To an Indian who grew
up in the 1970s and ‘80s, the sights of Dhaka, Bangladesh, seem to belong to a
past that Indian metropolises have mostly outgrown: exuberantly battered buses,
unpainted buildings, pavement book vendors with faded posters of Rabindranath Tagore and
Karl Marx as well as the Rolling Stones, and pitch darkness on the unlit
streets and squares where rural migrants congregate in the evenings. The
countryside still feels closer here than in Kolkata or Mumbai.
In recent years, Bangladeshis
have suffered the brutality of security forces and massive environmental
destruction. For months now, the news from the world’s seventh-most-populous
country has been dominated by the fractiousness of the country’s main leaders,
the trial of men
suspected of war crimes during Bangladesh’s
war of liberation in 1971, and the slavery-like conditions of the country’s
garment industry.
I arrived in Dhaka during one of the many recent strikes called by the
opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, against the ruling Awami
League. The shutdowns, imposed through force, seemed economically ruinous,
damaging small businesses the most; they resolved nothing. At first glance, Bangladesh
seemed, like many countries in its neighborhood, to be struggling to find a way
forward.
Irreconcilable
Differences
Shackled by
irreconcilable differences between political personalities, the country offers
yet another instance of a fledgling democracy undermined by an undemocratic
winner-takes-all attitude among its leaders. Bangladesh does have its
innovators, such as Muhammed Yunus, the
pioneer of microcredit. The banking system seems more responsive to the poor
majority than in it does India.
Bangladesh
also does better than its much richer neighbor in almost all indicators of the
United Nations’ Human Development Index.
But the benefits of
trade liberalization -- and, in general, Bangladesh’s integration into the
global economy -- have been more limited than previously expected. Certainly,
the country’s economic modernization, which seems necessary to pull tens of
millions out of destitution, seems to be proceeding much too slowly.
India is building a security fence on its border with Bangladesh,
ostensibly to keep out Bangladeshi immigrants whose presence provides fodder to
Indian demagogues. Meanwhile, a weakened state has ceded, often
opportunistically, its responsibility to mitigate poverty and improve social
infrastructure to such non-state actors as aid organizations, corporations,
security companies, consultants, and various domestic and international
non-governmental organizations. Bangladesh
is one of the most NGO-ized countries in the world.
What happens next? Can Bangladesh join
the modern world with its weakened governance, dysfunctional political system and uneven economic growth? An
absorbing new book, “Boundaries Undermined: The Ruins of Progress on the
Bangladesh-India Border,” seeks some answers in Bangladesh’s earliest attempt at
modernization.
The author, a
Bangladesh-born social anthropologist named Delwar Hussain, describes the
strange aftermath of the Khonighat Limestone Mining Project. Situated near the
Bangladeshi district of Sylhet and the Indian state of Meghalaya, Khonighat was
one of the spectacular projects of national modernization that every
postcolonial country once boasted of. India, for instance, had the
Soviet-built Bhilai township -- designed, as one early resident, the poet and
essayist Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, wrote, “by a pencil stub and a six-inch
plastic ruler.”
The grids were no
accident. They spoke of the rationalization and bureaucratization -- two
crucial aspects of modernity -- that were supposed to weaken the hold of
religion and custom. The worship of older authorities was to be discarded in a
projected future full of plentiful modern goods and pleasures. In the
postcolonial imagination of progress, projects such as big dams, factories and
roads were expected to bring the backward masses out of the rural hinterlands
and propel them into first-world prosperity.
Main Patron
Many of the new citizens of Pakistan, and then Bangladesh
after 1971, eagerly participated in these public works, largely because
employees were offered, as Hussain writes, “progress, status and prestige”
through a range of welfare provisions: skills training, set wages, fixed
working hours, health and safety regulations, pensions. The state, in turn,
enjoyed its greatest legitimacy as the main patron of economic development.
But state-led projects
such as Khonighat mostly helped people who were within its ambit; the majority
of the country’s population remained trapped in poverty. Khonighat was closed
down in 1993 after it became cheaper to import limestone from an economically
liberalized India, and the
World Bank and International Monetary Fund put greater pressure on Bangladesh to
shut down its state-owned enterprises.
With its rusting
machinery, unused cranes and half-torn railway tracks, Khonighat is now a ruin
-- of the kind that, in Walter Benjamin’s vision, piles up as the storm of
progress blows through the world. Meanwhile, the adjacent village of Borapani,
which has become the center of an unorganized and semi-illicit coal mining
industry, showcases the new forms of progress in many globalized economies.
Feeding the demands of Bangladesh’s
coal-fired factories, the cashiered laborers of Khonighat have transformed
themselves into traders. This impromptu and unusual elite is made more diverse
by people previously relegated to the margins by Khonighat’s top-down
modernization project, such as women and transgender hijras, who have achieved
prominence by fulfilling local needs, economic as well as sexual: The cover photo on “Boundaries Undermined,” of a hand
with brightly painted nails and a steel bracelet engraved with the word “Nike”
grasping a coal sack, hints at the new ideas of work and pleasure that have
emerged in the era of liberalization.
Subsidiary Professions
Religious practices suppressed by the secular ethos of
Khonighat have also emerged. The coal business has generated some semi-illegal
subsidiary professions, such as the trade in SIM cards in an area where both
Indian and Bangladeshi governments have banned the use of mobile phones. Many
of the older beneficiaries of the welfare and developmental state are now in
retreat; they wallow in nostalgia for the good times of state-backed
modernization and lament the new culture of greed and selfishness, while entrepreneurs
who walk a fine line between criminality and legality flourish.
What does the creation
of a new unsupervised social order with its multiple actors portend for Bangladesh?
Here, Hussain’s answers are disconcertingly tentative. NGOs have not managed to
reduce poverty; they may even have helped the middle class
more than the poor and the marginalized. Short-term microfinancing by local and
international NGOs has replaced long-term issues of infrastructure. According
to Hussain, “there are no public health facilities, sanitation or even
electricity” in Borapani. Residents who once had running water and even baths
in the old quarters of Khonighat have to make do with rainwater in its
abandoned limestone quarries.
There are other, less
tangible losses in this brave new world: Garment workers in Dhaka
pleading for better work conditions after an April factory collapse killed more than 1,000 people are
asking for things that the employees of Khonighat effortlessly possessed.
Hussain’s mood is not all bleak. He points to “creative
potentialities and possibilities” in the assertion of formerly excluded
communities. Noting their record of religious tolerance, he hails the
“disorganized cosmopolitanism” of Borapani. But he seems aware, too, of
simmering frustrations among the “floating mass” of workers in unregulated
zones. Much of today’s social and religious violence in India, for
instance, is caused by the disempowering and degradation of men employed, if at
all, in the vast “informal sector.”
Above all, millions of
South Asians suffer from a general loss of national direction in an age when
every man seems to be out for himself. In Bangladesh, as in India and Pakistan,
the collapse of old nation-building projects of modernization has deprived most
citizens of the stories and images through which they imagined themselves to be
part of a larger whole.
For them, the
disenchantment of the world feared by Max Weber has happened even while they
await, seemingly forever, the next step into consoling prosperity and leisure.
Meanwhile, ethnic and religious sectarians stand ready to channel their rage
over being cheated. In that sense, Bangladesh,
with its already antique modernity, illuminates South Asia’s
troubled present as vividly as it does its past.
Pankaj Mishra is the author of “From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against
the West and the Remaking of Asia” and a Bloomberg View columnist. For
comments: pmashobra@gmail.com
