders towards Rohingyas
indicate that this is not going to be resolved on a priority basis in the near future by Burma’s
leaders either.

Burma–Bangladesh border and the ‘right to have rights’

While six boats carrying the distraught and traumatized refugees from Sitwe were stranded in
the Naf river in June 2012, Bangladeshi Foreign Minister Dipu Moni stated in a parliamentary

409
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session that this was an internal issue of Burma/Myanmar, which was not persecuting the
Rohingya, and that Bangladesh had no obligation to provide humanitarian assistance because it
was not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol. She further stated
that Bangladesh had to protect its national security.
An internal displacement was caused after communal violence erupted in Burma that
also spilled over to the whole of Arakan in 1942. The Buddhist Rakhine and the Muslim
Rohingya were engaged in a bitter battle, after which the Buddhist Arakanese moved to the
south and the Muslim Rohingyas to the north, including 22,000 who crossed the border to
Bengal. The second wave of migration occurred following the nationwide census project,
Nagamin, during which over 200,000 fled across the border in Bangladesh. As discussed
above, during 1991 and 1992, more than 270,000 Rohingya refugees crossed the border
from Burma. Soon, the strain on localities where camps were constructed started to worry
the ruling regimes. Over the last two decades, public support in Bangladesh has significantly
decreased, which has also contributed to subsequent governments being less sympathetic to
the refugees.There are three causes behind the decrease in support.The recent anti-Rohingya
xenophobic attitude displayed by Bangladeshis primarily comes from the ultra-nationalistic
front, which claims that the Rohingyas are being supported and armed by Jamaat-a-Islami,
the party that questioned and violently opposed the Liberation War of Bangladesh in 1971.
Those who hold this view believe that the Rohingyas would also be used as a vote bank for
the next election.
Burma’s propaganda implying that the fleeing people were mostly Islamic insurgents
added to the anxiety of the Bangladeshi government. This accusation has taken attention away
from the inhumane living conditions of the Rohingya in various camps by making them a
national security concern. The UNHCR viewed repatriation as the most logical response
and in many instances resorted to involuntary repatriation of the Rohingya refugees from
Bangladesh. Currently, there are 26,311 Rohingya refugees living in various camps in bor-
der areas. Although the UNHCR is providing support to 21,716 of the Rohingya refugees
living in camps, the Bangladeshi government has repeatedly denied UNHCR requests to set
up self-reliance activities both inside and outside the camps. According to the Refugee Relief
and Repatriation Commission, the number of undocumented refugees is 200,000. Further,
the increase in undocumented Rohingyas in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), an unknown
number of whom are also economic migrants in the greater Chittagong area, particularly in
Bandarban district, have angered the local communities. Meghna Guhathakurta, a researcher
who is working on Rohingyas, noted in a personal conversation that

Rohingyas have come in [Bangladesh] anyway over the years and have [now] settled
in Bandarban only because they have been chased away from the plainland. The con-
struction boom in Cox’s Bazar is one of the main attractions, so they would naturally
want to settle in the plain lands, but [after] meeting hostility in the host community
they therefore are driven to woods and hill lands.

The CHT, homeland for indigenous Bangladeshis, is yet to recover from its own experience
of a protracted conflict that formally ended with the signing of an accord in 1997. Continual
human rights abuses, major displacements of indigenous communities (both internally and
across the border) and land grabbing by illegal Bengali settlers from the plain land have pro-
duced multi-layered insecurities for its indigenous population. Rohingya migration to the
CHT adds to these insecurities as there were reports of Rohingya involvement in illegal log-
ging, drug trafficking and various other unlawful activities. However, it is actually the security

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sector and the Bengali settlers who run these activities and take advantage of Rohingya labour
in the CHT. Both the Burmese and the Bangladeshi government have strategically employed
misperceptions, fears and prejudice to portray all Rohingyas as terrorists. Neither the states nor,
in many cases, the human rights and political activists from these states separate armed groups’
activities from the plight of the civilian Rohingyas.
Following the forced migration in 1991 and 1992, both states and, to some extent, the
UNHCR provided inadequate information and suggested that it would make more sense
to send the refugees back ‘home’. Bangladesh ignored their stateless status in Burma and the
UNHCR stated that the refugees would not be any worse off in Burma. As repeated incidents
of desperate attempts by Rohingya refugees demonstrate, power inequalities, repatriation polit-
ics and the discourse of national security not only made the Rohingya community more vul-
nerable but also denied them the ‘right to have rights’.
With regard to the legality argument, Bangladesh needs to adhere to international norms
and laws. The Partition of India displaced millions from West Bengal and Bihar, who took
refuge in East Pakistan, which later became Bangladesh. An estimated ten million people
were forcibly displaced to India during its Liberation War in 1971. A large number returned
when Bangladesh became independent. Since breaking away from Pakistan, it was the home
of 300,000 Biharis who became stateless and were interned in 66 camps within the country,
at least until 2007. It has a large indigenous population that was displaced during develop-
ment projects and/or during the conflict in the CHT. Also, every year, thousands of people are
internally displaced in Bangladesh due to floods and waterlogging. Thus, one could argue that
its population has a variety of experiences of displacement and the nation-state has been built
by refugees of history wars.
Yet, it does not have any legal regime that could protect people who are refugees, internally
displaced or stateless. As mentioned above, Bangladesh is not a signatory of the 1951 Convention
and the 1967 Protocol. However, it is party to a number of international human rights instru-
ments, the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and international conventions. Bangladesh is
bound to offer protection to refugees according to Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights (UDHR); Article 2 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
(ICCPR); Article 22 of the Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC); Articles 2, 3 (this
is paralleled to non-refoulement of the 1951 Convention) and 6 of the Convention against
Torture and Other Cruel and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment; and Articles
44 and 45 of the fourth Geneva Convention. Most importantly, Bangladesh’s constitution in its
preamble pledges to protect the fundamental human rights of all.
Bangladesh often invokes the argument of national security and state sovereignty in deal-
ing with the concerns of Rohingya and Bihari border communities. Bangladesh maintains its
position that the Rohingyas shelter armed groups and cross the border illegally to be trained
in India. Bangladesh further argues that it has to maintain a strong military presence in the area
because of the cross-border transnational crime concerns and potential armed insurgency. The
Bangladeshi state has been fairly uncompromising in recognizing the rights and diversity of its
population, and failed to allow the stateless Rohingya and Bihari people to voice their concerns.
Bangladesh has also strictly constrained any imaginative initiatives originating in these commu-
nities that would support them in constructing their own futures.
While Bangladesh has been unwilling to engage with the Rohingya and Bihari advo-
cacy groups about their successful reintegration in the society and to consider their develop-
ment, INGOs and NGOs have provided strategic assistance through community development
activities. Many of their projects in the area of health, education and microcredit are framed
as ‘development’ projects and not promoted as ‘human rights’ programmes, which could be

411
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considered politically dangerous. In Bangladesh neither of these border communities have suffi-
cient resources of time and money to be empowered through participation in collective action.
Border communities are often perceived as a ‘nuisance’ for states, which operate in an inter-
national system where sovereign states are the primary actors. People who belong to a state are
ensured protection as citizens. Citizens are expected to reciprocate by offering their loyalty to
the state. Notions of motherland, trust and belonging to the nation guarantee certain social
bonds and societal security for citizens within a state. For a state like Bangladesh, which was
created out of a conflict where ethnic and linguistic national identity became primary markers
of a national movement, stateless people not only present a challenge for the state but also for
the majority of the population. Rohingyas and Biharis are constructed as the ‘Other’ within the
state, for whom marked differences pose challenges for suitable integration within the state.4
The analytical and normative framework on which Bangladesh’s human security is based calls
for a multi-pronged strategy: identifying threats, seeking to prevent them from materializing,
mitigating harmful effects for those that occur and helping border communities cope with the
consequences of widespread insecurities such as conflict, human rights violations and massive
underdevelopment. In the same way that state-centric economic development paradigms have
failed to address the broader concerns of people, state-centric security discourses are no longer
adaptable enough to address the new threats to the safety and well-being of people on borders.
Human security is about protecting the fundamental core of human lives in such a way that
improves human freedoms and human capabilities. While Bangladesh has the legal and moral
responsibility to protect not only its citizens but also everyone who reside within its borders, in
particular the Biharis and the Rohingya people, the human security framework enables these
border communities to identify their own choices, exercise their rights and live with dignity.

Notes
1 I follow the pro-democracy movement’s preference of using Burma instead of Myanmar. A powerful
account of Burma’s military rule relevant to Rohingya identity questions is provided by Fink (2001).
2 While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to analyse the role of the UNHCR, my extensive fieldwork
confirms UNHCR’s inefficiency in handling Rohingya repatriation in Burma–Bangladesh since the
early 1990s. The UNHCR had also historically overlooked the specific issues experienced by women
and children, especially the extent of violence inflicted on them in the country of origin, during flight,
in camps and elsewhere. Since 2006, following growing unease raised by scholars and practitioners, and
with the support of local NGOs and CBOs and through coordination with other UN agencies, the
UNHCR has responded to some of these concerns.
3 Vernacular Rohingya is also similar to the Chittagonian dialect.
4 It is beyond the scope of the chapter to consider poverty in Bangladesh as an economic indicator and
compare with people in camps. This chapter focuses on the deteriorating human rights conditions in
the camps and the unsympathetic behaviour of the Bangladeshi state.

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 33
UN PEACEKEEPING MISSION
Rashed Uz Zaman

Since the early 1990s, there has been a significant increase in the number of peacekeeping
operations organized by the United Nations as well as expansion of their scope. The United
Nations defines peacekeeping as

[A]‌technique designed to preserve the peace, however fragile, where fighting has been
halted, and to assist in implementing agreements achieved by peacekeepers … peace-
keeping has evolved from a primarily military model of observing ceasefires and
separation of forces after inter-state wars, to incorporate a complex model of many
elements – military, police and civilian – working together to help lay the foundations
for sustainable peace.
(United Nations, 2008, p.18)

Thus peacekeeping has traversed a long way from the small post-World War II missions like
the 45 observers stationed along the 500-mile ceasefire line in Jammu and Kashmir in 1949. As
of March 31, 2014, the United Nations was deploying 83,571 troops, 1,853 military observers
and 12,094 police, a total of 118,111 personnel, in 17 missions (United Nations, 2014a). Only
the United States possesses a greater global military deployment than the United Nations. Of
the 122 contributing countries, Bangladesh with 7,950 uniformed personnel is one of the top
suppliers of UN peacekeepers (United Nations, 2014a). Indeed, over the past two decades,
Bangladesh, a country usually associated with natural calamities and general impoverishment,
has consistently been one of the top peacekeeper contributing countries. Interestingly, while
Bangladesh’s political situation has come under severe scrutiny and doubts have been expressed
about the future of democracy in the country (Riaz, 2014), Bangladesh’s peacekeepers have
striven hard to establish peace and democracy in various conflict-affected countries of the
world and have acquired laurels that have rightly become a source of pride for the armed
forces.

A brief history of Bangladesh in UN peacekeeping missions

In 1988, just 17 years after Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan and the creation of the
armed forces virtually from scratch, Dhaka sent 15 military observers to the UN Iran–Iraq

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Bangladesh
12000
Bangladesh
10000
8000
6000
4000
2000
0

Feb-10
Feb-02

Feb-04

Feb-06

Feb-08

Feb-12

Feb-14
Jun-03

Jun-05

Jun-07

Jun-09

Jun-11

Jun-13
Jun-01
Oct-00

Oct-02

Oct-04

Oct-06

Oct-08

Oct-10

Oct-12
Figure 33.1 Bangladesh’s uniformed personnel in UN peacekeeping operations, 2000–2014

Military Observation Group (UNIIMOG) mission (Bangladesh. Armed Forces Division,

2014a).Within a short period of time Bangladesh became a leading provider of UN peacekeep-
ers and by April 2014, its forces had participated in 52 missions in 40 countries (Bangladesh.
Armed Forces Division, 2014b). Between 2000 and 2014, Bangladesh’s contribution of troops
has increased about 336 percent (Figure 33.1).1 As of April 2014, Bangladesh had contributed
a total of 120,587 personnel from uniformed services (armed forces and police) to UN peace-
keeping missions.The armed forces contributed 90 percent (101,332) and the police 10 percent
(13,233) of this total. Contributions by the navy and air force were 2,439 and 3,583, respectively.
Some 118 Bangladesh’s uniformed peacekeepers, of which 97 were members of the Bangladesh
Army, have died while serving under the UN flag and more than 130 have been seriously
injured in its ongoing deployments.2
In the 1990s, Bangladesh participated in peacekeeping missions in Cambodia, Rwanda,
Mozambique, Somalia, Haiti, Angola, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo (DR
Congo), East Timor and parts of the former Yugoslavia. Between 1990 and 2000, Bangladesh’s
troops served in three major concurrent UN missions: Mozambique (February 1993–December
1994), Rwanda (October 1993–February 1994) and Somalia (July 1993–February
1995) (Krishnasamy, 2003, p.32). By April 2014, Bangladesh was participating in eight UN
peacekeeping operations with a total of 8,034 uniformed personnel. The missions were located
in Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, South Sudan, DR Congo, Darfur (Sudan), Western Sahara, Lebanon
and at UN headquarters in New York. (Bangladesh. Armed Forces Division, 2014b). In the cri-
sis that recently engulfed Mali, Bangladesh was quick to offer troops to any UN-led mission in
that country and as part of this deployment a 112-member contingent of the Bangladesh Army
joined the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) in
April 2014 (Daily Star, 2014).
Bangladesh deployed its first naval contribution to a UN mission in 2005. A naval contin-
gent was sent to Sudan in that year. This was followed by the deployment of a boat detach-
ment unit in Côte d’Ivoire (Bangladesh Navy, 2014). In 2010 the Bangladesh Navy made a
giant stride when it acquiesced to participate in the multinational maritime task force in the
Mediterranean Sea, contributing a naval frigate and an offshore patrol vessel to the UN Interim
Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). Recently, two naval warships, a frigate and a corvette, namely BNS
Ali Haidar and BNS Nirmul, with a total complement of 290 sailors and officers, joined the
UNIFIL mission (DefenceBD, 2014).They will replace BNS Osman and BNS Madhumati, which

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 R. U. Zaman

have been operating in the Mediterranean Sea for the last four years as a part of the UNIFIL’s
mission mandate.
The Bangladesh police force first contributed to UN peacekeeping in 1989 through the
UN Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG) in Namibia (Rahman, 2009, p.36). Since then
Bangladesh’s policemen and women have participated in all major peacekeeping missions where
the United Nations have deployed police. Between 2001 and April 2014, there has been an
890 percent increase in the numbers of Bangladesh’s police personnel in UN missions. From
their first deployment in 1989, 13,233 Bangladesh police members, including 603 female police-
women, have taken part in 19 missions spread across 14 countries and earned Tk 40 billion for
the country (Financial Express, 2014). They have been deployed as individual police experts and
Formed Police Units (FPU) in East Timor, DR Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Darfur (Sudan), South
Sudan, Mali and Haiti. The number of female police officers participating in peace missions has
also increased. As of January 2014, Bangladesh was the second-highest female police contributor
(176) to UN missions (United Nations, 2014b, p.19). The first full-fledged female contingent
of a FPU, comprising 110 female police, the first of its kind from a Muslim-majority nation,
was deployed by Bangladesh in Haiti (MINUSTAH) in May 2010 (Mia, 2012; Financial Express,
2014). Prior to that, the only all-female FPU was deployed in Liberia (UNMIL) in January
2007 by India. In May 2012, a Bangladesh’s FPU made up of 120 police personnel received the
UN Medal for commendable performance in dealing with the law-and-order situation in Haiti
(New Age, 2012). On May 13, 2014, Bangladesh contributed a 139-member FPU to Mali. This
was the first full-fledged FPU from Bangladesh sent to the Western African nation (Financial
Express, 2014). Inspired both by the success achieved through taking part in various peacekeep-
ing missions and also the prospect of participating in future UN missions, the Bangladesh police
has strengthened its ongoing reform program that is jointly funded by the UN Development
Program (UNDP) and Department for International Development (DFID). As a part of its
ongoing commitment to increase the participation of more policewomen in UN missions and
share expertise on how to go about achieving the desired goal of having at least 20 percent
policewomen in all UN missions, the Bangladesh government in 2012 hosted the Asia Region
Women Police Conference in Dhaka.3 Bangladesh aims to build on its successful track record
of deploying an efficient police force to UN missions, and with a view to attaining this object-
ive Bangladesh seems to be willing to commit more resources and training to its police force to
serve in future UN missions.

