Transcript 1971

Bangladesh:
Development and
political economy
Link to map
Recap:Turning points in History
• 1952 – Language revolution
• 1971 march – Beginning of the Liberation War
• 1971 - Sheikh Mujib arrested and taken to West
Pakistan. In exile, Awami League leaders
proclaim the independence of the province of
East Pakistan on 26th March. The new country
is called Bangladesh. Just under 10 million
Bangladeshis flee to India as troops from West
Pakistan are defeated with Indian assistance
• Dec 16 1971: Surrender of the Pakistan Army
(termed Victory Day)
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Birth of Bangladesh
• Internal colonialism
• Challenge of facing both a state apparatus
and a political community
• Disarray of civil bureaucracy and the
military
• Schism between ‘collaborators’ and
‘patriots’
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Bangladesh
• Continuing militancy
• Debates over the constitution – extent of
political power of the Prime Minister
• Mujibbad – Mujibism – nationalism,
socialism, democracy and secularism
• Supposed to correct the deficiencies of
communism and capitalism (the third way)
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Indicators
SL
I
P
B
Children underweight for age
(% under age 5)
29
46
38
48
Population living below $1.25 a
day (%)
14.0
41.6 d
22.6
49.6
Population living below $2 a
day (%)
39.7
75.6 d
60.3
81.3
Total GDP (PPP US$ billions)
84.9
3,097
405.6 196.7
Annual growth rate of GDP per
capita (%)
3.9
4.5
1.6
3.1
Income/expenditure share of
the richest 10% of the
population (%)
2.9
3.6 f
3.9 f
4.3
33.3
31.1
26.5 f
26.6
11.7
8.6
6.7
6.2
Ratio of the richest 10% to the
poorest 10%
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Bangladesh timeline
1971-5: The Mujib era. This is the formative period, associated with a
strong nationalist and statist fervour, with Mujibur Rahman and his
party Awami League in power;
1977-81: The Zia regime. This is the beginning of military rule in
Bangladesh, marked by the adoption of Islam in the constitution;
1982-91:The Ershad regime. Military rule, and declaration of Islam as
state religion;
1991-6: the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) regime, with
Khaleda Zia as Prime Minister;
1996-2000:
The second Awami League regime, with Sheik
Hasina as leader;
2001-6: Coalition government headed by the BNP
2006-9: Caretaker government, postponement of elections,
declaration of a state of Emergency and political violence
2009: The third Awami League regime, with Sheik Hasina as leader
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The story of Bangladesh:
stunning ironies
On the one hand, it affirms the power of
popular discontent and the eventual
vulnerability of a minority elite, however
powerful, to such discontent.
On the other hand, it suggests the irony that
states may well reproduce processes of
exclusion which they themselves are born
out of.
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Origins
• In 1971 Bangladesh inherited an economy
with a high external dependence on food,
inequity, and landlessness. The Liberation
War caused large-scale death and
displacement, along with the withdrawal of
the Pakistani industrial classes from the
productive economy. The immediate
problem was to rehabilitate ten million
refugees – a task for which foreign aid
became the only feasible option.
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Dependent development
• The very premises of autonomy and selfsufficiency on which the liberation struggle
was based became marginalized, as state
power became directed towards a strategy
of dependent development
• It offered certain classes legitimate
instruments to institutionalize their
monopoly over domestic and external
resources, in particular the state.
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Dependent development:
two elements
• the strategy of promoting a local capitalist class
through state patronage;
• and a systematic dependence on foreign aid. As
elsewhere in the Third World, the process
engendered a rather unhealthy symbiosis
between the bureaucracy and the emergent
indigenous capitalist class. What evolved was
therefore a predatory state par excellence,
couple with a distorted and primitive form of
capitalism.
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“Proto capitalism”
• The political-economy that evolved in
Bangladesh has been labeled in various
ways. Broadly speaking, it has had the
character of petty mercantilism and has
often been referred to as “proto capitalism”
or “shopkeeper capitalism”. Various kinds
of ‘rents’ emanating from state patronage,
price manipulation and overt exploitation
of workers became the hallmark of this
structure of predation
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Recent insertion into the
global economy
• myriad forms of oppressive social relations drawn from
different types of social formations – ranging from
feudalism to flexible accumulation – exist quite
comfortably in synergy with one another.
• The extraordinary development of the textile sector in
Bangladesh. This new ‘growth sector’ is the lifeline of
today’s Bangladesh. It has drawn millions of Bangladeshi
women into the orbit of factory production, generating
profound and often irreconcilable contradictions in social
relationships at the level of the family, the community, the
workplace, and the nation-state
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From “Womanmachine”
• “Both economically, and in literal terms, workers feel trapped by their
machines –the operators of machines experience the machine
operating them at multiple levels…. In the eyes of many workers,
they are part of a machine that men are in control of…. It is men
who throw on the switches to turn the giant on, men who guard its
products, and of course, men who own it. Moreover, the promise of
empowerment through paid labor is belied by the knowledge of
workers’ entrapment in the labor market. It is not only that women
are perceived as inhabiting the space of men – certainly the factory
is an archetypically masculine site. Of critical import here, however,
is the specific conditions under which women come to ‘displace’
male labor. Since women’s access to the factory occurs in the
context of inequality and severe male unemployment, female
garment workers have come to represent a socially disruptive labor
force. … “
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Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHTs)
• Inhabited by indigenous communities who
inhabit the south-eastern region of the
country and comprise less than 1 per cent
of the population. The conflict between the
Bangladeshi state and the indigenous
communities continues to result in much
violence and destruction.
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The people of CHT
• The people of CHT belong to thirteen different
indigenous tribes primarily of Sino-Tibetan descent. A
majority of them are Buddhists or Hindus. Bengali, which
is the language spoken by the majority of Bangladeshis,
is not their language. They speak a variety of languages
and are governed by different legal, social and cultural
customs What explains the intensely conflictual
relationship
• It appears to be a conflict between two fundamentally
opposite understandings of justice and ‘development’
and of the relationship between the state and its people.
The state took recourse to violence to resolve these
oppositions, unleashing an armed conflict in response.
•
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History
• During British colonialism, the CHT region enjoyed a special status
and limited self-government. Migration into the region was strictly
prohibited during colonial rule, and the local populace was allowed
to live by its distinctive cultural and economic practices with
relatively limited interference from the state. The special status was
lost in 1963 as a result of an amendment to the constitution of
Pakistan. With this amendment began two processes of enduring
impact on the region: the in-migration of Bengalis from other parts of
Bangladesh, and the initiation of large-scale development projects.
Approximately 54,000 acres of settled cultivable land, mostly farmed
by the Chakma tribe, were lost as a result of these processes. Some
100,000 people lost their homes and livelihoods, leading to a fairly
large out-migration of Chakma tribals into India. The Government of
Pakistan also embarked on a policy to encourage poor Bengali
families to settle in the region, a policy that the government of
independent Bangladesh decided to continue and expand.
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Structural inequality
Structural inequality does not affect people as
individuals but as collective entities who share
similar structural locations that similarly condition
their opportunities and life-chances and their
ability to act as agents. It is in this sense we
argue that collectivities such as gender, race,
ethnicity or class are best understood as
structural. The structural locations shared by
these collectivities are engendered through
historical processes and reflect the intersection
of the realms of economics, politics, culture and
knowledge.
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Origins of structural inequality
intermingling of several distinct historical
forms:
• different varieties of proto capitalism;
• predatory and rentier states and
associated patterns of governance;
• the dominance of religion in the cultural
and political realms;
• the pervasive patterns of subordination of
women, etc.
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