The Bangladesh Paradox

File photo: Voters long queue during parliamentary election in a small town in Bangladesh

WILLIAM B MILAM

Bangladesh is in crisis mode again. Every five years, as predictable as its annual monsoon, but not nearly as monotonous, comes the quinqennial political crisis. These occur because the Constitution mandates a general election every five years, and elections bring on crisis because incumbent parties spare no effort, no matter how legally or morally questionable, to win re-election. The opposition’s scruples are no less reprehensible, however lacking they are in constitutional mechanisms to manipulate to their advantage. Violence, and sometimes extreme violence, is at the top of the election tool box of both parties.

And yet, no incumbent party has ever been re-elected in the era of electoral politics, because in every election, the record of the party in power is such that the voters are desperate to give the opposition a chance to show it can do better. The voters are always disappointed. In Bangladesh politics, as in all politics in all countries, hope repeatedly triumphs over experience. This year is the same: the polls show that a free and fair election would bring the opposition to power; and the government has done all in its power, and perhaps if the Constitution and Supreme Court are read literally, a lot that is not legally in its power, to remain in office.

Currently, the political impasse over election procedures has led the opposition to threaten to boycott the election and to launch a violent blockade of Dhaka. The opposition assumes that an election without the participation of the other half of the polity would be regarded by, at least, half the voters and by the outside world, as illegitimate. The loss of life is mounting, not just among the party apparatchiks, but among innocent bystanders, yet the government shows no signs of agreeing.

Business leaders and most of civil society, as well as the international community, are crying for an agreement between the two party leaders. Many in civil society want a ‘recess’ from politics, the elements of which range from: 1) postponing the election for a few months until things are worked out; to 2) a ‘reset pause’ which is a euphemism for a military intervention and a technocratic government devoted to rebuilding institutions and reforming the parties.

It didn’t work before, so why would it work now? The answer to that lies, probably in a riddle called ‘The Bangladesh Paradox’. That paradox is that Bangladesh defies modernisation theory, which remains the intellectual foundation of much development activity. Simply put, this theory is that political development is linked to high sustained rates of economic growth, lowered rates of poverty, marked improvement in social indicators such as education, literacy, public health. In other words, a rising tide of income and social advancement raises all boats, and through growth and advancement of the middle class, democratic structures and institutions, and thus democracy itself, will follow inevitably.

There is no empirical evidence for this conclusion and, in fact, much evidence against it (China, Malaysia, among others). Bangladesh has achieved GDP growth of five-six per cent for almost 20 years; its social indicators are better than India (and grossly better than Pakistan) and probably only surpassed in South Asia by Sri Lanka. So, why has it marched backward on the authoritarian/democratic axis towards a more authoritarian state? The primary reason is surely that formal democracy, lacking the checks and balances of real democracy, has hollowed out its institutions by turning them into mechanisms for the ruling party (either one) to extract the growing economic rents to be had from an expanding economy.

The reaction of most outsiders to the present crisis is that things will work out as they always have. In past crises, the incumbent party always had to give up and the opposition took office, to restore balance if not functionality. But history does not always repeat itself. If the government actually goes forward with its planned one-party election, the ensuing violence could bring it down and/or make another election necessary, which the opposition would probably win. That is, sadly, the best-case scenario. The alternative is worse, a government which, because of the perverted institutions of the state, is in a position to eliminate the opposition as a force to be reckoned with, and move towards a one-party state. This election, Instead of deja vu all over again, could be the tipping point to something entirely new on the subcontinent.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 10, 2013

William B Milam served as US ambassador to Pakistan from 1998 to 2001. He is also Senior Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.

Bangladesh: Are our leaders at war against citizens?

Otherwise how can they be so destructive?

MAHFUZ ANAM

In wars, enemies not only destroy the soldiers and weapons of their opponents but also each other’s industries, agriculture, roads, bridges, food supply chain, etc., with the express purpose of making the common people of the opponent’s country suffer.