Reasons behind Bangladesh’s commitment to UN peacekeeping missions

Bangladesh’s checkered political history and the economic and social challenges the country
faces has pushed Bangladesh to such a sterling record as a provider of UN peacekeepers (Zaman
and Biswas, 2013a, pp.193–198). Usually, three reasons are cited to explain why Bangladesh has
such a large number of peacekeepers:

1 From its inception, Bangladesh has emphasized its commitment to the UN Charter and has
regularly voiced its support for the world body. Bangladesh believes that participation in UN
peacekeeping missions fulfills the country’s constitutional and international obligations.
2 Deployment to such missions allows members of the Bangladesh armed forces to interact
with foreign armed forces and improve their professional skills. Such multinational exposure
helps them gain operational expertise and obtain first-hand knowledge of the latest military
doctrines and military equipment.

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3 Financial inducement is a powerful factor behind Bangladesh’s participation in UN peace-

keeping missions. Participation in peace operations allows the Bangladesh armed forces to
purchase and maintain a weapons platform that it would not be able to obtain under normal
circumstances and to financially reward its personnel. In other words, peacekeeping missions
help subsidize Bangladesh’s armed forces (Islam, 2001, 2011).

In addition to these, analysts have offered other reasons as to why Bangladesh has emerged as
a top peacekeeper contributing country. Dipankar Banerjee, for example, believes that fulfill-
ing international commitments, the desire to present a positive image of the country, diverting
the armed forces’ attention away from any praetorian desire, subsidizing the armed forces with
the reimbursement obtained from peacekeeping missions and the financial incentives accru-
ing to the members of the armed forces by taking part in such missions are reasons inducing
Bangladesh to adopt such a policy (Banerjee, 2008, pp.195–196). A similar argument is made
by Murthy, who emphasized that the financial benefit gained through participation in UN
missions has made Bangladesh’s soldiers unwilling to resort to extra-constitutional means and
acquire power, though the country’s political situation has remained volatile (Murthy, 2007,
p.160).
While these arguments are convincing, one can argue that the unique characteristics of the
Bangladesh armed forces should also be credited for the country’s leading role in UN peace-
keeping. These factors can be discussed under the headings of economic, normative and insti-
tutional rationales.

Economic rationales
Bangladesh is a low-income developing country with a gross national income per capita of
US$1,190 in 2014 (BDNews24, 2014). While the country has experienced sustained economic
growth over the last two decades, it is still a densely populated country with limited economic
resources. This means successive governments have been pushed to look for economic oppor-
tunities abroad, which explains why UN reimbursement rates for peacekeepers are attractive
to Bangladesh’s troops and police. The financial benefits accrued by Bangladesh’s peacekeepers
thus play an important role in supporting the economy. Official sources indicate that during
2001–2010, the government received a total of US$1.28 billion from the United Nations as
compensation for troop contribution, contingent-owning equipment and other forms of com-
pensation ( Table 33.1).4
UN peacekeeping may also lead to other indirect economic benefits through facilitating
contacts in new markets, especially in Africa.This may be particularly relevant in the agro-based
industries and pharmaceutical sectors. Of course, such initiatives require the Bangladesh busi-
ness community to work in tandem with both civil and military bureaucrats to attain success.
Unfortunately, Bangladesh is yet to obtain the desired success in this field.

Normative rationales
Ever since its inception, one of the enduring aspects of Bangladesh’s foreign policy has been
its commitment to the principles of the United Nations, including the maintenance of inter-
national peace and security. Also, Bangladesh is often portrayed in the international media as
a country prone to natural and man-made disasters, and afflicted with poverty. Participation
in UN peace missions has given Bangladesh an opportunity to project a positive image of the

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 R. U. Zaman

Table 33.1 UN reimbursement of money (as of July 2010)

Fiscal year Equipment Troops cost Total reimbursement

reimbursement (US$) reimbursement (US$) (US$)
C E C+E
2001–2002 16,118,800.47 81,639,026.00 97,757,826.47
2002–2003 37,432,740.09 67,051,154.00 104,483,894.09
2003–2004 44,296,416.36 46,713,064.00 91,009,480.36
2004–2005 31,606,099.37 93,794,400.06 125,400,499.43
2005–2006 84,182,738.40 161,861,802.37 246,044,540.77
2006–2007 79,046,617.94 136,366,902.22 215,413,520.16
2007–2008 49,200,697.85 105,686,967.55 154,887,665.40
2008–2009 27,844,530.37 95,053,666.20 122,898,196.57
2009–2010 48,936,327.81 80,945,156.00 129,881,483.81
Total 418,664,968.66 869,112,138.40 1,287,777,107.06

country. As The Economist observed, Blue Helmets from Bangladesh have helped in the creation
of a positive brand image of the country otherwise known for its vitriolic politics and both nat-
ural and man-made disasters (The Economist, 2007).
There is another dimension to normative rationales for countries like Bangladesh to partici-
pate in UN missions. Given the fact that Bangladesh’s peacekeepers are exposed to technologic-
ally advanced weapons systems and are deemed able to master them adds to the self-confidence
of Bangladeshis. Michael Adas (1989) contends that in the heyday of European colonialism, the
civilizations of India, China and Africa were identified by European conquerors and colonizers
as lacking in technological skills and unable to master elementary, let alone complex, scientific
and technological knowledge, and were thus deemed unfit to be counted as equals. In a similar
vein, this chapter argues that Bangladesh’s peacekeepers, especially airmen, feel proud of their
ability to use advanced weapons systems and operate in tandem with Western forces. Such expe-
riences result in a tremendous boost to Bangladesh peacekeepers’ self-confidence and increase
their self-respect. This was reiterated by a senior Bangladesh Air Force (BAF) officer to the
author during the latter’s visit to a BAF detachment located in the eastern DR Congo town of
Bunia in October 2013. Commenting on the operations of the BAF’s C-130 transport aircraft
in various parts of DR Congo, the officer confessed that he and other pilots felt proud when
their aircraft touched down in remote regions of the country and the Congolese expressed their
admiration at Bangladesh’s pilots mastering and operating such remarkable flying machines
(interview, BAF officer, Bunia, DR Congo, 2013).

Institutional rationales
Bangladesh’s participation in peacekeeping missions is influenced by powerful institutional
rationales.As noted above, peacekeeping allows members of Bangladesh’s armed forces to interact
with soldiers and officers of foreign armed forces and enhances their professional skills includ-
ing inter-operability skills. Exposure to such a multinational environment helps them improve
their operational ability, adds to their knowledge of latest military doctrines and equipment
and increases their motivation and self-respect. Second, peacekeeping helps finance military
equipment and weapons platforms that might otherwise be out of reach. Third, peacekeeping
leads to the development of the military’s professional skills through language training, increased

418
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interpersonal skills and by providing opportunities to interact with foreign civilians and troops
during their deployment abroad. Finally, peacekeeping has promoted institutional development
in Bangladesh. As the United Nation’s demand for Bangladesh’s peacekeepers gathered pace and
the realization dawned of the need to provide trained troops specifically for the task of peace-
keeping, the Bangladesh Army established the Bangladesh Institute of Peace Support Operation
Training (BIPSOT), a world-class training facility that serves both Bangladeshi and foreign per-
sonnel. BIPSOT has benefited from active support provided by United States and other Western
countries and has helped strengthen the professional image of the Bangladesh’s armed forces
hosting world-class training institutions (Zaman and Biswas, 2013b, p.3).

Challenges and issues

UN peacekeeping has had a tremendous impact on Bangladesh’s armed forces. A focus on
peacekeeping has led to the inclusion of peace-based modules and post-war state-building
components in its training discourse. Such modules focus on ‘human’ rather than traditional
national security and combat roles. Moreover, in interviews with the author, serving Bangladesh
armed forces officers have expressed concerns about the impact of 25 years of UN peacekeep-
ing missions upon the orientation of the armed forces and argued that a balance needs to be
struck between their role as peacekeepers and traditional soldiering (interview, armed forces
officer, Dhaka, 2014; interview, armed forces officer, Bunia, DR Congo, 2013). Until now, little
or no discussion has been heard on how the transformation brought about by peacekeeping
missions has impacted the capacity of the Bangladesh armed forces to carry out traditional
combat missions.
Peacekeeping has also had an impact on defense budgeting and procurement. In 2013 the
government of Bangladesh signed an arms deal worth US$1 billion with Russia. The deal
includes purchase of large-bodied Mi-17 helicopters, combat trainer aircraft, bridging equip-
ment, armored personal carriers and anti-tank missiles.The Armed Forces Division of Bangladesh
Army in a press release said that the United Nations had suggested that Bangladesh procure
modern weapons for its peacekeepers. This suggestion was made as Bangladesh’s peacekeepers
operate in troubled regions of the world where armed groups often have access to advanced
weapons compared to those available to Bangladesh’s troops (Financial Express, 2013). There is
no doubt that some of these acquisitions will immensely benefit Bangladesh’s peacekeepers
operating in remote and hostile parts of the world. However, such procurements may pose
significant challenges with adverse consequences for civil–military relations. It should be men-
tioned here that, like many other countries, the government of Bangladesh’s defense purchases
are often not transparent and may lead to questions about Bangladesh’s role in UN peace-
keeping missions. It should be pointed out that the international watchdog against corruption,
Transparency International, has in the recent past identified Bangladesh as one of 15 countries
risk-prone to corruption in defense purchasing (Transparency International, 2013). Questions
have also been raised about the veracity of the claim by the Armed Forces Division of the need
for these weapons for peacekeepers. Rather, it is believed that other complex rationales, such
as strengthening Russia’s strategic presence in the region, are at work (Blank, 2013). Also, the
government of Bangladesh finds additional money for the defense budget by ignoring other
priority factors. This may have a negative influence on the country’s overall economic devel-
opment. Such apprehension is corroborated by reports that point out that Bangladesh’s defense
allocation is set to rise by 35 percent in financial year 2014–2015 and 30 to 40 percent of the
allocation will be in foreign exchange to repay the credit on weapons procurement, which will
have an adverse impact upon Bangladesh’s balance of payments (New Age, 2014).

419
 R. U. Zaman

While Bangladesh has been a top troop-contributing country, it must be pointed out that it
may face a challenge holding on to its position in the near future. Such a scenario should espe-
cially be contemplated following the publication by the United Nations of A New Partnership
Agenda: Charting a New Horizon for United Nations Peacekeeping in 2009. The New Horizon
report, as it is popularly known, called for ‘an expanded base of troop- and police-contributing
countries … to enhance collective burden-sharing and to meet future requirements’ (United
Nations, 2009). This is critical for Bangladesh because it suggests more contributions of per-
sonnel and equipment from new and emerging troop-contributing and police-contributing
countries. The major focus here is that the United Nations will not be overdependent on one
or two major suppliers of troops and will increase the availability from new sources – states or
regional bodies. South Asia has already experienced a 17 percent decrease in its market share
of UN troop contribution over the last seven years (from 51 percent in 2006 to 34 percent in
2013) (Smith, 2013). Given such trends, it is imperative that Bangladesh formulates contingency
plans to deal with a possible drying-up of UN peacekeeping missions and its impact on the
Bangladesh armed forces.
The increasingly complex nature of conflicts may also emerge as a potential area of con-
cern for future Bangladesh’s participation in peacekeeping missions. It should be mentioned
that all contributing countries want to avoid casualties and are reluctant to contribute troops
to missions that are deemed overly risky. National publics, even in countries strongly commit-
ted to peacekeeping, are often intolerant of casualties sustained on UN missions and this may
pose a particular challenge to the emerging concept of ‘robust peacekeeping’ (Bellamy and
Williams, 2013, p.439). Such a scenario has become a reality since March 2013 when the UN
Security Council approved an explicit mandate to favor the robustness of its missions that would
allow peacekeepers to use force. The mandate authorized a newly created ‘Force Intervention
Brigade’ for the UN mission in DR Congo to ‘carry out targeted offensive operations … in
a robust, highly mobile and versatile manner … to prevent the expansion of all armed groups,
neutralize these groups, and to disarm them’ (United Nations, 2013). Needless to say, such mis-
sions may lead to the identification of UN peacekeepers as biased toward particular groups or
governments and increase the chances of them coming under attack with inevitable casualties.
Whether Bangladesh is willing to accept heavy casualties in UN peacekeeping missions has not
yet been discussed adequately within the country.
With the increasing emphasis on robust missions comes the issue of having peacekeepers
who are well-equipped to handle increasingly technologically dependent missions. Indeed,
in an article written on the occasion of the International Day of UN Peacekeepers, two
top UN officials noted the introduction of unarmed unmanned aerial vehicles in areas of
eastern DR Congo and wrote that in a world of increasing financial constraints, the United
Nations is creating platforms that can assist it to adapt to challenging scenarios quickly and
do more with limited resources. UN peacekeeping, they say, will soon launch an expert
panel of technological innovation that will chart ways for peacekeeping to take advantage
of new and emerging technologies (Ladsous and Haq, 2014). How Bangladesh will adapt to
the technological challenges of future peacekeeping operations should be an issue of con-
cern for the country’s policy planners. It should be remembered that not being adequately
equipped to deal with demanding scenarios may not only lead to missing out on future mis-
sions but also cause financial and material losses due to inadequate and poor equipment. The
experience of a Bangladesh engineering construction company (not a Horizontal Military
Engineering Company, or HMEC, which comprises heavy construction equipment like
bulldozers, cranes and excavators) in South Sudan without the right type of equipment and
suffering from extreme wear and tear over the years without being replaced may be cited

