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Pressing need for rural reform

Md. Anisur Rahman
***Whatever land and water spaces are available today for redistribution must be redistributed, khas land which is legally the right of the landless must be genuinely given to them and them only, and the rural asset-poor have to be motivated to form solidarity organisations of their own for socio-economic co-operation and to stand by each other in distress and in bad times so they do not lose their assets again to be thrown back into patron-client relations to some or other maliks.***
Fundamental socio-economic reform including land reform was a promise of our independence struggle and muktijuddho. The first Planning Commission submitted proposals for agrarian reform to the then cabinet, also proposing that this be presented to the nation for public debate. But the jotdar government of the time threw this into the bin.
Today the number of big jotdars in the country has dwindled, but the bulk of rural masses are tied with a class of rural 'maliks'' in a patron-client relation that inhibits them from taking independent initiatives and also to vote freely in local and national elections.
Liquidation of such patron-client relation is a necessary pre-condition to establishing genuine democracy as well as for pro-people development of the country. We are putting the cart before the horse by trying to bring democracy in the country without fulfilling this pre-condition, an effort that is failing repeatedly and will continue to fail.
Our governments behave as slaves of foreign powers, who are against such reform and are looking for an enabling environment mainly to exploit the cheap labour of the country. For this they want merely a show of ’’democracy" by way of "free and fair" election, and "goodgovernance."
Ravaged by the barbaric and nation-
ravaging tug-of-war for power between the two major paribartantric parties of the country, even "good governance" to fulfill the designs of our foreign masters is eluding us. But more importantly for the country, we are unable to join the camp of "Asian Tigers" in economic development as we are not doing any fundamental socio-economic reform, and are rejoicing merely at being able to enter world contests in sports like cricket and football.
We got two years that do not come easily in the life of a nation. This opportunity could have been taken to strike a major blow at the patron-client relationships in rural Bangladesh.
I had personally written about this to the head of the CTG and the economic adviser, both of whom happen to have been my students. But my advice has fallen on deaf ears, perhaps because this was contrary to the desire of our global masters from whom they seem to be taking their cues.
Most surprisingly, the CTG itself fully revealed the rogue character of our political leaders to the nation and to the whole world, and then, after putting them in the cage for a while, have released them to a chilled nation before the national elections to bid for
national power.
It is too late now for the CTG to do anything fundamental about this even if it were patriotic enough to want to. If there are genuinely patriotic elements among our political and civil leaders it is vitally essential that they realise clearly that, not to speak of objectives like the country's development, poverty alleviation, etc even the frightening political state of the country cannot be improved just by so-called "free and fair election" without freeing the greater mass of our rural people from the patron-client relation in which they are living.
For this, whatever land and water spaces are available today for redistribution must be redistributed, khas land which is legally the right of the landless must be genuinely given to them and them only, and the rural asset-poor have to be motivated to form solidarity organisations of their own for socioeconomic co-operation and to stand by each other in distress and in bad times so they do not lose their assets again to be thrown back into patron-client relations to some or other maliks. Needless to say, well-wishing seniors by themselves cannot execute such reform for which the masses of the country have to be made aware and mobilised.
At the same time, the masses of the country need to be made literate as fast as possible through a national campaign so that they can rise above the status of cheap labour and can become free entrepreneurs in various directions. The Asian Tigers have all taken such steps in order to rise to this status. And with such reform the character of development of the nation will also turn toward equity that was the promise of our freedom struggle which has been totally forgotten by our political leaders.
Without this, what is it that we are chanting by the slogan of "muktijiiddher adarsha” and "Bangabondhu's adarsha"? And what exactly is "Ziaur Rahman's adarsha" for that matter? Isn't the great fraud in such feudalism-scented paribartantric slogans rather obvious to everybody today?
Today the slogan of "globalisation" and "free market" designed to exploit cheap labour of the south are also fully exposed by its own cancerous eruption, and the new US leadership itself is looking for a way of rising out of its debris and is in favour of protection of the interests of US labour.
The economic growth of Bangladesh, being vitally dependent on basically the
growth of one major industry, is there-ore facing a serious threat. The future )f the country is bleak, to say the least, vithout fundamental socip-ecoppmic eform to free the huge7 rhanpB^el of he nation from their status of cheap about to move toward free entrepreneurship in various directions.
I hope that we shall truly get a "free and fair election.” But we need to understand the difference between true democracy and paribartantra or maliktantra even if our foreign masters do not care about such deformations of democracy and may even like this as this makes it easier for them to control us to serve their interests.
I shall cast my vote in the national election — if we truly get one as promised -- to that party in whose manifesto there will be credible promise of rural socio-economic reform and of making the masses of the nation fully literate in the shortest possible time -- with an imaginative leadership this should not take more than two years. And I advise all patriotic voters to do the same.
Md Anisur Rahman was a member of the first Planning Commission This paper is an edited version of the introductory presentation in a seminar on rural reform for socio-economic and political change in Bangladesh organised by Research Initiatives, Bangladesh on November 9 at CIRDAP auditorium.