The way our two leaders are refusing to reach any compromise, the indifference they are showing about the impact of their actions on our industry, agricultural products, income of the poor, disruption of food supply chain, etc.,  force us to ask the question as to whether or not they are at war against a country called Bangladesh. Is it their wish to make our common people suffer? Is it their wish that our productive capacities built at huge expense and with exceptional leadership be destroyed? Is it their wish that we return to the label of a ‘basket case’ after having proven so determinedly and forcefully that the original remark was based on false premises?

If not, then how can they be pushing the country and its people towards an end that everybody knows will be disastrous? How can they be disrupting education of all levels of students and demoralising them in ways that are making them lose faith in the future of the country? How can they continue to call hartals and blockades for weeks, pushing more and more people below the poverty line? How can they knowingly create a situation which will inevitably lead to RMG buyers shifting to other countries? How can they set fire to public transport, killing and burning innocent travellers and commuters? How can they be destroying state and private properties in the way that mercenaries do inside enemy territories? How can they be just onlookers while our dream for a better future slowly but surely fades?

Some of us may brush aside the above questions as rather exaggerated. Bangladesh, they will say, has seen similar political crises before and has survived. So will it again. While we hope that they prove to be correct, we still have reasons to believe that the situation is far graver than before.

The level and cruel nature of the violence that we have seen this time around has surpassed the violence of the past in intensity and fury. Throwing petrol bombs into a running bus full of passengers can have only one purpose — kill people. Setting fire to vehicles with people inside cannot but have only one aim — kill people. From January till date, 174 people have been killed and more than 4,600 injured. This makes for an average of 14.5 citizens of Bangladesh killed per month and 383 injured. These deaths are from political violence alone. The question is: Why should even a single citizen die just because our two leaders refuse to compromise?

What are these two leaders fighting for anyway? Sheikh Hasina wants to stick to the present constitution and Khaleda Zia wants to go back to the previous version     of it.

What is the reason for Sheikh Hasina’s sudden love for this constitution? Because she amended it to her liking in 2011, without consulting anybody, and abolished the caretaker government system meant to oversee national elections every five years. Why is an election time government so vital? Because our history says that every government uses the state machinery to influence the election. If we recall, it was Sheikh Hasina and her party that popularised the idea of the caretaker government and forced Begum Zia and her party — vehemently opposed to the idea — to incorporate it in the constitution in 1996.

The reason was as clear as it was simple. The incumbent government cannot be trusted to hold a free and fair election. So the incumbent government must go and be replaced with a neutral caretaker government that will hold a free and fair election. People accepted this argument and went along with the AL and its chief’s proposition.

Today, ironically, the situation stands totally reversed. The original proponent has now abolished it and the original opponent now wants it. And we, the people, must die because they cannot agree about it.

What is most disgusting is the duplicity and immorality of it all. The very arguments that the AL is putting forward today against the caretaker government system — continuity of the constitution, unelected people running the government, etc — were the very ones (in fact the wordings are the same) given by the BNP in 1996. And, conversely, what the BNP is saying today in favour of the caretaker government were the same arguments given by the AL to justify why its leaders wanted it. Both have shifted their respective positions because it increases their chances of, for one, retaining power and, for the other, capturing it.

Thus there is no principle, no ideology, no moral or ethical questions involved in today’s standoff between Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia. It is a clear case of fighting for power and the people and the country be damned.

As a freedom fighter and as a proud citizen of this country, I feel ashamed that a UN envoy has to shuttle between our two supreme leaders to bring about an understanding between them so that people are no longer brutally killed, an outsider has to plead with them to compromise so that our people suffer less, so that our factories can run, our children can go to schools, our doctors can attend to their patients, our poor day labourers can earn enough to feed their families, so that we can again walk on our streets with a modicum of security. I feel a thorough sense of betrayal knowing that a foreigner has to fly in to teach us how to be civil to each other. Even so, we will be grateful if we learn.

We can no longer afford to be victims of the vendetta between these two leaders.