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as an example of such a scenario and Bangladesh should draw lessons from such weaknesses
(Boutellis and Smith, 2014, p.12).
Another challenge centers on the desire of members of paramilitary forces like the Bangladesh
Ansar and Village Defence Party (VDP) and Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) to participate in
UN peacekeeping along with their colleagues from the Bangladesh armed forces and the police.
However, such deployments are yet to materialize (Rashid, 2014). The government’s reluc-
tance may cause disaffection, which may adversely affect the performance of these paramilitary
organizations in the long run.
Bangladesh’s participation in UN peacekeeping missions has not been without controversies.
In Rwanda, peacekeepers from Bangladesh were criticized by the force commander of the UN
Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), General Romeo Dallaire. Writing on the geno-
cide that afflicted Rwanda in 1994 and the role of UN peacekeepers deployed there, Dallaire
castigated the Bangladesh contingent for their preparation and commitment to the mission
(O’Clery, 2010). The issue of sexual exploitation and abuse has also tarnished the image of
Bangladesh’s peacekeepers. In 2007 four of Bangladesh’s peacekeepers deployed in South Sudan
were repatriated after an internal UN investigation found one peacekeeper guilty of a serious
sexual assault on a child and three others for ‘a failure of command responsibilities’, meaning
they were alleged to have known about the perpetrator’s actions but failed to act appropriately
in accordance with UN policy (Sudan: The Passion of the Present, 2007).
Finally, allegations that the Bangladesh’s security forces might have engaged in extrajudi-
cial killings of ethnic minorities in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) and elsewhere raise
questions about the military’s compliance with international human rights standards, which
could affect future participation in UN missions. In the 13th Session of the UN Permanent
Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) held in New York in May 2014, an International CHT
Commission activist urged the Department of Peacekeeping Operations to develop a mech-
anism to ‘strictly monitor and screen human rights records’ of members of the Bangladesh
armed forces before they are permitted to participate in peacekeeping operations (Kapaeeng
Foundation, 2014). In a recent report, a human rights organization contended that the United
Nations should prevent Bangladesh from sending alleged human rights violators to peacekeep-
ing missions (Asian Centre for Human Rights, 2014).

Conclusion
Participation in UN peacekeeping missions has emerged as an important aspect of Bangladesh’s
foreign and domestic policies. In this chapter various dimensions and challenges of this par-
ticipation are discussed. In a changing world, it is imperative that Bangladesh approach the
issue of peacekeeping in a pragmatic way and give it the importance it deserves. Unfortunately,
Bangladesh has not yet been able to formulate a national policy on how to deal with the pre-
sent and future of peacekeeping. In the absence of a national peacekeeping strategy, the police,
military and Foreign Ministry are unable to tackle peacekeeping issues in a coordinated manner.
This situation will only exacerbate as peacekeeping faces new challenges, and it is imperative
that academic research be conducted and effective policies formulated based on such research.
As Sageman (2014) points out, much research carried out in the post-9/11 world was con-
ducted without access to primary source information. Similarly, research on peacekeeping in
Bangladesh often experiences a similar fate. The few writings in the field have come from his-
torical archival research and analysis of a few field interviews. Nor have the armed forces been
able to achieve any breakthrough because of the structure and dynamic of this community
and its lack of methodological rigor. The solution to this stagnation is to make non-sensitive

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data available to academia and to structure more effective discourse between the armed forces,
police, concerned ministries and the academic community and benefit from the complemen-
tary strengths of all parties. For Bangladesh, peacekeeping has become too important a subject
to be approached in an ad hoc manner.

Notes
1 The graph is compiled by the authors from the yearly reports available at UN website. [Online] Available
from: www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/resources/statistics/contributors.shtml [Accessed: December
15, 2013].
2 See Bangladesh. Armed Forces Division (2014a), Bangladesh Police (n.d.).
3 The Police Reform Programme (PRP) aims to reform the strategic direction of Bangladesh Police
and strengthen the capacity of the police force to improve the human security situation. It transfers
the basic nature of the police force from its colonial past to a more effective and service-oriented
organization.The PRP also promotes gender equity within the force, more interaction with the com-
munity and effective service delivery to people. For more details on the PRP, see: www.prp.org.bd.
4 ‘Role of BD Armed Forces in UN Peacekeeping Missions’, restricted Bangladesh Army document
(Anon., n.d.).

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O’Clery, N. (2010) The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda: Peacekeeping Operations in the 21st Century.
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10, 2014].
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Journal of Politics. 43 (1). pp.19–44.
Rashid, M. (2014) No Peacekeeping Jobs for BGB, Ansar. New Age. February 25.
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and Police-Contributing Countries. Lecture presented at the Regional Conference on South Asian
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University of Dhaka, in collaboration with the American Center, US Embassy, Dhaka. August 22–23.
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sent/2007/01/un_sent_home_pe.html [Accessed: September 10, 2014].
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 34
TERRORISM AND
COUNTER-TERRORISM IN
BANGLADESH
Saimum Parvez

Bangladesh emerged as a sovereign nation in 1971 after a bloody and fierce war against Pakistan.
The war was short, only nine months long, but it took a heavy toll on the new-born nation’s
lives, economy and infrastructure. Frustrated and unsatisfied by the dismal economic and pol-
itical situation, many soon pointed their fingers at the government for its alleged corruption,
incompetency and nepotism. At that point, Bangladesh first experienced a bout of leftist ter-
rorism against the government. After almost three decades, the country started to confront
the rise of Islamic militancy in the late 1990s. In the international media, it was feared that
Bangladesh was on its way to becoming a ‘cocoon of terror’ (Lintner, 2002, p.14) or a ‘sanctuary
for al-Qaeda and Taliban fugitives’ (Islam, 2002). A series of bomb blasts and suicide attacks in
2005 reinforced these apprehensions. Although the then ruling party was initially reluctant and
denied the presence of militants, tremendous internal and external pressure compelled the gov-
ernment to start a crackdown on the militants. With unusual speed, the government conducted
arrests, rapid trial and execution of the top leaders of the militant outfits. After nearly a decade of
that crackdown, Islam is still a salient factor in Bangladeshi political discourse with its complex
and multi-faceted variations and interpretations. The bitter and violent relationships between
major political parties and their ‘zero-sum’ mentality to acquire or retain political power may
create a favorable ground for the growth of radicalism. However, militancy in Bangladesh, be it
leftist or Islamist, has been confined only in small pockets of a number of regions, propagated
by a handful of splinter groups, and has not yet been successful in gaining considerable traction.

Left-wing terrorism: from revolution to extortion

Soon after the War of Liberation in 1971, extreme leftist political ideology began to appear
in Bangladesh. Even during the Liberation War, there was a strong presence of leftist Naxalite
groups in south-western districts of the country. In mainstream politics, the Jatiyo Samajtantrik
Dal (JSD) broke from the ruling Awami League and declared its radical views (Datta, 2005,
p.427). Also, outside the realm of mainstream politics, some radical factions of the leftist parties
called for ‘an armed struggle’ against the state (Maniruzzaman, 1973, p.223).

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 S. Parvez

The Sarobohara Party, under the leadership of Siraj Sikder, waged a war against the then
Awami League government. Sikder claimed that the government was only a ‘puppet of the
Indian expansionism’ (Maniruzzaman, 1973, p.223). Another important radical group was the
Mohammed Toaha- and retired Colonel M. Ziauddin-led Maoist splinter group, the BCP (ML)
(Bangladesh Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist)). In the mid-1970s, this radical group car-
ried out hit-and-run guerrilla attacks on police stations and government establishments. Both
Sarobohara and the BCP (ML) attacked and executed local landowners and moneylenders.
However, by the late 1970s, these groups had ‘lost much of [their] appeal and most guerrilla
factions sought to become legal organizations’.1
Although these leftist militant groups now do not have a strong presence throughout the
country, some smaller factions continue to operate in various pockets of the western and
south-western districts. Many of these groups essentially lost their political ideology and were
engaged in extortion, abductions and killings. As of 2011, there were 13 left-wing extremist
(LWE) groups believed to be ‘active’ in the country. They are: Purba Banglar Communist Party,
PBCP (Janajuddha), PBCP (M-L Red Flag), PBCP (M-L Communist War), Biplabi Communist
Party, New Biplabi Communist Party, Gono Bahini, Gono Mukti Fouz, Banglar Communist
Party, Socialist Party, Biplabi Anuragi, Chhinnamul Communist Party and Sarbahara People’s
March (SATP, 2011).
After the government started its crackdown in 2006 on both the Islamist militants and the
leftist extremists, the number of fatalities caused by the LWE decreased exponentially.The South
Asian Terrorism Portal claims that from 2005 to September 2014, there were in total 629 LWE
fatalities, against fatalities of 61 civilians and 12 members of the security forces. From 2007 to
September 2014, the death toll of the civilians and security forces was 26, including 22 civilians
and four members of the security forces, against the deaths of 327 extremists (SATP, 2014a).The
law enforcement agencies claim that these extremists were killed by so-called ‘crossfire, shoot-
out, gunfight or encounters’. However, human rights organizations think that these incidents
were mostly ‘extra-judicial killings’ (Daily Star, 2008a).
It should also be noted that there was a link between these LWE groups and the rise of
the Islamist militant groups in Bangladesh, particularly the Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh
(JMJB). From 2001 to 2004 the total number of fatalities caused by these LWE groups was 308
(SATP, 2014b). No wonder the militant group JMJB took the opportunity to garner popu-
lar support by directly opposing and eliminating ‘outlaw’ extremists. In April 2004, the JMJB
launched its operation in north-western Rajshahi district. According to the International Crisis
Group (ICG) (2006, p.18), the JMJB was ‘quite openly cultivated in certain quarters as a coun-
terbalance to leftist groups and their main focus was initially to eradicate left-wing extremists,
particularly cadres of the outlawed Maoist Purba Banglar Communist Party (PBCP)’.

Factors behind the rise of Islamist militancy in Bangladesh

Islamist militancy in Bangladesh has developed due to a convergence of domestic, regional and
international factors. A closer look at these factors explains the ability of Islamist militant groups
to flourish in modern-day Bangladesh. Islamist militancy in Bangladesh has been confined pri-
marily to a small group called Ahl-e-Hadith. In its earlier phase, this group was mainly engaged
in non-political and peaceful religious activities under the leadership of noted academic, Abdul
Bari. This group was concerned with ‘the preservation and preaching of the Ahl-e-Hadith
doctrines’ from the 1950s to the late 1970s (Ahmad, 2008, p.68). However, Asadullah Ghalib,
the successor of Bari as the new leader of the Ahl-e-Hadith group, was dissatisfied with the
restrained posture of Bari’s leadership and wanted to assert a distinct religious identity and

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‘translate this religious identity into an organized political movement with a clear religious
agenda’ (Ahmad, 2008, p.68). Ghalib factionalized the movement and established his own sep-
arate organization known as Ahl-e-Hadith Andolan, Bangladesh, in 1994 (Ahmad, 2008, p.70).
However, it is not clear whether Ghalib is in favor of the violent overthrow of the political
system. Kumar (2012, p.40) argues that Ghalib was closely associated with the violent mili-
tant group Jamaatul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB). According to Ahmad (2008, p.71), ‘Ghalib
rejects violence as a means of Islamic change and argues for a peaceful, “educational jihad”
to transform society and to press rulers to attend to their Islamic duties’.2 However, Ghalib’s
rhetoric and political ambition may have inspired Abdur Rahman and Siddiqur Rahman to
form their radical splinter groups, the JMB and the JMJB. They both took the violent path of
militancy with their great fascination for the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Along with the
Ahl-e-Hadith group, Deoband madrasa-inspired quomi madrasa-based groups are also report-
edly connected with militancy in Bangladesh. The Islami Oikya Jote (IOJ) is a conglomeration
of seven smaller radical organizations, some of which have previously expressed solidarity with
the Taliban regime (Riaz, 2008, p.31).
The acrimonious nature of the political environment is also a significant factor for thriv-
ing radicalism in Bangladesh. Both the left-wing and the Islamist terrorists took advantage of
this political environment, culture and weakness of governance. The major political parties of
Bangladesh all share some common features. Riaz (2008, p.24) identifies these features as ‘lack
of democracy in parties, concentration of power in the hands of the party chief and heredity
as the means of accession to and continuance in power’. He further argues that this acrimoni-
ous relationship between party leaders undermined the confidence of ordinary Bangladeshis in
the democratic political system (2008, p.24). Ahmad also asserts that ‘the internecine conflict
between the two main political parties, the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party
(BNP), which seems to have paralyzed the administrative structures, thus create a fertile ground
for militants’ (2008, p.74).
The close ties between the militants and the BNP-led ruling coalition (2001–2006)
were also obvious. At least two law-makers of the coalition, Mufti Shahidul Islam and
Muhammad Habibur Rahman from IOJ, were ‘Afghan Mujahideen’ (fought in the
Afghan war against the Soviet Army). Besides the four-party coalition’s favorable atti-
tude toward the rise of Islamist militancy in Bangladesh, the country’s weak governance
and administration’s sympathy toward the radicals also deserve attention. In 2004, both
the police and civil administrations at the district level, local-level BNP leaders and even
some ministers favored the militant groups, particularly the JMJB. Although the militants
have been arrested on many occasions between 2001 and 2005, the local administration
showed leniency to at least 500 Islamist militants who were released in those four years
(Ahsan, 2005, p.1). It is also believed that encouragement from the Home Ministry was
the main cause behind the sympathetic attitude of the local administration toward Islamist
militants (Azad, 2005, p.1). Along with the BNP-led ruling coalition (2001–2006), the
opposition Awami League also maintained ties with some of the radical parties (Riaz,
2008, p.46). For example, the League signed a memorandum of understanding in 2006
with Bangladesh Khelafat Majlish (BKM), a party known for its radical views and alleged
connection with the militants.
The exponential increase of unregulated quomi madrasas has been a matter of concern for
years. The government has no control over the privately managed quomi madrasas, which are
modeled after the Deoband Madrasa. In fact, there is no official figure regarding the number
of quomi madrasas. The figure varies from 9,000 to 64,000.3 It is believed that some of these
institutions have been used by the militants as centers for training and planning. Also, every year

427
 S. Parvez

these madrasas produce a large number of graduates who cannot find jobs. Ahmad (2008, p.74)
argues,

this large army of these poor, unemployed young men, many of them religiously moti-
vated as well, were most vulnerable to the radical ideas of the militants – those ideas
that promised them a quick solution to their existential problems, as well as justice in
a cruel world.

