SWEDISH SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES NETWORK

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Bangladesh – mounting fears of spiralling violence
Sunday, 4 December

Bangladesh now has a stable government with the Bangladesh National Party (BNP) at the steering wheel. The economy of this country inhabited by 140 million people is stable at around 5 per cent growth of BNP per year, which is not bad, but still lower than the Indian high growth performance at 7–8 per cent a year. School enrolment is higher than in India, and there has been a progressive decrease of people below the poverty line in the last 15 years, according to official statistics. Room for optimism?
It is the garment industry that has fuelled the economy, now making up 75 per cent of exports, but the green revolution has also come to Bangladesh with subsequent demand for industrial goods in the countryside. Add to this increasing numbers of migrant labour to the Middle East and steadily rising remittances, which the many banks not least Arabic in the countryside bear witness to. Moreover, the country is still one of the biggest receivers of development assistance, which the large Dhaka expatriate community from the whole world bears witness to.

Undernutrition and fear for Indian takeover

But the bottom line for Bangladesh was extremely low when this country was born in 1971 and still about half of the population is below the national poverty line, which is the worst record of all South Asian countries. There is severe under-nutrition among at least 30 million people and there is malnutrition among many more. There is low birth weight of a sizable number of newborn babies and malnutrition which in turn is related to low weight among pregnant mothers.
SAARC is now trying to open a freer market in South Asia. However, there is a general fear that Bangladesh will suffer a big loss if and when the South Asian markets for goods and services are opened up fully. The Indian companies would simply outdo the Bangla ones. This comes somewhat as a surprise to us, seeing Indian goods all over in the bazaars. The Indians are already here!
A recent offer by the Tata Group in India to invest about USD 3 billion in a steel plant, a fertiliser factory, a power generation unit and a coalmine is now being considered by the Government here. It is more than the total foreign investment so far in Bangladesh since its independence in 1971. Even so it arouses the fear of an Indian take over of the economy of this young nation.

Tops the corrupt nations list

One great concern is, of course, that Bangladesh now tops the list of most corrupt nations for the fifth consecutive year and that public institutions’ performance is extremely poor. So this is also the country, where powerful NGOs and private service deliverers compete with the public sector. People simply vote with their money to get health, education and other services, which means that the poor go without. What can save the public sector from falling into oblivion and become completely obsolete?

But the overriding concern is now the fear of fundamentalist violence in the form of suicide bombers. The simultaneous blasts in 450 places all over the country on 17 August this year has now been followed up with several new bomb attacks, many of them carried out by suicide bombers. The attacks seem at random and can be anywhere, but some at least have targeted courts and judges, policemen and politicians. ‘Man’s rule of the country have failed, so has military rule, now only the rule of Allah can save the country and give progress to the poor man,’ is the saying we hear with increasing intensity. Yesterday’s papers reported about thousands of potential young suicide bombers in the counter, ready to attack if they are called to do so. Here is the fear of violence and death, which cannot be prevented by police surveillance.
The army is now contemplating to set up a special terrorist unit to prevent more bombings. ‘Otherwise we have to invite the US army to come here and fight the terrorists,’ as someone close to Government circles remarked.
And everybody asks: Who is behind it? Is it foreign groups or domestic or both?

Quarrel between the ‘widow’ and the ‘daughter’

On 4 December 2005 Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, leader of BNP and widow of the murdered Zia-Ur-Rahman, invited the leader of the opposition party Awami League, Sheik Hasina Wajed, to enter into a ‘dialogue on ways to cope with the raging militancy in the country. Sheikh Hasina, daughter of the murdered liberation leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman howevere bluntly refused any cooperation and instead asked for the resignation of the government. Such is the political quarrel here between two parties, that have about the same ideology (read: ‘making Bangladesh a pure Muslim country and fighting back Indian imperialism’) but with BNP to the centre-right and Awami League to the centre-left. The main accusation is, of course, that BNP rules with the help of two Islamist parties and have made the fundamentalist ideas politically correct. “Playing with fire” so to say.
All along, since the first bomb blasts in 1999, this terrible violence has claimed at least 179 lives. A number of insightful studies have revealed the seriousness of this mounting problem and asked for political remedies. But the reaction of the sitting regime has been first denial of the facts of rising violence with a foreign and domestic backing and then blatant inaction.

Fear for terrorism

A few days later during a bus trip to Rajshahi I conversed with a general surgeon and associate professor at Rajshahi Medical College. He was one of those increasingly scarce Hindus still clinging to his native soil. During the tiffyn break, while seated in the restaurant, he leaned somewhat forward and said. ‘Can we talk freely since we have time and nothing else to do?’ I nodded my head. ‘You see, Prof. Lindberg, I think the world is in a big turmoil. One country has invaded another country. The whole world should condemn this, but it is not happening. I am not a Muslim, but I think that this is why fundamentalist terrorism is growing every day and has now also come to us here in Bangladesh.’
In the morning papers the same day there were news about the police arresting suspected members of the outlawed Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) and potential suicide attackers. It seems one target is public prosecutors and the Supreme Court Bar Association has received a letter that it will be bombed soon.

There is something deeply tragic about this transformation of the “ultimate weapon of the weak” of the Palestine people for generations facing Israeli-US over-might on their own land. In Bangladesh Islamic jihad is clearly invoked, propelled by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it is the ‘evil’ of a democratic but rotten system with no relevance for the development needs of the many poor that really forms the resonance bottom of this process. This is the opportunity structure that is being used by those now waging this more than unholy war.
Illiterate and poor young men are the first victims. Trained in madrassas with only teachings of the Koran, they come into the hands of the extremist groups who teach them about the holy mission and the salvation they will achieve. There is money involved too, to the madrassas who provide the young boys and to the families that lose their sons. The terrorism of extremism here blends with criminality.
National cohesion and solidarity is the second victim. When schools are now asked to stop using the national anthem (Amar Shonar Bangla) written by Rabindranath Tagore, because it is written by a Hindu – and asked not to hoist the national flag, because it is the flag of the separatists, something has gone fundamentally wrong in the social fabric.

Staffan Lindberg