First published in The Daily Star, Dhaka, Bangladesh, December 10, 2013

Mahfuz Anam is Bangladesh 1971 liberation war veteran and editor of The Daily Star

Bangladesh: Democracy Stumbles

The country is once again in the grip of authoritarianism and political violence, the roots of which run deep.

Photo Ben Hayes: Secularist demand to expedite trial of war criminals at Shahbag Square

NISHA SHARMEEN ALI

The announcement of the schedule for elections to the tenth Jatiya Sangsad (national parliament) on November 25 has stoked an already volatile political situation in Bangladesh. The ready reaction of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party-led opposition alliance to the chief election commissioner’s televised speech to the nation, during which he announced that the general elections will be held on January 5, 2014, came in the form of what was initially a 48-hour countrywide blockade of road, rail and water ways, subsequently extended to 71 hours, beginning from November 26. The blockade ended on November 30, but the BNP commenced another 72 hour countrywide blockade the next day, which was ultimately extended until the evening of December 5. The alliance has called for yet another blockade to begin on Saturday, December 7.

In the meantime, there has been widespread violence and vandalism: vehicles are torched, public and private property destroyed. The death toll as reported on December 4 had reached 40 and scores more have been wounded. Many of the casualties were caused by an explosion of crude bombs and arson attacks on public transport. According to Samanta Lal Sen, the coordinator of the burn and plastic surgery unit at Dhaka Medical College Hospital, the premier public hospital in the country, several of the victims of political violence, admitted with severe burn injuries in the last one month, had died and quite a few are in a critical condition.

The BNP-led alliance has been engaged in street agitation for months now in its demand that Sheikh Hasina resign as prime minister, given that her Awami League government completed its term on October 25. The opposition alliance claims that polls conducted under the government will not be free, fair or transparent. While the two sides continue their finger-pointing over the ongoing political impasse and social disorder, arising out of the failure of the ruling and opposition political alliances to reach a consensus on election-time government, there have reportedly been informal contacts between the feuding camps, supposedly geared towards a dialogue. Still, publicly at least, the two camps have thus far produced only contradictory statements about what the media has dubbed as “clandestine” meetings between the general secretaries of the Awami League and the BNP.

A History of Acrimony

Mutual mistrust, acrimony and recrimination between the two major political parties have come to mark Bangladeshi national politics, especially since the ouster of HM Ershad’s military regime in 1990 and the subsequent restoration of parliamentary democracy in 1991. In any case, intense political unrest has marked almost every election cycle in Bangladesh since the country won independence in 1971. For instance, during the 2001 elections, which the BNP won, approximately 400 people were reportedly killed and more than 17,000 injured, primarily in street clashes between members and supporters of competing political camps. The next election cycle in 2007 also resulted in several deaths and injuries, leading to an extra-constitutional takeover by a military-backed interim government. The elections to the ninth Jatiya Sangsad (national parliament) were eventually held in December 2008, with a 14-party alliance led by the Awami League scoring an electoral landslide victory.

The seeds of the political unrest and uncertainty over the forthcoming general elections were planted in June 2012, when the Awami League-dominated parliament pushed through the Fifteenth Amendment to the constitution, scrapping the provision that parliamentary elections must be held under a non-partisan caretaker government, headed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court. Ironically, in 1996, the Awami League and its opposition allies forced the then BNP-led government, through prolonged street agitation, to incorporate that particular provision in the form of the Thirteenth Amendment. Subsequently, two parliamentary elections, in 1996 and 2001, were held under caretaker governments.

After being elected in 2001, the BNP-led government increased the retirement age for the Supreme Court chief justice, apparently to have a person perceived loyal to it as the head of the caretaker government for the next elections scheduled for 2007. Then the main opposition party, the Awami League refused to accept the former chief justice in question as the chief adviser to the caretaker government and took to the streets. Amidst the consequent political stalemate, marked by sustained violence across the country, scope was created for the military-backed interim government to take over and rule for two years unconstitutionally, after declaring a state of emergency.