Besides, there are some important regional and extra-regional factors that have affected
the rise of Islamist militant groups in Bangladesh.The Afghan war was one such crucial factor.
This war provided a platform for the Bangladeshi jihadists to meet and to encourage them to
establish their own organizations. In addition, Bangladesh’s crisis of identity between ‘secu-
lar’ and ‘Islamic’, which has been significantly influenced by the relationship with India and
Pakistan, plays a crucial role in shaping the political environment of Bangladesh. It is believed
that Bangladesh is a proxy battleground between the two regional rivals of South Asia – India
and Pakistan. Ollapally (2008, p.220) puts it nicely: ‘the competing pressures on identity seem
to have been stronger in Bangladesh than in any other South Asian state. It is caught between
its own past, and between India and Pakistan.’ Zaman (2012, p.152) also argues that the
‘prevailing political culture, exacerbated by a crisis of identity’, plays an essential role in the
growth of extremist politics and the resulting violence in Bangladesh. One should bear these
factors in mind, along with the connections between militant outfits in Bangladesh and those
in its neighboring countries, before assessing the nature of Islamist militancy in Bangladesh.

The Islamist militant groups in Bangladesh

The violence committed by the Islamist militants started in the late 1990s and increased exponen-
tially in the first half of the 2000s. From 1999 to February 2005, at least 34 attacks killed 164 people
and injured another 1,735 (Islam, 2011, p.36). Another source claims that between 1998 and 2007
there were 246 attacks perpetrated by extremists (WITS, 2011, p.26, cited in Riaz and Fair, 2011).
Most of these attacks were aimed against government establishments, non-governmental organi-
zations and private citizens. The main Islamist militant groups in Bangladesh are the Harkat-ul-
Jihad-al-Islami Bangladesh (HuJIB), JMJB and the JMB. However, these groups are intercon-
nected and interdependent. Sometimes their memberships are also overlapping. For example, the
International Crisis Group report claims that ‘JMJB is an offshoot of the JMB, renamed only after a
clash with police’ (ICG, 2006, p.17). There were also instances when some of the members of one
organization changed the group’s name and operated under another entity. For instance, the HuJIB
was banned in October 2005 and some of the members of the HuJIB reportedly changed its name
to Islami Dawaat el Kafela (United States. Department of State, 2008).

The Harkat-ul-Jihad-al Islami Bangladesh (HuJIB)

The HuJIB was formed by a group of Afghan war veterans under the leadership of Sheikh
Abdus Salam. Interestingly, HuJIB members did not launch their organization covertly. On
April 30, 1992, they organized a press conference at the National Press Club in Dhaka and
announced their vow of establishing a sharia-based Islamic state in Bangladesh (Daily Star,
2009a). Analysts think that the HuJIB is the main source of militant organizations in Bangladesh.
According to Riaz and Bastian (2011, p.153), ‘leaders of many of these (militant) organizations
had been, at one point or another, connected to the HuJIB or inspired by it’.

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Mufti Abdul Hannan Munshi, alias Kalam, alias Jaman, the ‘operations commander’, is pos-
sibly the best-known member of the HuJIB. Mufti Hannan joined the HuJIB in the early 1990s.
Although he joined as a local leader, he soon became one of the important leaders of the organ-
ization. Hannan was accused in 2007 of the grenade attacks on the British High Commissioner
Anwar Chowdhury in Sylhet in 2004. Later, he made a confession vis-à-vis his involvement in
the grenade attack on the then opposition leader Sheikh Hasina on August 21, 2004 and a bomb
blast on Romona Botomul (new year celebration) in Dhaka in 2001. It is very difficult to estimate
the exact number of HuJIB members due to its clandestine and fluid nature and organizational
structure. According to the estimate of the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), the HuJIB has
around 15,000 members in Bangladesh, including local residents and foreigners (SATP, 2014c).
However, the ICG report claims the number to be only 2,000 (ICG, 2006, p.40).

Jamaatul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) and Jagrata

Muslim Janata Bangladesh (JMJB)
The JMB is arguably the most violent terror outfit in Bangladesh. It first came to promin-
ence on February 13, 2003 when a series of bomb blasts took place inside a tin shed in the
Chhoto Gurgola area in Dinajpur town, leaving three persons injured. Police recovered jihadi
leaflets, books and some subscription receipts, as well as arms and ammunition from the spot.
The organization had been reportedly active in that region for more than a year and eight of
its members were arrested on May 20, 2002 (Kumar, 2005). On August 17, 2005, the militant
group carried out near-simultaneous blasts in 63 out of 64 districts in Bangladesh, which killed
two people. The detonation of 400–500 bombs clearly showed the strength and reach of this
outfit. In subsequent years, the JMB killed a number of people including two judges in the
southern part of the country. The JMB introduced suicide bombing in these attacks, which was
an unprecedented phenomenon in Bangladesh.
Sheikh Abdur Rahman and Siddiqul Islam, alias Bangla Bhai, were leaders of the JMB.
As mentioned earlier, the JMB reportedly launched its operation in the northern region of
Bangladesh and renamed itself the JMJB. Abdur Rahman was the Ameer (‘chief ’) of the JMB
while Siddiqul Islam (Bangla Bhai) was the commander of the group’s militant activities. As
the terrorist outfit grew stronger it started to demand the imposition of strict Islamic law in
Bangladesh. The JMJB frequently targeted locally prominent NGOs and NGO-run schools,
members of the judiciary and cultural activists.
In 2006, the government arrested most of the top leaders. In August 2006, a new ‘Shura’,
the highest policy making body, was constituted with Maulana Saidur Rahman, alias Abu Zafar,
as the new chief of the organization (Ashraf, 2006, p.1). Two years later, in November 2008,
the Shura was reconstituted again. The chief explosive expert of the JMB, Jahidur Rahman,
alias ‘Boma Mizan’, told police that the new Shura members were Maulana Saidur Rahman,
Mohammad Mahfuz (alias Sohel Mahfuz), Najmul Shahid (alias Bhaigna Shahid), Mehedi
Hasan Abir, Sayem and Osman (alias Shahed) (Ahsan and Banavar, 2011, p.76). In May 2004,
Shaekh Rahman claimed that the outfit had 10,000 Ehsars (full-time members), 100,000 Gayeri
Ehsars (part-time recruits) and a million Sudhis (supporters).The new chief Saidur Rahman was
also arrested in 2010. In a confession statement, Saidur claimed that the group had around 400
full-time members and 50,000 supporters across the country in 2010 (Kumar, 2010, p.1).
Besides the aforesaid militant outfits, there are some small groups such as the
Jaish-e-Muhammad, the Shadat-e Al Hiqma, the Jadid al Qaeda and the Ansarullah Bangla
Team (ABT). Reliable data about these groups is scarce. In May 2007, members of Jadid al
Qaeda carried out bomb attacks at three railway stations at Dhaka, Chittagong and Sylhet (Daily

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 S. Parvez

Star, 2007, p.1). Activities of some groups, namely the Allahr Dal, the Hizbul Tahrir and the
Hizb-ul Touhid, are also suspicious. However, these groups could be parts of above-mentioned
larger organizations that have renamed and reorganized themselves. Another militant outfit, the
ABT, came into the limelight in early March 2013 when five students from the North South
University were arrested for the brutal murder of a blogger, Ahmed Rajib Haider. The group
reportedly has 3,000 followers, and more than 100 of them put their faith in armed jihad
(BIPSS, 2013, p.2). The Hizb ut-Tahrir (HTB) is another dubious organization that envisions a
sharia-based Khilafah state. The HTB is the country chapter of the Hizb ut-Tahrir headquar-
tered in London. Interestingly, the HTB ‘has been gaining most momentum through its activ-
ities at the country’s universities’ (Sadiq, 2005, p.1).

The external network of terror

The connection between Islamist militants in Bangladesh and transnational terrorist groups is
evident from various arrests made in Bangladesh and consequent confessions by the militants.
According to a report published in Time in 2002,Alex Perry argued that ‘not only does a relation-
ship exist, these groups work closely together’ (Perry, 2002). One of the major militant outfits, the
HuJIB, reportedly maintained connections with the al-Qaeda network and Taliban militias. It is
also believed that the emergence of the Taliban regime in the mid-1990s paved the way for build-
ing a strong relationship between militants in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The HuJIB
has also been allegedly engaged in terror activities in a number of Indian cities in concert with
some Pakistani militant groups, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM).
The SATP claims that a 25-member team of Taliban operatives reached Bangladesh in June
2001 to train HuJIB cadres (SATP, 2014c). Between May and October 2009, six Indian nation-
als including Abdul Rauf Daud Merchant, a close associate of Indian gangster Daud Ibrahim,
who is believed to have ties with both the Pakistan-based militant organization LeT and the
HuJIB, were arrested in Bangladesh (Daily Star, 2009b). In another instance, police arrested Mufti
Abdullah, alleged leader of the Indian-based Asif Reza Commando Force.
Even after the arrest and conviction of the top militant leaders in Bangladesh, the LeT and
JeM reportedly maintained a strong network in Bangladesh. It is believed that the LeT tried
to attack the US and Indian embassies in Bangladesh but intelligence agencies foiled the plot
(Raul, 2009, p.1).The Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) of Bangladesh arrested Rezwan Ahmed,
a Pakistani national, in Dhaka on February 28, 2010 (Kumar, 2012, p.40). He reportedly had
been coordinating JeM operations, recruiting locals for the terror outfit and sending them for
training in Pakistan. On February 26, 2006, two alleged Bangladeshi HuJIB militants, Anisul
Mursalin and Mahibbul Muttakin, were detained at Delhi railway station with 3 kg of the
high-powered explosive RDX, two electronic detonators and two pistols (Kumar, 2008, p.1).
Along with the Islamist militant groups discussed earlier, the HuJIB is believed to have
links with extremist groups such as the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) of India and
the Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO) of Myanmar. The working relationship between
these militant groups developed as early as the 1990s,4 even before the Islamist militant outfits
had a strong presence across Bangladesh. The reciprocal nature of this relationship is clear in a
statement by Jahidur Rahman (alias Boma Mizan), a JMB operative arrested in May 2009 by
Bangladeshi security forces: ‘We received training from the RSO arms experts in a camp near
the Myanmar border in 2002. In exchange for the firearms lessons, we trained Rohingyas to
improvise and set off bombs’ (Daily Star, 2009c, p.1).
Claims have been made by Indian sources that Bangladeshi Islamist militants are training and
organizing Indian Muslims. Bangladeshi militants are also accused of supplying the Indian Muslims

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with the means to effectively carry out violence in India (Mukharjee, 2009). It is true that some
incidents such as the arrest of Bangladeshi militants in India give credence to these accusations;
however, the extent and the scale of cooperation between local Indian militants and the Bangladeshi
militant groups should be taken into consideration. In recent years, the government of Bangladesh
has been working closely with Indian authorities to crack down on militants. The increasing ten-
dency to refer to ‘cross-border migration under the all-encompassing term of international terror-
ism’ hampers bilateral counter-terrorism efforts (Abraham, 2006, p.1). For example, the new prime
minister of India, Narendra Modi, has said that ‘illegal migrants from Bangladesh would have to go
back. Bangladeshis, pack up and leave’.The Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Kiran Rijiju
said that ‘Illegal immigration from Bangladesh is a national problem’ and action will be taken against
those ‘infiltrators’ staying in India (India Today, 2014). However, Bangladesh hotly denies any illegal
Bangladeshi presence in India. Bangladesh claims that these so-called ‘illegal Bangladeshis’ are actu-
ally Bengali-speaking Indian Muslims evicted from their own homes for different reasons such as
political and religious violence (Ramachandran, 2005). Also, some Bangladeshis claim that Indian
political leaders use the ‘illegal immigration issue as a scapegoat’ (Indo-Asian News, 2008) to cover
up their own failure to address the main causes of increasing militancy inside the country or to gain
support from the majority Hindu population in general elections.

Jihad and the ‘Second God’: financing terror in Bangladesh

The sources of financial support for militant outfits in Bangladesh can be divided into four
types: external sources including foreign NGOs and private citizens, membership dues and
supporter’s donations inside Bangladesh, investment and extortion.
First, the bulk of the funding comes from NGOs and individual donors from Persian Gulf
states and the Middle East. Besides, some groups and individuals from Britain and South Africa are
also believed to fund these militants as covert donations to madrasas and other religious institu-
tions. The Bangladeshi press and intelligence agencies accused a number of charity organizations
such as the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation (AHF), the International Islamic Relief Organization
(IIRO) and the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society (RIHS) of providing funding to Islamist mili-
tants in Bangladesh (Daily Star, 2005, 2006a). According to the intelligence agencies in Bangladesh,
the AHF funded an orphanage in which about 500 JMB operatives underwent training in the
manufacturing of bombs and use of explosives (New Age, 2005, p.1). Besides the Middle East,
the SATP claims, the HuJIB reportedly ‘receives financial assistance from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia
and Afghanistan through the NGOs in Bangladesh, including the Adarsa Kutir, Al Faruk Islamic
Foundation and Hataddin’ (SATP, 2014c). Some of the British- and South Africa-based proscribed
groups and private citizens also reportedly fund Islamist militants in Bangladesh. According to the
ICG report, the proscribed British group, Al Muhajiroun, is one such organization (ICG, 2006,
p.20). In April 2009, the head of a UK-based charity, Green Crescent, was arrested in Bangladesh
for militant connections. Bangladeshi security forces discovered a huge cache of weapons at the
Green Crescent madrasa at Bhola (Daily Star, 2009d). In another instance, two officials of the
South Africa-based organization, the Servants of Suffering Humanity, were rounded up in Dhaka
on January 25, 1999 for their alleged involvement with HuJIB (Riaz and Bastian, 2011, p.154).
Second, these militants collect membership dues and receive donations from supporters and
sympathizers inside Bangladesh. Three, militant groups reportedly have investments in several
businesses such as in transport, pharmaceutical companies, financial institutions and real estate
(Barkat, 2006, p.16). The JMB reportedly invests in many shrimp farms and cold storage units
in south-west Bangladesh. The militant outfits are also allegedly involved in money-laundering,
hundi and fake currency transactions. Finally, militants collect funds from involuntary sources

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 S. Parvez

such as extortion and looting. The left-wing militants, in particular, are notorious for using
extortion and ransom as the principal sources of funding for their activities.