Elections or no elections, violence has become a major feature of Bangladesh politics. Numerous political leaders and activists have been killed by rivals or by their own party colleagues. Data from different human rights organizations suggests that the total number of deaths resulting from political violence in 2013 is substantially higher than in recent years, according to a report published in New Age on November 7. Ain O Salish Kendra reported that political violence had claimed the lives of 289 people in the first nine months of the current year while the figure was 84 for the whole of 2012. According to a monthly report by rights organization Odhikar, at least 27 people were killed and 3,433 injured in political violence in October alone.

This political violence may very well have had its origins in the early days of independent Bangladesh. The Awami League, which had presided over the political struggle for the country’s liberation and come to embody the people’s democratic aspirations, proved autocratic in power. In 1975, its head and then president Sheikh Mujibur Rahman introduced BAKSAL, which banned all opposition parties and compelled the country to adopt a one-party system. President Ziaur Rahman, the military general-turned-politician and founder of the BNP, restored the multiparty system in the late 1970s.

Military Intervention

Meanwhile, the path for military intervention in the political process may have been paved during the rule of the post-independence AL government. Notes Professor Amena Mohsin of Dhaka University in her published research paper: “The Mukti Bahini (liberation forces), which formed the nucleus of the Bangladesh army in the immediate aftermath of the liberation war was divided along the regular Bengali forces of the then Pakistan army and those recruited by the Awami League. After the liberation of Bangladesh, Mujib paid little attention for rebuilding the armed forces; this was a cause of major discontent among the army.” The discontent deepened when Mujib created Jatiya Rakkhi Bahini (National Defence Force). Rakkhi Bahini was generally viewed as a parallel institution and a threat to the interests of the army. The army was also apparently fed up with the discrimination, and disenchanted with the AL government’s unchecked rule, which had encouraged unbridled looting, illegal land grabbing and civil disorder. It was also carrying the legacy of the Pakistan army, which had its own track of deep engagement in politics. On August 15, 1975, Mujib was assassinated by a group of Bangladeshi military officers.

General Ziaur Rahman (popularly known as Zia) became president in 1977, following the resignation of the interim government president, Justice Sayem, on the grounds of illness. Many believed this was a Zia ploy to take control of the state with army backing. Although Sayem had promised early elections, Zia kept delaying them. The years of anarchy had left most of Bangladesh’s state institutions in a shambles, with constant threats of military coups amidst strikes and protests. Gaining total power, Zia banned political parties, censored the media, re-imposed martial law and commanded the army to arrest opposition forces. Ironically, Zia himself was assassinated in a military coup in 1981.

The country remained in the grip of military and quasi-military rule from 1975 till 1990, when Ershad’s regime, which had seized power through a military coup in 1982, was overthrown by a popular uprising. For the first time in the political history of Bangladesh, all major political parties joined forces to oust the rule, yet the role of the army in politics had become entrenched. The end of the autocratic regime and the election of the BNP in 1991 did not bring stability in the political arena and the military remained a major factor. Meanwhile, the student wings of the political parties have been encouraged to use arms, and continuous hartals (general strikes) emerged as a common phenomenon. Bangladesh politics became increasingly weaponized and street-centric.

A Hybrid Regime

In 2004, when the BNP was in power, AL president Sheikh Hasina was speaking at a rally in front of the party’s Bangabandhu Avenue office in Dhaka when grenades were hurled, in what was an apparent assassination attempt. Twenty people were killed and 300 injured. Since then, grenades have been found inside Dhaka Central Jail, Dhaka Medical College Hospital and at various cultural hubs. Disorder was rife during BNP’s last stint in power and the state was unable to protect the political rights and civil liberties of its citizens. The situation is unchanged, if not worse, during the Awami League-led government, which is characterized by negligible checks and balances. Not surprisingly, Bangladesh continues to be categorized under “hybrid regimes” in the Democracy Index by The Economist Intelligence Unit, meaning that democratic structures such as elections exist but the state has remained fundamentally authoritarian.

Clearly, the political system of Bangladesh needs a review. Can it transition to a full democracy or will it remain a hybrid regime? It is not easy to build a sturdy democracy. Even in established democratic states, the system can corrode if not nurtured and protected. The Global Corruption Barometer 2012, the largest worldwide survey on public views on corruption, says 50 per cent of Bangladeshis surveyed in 2010 considered the government’s measures effective in curbing corruption. After two years, that had declined to 26 per cent. According to the survey, Bangladeshis see the political parties and the police as the most corrupt institutions, followed by the judiciary, parliament and civil administration. People have reason to lose faith, given the extent of nepotism and graft. This erosion in faith persists with the two major political parties refusing to desert confrontational politics and work towards a transparent, accountable, and participatory democratic system.

Now, as the Awami League continues to evince no interest in accommodating the BNP’s demands by clinging to power beyond its tenure, while the opposition resorts to violent street agitation, there are fears of a repeat of the January 2007 intervention by the army. Were that to occur, Bangladesh would once again be going backwards on the path towards democratization.

First published in The Diplomat, December 06, 2013

Nisha Sharmeen Ali is a Dhaka-based journalist

Will Bangladesh Ever Have a Future?

PANKAJ MISHRA

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.

First published in Bloomberg.com, December 2, 2013

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

The Queenmaker of Bangladesh

TAHMIMA ANAM

Call Bangladesh the land of the resurrected. Here, a dictator can be overthrown, disgraced and imprisoned, and still make a comeback.

More than two decades after being ousted, Hussain Mohammed Ershad is now being called the “Queenmaker.” Thanks to recent political maneuvering, he is in a prime position to tip the scales between the two main contenders in the general election to be held in January: Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister, and Khaleda Zia, former prime minister, leader of the opposition and Ms. Hasina’s longtime foe.

Mr. Ershad came to power in 1983, as the head of a military-backed government. By late 1990, after nearly a decade without free and fair elections, a massive popular uprising — led by the two most powerful opposition parties, the Awami League (Ms. Hasina’s party) and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (Ms. Zia’s) — was putting pressure on Mr. Ershad to step down. His government fell after the army withdrew its support. Within weeks, Mr. Ershad was in jail on corruption charges.

More than 20 years later, Mr. Ershad’s influence is on the rise again. Though Ms. Hasina and Ms. Zia once cooperated in the movement to restore democracy, they have become bitter opponents in the intervening years, as power has shifted back and forth between the Awami League and the B.N.P. Now, on the eve of another election, Mr. Ershad is the accidental arbiter in the enduring rivalry between the co-architects of his downfall.

Bangladesh is deeply divided. Ms. Hasina’s record in many areas — development, infrastructure, health care, the trial of war criminals from the 1971 liberation war — boasts important victories, and those go far beyond anything Ms. Zia achieved when she was prime minister, in 1991-1996 and 2001-2006.

But Ms. Hasina’s decision to stand by allegedly corrupt ministers and her consistent repression of her political opponents have damaged her standing. Especially controversial, Ms. Hasina has scrapped the so-called caretaker government that had overseen national elections since Mr. Ershad’s fall. In its place she has appointed a special election-time cabinet formally open to all parties and placed herself at its helm.

Ms. Zia looks even worse. Her last term in office was marred by allegations of corruption (some involving her immediate family), and she reigned over an unprecedented spate of violence by religious extremists, including the Islamic terrorist Bangla Bhai. While in the opposition, Ms. Zia has been obstinately uncooperative. She has boycotted Parliament since losing the election in 2008. Now she is threatening to boycott the January election unless the caretaker framework is reinstated. In the meantime, she has called a series of strikes and demonstrations that have brought the country to a standstill. She has refused to join Ms. Hasina’s interim cabinet.

Mr. Ershad, for his part, has accepted to join the new cabinet. He has also agreed to run in the election, a move that will lend the process the credibility that Ms. Hasina badly wants and Ms. Zia is trying to deny her. And if Ms. Zia does stick to her boycott, the Jatiya Party of Mr. Ershad will likely become the country’s new main opposition party, vastly increasing its current influence.