Fighting terrorism
The Bangladeshi government started a massive crackdown on these military outfits in 2006.
Within months, the security forces had arrested almost all the top leaders, including the JMB
chief Sheikh Abdur Rahman and his deputy Bangla Bhai. Following rather speedy trials, some
of them were sentenced to death. Skeptics think that the apparent success of the government
indicates that there was a close connection with these groups and that the security forces knew
their whereabouts. Indeed, the then BNP government dismissed the threat of Islamist terror in
Bangladesh as a ‘media creation’ and a ‘foreign worry’ (Daily Star, 2006b, p.1).
So far the Bangladeshi government has outlawed five Islamist militant organiza-
tions: Shahadat-e-al Hikma, JMB, JMJB, HuJIB and Hizb-ut-Tahrir. In 2009, seven other
organizations – Hizbut-Tawhid, Islami Samaj, Ulema Anjuman al Baiyinaat, Islamic Democratic
Party,Tawhid Trust,Tamir ud-Deen and Alla’r Dal – were blacklisted for their suspected involve-
ment in militant activities (Dhaka Tribune, 2013, p.1).
The Bangladesh government successfully arrested several militant leaders. Sheikh Abdur
Rahman, with his two other accomplices, surrendered to the RAB on March 2, 2006 at a house
in the north-eastern city of Sylhet. Four days later, Bangla Bhai was also arrested in Mymensingh.
The bomb expert of the JMB, Shakil (alias Mollah Omar) was killed in an encounter with the
RAB on March 13, 2006 in Comilla (Kumar, 2006, p.1).
Bangladeshi courts, rather promptly, convicted these extremists in a series of verdicts. In
July 2006, district courts in Feni, Kurigram, Laxmipur, Thakurgaon and Rajshahi sentenced
18 militants to life imprisonment in five separate cases. Before that, on May 29, 2006 a court
in Jhalakathi condemned seven militants, including the two top leaders Abdur Rahman and
Bangla Bhai, to death for a suicide bomb attack on two judges, Jagannath Pandey and Sohel
Ahmed. On the evening of March 29, 2007, Abdur Rahman was hanged at Comilla jail and
Bangla Bhai at Mymensingh jail (Daily Star, 2007, p.1). Another militant kingpin, Mufti
Hannan, is still in jail. In 2008, a court in Bangladesh sentenced Mufti Hannan and another
two Islamist militants to death and two others to life imprisonment for a grenade attack in
2004 that killed three people and wounded a British diplomat (Percival, 2008). However, the
alleged spiritual leader of the HuJIB and ameer of the Ahl-e-Hadith Andolon Bangladesh,
Asadullah Al-Ghalib, was acquitted of all the charges against him. He was arrested on February
23, 2005 for alleged connections with the militants (BBC, 2005). A total of ten cases had been
filed against him, but he denied any involvement with Islamic militancy and was acquitted of
all the charges one by one and released from jail on August 28, 2008 (Daily Star, 2008b).
After the arrest, trial and conviction of the key leaders of the Islamist militant outfits, the
militant groups appear to have withdrawn into a defensive shell. Indeed, after 2007, there was no
major militant attack committed by these Islamist militants in Bangladesh. From 2009 to 2011,
no fatality linked to Islamist militants was recorded by the SATP (SATP, 2011). However, the
law-enforcement agencies continued their crackdown against militants. On December 13, 2010,
the RAB neutralized a hilltop training camp run by HuJIB in Chittagong District and arrested
five militants. In a further development, security forces arrested 372 militants in 2012 and 160
militants in 2013 (SATP, 2014a). However, there are increasing concerns about human rights
violations associated with the RAB.They have been described as ‘a government death squad’ by
Human Rights Watch (Adams, 2006). Amnesty International has also expressed concerns over
‘reports of excessive use of force by police and army personnel’ (Amnesty International, 2007).

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The Bangladesh government also took several measures against extremist groups active in
north-eastern India. The Bangladeshi authorities allegedly arrested Rajkumar Meghen, the
Manipur-based United National Liberation Front ‘chairman’, Ranjan Daimary, the ‘presi-
dent’ of the Anti-Talks Faction of the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB-ATF),
and Champion R. Sangma, co-founder and ‘chairman’ of the Garo National Liberation Army
(GNLA), and handed them over to India in 2010 (SATP, 2014b). On September 4, 2014, after
a home-secretary-level talk, Bangladesh and India decided to swap Nur Hossain, a Bangladeshi
accused of multiple murders and currently in an Indian jail, with ULFA leader Anup Chetia.
Chetia has been in a Bangladeshi jail for the last 17 years (BDNews24, 2014).
Bangladesh and India took several steps to improve bilateral relations and combat terrorism
together. For example, during Sheikh Hasina’s visit to India, on January 11, 2010, India and
Bangladesh signed agreements on Combating International Terrorism, Organized Crime and
Illicit Drug Trafficking. Also, on January 13, 2013, Bangladesh signed an extradition treaty with
India, which came into effect in October 2013 (SATP, 2014a).
On February 16, 2012, the government of Bangladesh passed the Anti-Terrorism (Amendment)
Act 2012. According to the Act, the Bangladesh Financial Intelligence Unit can cooperate with
other countries with information relating to the financing of terrorism, when so required or
requested. ‘The Act also included provisions relating to atomic, chemical and biological weapons;
to the arms and ammunition used for terrorist activities; and interventions by terrorist and sub-
versive organizations in the financial sector’ (SATP, 2014a). However, human rights organizations
publicly criticized the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) and described it as a ‘black law’. According to
the International Federation for Human Rights (IFHR) (FIDH, 2010, p.101), this legislation will
facilitate torture and other violations of human rights. The organization believes that the ATA
is ‘nothing more than a political tool to prove to the Bangladeshi public and foreign partners
that Bangladesh takes a “tough on crime” and strong anti-terrorist position’. To illustrate their
apprehension of the ‘misuse’ of the ATA for political vendettas, the IFHR report cited the case of
Mahmudur Rahman, acting editor of the daily newspaper Amar Desh and a critic of the ruling
party, who was issued a four-day remand under the Anti-Terrorism Act 2009.
The Bangladeshi government also cooperates with the United States in combatting terrorism.
The US Bureau of Counter-Terrorism report 2011 described Bangladesh as ‘a good partner’ in
the Department of State’s Antiterrorism Assistance program. To boost counter-terrorism efforts
in the long term, the United States initiated a four-year program called Bangladesh’s Leaders of
Influence (LOI) project. Under the LOI project, at least 20,000 leaders, including approximately
10,000 imams, received training in programs that included democracy and governance. Also,
USAID and the US embassy in Dhaka, in cooperation with the Home Ministry of Bangladesh,
have been conducting the Community Policing Initiative.This initiative was designed to improve
police–civilian relations and reduce the appeal of extremist groups. In November 2011, the
Bangladesh Cabinet gave approval to the Anti-Money Laundering law. The Bangladesh Bank
and its financial intelligence unit will lead the government’s effort to comply with international
standards of countering money-laundering activities (United States. Department of State, 2011).
Along with bilateral cooperation with the United States and India, Bangladesh has been
working closely with the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) for dec-
ades. Bangladesh, together with other members, signed the SAARC Regional Convention on
Suppression of Terrorism in 1987, which came into force in 1988. During the twelfth SAARC sum-
mit in 2004, the member states signed the Additional Protocol to the SAARC Regional Convention
on Suppression of Terrorism.The purpose of this Additional Protocol is ‘to strengthen the SAARC
Regional Convention on Suppression of Terrorism, particularly by criminalizing the provision,
collection or acquisition of funds for the purpose of committing terrorist acts and taking further

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measures to prevent and suppress financing of such acts’ (SAARC, 2014a). The SAARC Terrorist
Offences Monitoring Desk (STOMD) was established in Colombo in 1995. The objectives of the
desk are to ‘collate, analyze and disseminate information on terrorist offences, tactics, strategies and
methods’ (SAARC, 2014b). In the third STOMD meeting on June 23, 2010, the member states
decided to share information about terrorists on a real-time basis and to exchange data on many
related areas such as photographs of terrorists, terrorist incidents and the profile of terrorists.

Conclusion
On September 4, 2014, the al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri announced in a video mes-
sage the creation of a South Asian branch of his militant group. Zawahiri said that ‘al-Qaeda in
South Asia’ would be good news for Muslims in Myanmar, Bangladesh and India, where ‘they
would be rescued from injustice and oppression’ (BBC, 2014).This message from the al-Qaeda
chief clearly indicates that Bangladesh is still a target for transnational terrorist organizations.
Along with external factors, the domestic politics of Bangladesh has also become more hostile
and unstable. The one-sided national election, held on January 5, 2014, was marred by deadly
clashes, 21 poll-related deaths, low turnout and a boycott by opposition parties. Before the
election, Bangladesh experienced months of violent protests and 379 people killed in 2013
alone. As of September 7, 2014, 60 more people have died in political feuds (SATP, 2014b).5
However, despite the violent participation of Islamist political party cadres in these protests and
their deadly attacks on the security forces, it would be far-fetched to associate this political violence
with the possible rise of radical fundamentalism or jihadi Islam in Bangladesh. Islamic militancy in
the form of violent activities has been limited primarily to the radical Ahl-e-Hadith movement.
Analysts argue that these militant outfits lack any ‘social embeddedness in the larger Bangladeshi
society’ and have been condemned by an ‘overwhelming majority of the ulama and religious pol-
itical groups’. Even the mainstream Ahl-e-Hadith organizations, including Ghalib’s Ahl-e-Hadith
Andolan, have dissociated themselves from the terrorist violence perpetrated by the JMB and the
JMJB (Ahmad, 2008, p.72). Some analysts think that Bangladeshi society is largely inhospitable to
radicalism. As Maniruzzaman, a notable political scientist of Bangladesh, duly noted:

A fish, in order to survive, needs [the] ocean, or at least a pond. The JMB fish has no
water to swim … no popular support.They have made a few splashes and that’s it; they
will have no impact on Bangladesh society.6

Finally, the challenge of Bangladesh is to ensure that militancy and violence are completely
reined in before the radical groups earn any further acceptability. Currently, the radical groups
are a minority; perhaps they will remain in the minority in future, but political instability, vio-
lence and rancorous relationships between political parties may create an opportunity for them
to thrive again and to turn dangerously hostile and aggressive.

Post-script
Between February 2013 and November 2015, Bangladesh witnessed a surge of terrorist activities,
including the brutal killings of five self-proclaimed atheist bloggers and one publisher (the latter
responsible for publishing a book written by one of the bloggers), the murders of foreign nation-
als, and attacks on minority religious gatherings and individuals. The year 2015 was especially
eventful. In only three months (September–November 2015), there were 14 extremist attacks in
Bangladesh. In a series of unusual attacks and threats on foreign nationals, two foreign nationals,

434
 Terrorism and counter-terrorism in Bangladesh

Cesare Tavella, an Italian aid worker, and Kunio Hoshi, a Japanese aid worker, were killed and mis-
sionaries who had been working for years in various districts of Bangladesh came under attacks or
received death threats. Bangladesh also witnessed two attacks on the Shiite community in October
and November 2015. Although there have been previous incidents of attacks and killings of the
members of the Ahmediya community, attacks on the Shiite community were unprecedented.
Starting from late 2014, security officials made several arrests and claimed that the detain-
ees were members of Islamic State (IS, also referred to as ISIS/ISIL) or Al Qaeda in Indian
Subcontinent (AQIS). Most of the alleged members of IS/AQIS who were arrested were well-
educated, young, tech-savvy, and from higher-middle-class families. Jihadi appeal of IS/AQIS
also seems to provide a common platform for many splinter groups. However, it remains unclear
whether militants organizing and acting under the IS/AQIS name are acting on their own or
as part of a centralized initiative originating from IS or AQIS.
The Anasrullah Bangla Team (ABT known as Ansar al Islam, self-proclaimed representative
of the AQIS) claimed responsibility for the killings of the blogger and publisher. According to
SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors radical extremist organizations, and Dabiq, an online
propaganda magazine of IS, the responsibilities for the killings of foreign nationals and attacks
on missionaries has been claimed by IS. However, the Bangladesh government rejected this
claim. The ruling party leaders insist that opposition political parties are trying to tarnish the
good image of the government by killing the foreigners. Security officials, on the other hand,
blamed the JMB (Jamaatul Mujahideen Bangladesh), a local extremist group, for these attacks.
Besides domestic drivers such as political instability, growing authoritarian tendencies of the
ruling regime, proliferation of intolerance, polarization of society, and lack of space for religio-
political parties within the mainstream, the future trajectory of terrorism in Bangladesh will
depend on the global political situation, especially the situation in the Middle East. If the role of
the West, mainly the USA, in international politics reinforces the sense of Muslim victimhood,
then the appeal of violent extremism to the common people in Bangladesh is likely to intensify.

Notes
1 For a detailed analysis on radicalism in 1970s, see Mohaiemen (2006).
2 By interviewing top leaders of Ahl-e-Hadith movement and analyzing the articles written by Ghalib,
Mumtaz Ahmad came to the conclusion that Ghalib rejects violence as a means of Islamic change in
Bangladesh (Ahmad, 2008, p.71).
3 The Bangladesh Qwami Madrassa Education Board put the total figure at 43,000 in 2003 and 15,250
in 2005. In 2008, the board said it oversaw 9,000 madrasas. See Bano (2008). However, according to
Ahmed, the number is 64,000. See Ahmed (2005).
4 Other armed groups active in the Bangladesh–Myanmar border region are the National Unity Party of
Arakan (NUPA) and the Arakan Army.
5 The South Asian Terrorism Portal (SATP) is probably the most comprehensive and detailed database
of incidents related to extremism in South Asia. However, in some instances the portal mistakenly
portrayed political violence as extremism or terrorist activities. The violent protests and deaths before
and after the January 5 general election were associated mainly with political feuds and I think these
incidents should not be linked with terrorism.
6 Mumtaz Ahmad cited his interview with Talukder Maniruzzaman, a notable political scientist of
Bangladesh, in Ahmad (2008, p.72).

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 INDEX

Note: the letter f following a page number indicates a figure, n an endnote, and t a table.

Abbasuddin 32 Amnesty International 49n3, 105n2, 433

Abdullah, King, of Saudi Arabia 374–5 Amu, Amir Hossain 74
Abed, Sir F. H. 123 Annoda Prosad 321, 322
Abedin, Zainul 32 army see military
Adas, Michael 418t arsenic 183, 240, 273, 274, 275, 358, 360–1
administration 95–8; accountability 100–2; reforms Asia Pacific Trade Agreement (APTA) see Bangkok
104; structural-functional contours 97–8; Agreement
see also bureaucracy Asian Development Bank (ADB) 176, 251
advertising 327, 332 assembly and association, freedom of 287
Afghan war 373, 427, 428 Association for Social Advancement (ASA) 124,
agnosticism 46, 47 154, 238
agriculture 144–57; challenges to 156–7; crops atheists/atheism 28, 29, 45, 46, 47
144, 145–7; development 139; drivers of Awami League (AL) 18, 19, 20, 21–2, 23, 24,
change 148–9; economic and social indicators 25, 29, 37, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 48, 54, 58, 60,
140t; employment 144, 226; GDP share 163; 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 74f, 77, 78, 79, 80, 84,
industrialization of 160, 170t; labor force 167t, 92, 96, 99, 109, 113, 114, 131, 254, 314n6,
175t, 183; and migration 202; NGOs and 317, 320, 321, 323–4, 327, 382, 385,
154; policy 133–4; and poverty 220; seasonal 426, 427
variations 174; sector performance 144–5; Ayub Khan 33, 182
vulnerability 263, 264–5, 267; wages 177; and Azad, Abdus Samad 378–9
water quality 273 Azam, Ghulam 46, 54, 294
Ahl-e-Hadith 26–7, 434
Ahmad, M. 6, 427, 428, 435nn2 Bachhu, Abdul Kader 75–6
Ahmadiyya 11, 19, 322–3 Bahini, Mukti 378–9
Ahmed, Fakhruddin 113 Bangkok Agreement (Asia Pacific Trade
Ahmed, Kazi Zafar 75 Agreement (APTA)) 394
Ahmed, Muzaffar 60, 76 Bangla language 33, 34, 307
Ahmed, Oli 79 Bangladesh Bank 137–8, 200, 201, 202, 237
Ahmed, Shahabuddin 86 Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity
Ahmed, Tofail 74 121, 124
aid 120, 174, 371, 391, 397 Bangladesh Energy Regulatory Commission
Aikat, D. 334 (BERC) 251, 255
Ain O Salish Kendra 25, 58 Bangladesh Islami Andolon 66, 72t
air force 115, 116, 396, 418t Bangladesh Islami Front 73t
al-Qaeda 374, 381, 430, 434 Bangladesh Jatiya League (BJL) 76

438
 Index

Bangladesh Khilafat Andolon 72t BRAC (NGO) 25, 119, 123, 124, 125, 127, 154,
Bangladesh Khilafat Majlish (BKM) 44, 72t, 238, 356, 373; The Net study 121
73t, 427 Brahmanbaria 199
Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs) 132–3
(BKSAL) 20, 72, 74f, 76, 77, 78 Brezhnev, Leonid 395
Bangladesh Labor Party (BLP) 77 brickmaking 178, 183
Bangladesh Medical Association 121 British colonial period 209
Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) 18, 19, Brownmiller, Susan 53, 293
21–2, 23–4, 29, 36, 53, 54, 66, 67, 68, 69–70, Buddhists/Buddhism 44, 302, 316, 323
74–5, 77, 78, 79, 80, 84, 92–3, 96, 99, 113, 126, bureaucracy 20, 94–105, 376; and development
295, 314n6, 321, 381, 383, 427; alliance with 99–100; hostilities within 100; military rule
Jamaat-e Islami 42, 43, 44, 48, 322 111; and policy making 99; post-colonial and
Bangladesh Online Activist Network pre-independence legacy 94–5; relationship
(BOAN) 56, 57 with politicians 98–9
Bangladesh People’s League 77 Burma: Rohingyas 406–12; terrorism 407–8; see
Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation (BPC) 251 also Myanmar
Bangladesh Petroleum Exploration & Production business, micro- 227
Company Limited (BAPEX) 246, 251
Bangladesh Petroleum Institute (BPI) 254 Calcutta General Advertiser 325
Bangladesh Power Development Board 246, 248, capitalism 21, 30, 96, 216, 233, 331
249, 250, 253, 255, 256 caretaker government 23–5, 74, 75, 84, 109, 112,
Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) 114 113, 117, 255, 318, 326
Bangladesh Scheduled Caste Federation cellphones 327, 328, 329, 330, 359
(BSCF) 77 censorship 287, 325, 334, 336
Bangladesh Tariqat Federation 72t, 73t Char Kumari 322
Bangladesh Times 323 charitable work 120, 202–3
banks 137–8, 233; see also Asian Development Chayyanot 33
Bank; Bangladesh Bank; Grameen Bank; Islamic chemicals: and pollution 274
Development Bank; World Bank Chhatro League 58
Bari, Abdul 426 children: custody of 300; inheritance 301; labor
Barisal 224, 225 force 178, 181; malnutrition 151, 229; marriage
Bengal: governance 212; Islam 317; Legislative 304–5; mortality 151, 263, 352, 354, 360, 361;
Council 82; nationalism 18, 19; Partition see also babies
35, 209 China: climate change 374; relations with
Bengalis: Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) 311; 60, 393–5; trade with 115, 149, 184, 196,
national identity 31, 32–3, 307 372–3, 392
Bergman, David 55 Chittagong: foundation 213; migrants 153, 175,
Berman, Sheri 25 199; population 207, 208t, 209–10; poverty
Bharatiya Jananata Party (BJP) 381–2 224, 225; slums 361; Soviet consular office 396;
Bhashani, Abdul Hamid Khan 17 water supply 214t
Bhashani, Maulana 60, 76 Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT): identity 311;
Bhutto, Benazir 405 land grabbing 320; and peace process 306–13;
Bhutto, Zulfiqar Ali 384–5 refugees 410; religious minorities 316; security
Bhuyian, Abdul Mannan 74 issues 380
Biharis 402, 404–5, 411, 412 Chowdhury, Badruddoza 79
Bikalpa Dhara (BD) 79 Chowdhury, Mizanur Rahman 71, 72
biodiversity 266 Chowdhury, Shamsul Huda 74
biomass 245, 249 Chowdhury, Zafarullah 121
Birangonas (war heroines) 294 Christianity 44, 120, 299–300, 301, 316
Biswal, Nisha Desai 392 cinema 327, 329f; see also film industry
blogging 335 cities see Chittagong; Dhaka; Rajshahi;
Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) 114 urbanization
borders 378, 402–22; Biharis 404–5; Burmese citizenship: and borders 403; and choice 383; and
rights 409–12; effects of 402; inconsistencies security 412; and statelessness 404, 405, 406,
of 403; with India 380, 381, 382–3, 384, 407, 409
403; refugees and 386, 405–7; Rohingyas civil service 94, 96, 97–8, 99, 102–4; see also
and 407–9 bureaucracy

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civil society 121–2, 125, 126 Democratic Revolutionary Front 79

climate change 141; adaptation 268–9, 272; Desai, Morarji 380
agricultural vulnerability 264–5, 268; desecularization 36–7
biodiversity and forests vulnerability 266; development: agriculture 133–4; challenges
economic vulnerability 267; global 259–60, 139–41; European Union and 398; financial
269; greenhouse gases (GHG) 261; human sector 137–8; human 138; industry 134–5;
health vulnerability 265–6; impacts 261–4; performance 138–9; refugees 411; shifts in
infrastructure vulnerability 266; and public 131–3; trade 135–7
health 362; rainfall 260; response to 267; Dhaka: Bakhshibazar Ahmadiyya complex
socio-economic vulnerability 267; strategies 323; child labor 181; employment 178,
268; temperature 260; urban vulnerability 266 211; foundation 209, 213; government 212;
Clinton, Bill 390 Hefajat-e-Islam gathering (April 6, 2013) 28;
Clinton, Hillary 390, 392 housing 214t; industrialization 166; migration
coal 246, 247–8, 255, 256 to 153, 175, 199, 200, 211; population 178,
coastal erosion 272 207, 208t, 209–10; poverty 224, 225; slums 361;
Cold War 389 transportation 214t; water supply 214t, 276
Comilla 153, 199 Dhaka University 33, 34, 346
communalism 41, 43, 44 dictators 25, 42, 43, 52
communications technology 125, 347, 359; see also digital divides 335–6
telecommunications diplomacy: climate 373–4; cultural 374–5;
communism 45 economic 371; energy 371–3; of
Communist Party of Bangladesh (CPB) 42, 66, 70, recognition 369–70
75, 76, 78, 426 diseases: arsenic-related 360–1; and climate change
community health workers 358 265–6; kidney 362; non-communicable 362;
connectivity 197, 220, 228, 245, 372, 375, 383, slum dwellers 361; water-borne 359; see also
389, 393, 394, 397; see also infrastructure; diabetes; obesity; tuberculosis
telecommunications dissidents 17
constitution 19, 307; amendments 11, 20, 22–3, divorce 299–300
24, 42, 43, 44, 45, 82, 83, 95, 109, 112, 117, 287, doctors 360, 363
318; and freedom of the press 333; military rule droughts 264, 265
95; preamble 21; secularism in 25, 36, 40, 41, drugs 358, 362
42, 71; women and 295
construction industry 163, 183, 210; labor force East Bengal 319, 404
167t, 181; see also brickmaking East Pakistan 18, 34, 52, 60, 131, 168, 182, 209,
corruption 18, 101–2, 103, 116, 182, 304, 331, 317, 318, 325, 327, 384, 404
375–6, 419 Eaton, Richard: The Rise of Islam and the Bengal
coups d'etat 20, 21, 36, 40, 53, 67, 82, 95, 109, 111, Frontier, 1204–1760 316–17
112, 113, 318 economy: categorization 160–1; and climate
crime 286, 287t, 432; see also war crimes change 267; development 131–3; Enhanced
crops 144, 145–7 Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF) 132;
cultural centers 375 Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of
cyclones 358–9 Commerce and Industry 17; Five Year Plans
132, 212, 216; growth 124, 138–9, 141, 263;
Dallaire, General Romeo 421 indicators (1973-2014) 140t; local 202–3;
Danone (company) 357–8 openness 136t; and peacekeeping missions
Dawn (newspaper) 35 417, 418t; Policy Framework Paper (PFP) 132;
de Soto, H. 212 and remittances 200–1, 202; and secularism
de Tocqueville, Alexis 122 46; Structural Adjustment Facility (SAF) 132;
debt 132–3 Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) 132;
defense 115, 391–2, 394–5, 396, 419 two-economy thesis 34; and urbanization
dehydration 357 210–11; see also GDP
Deleuze, Gilles 374 education: aid 391; development 138, 139, 348–9;
democracy: 1972-1975 19–21, 95; and elections examinations 348; future of 349–50; gender and
78, 109, 398; Islamic Democratic League 71; 200, 263, 355; governance and management
and justice 54; liberal 122; political parties 348; Islamic see madrasas; lifelong learning
and 427; post-1991 112; post-2009 114–17; 344; and migration 202; militants and 427;
procedural 17; and secularism 41 National Skill Development Policy (NSDP)

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349; overview 340–2; policies 342–4, 347–8; European Union 397–8; India 20, 111, 370,
pre-school 349; safety net programs 179; 372, 373, 378–84; Japan 397; ‘Look East’ policy
secular 43; and social class 215, 345; state's 393, 398; mediation 398; Myanmar 372, 375–6,
role 343–4; tertiary 342, 346–7, 348, see also 386; Pakistan 384–6; Russia 395, 396; Soviet
colleges; universities;Vision 2021 initiative 347; Union 395–6; Tripartite Pact 393; United
vocational 345, 348, 349; see also schools States 389–92
Election Commission (EC) 24, 65, 75 forestry 144, 145, 167t, 266
elections: local 21; parliamentary 18, 21, 22, 23–4,
42, 43, 52, 77, 92–3, 109, 113, 383, 390, 398, Ganajagaran Mancha movement 45, 58, 59
434; party participation 65–8; presidential 77; Gandhi, Indira 379
and religion 36–7, 47; and state power 58–9; Ganges–Brahmaputra–Meghna (GBM) basin 271,
voting 80, 320–2, 410 272, 278
electricity 163, 167t, 214t, 246, 249–50, 256, 257 Ganotantri Dal 42
elites 35, 41, 48, 70, 80, 101, 111, 121, 126, 307 Gantantrik Party 77
employment: agriculture 144, 266; creation of 200; garment industry (RMG) 162, 164, 165, 166,
informal 177–9, 211–12; manufacturing sector 169, 170t, 174, 179, 181, 182, 183–4, 187, 190,
211, 227–8; opportunities 141, 183; see also 191–2, 211, 226, 228, 229, 302–4, 355, 391
labor force; migrant workers gas 163, 165, 167t, 245, 246–7, 251, 255, 256, 396
enclaves 370, 379–80, 383–4, 403, 404 GDP 132, 133, 135, 138, 139, 140t, 144, 162–3,
energy 165, 246–7, 246–58; actors 251–3; biomass 168, 173, 177, 190, 192, 220, 225, 227, 257, 263,
249; coal 246, 247–8, 255, 256; diplomacy 267, 344
371–3; hydopower 249; institutions and reforms Gellner, Ernest 29–30, 31
249–51; petroleum fuel 248; political economy gender: constitution 295; definition 293; and
253–7; resources 251; solar 248; wind 249; see education 263, 341t, 342, 355; and foreign
also gas; oil policy 376; labor force 175, 176t; and migration
entrepreneurship 228–9, 230 198, 201, 202, 203; norms 125; see also women
Environmental Sustainability Index 273 genocide 52–3, 56, 308
Ershad, Hussain Mohammad 18, 21–2, 37, 42, geopolitics 310, 387, 390, 396, 397
69, 70, 74, 77, 79, 82, 111, 112, 309, 319, 326, al-Ghalib, Asadullah 426–7, 432
346, 381 Ghatak Dalal Nirmul Committee (GDNC) 54, 56
Ershad, Rawshan 70 global warming see climate change
European Union 190, 191, 195, 397–8 globalization 125, 373, 374
exports 161, 162t, 164–5, 169, 174, 187, 189–92, Gono Azadi League (GAL) 77
195; see also trade Gono Forum 74, 75, 79
Gono Oikyo Jote (GOJ, People’s Unity
Facebook 330, 335 Alliance) 77
factories 304, 391; see also garment industry Gono Shahajjo Sangstha (GSS) (NGO) 124, 125
family planning 358 Gonoshathya Kendra 358
farming see agriculture governance 141, 203–5, 212–13
fatwas 44, 287–8 Grameen Bank 25, 119, 123, 124, 154, 373, 392;
fertilizers 133, 148, 149, 156, 273 critique of 237–9; and healthcare 357–8;
film industry 215, 329; see also cinema history 232–3; as a model of overcoming
financial sector 137–8; see also banks; microfinance poverty 233–7; ‘The Sixteen Decisions’ 235,
fish 144, 145, 147, 148, 150–1, 152t, 167t, 169, 237, 239–40
174, 202, 265; see also shrimp industry Gramsci, Antonio 122
floods 155, 177, 263, 264, 266, 267, 358–9, 371, greenhouse gases (GHG) 259, 260, 261, 268
411; Flood Action Plan (FAP) 125; Flood Flow Guhathakurta, Bashonti 294
Zone 216
folk traditions 32 Haider, Ahmed Rajib 58, 430
food: consumption and nutrition 150–1; frozen Harkat-ul-Jihad al Islami Bangladesh (HuJIB) 72t,
162; grains 145, 146t, 150, 151t; imports 150; 428–9, 430, 432, 433
security 149–50, 153–7, 267 hartals (general strikes) 17, 24
food industry 169 Hasina, Sheikh 18, 24, 37, 48, 69, 72, 86, 112, 113,
foreign policy 369–77; China 393–5; climate 114, 115, 116, 246, 311, 326, 329, 372, 382, 385,
diplomacy 373–4; cultural diplomacy 374–5; 386, 393, 396, 403
diplomacy of recognition 369–70; economic Hazur, Maulana Muhammadullah Hafezzi 79
diplomacy 371; energy diplomacy 371–3; health 121, 138, 139, 265–6; see also public health

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Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) industrialization 159–71; capital 160, 168; energy
initiative 132, 133 and power 165; export market 164–5; labor
Hefazat-e-Islam movement 17, 28, 58, 117 166–8, 175t; locational concentration 166;
Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (Calcutta General production 162–4; sectoral changes and stage of
Advertiser) 325 growth 168–9, 170t; sectoral concentration 164;
High Court 405 sick industries 164; stages of 161–2; technology
Hill people 36 see also Chittagong Hill Tracts 165; and trade 165, 187; understanding of
Hindu Boudhyo Christian Oikyo Parishad 319–20 160–2; value addition 166
Hindus 316; charitable work 120; and child industry 134–5, 140t
custody 300; and communalism 44; and divorce inequality 141, 224, 225–8
299; fundamentalist 318; and inheritance 301; inflation 153
and maintenance 300; and marriage 299; information and communication technology 104,
migration 318; Pakistan 317; and Partition 115, 125, 329, 347
35, 404; two-nation theory of 29; and Vested infrastructure 174, 213, 228, 266
Property Act 319–20; violence against 58, 320, inheritance 301, 319–20
321, 323; and vote banks 320 institutional reform 141
Hizb ut-Tahrir (HTB) 72t, 114, 430, 432 intellectuals 33, 34, 49, 54
hospitals 359–60, 363 International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) 19,
Hossain, Delwar 74 54–5, 60n3
Hossain, Hamida 34 International Labour Organization (ILO)
Hossain, Kamal 34, 49n2, 74 177, 205
Hossain, Noor 22 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 132, 137,
housing 214t, 216 200, 251
human development 17, 138, 221, 230, 340 internet 329–30, 335
human rights 23, 114, 398; Bangladesh National Inu, Hasanul Huq 69
Human Rights Commission (NHRC) 283–4, Irrawaddy (magazine) 409
288–9, 290; and emancipation 283–8; as a irrigation 134, 148, 149, 156, 174
hegemonic language 288–91; International Islam: and Bangladeshi identity 126; charitable
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights work 120; rise of 316; Saudi Arabia 374–5; as a
(ICCPR) 284, 289; International Covenant state religion 21, 22, 36, 37, 42, 44, 47, 48, 67,
on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 287, 318; and terrorism 425, 426–30; see also
(ICESCR) 289; minorities 421; Rohingyas Muslims; Quran
406, 409, 410; and statelessness 403; and Islami Andolan Bangladesh (Bangladesh Islamic
terrorism 433; Universal Declaration Movement, BIM) 73t
of Human Rights (UDHR) 284, 289; Islami Chatro Shibir 19, 117
violations of 384 Islami Dawaat el Kafela 428
hunger, Global Hunger Index (GHI) 151, 153 Islami Jubo Shibir 75–6
Huntington, Samuel 23 Islami Oikya Jote (IOJ) 66, 71, 73t, 79, 427
hydropower 246, 249 Islamic Democratic League 71
Islamic Development Bank 257
Ibrahim, Neelima: Ami Birangona Bolchi 294 Islamic Foundation 24
Imama Council 323 Islamists 28, 60, 70–1, 73t
imports 150, 161, 394–5; see also trade Ittefaq (newspaper) 325
income inequality 141; see also poverty; wages
independence 18, 40, 43, 52–3, 82, 209 Jabaar, Maulana Abdul 75
India: Babri Mosque attacks 318, 319, 381; and Jacob, Lt. Gen. J. F. R. 53
Bangladeshi independence 53; and Chittagong Jagodal (Jatyitabadi Gonotantrik Dal, Nationalist
Hill Tracts 310; city planning 216; climate Democratic Party) 77
change 374; development and health system Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh (JMJB) 426, 428,
output index 357t; elections 320; enclaves 429, 432
403; Enemy Property Act 319; exports to 155, Jahanara Imam 54, 56, 294
196; health system indicators 353t; power and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) 430
energy trade 246, 256; radio 326; relations Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) 18, 19, 23–4, 36, 37, 42, 48,
with 20, 111, 370, 372, 373, 378–84; religion 49, 52, 54, 55, 66, 68, 70–1, 72t, 73t, 75–6, 79,
317; secularism 45, 46; television 327; terrorist 80, 80n1, 117, 296, 317, 318, 410; alliance with
groups 430, 431, 433; water resources 272 BNP 42, 43, 44, 48
Indian Civil Service (ICS) 94 Jamaat-i-Ulema-e-Islam 72t, 73t

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Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), 72t, Left Democratic Front 78

427, 428, 429–30, 432, 434 legal system: gendered 298–302; see also judiciary;
Janadal party 77 sharia law
Japan 397 legislation 124; administrative law 101; labor laws
Jasimuddin (poet) 32 304; parliament 84–6; terrorism 433
Jatiya Front (National Front) 77 Legislative Council of Bengal 82
Jatiya Party (JP) 18–19, 21, 66, 67, 69, 70, 75, 77 Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) 79
Jatiya Rakkhi Bahini (paramilitary force) 111 Liberation War 18, 19, 45, 46, 60, 110, 111, 120,
Jatiya Samajtrantrik Dal (JSD – National Socialist 132, 233, 317, 328, 378, 385, 389–90, 395, 404,
Party) 19, 42, 66, 71, 78, 425 411, 425
Jebtik, Arif 58 life expectancy 140t; see also mortality
JI–Shibir 58, 60n3, 68, 69, 80 Lijphart, Arend: Constitutional Choices for New
Jinnah, Muhammad Ali 29, 35–6, 404 Democracies 25
journalism 333–4, 335; see also magazines; media; literacy 23, 140t, 344, 348
newspapers livestock 144, 145, 148, 265
Joy, [Sajib] Wajed 70 local government: Chittagong Hill Tracts 312–13;
JSS see Parbattya Chattagram Jano Samhati Samiti and education 343, 344; policies 99; role 97;
judiciary 59; see also High Court; Supreme Court weakness 120–1
justice, restorative 59–60 Long March (2013) 29, 58
jute 34, 146t, 147, 162t, 169, 170t
madrasas 36, 42, 215, 340, 342, 345–6, 391, 427–8;
Kabir, Nurul 55 Bangladesh Qwami Madrassa Education
Kader, Ahmed Abdul see Bachhu, Abdul Kader Board 435n3
Kamal, Begum Sufia 33 mangroves 246, 266
Kaptai dam 307, 311 Manik, Saifuddin Ahmed 75
Kerry, John 390 manufacturing 210–11; labor force 167t, 227–8;
Khan, Ataur Rahman 76 see also garment industry
Khan, Lieutenant General Nuruddin 22 Maoists 60
Khan, Serajul Hossain 77 marriage 298–302; of children 304–5
Khan, President Yahya 18 martial law 21
Khatme Nabuwat (KN) 322–3 Marxism 31, 32
Khelafat-i-Majlish 79 meat 147, 148, 150, 152t; see also beef
Khulna 207, 213, 225 media: censorship 287, 325; commercialization and
‘Kings’ Party 67 market orientation 332–3; development 325–7;
kinship 215 digital divide 335–6; Islam 42; journalistic
Kissinger, Henry 389 autonomy 333–4; outreach 329f; ownership
330–1; policies 334, 335; politics of 331–2;
labor force, manufacturing 167t, 227–8 social 334–5; see also internet; radio; television
labor, international: governance challenges of medicine industry 162
203–5; impact of 201–3; nature and extent of Menon, Rashed Khan 69
197–200 Mian, Rafiqul Islam 405
labor force 166–8; bonded 181, 182; children 178, microfinance 226, 232–40
181; garment industry 191; health and safety middle class 30, 31, 33, 126; see also intellectuals
181; informal sectors 175, 177–9; organized migrant workers: definition 197; destination
182–3; population changes 175–6; productivity countries 198–9, 203–4; Gulf region 374, 375;
and earnings 177; safety 179, 180t; sectoral illegal 431; impact of international labor on
changes 173–5; women 174, 176, 178, 184, 191, 201–2; Kafala (sponsor) system 204; recruitment
198; see also employment 201, 203, 204; remittances 153, 197, 200–1,
labor laws 304 202; skills 200; wages 204; working conditions
land rights 123–4, 124–5, 311 201–2, 204–5
land-use 273; see also agriculture migrants: social networks 215
language 317; Bangla 33, 34, 307; English 348; migration 176, 183; Chittagong Hill Tracts 308;
homogenization of 215; and national identity 36; Hindus 317–18; to India 384; International
and nationalism 30; Urdu 404, 405; see also literacy Organization for Migration (IOM) 201, 202;
Larma, Manabendra Narayan 19–20, 36, 308 reasons for 153, 227; Rohingyas 410; urban
Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) 430 209, 211
law enforcement 286; see also police militants see terrorism

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military: arms procurement 115, 116; attempted national identity 28, 29, 30–1; Bangladeshi
putsch (2012) 114–15; Bangladesh Rifles 28, 31–7, 126, 428; Bengali 31; Bihari 405;
carnage (2009) 114; and Chittagong Hill Pakistani 33
Tracts 308, 310, 312; and civil society nationalisms 28; Bangladeshi 36, 67; Bengali 18,
114–17; corruption 116; coups 20, 21, 19, 32–3, 35–6, 67, 317; crimes against 49n3;
36, 40, 53, 67, 82, 95, 109, 110–13, 318; definitions 29, 31; economic 33–4; emergence
information and communication technology of 30; Islamist 32; Pakistani 46; secular 32;
115; modernization of 114, 115; Pakistani typology of 30
52–3, 379; patronage 22; rule of 42, 82–3, Nationalist Front (NF) 77
95, 346; and sectarian violence 406; Sector natural disasters 177, 358–9, 374, 390; and food
Commanders’ Forum 54; Sena Kalyan Sangstha security 153, 154–5, 156; projected 264; see also
(Army Development Committee) 21; as UN cyclones; floods
peacekeepers 112, 115, 117, 390, 417, 418–19, navy 115, 116, 392, 394–5
420; and war crimes 55 Nehru, Jawaharlal 29
milk 147–8, 150, 152t, 155 Netrakona 153
Millennium Development Goals 99, 263, New Nation (newspaper) 303
342, 352 newspapers 325, 326, 329f, 330, 331, 333
Milon, Shamsul Alam Khan 22 Nezam-i-Islami (NI) 71
mining 163, 167t, 246; see also coal NGOs 119–27, 373; activities and achievements
mobile telephony 229 122–6; and civil society 121–2; and credit 238,
Modi, Narendra 370, 383–4, 431 239; criticism of 125–6; and democracy 25;
Mollah, Abdul Quader 43, 55, 386 and education 355; and entrepreneurship 229;
Moni, Dipu 409 evolution of 126; and food security 154–5;
mortality: children 151, 263, 352, 354, 360, 361; health sector 352; historical evolution 120–1;
maternal 263, 352; see also life expectancy and human rights 290; influence of Grameen
Mozena, Dan 390, 398 Bank 237; NGO Affairs Bureau (NGOAB) 119,
MPs: accountability 87; and committees 88–9; 124; power and energy 253; and public health
and legislation 85; petitioning 90–1; power 96; 355–6, 357, 358; and refugees 411; as terrorist
privileges 89–90; relationship with Speaker 91; targets 429; and women's rights 297, 304
role 92; voting rules 84 Nijera Kori (NK) (NGO) 25, 123
Mughals 209 Nizam-e-Islam 72t
Mujib, Sheikh 18, 19, 20, 31, 32, 36, 41–2, 52, 53, Nizami, Matiur Rahman 43
76, 111, 132, 294, 307, 313n3, 346, 369–70, 379, North America: exports to 191, 195; see also
380, 384–5, 393 United States
Musharraf, Pervez 385 nutrition 357–8
music industry 329
Muslim League 35, 42, 77, 317, 318 obesity 362
Muslims: Ahmadiyya 11, 19, 322–3; Burma 407; Odhikar (human rights organization) 114
child custody 300; divorce 299; elections 47; Odinkalu, C. 290–1
identity 35; inheritance 301; nationalism 28; Oikabaddo Nagorik Andolan (United Civil Society
oppression 52–3; Rohingyas 386, 402, 403, Movement) 125
407–9, 431; two-nation theory 29; vote banks oil 245, 253, 255, 257, 372
320, 410; Wahhabi 374; witness 299; writers 33; Oil and Gas Development Corporation
see also Islam (OGDC) 251
Myanmar: refugees from 13, 386; relations with oils, edible 150, 151, 152t, 155
372, 375–6, 386; see also Burma oilseed 146t, 147
Mymensingh 153 ombudsman 101
onions 152t, 155
Nahid, Nurul Islam 75 Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC)
Naripokkho (feminist organization) 22, 25 369–70, 393
Nasim, General Abu Saleh Mohammad 112 Organisation of Islamic Countries 44
nation, definitions 29–30, 33 Osmani, M. A. G. 77, 379
nation-building 307
nation-states 30 Pahela Baiskhak 33
National Awami Party (NAP) 19, 60, 76, 77 Pakistan: and Biharis 405; and Chittagong Hill
National Committee to Protect Oil Gas Mineral Tracts 306–7; creation of 34–6; development
Resources Power and Ports 252 and health system output index 357t;

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diplomacy of recognition 369; economy Powell, Colin 390

34; health system indicators 353t; migration power industry 165; actors 251–3; planning
318–19; and national identity 33, 34; 249–51; political economy 253–7
nationalism 46; public administration 95; president: role 82
relations with 384–6; religion 41, 317; see also press freedom 331; see also media; newspapers
East Pakistan; West Pakistan prime minister 84, 86–8, 96, 97
Palli Karma Shahayak Foundation (PKSF) 237 prisoners of war 53, 384, 385
paramilitary forces 421 Projonmo Ekattor 54
Parbattya Chattagram Jano Samhati Samiti (United Proshika (NGO) 123, 124, 125, 154, 238
People’s Party of the CHT (JSS)) 306, 308, 309, public health 352–63; arsenic 360–1; challenges
310, 311 359–60; climate change 362; demographic
parliament: committees 85, 86, 88–9; composition 361–2; development and health system output
and tenure 83t; in constitutional framework index 357t; drug market 362; equity 354–5;
83–4; defense policy 115–16; executive and family planning 354; health system indicators
87–8; Leader of the Opposition 92; and 353t; immunization 354, 355f; innovation
legislation 84–6; origins 82; petitions to 90–1; 357–8; NGOs 355–6; non-communicable
president's relationship with 86–7; privileges diseases 362; pluralism 355–7; resilience 358–9;
89–91; reforms 83; Rules of Business (ROB) slum dwellers 361; Urban Primary Health Care
96, 98; Rules of Procedure 87, 88–9, 90, 91, Project 121; see also diseases
92; Speaker 85, 90, 91, 92, 93; walkouts and pulses 146t, 147, 150, 152t, 155
boycotts 92–3, 117 Putin,Vladimir 396
Partition 35, 209, 318, 377n1, 404, 411
patrimonialism 70, 95, 96 Qauder, G. M. 70
patronage 22, 70, 94, 99, 125 quarrying 163, 167t
Petrobangla 246, 251 Qudrat-e-Khuda, Dr 138, 346
petroleum see oil Quran 37, 42, 44, 48, 297, 301, 323
pharmaceuticals 169, 170t, 358, 362
police: Community Policing Initiative 433; and radio 326; community 328–9, 334; and internet
human rights 285; and militant groups 427; 330; Shadhin Bangla Betar Kendra 328
and political violence 321, 322; and sectarian Rahman, Chief Justice Hamoodur 385
violence 406–7; as UN peacekeepers 416 Rahman, Mahmudur 433
political intolerance 331 Rahman, Muhammad Habibur 427
political parties 18–19; alliances 76–80; conduct Rahman, Sheikh Mujibur see Mujib, Sheikh
of 95; and democracy 87, 427; ethos and Rahman, Saifur 74–5
practices 68–70; and foreign interference 398; Rahman, Siddiqur (‘Bangla Bhai’) 427, 429
fragmentation of 71–6; Islamic 287; Islamist Rahman, Ziaur 18, 19, 20–1, 31, 42, 77, 82, 111,
70–1, 72t, 79; leadership 69–70, 76, 80n2; leftist 112, 309, 326, 346, 380
425–6; numbers and categories 65–6; and rainfall 260
television 331 Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha (RAJUK) 217n10
Political Parties Regulation (1976) 42 Rajshahi 214t, 225, 323, 426
political rights 403 Rajshahi University 49n7
pollution 174, 178, 256, 273, 274, 275, 277, Rakkhi Bahini paramilitary force 20, 379
278, 363 Ramu incident (2012) 323–4
population 178, 263; and labor force 175; policy Rana Plaza disaster 60, 182, 391, 398
138; urban 208t, 209, 216 Rangpur Bartabaha (newspaper) 325
potatoes 146t, 147, 152t, 155 Rashid, S. 216
poultry 148, 152t Razzaq, Abdur 72, 74
poverty: and digital divide 335–6; economic and Razzaq, Brigadier General 114
social indicators 140t; and food consumption ‘Red Maulana’ see Bhashani, Abdul Hamid Khan
151; and food security 153; Grameen Bank and Refugees: Chittagong Hill Tracts 13; definition
235–7; ‘hard-core poor’ 179; and health care 405–6; policy 402–3; Rohingya 386, 403,
360; and inequality 220–1, 225–8; reduction 405–7, 409–10, 411
of 124, 125–6, 131–2, 133, 138, 139, 184, 263; Rehana, Sheikh 70
regional variations 224–5; and remittances 200, religions 47; see also Buddhists/Buddhism;
202–3; rural 121, 174, 175, 224; trends 221–4; Christianity; Hindus; Islam
urban 211–12; see also income inequality; religiosity 38
underclass religious extremism 43, 44, 49, 110, 322–3

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religious freedom 35–6, 41, 46, 47, 286, 287 social indicators (1973-2014) 140t
religious fundamentalism 38, 43, 49 social safety net (SSN) programs 154
religious minorities: Amadiyya community 322–3; socialism 45, 60
in civil service 103; crimes against 49, 323–4; Socialist Party of Bangladesh 66
discrimination and exclusion of 318–20; solar energy 248
historical context 316–17; marginalisation of Sommilita Sangram Parishad (Combined Action
58, 59; state ideology and 317–18; and vote Committee) 79
bank 320–2 South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation
religious toleration 48 (SAARC) 156, 387, 395, 434
rice 133, 145, 146t, 148, 149, 150, 152t, 155, 156, South Asian Terrorism Portal (SATP) 429, 430,
226, 228–9, 263, 264–5 431, 432, 435n5
right, radical 58 South Talpatty Island 381
rivers 263, 271, 272, 382 Soviet Union 45, 395–6; see also Russia
road links 394 spices 146t, 147, 150
Rob, A. S. M. 78 Stalin, Joseph 29
Rohingyas 386, 402, 403, 407–9, 431 Stalinists 60
Rostow, W. W. 160 statelessness 403, 405
Russia 395, 396; see also USSR strikes see hartals
students 22, 28, 29, 36, 123
SAARC see South Asian Association of Regional sugar 146t, 147, 150, 152t
Cooperation Sundarbans mangrove forest 246, 252, 266
Samachar Darpan (newspaper) 325 Supreme Court 24, 43, 79, 84, 287
Samata (NGO) 123 Suu Kyi, Aung San 409
Sangbad (newspaper) 325 Sylhet 224, 225
sanitation 214t, 357
Sarkar, Imran 58, 59 Tagore, Rabindranath 33
Sarobohara Party 426 Taher, Colonel Abu 20–1
Sattar, Abdus 77, 112 Tajuddin Ahmed 20
Saudi Arabia: 198–9, 200, 203, 204, 374–5 Tangail 199, 200
schools: curriculum 348; faith-based 342, 346; tea 146t, 147, 162t, 182
primary 340, 341–2, 347, 348, 355; secondary teachers 341t, 342, 343–4, 345, 348, 350
340, 341, 343, 345, 355; textbooks 59; see also technology 165, 166; communications 125, 347,
madrasas 359; information and communication 104, 115,
sea-level: rise in 264, 266, 271–2 125, 329, 347
secularism 37, 40, 318; abandonment of 41–3; telecommunications 329
acceptance of 41, 44, 287; arguments against television 326; Bangladesh Television (BTV) 327,
45–6, 48; arguments in favor of 46–7; and 328, 331–2, 332; cable 327; digitization 335–6;
constitution 25, 36, 71; realities of 47–8; Internet Protocol (IPTV) 329; journalists and
relaunch of 43–4; see also desecularization 333; licensing 334; popularity of 327–8; private
self-help 120 327, 331, 332; satellite 326, 327, 328; talk shows
Sen, Amartya 124, 371 332; transnational 327; viewership 329f
Sengupta, Suranjit 74 territoriality 374
service sector 163, 175t terrorism: attitude to 374; Burmese 406, 407,
sex 45 408; and counter-terrorism 425–35; external
Shafi, Shah Ahmad 17, 19–21 networks 430–1; fighting 432–4; financing
Shahadat-e-Al Hikma 72t, 432 431–2; Islamist 426–30; left-wing 425–6;
Shahbag Movement 28, 52, 55–8, 60, 334–5, 386 legislation 433; strategies 391; see also al-Qaeda
Shanti Bahini (guerrilla force) 308, 380, 381 textiles 229; see also garment industry
sharia law 287–8, 297 Tin Bigha Corridor 381
Sharif, Nawaz 405 trade: agriculture 134; China 392, 394; economic
shipbreaking 179 and social indicators 140t; European Union
shrimp industry 181 398; export policies and regimes 189–92, 194;
Sikder, Siraj 426 export-promotion schemes 187, 195; food
Singh, Manmohan 382, 403 imports 150; and food security 155; foreign
slums 215 187–96, 209; import policies and regimes
Sobhan, Rehman 34 188–9; India 372, 382, 383; and industrialization
social development 139 187; Japan 397; Myanmar 386; orientation 165;

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Pakistan 385; policy 135–7, 149, 192–3; reforms Wall Street Journal 398
187; Russia 396; tariff regime 193–4; United war crimes 19, 68, 71, 324, 385
States 390–1 war criminals 28, 40, 45, 52, 53, 54, 55–6, 57, 58,
trade unions 182–3; constitution and 287; Ershad 60, 294, 335, 384, 385–6, 404
regime and 22; NGOs and 125; power and war heroines see Birangonas
energy 251, 252–3; teachers 343–4, 345 War of Independence 40, 52
trains 382 waste 181, 214t, 260, 261, 273, 274; see also
Transparency International Bangladesh 124 sanitation
Transparency International UK 116 water 271–8; beneficial uses 274; and climate
transportation 214t; see also trains change 265, 362; Farakka barrage 380, 381;
tuberculosis 356–7, 358 GDP share 163; Kaptai dam 307, 311; labor
two-nation theory 29, 35, 318 force 167t; land use and quality of 183, 273;
management 156; National Surface Water
underclass 212 Quality Assessment Program (NSWQAP)
UNDP 213 273, 274–5; planning 274–5; pollution 273,
UNHCR 213, 405–6, 410, 411 274; surface 274; Teesta agreement 382;
UNICEF 304 urban 214t; Water Act (2013) 275–7; Water
United Nations, The New Horizon report 419 Quality Assessment Program 273–4; see also
United Nations Framework Convention on irrigation
Climate Change (UNFCCC) 263, 268, 269 Weber, Max 65
United Nations peacekeeping missions 414–22; welfare, and secularism 46
challenges and issues 419–21; commitment West Pakistan 34–5, 52, 131, 168, 209, 404
416–17; definition 414; history 414–16; wheat 145, 148, 150, 152t, 155
rationales 417–19 wind energy 249
United People’s Party (UPP) 77 witnesses 299
United States: aid see USAID; exports to 183, women: abuse of 53; and child custody 300;
190, 371; military deployment 414; relations in civil service 102–3; and consent 299;
with 45, 369, 389–92; and terrorism 433; water Convention on the Elimination of All Forms
pollution 274 of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW)
Universities: Dhaka 33, 34, 346; growth of 341t, 296–7; and divorce 299–300; and food security
346–7; Rajshahi 49n7; and terrorism 430 154; and Grameen Bank 123, 232, 236; and
urban planning 212–13, 216 health 138, 360; as health workers 354; and
urbanization: and climate change 266; Compact inheritance 296, 301–2; in international arena
Township (CT) 216; demographic trends and 296–7; and Islam 37; in labor force 174, 176,
patterns 209–10; economic forces 210–11; 178, 184, 191, 198; life expectancy of 139,
future 215–16; governance, planning and 263, 352; and literacy 125; and maintenance/
institutions 212–13; historical determinants alimony 300; in manufacturing sector 226; and
207–9; infrastructure and amenities 213; and marriage 298–9; and migration 198, 201, 202,
poverty 211–12; social transformation 213–15 203, 204; National Women’s Development
USAID 254–5, 391, 433 Policy (NWDP), 295–6; NGOs and 119;
USSR 395–6; see also Russia participation and exclusion of 83–4, 409;
physical insecurities of 304; as police officers
vegetables 146t, 147, 152t 416; political participation of 296, 297–8;
villages: connectivity 220, 229; Grameen Bank and post-independence 293–5; protests by 28;
237, 239; health centers 121; infrastructure 174, psychological insecurities 303–4; psychological
228; and national identity 32–3; poverty 223; insecurities of 305; and purdah 303; and rape
power relations 121; self-help 120; violence against 293–4, 321, 404, 406; rights of 22, 288; role of
minorities 321–2; wages 227; and witness 56 19, 37; and unemployment 176; as war heroines
violence: political 17, 24–5, 68, 117, 313, 318, 320, 294; and wages 177; as witnesses 299; and work
321–2, 427, 434–5; religious 52; sectarian 406; 302–3, 355
sexual 408, 421; see also terrorism Workers Party 69
workers' rights 124
wages: discrimination 304; migrant workers 201, working conditions 201–2, 204–5, 398
204; and productivity 177; real wage index World Bank 132, 137, 138, 182, 200, 202, 222,
167t; rural 226–7; tea plantations 182; and 223; and climate change 268; Northern Areas
unionization 182; women 177 Reduction-of-Poverty Initiative (NARI) 184;
Wahhabism 374 poverty assessments 224, 230n4; power and

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energy 248, 250, 251, 254; sea-level rise report YouTube 330, 335
271; Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP) 326 Yunus, Muhammad 123, 232, 233–5, 373, 392
World Health Organization (WHO) 356
writers: and national identity 33 Zahid, Anwar 77
Zaker Party 72t
xenophobia 409, 410 al-Zawahiri, Ayman 434
Zia, Khaleda 18, 22, 24, 37, 69, 74, 112, 113, 116,
Yahya Khan 52 309, 326, 381, 383, 385, 386
Young Power in Social Action 124

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