And so it is that while the two leading ladies of Bangladeshi politics quarrel, Mr. Ershad’s clout is growing. In fact, it is almost tempting to forget the dark spots in his past. Mr. Ershad’s rule is sometimes looked upon as a dictatorship of the benign sort. The 1982 coup that brought him to power was bloodless (conveniently, his predecessor had already been assassinated). And the years of democracy that have followed his downfall have been tainted by so much corruption, cronyism and repression that his regime can seem innocuous by comparison.

But nostalgia underestimates the damage the man did to Bangladesh. Mr. Ershad institutionalized corruption on a large scale, undertaking building projects that enriched him and his cronies. In 1988, his government amended the Constitution, ignoring its foundational secular principles to declare Islam the country’s state religion. The return to politics of this dictator, whose fall was so hard-won, sends a message of impunity.

Democracy in Bangladesh has taken another hit, in other words. Politicians are unaccountable. The electoral process is sketchy. Yes, Bangladeshis have held on to the right to vote, but it is, in effect, the right to vote only for warring factions determined to destroy each other.

A few weeks ago, in a bid to convince her to end the strikes, Ms. Hasina made a telephone call to Ms. Zia. The transcript of the conversation, which was circulated online, reads like a parody.

Ms. Hasina: “We don’t want to quarrel.”

Ms. Zia: “You are quarrelling.”

Ms. Hasina: “You are the only one doing the talking. You are not allowing me to talk.”

Ms. Zia: “Why would I do that? You are asking questions, I am replying.”

Ms. Hasina: “I am not getting a chance to speak.”

Amid that bickering, Ershad doesn’t need to do much talking at all.

Published in The NewYork Times, November 26, 2013

A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 27, 2013, in The International New York Times.

Tahmima Anam is a writer and anthropologist, and the author of the novel “A Golden Age.”

Dr Amartya Sen: What's happening in Bangladesh?

AMARTYA SEN

Self-assured commentators who saw Bangladesh as a “basket case” not many years ago could not have expected that the country would jump out of the basket and start sprinting ahead even as expressions of sympathy and pity were pouring in. This informative Lancet Series on Bangladesh helps to explain what happened—and why. It is important to understand how a country that was extremely poor a few decades ago, and is still very poor, can make such remarkable accomplishments particularly in the field of health, but also in social transformation in general.

The lessons are important for Bangladesh's own future, and for what The Lancet Bangladesh Team describe as the construction of “a second generation of health systems”. But the messages from Bangladesh's experience are also of great relevance for many other countries in the world that suffer from debilitating poverty. It might not be good manners for Bangladesh to start lecturing the world on what to do, so soon after jumping out of the basket to which it had been relegated, but the country's experience has important lessons for other developing countries across the globe.

These lucid and helpful papers discuss the main avenues of change on which Bangladesh has travelled. I will not summarise the findings: this has been nicely done in the introductory paper by Mushtaque Chowdhury and colleagues. Instead I will concentrate on a small number of striking features of the strategy followed by Bangladesh in moving rapidly towards health transition.

One direction of change is the emphasis that the country has placed on reducing gender inequality in some crucially important respects. The impetus for the change was linked in many different ways with the politics of liberation that made the issue of freedom, including the liberation of women, a part of the progressive agenda of what people wanted and were ready to fight for. There are inescapably complex issues to be addressed in order to explain more fully how exactly that happened. It can be argued that there were historical elements in the culture of Bengal, and particularly in the emergence of radical movements in various forms in that province throughout the first half of the 20th century, that leant them to include a serious concern for gender equity. But it was the nature of the struggle for independence of Bangladesh, particularly in focusing on the contrast with West Pakistan, that made it possible to make an effective political translation towards empowering women.

The causation of this move towards gender equity cannot but remain somewhat speculative, but its consequences are clear enough. Schools focused particularly on expanding the education of girls: Bangladesh is one of the few countries in the world where the number of girls in school now exceeds the number of boys. Public services, including school teaching, health care, and family planning, employ a much higher proportion of women workers than is the case in most developing economies, including in Bangladesh's neighbouring countries. Women have also entered the economic workforce in plentiful numbers, led by such industries as garment making that provided easy entry to female labourers, even though the neglect of safety at work has been a huge blot in the record of that industry, a serious deficiency that is only belatedly being addressed, and perhaps not yet strongly enough.

Women have also received special attention from Bangladesh's powerful non-governmental organisations (NGOs)—from large initiatives like BRAC and Grameen Bank to smaller organisations—and the mobilisation of the active agency of women has been a distinctive feature of the vision that has moved Bangladesh forward. And there has been a general determination in post-independence Bangladesh to target the elimination of female disadvantage in different fields of action, including maternal and child survival.

The removal of female disadvantage and the use of female agency have raised Bangladesh's record of achievement even on its own, but it is in fact the case that women's agency has also contributed greatly to the advancement of the lives and freedoms of all—men, women, and children. The unlocking of the power of women's active role in the society and in the economy has been an extremely productive move for Bangladesh and contrasts with what has happened in much of India. Bangladesh's powerful achievement in making much greater use of women's agency is a remarkable affirmation of the importance of what Mary Wollstonecraft called, in 1792, “the vindication of the rights of woman”. Indeed it turns out that the removal of the social shackles that restrain women has a crucial part to play in the progress of all people—of both sexes and of all ages.

A second striking feature of the Bangladesh story is the general acceptance of a multiplicity of instruments in the public and private sectors for rapid social advancement. Just as state initiatives have been seriously undertaken, NGOs and private enterprises have been forcefully supplementing the efforts of the public sector. As Syed Masud Ahmed and colleagues argue, the use of pluralism has allowed Bangladesh to get off to a quick start bringing the country a little closer to a health transition.

This is not to deny that the mixture of instruments that characterise Bangladesh's path of development will demand critical examination over time, since substantial overall advancement can coexist with persistent inefficiency and inequalities in the sharing of the benefits of health transition. These evaluative issues remain open to scrutiny and critical examination, but what has to be immediately—and firmly—recognised is that Bangladesh has been, in its own way, going ahead rapidly, rather than remaining paralysed by the slowness that is often entailed by the pursuit of “purity” in more ideologically oriented initiatives which favour either exclusive reliance on private enterprise or exclusive use of state-based programmes. The pragmatism that Bangladesh came to accept through a complex political and social process has yielded noticeable success, which has impressed—and to a considerable extent surprised—the world.

A third feature, closely related to the second, is the intelligent use of community-based approaches in the delivery of health services and medical care. As Shams El Arifeen and his coauthors outline, the mobilisation of community-based participation has many advantages, not only for the fostering of social cooperation, but also for extending the reach of the health initiatives and their impact. The innovations in health-service delivery from which Bangladeshis have benefited have been possible partly because of these participatory features in the process of social change. The importance of innovations is also discussed in the context of equity in the paper by Alayne Adams and colleagues.

A fourth feature, which demands particular attention in Bangladesh, is the country's improved ability to face natural disasters, such as storms, cyclones, floods, and droughts. These natural calamities have acted as a persistent drag on the country's progress. As the contributions by the Richard Cash and colleagues highlight, the deep vulnerability of the disaster-prone country to unruly forces of nature, which needed to be subdued, has indeed been, to a considerable extent, reduced. The elimination of these problems would, however, demand much more security-oriented progress in future years, especially if the threats for climate change become stronger.

I have pointed to a few of the special features in Bangladesh's progress towards a health transition, and many other features have been explored in this valuable Lancet Series. One very important aspect of this compendium of investigations is the continued focus on a call to action that nicely supplements the appreciation of what has been accomplished. Bangladesh has still a long way to go. This Lancet Series shows how Bangladesh has firmly placed itself on the way to that long journey (and has made an excellent beginning), but also points to further problems that have to be tackled as the journey proceeds. The key to Bangladesh's laudable success has been the avoidance of the twin dangers of inertia and smugness. The future will demand more from these virtues.

I declare that I have no conflicts of interest.

First published in The Lancet journal, 21 November 2013

Prof Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate and professor of economics, Harvard University, Littauer Center, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA