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GROUND REALITIES

A reason to remember Tajuddin
POVERTY
iS.
always debilitating. And when you add corruption to it, you have the makings of a disaster. And disaster takes
an extreme form when foreign governments and donor agencies step in to humiliate you publicly, for reasons that may or may not have to do with you. Tajuddin Ahmed was one of the very few men in Bangladesh's political domain who understood the need for even the poverty-stricken to have a right to self-esteem. The World Bank, he reasoned in early 1972, did not need to be here in Bangladesh. Having fought a war for freedom against overwhelming odds on their own, Bangladesh's people were eminently qualified to take the country towards a socialist transformation. In Delhi, even as Robert McNamara looked for a chance of a conversation with him, Tajuddin kept the World Bank president (and architect of the Vietnam War) at arm's length.
Today, the World Bank is not at arm's length. It is all over us, part of the reason being our own inability to handle ourselves better. The government should have asked Syed Abul Hossain to stand aside or the prime minister should have dropped him from the cabinet when allegations of corruption first surfaced against him and his family firm around the issue of an appointment of contractors for the proposed Padma Bridge. Every official at whom the finger of suspicion was pointed by the World Bank should have been sent on leave until such time as inquiries into the Bank's allegations were complete. The Padma Bridge was, and is, a matter concerning an entire nation. Why was it then not possible for the government to sacrifice a few individuals at the altar of enlightened national self-interest?
These are worrisome days. And there are worrying things happening before us. Somehow you get the feeling that darker times are ahead, that mischief is afoot to create the precise conditions which could put all of us, and not just the government, in danger. The repeated violence in the readymade garments sector, the virulence with which factories are put to the torch, the explosions which occur on the basis of mere rumours of workers' deaths -- these are disturbing signs of things that could be even worse. You do not expect those employed, sincerely employed, in the garments sector to destroy the very institution which gives their lives an underpinning of survival.
Then who are these elements who go so swiftly and so angrily into turning the garments sector into a battlefield?
There are an infinite number of instances from history to remind us of the tenuous nature of poor societies trying to create a democratic structure for themselves. Such societies find, at a point, that they must wage battle against forces more organised than they, that in the end they might not win. In 1953, for all the nationalistic support for his government, Prime Minister Mossadegh saw Iran slipping out of his grasp and the briefly exiled Shah restored to his throne by his friends in the West. And following the bloody coup which brought General Suharto to power in Indonesia in 1965 (tens of thousands of Indonesians were being hunted down by the soldiers on the suspicion that they were communists), western multinational companies came together in happy
conference to carve out territories of influence in the country. Capitalism took over and, with it came a military regime beholden to the West.
The violence you run into in Bangladesh these days, the organised chaos you experienced in 1974 in this same country, tend to pull you back, almost against your will, to the troubles which assailed Chile in the early 1970s. Wads of money were pumped in from abroad, to organise strikes against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, who eventually went down fighting in September 1973. Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman received the news of the Chilean coup the day after. Too depressed to work, he went home with the feeling that the shadows in the dark would be coming after him next. And they did, less than two years later.
The danger to a country comes in varied ways, generally. It first rears its head when its government is either too inept or too corrupt or too weak structurally or too arrogant to read the writing on the wall. It then assumes a trenchant shape when powerful people abroad realise there is a chance for them to step in and turn matters to their advantage. Henry Kissinger warned Zulfikar Ali Bhutto that the latter would be made a horrible example of. Christopher Hitchens maintained to the very end that Kissinger had a role in August 1975-Bangladesh. And that, my friend, is the vulnerability weak, resource-constrained states go through.
The World Bank, through its public
announcement of the scrapping of the Padma Bridge deal, has demonstrated the patronising tone which often underscores the voices of the powerful around the world. And yet, much like the bureaucracy and the non-transparency which undermines governments like Bangladesh's, the World Bank remains hamstrung by some of the very ailments it spots in the world's impoverished states. Those ailments need to go. The bank has had Paul Wolfowitz, another cheerleader for undeclared and unjustified war, as its president. It has not opened its doors to leadership by non-Americans. Its record since the Bretton Woods conference has not been terribly bright. But neither has that of nations like ours, where bad governance and worse politics keep shooting holes in the armour of the state decade after decade.
Perhaps, as a former director of the World Bank has been quoted as saying in a journal, the Bank is a place where "the inmates are running the asylum." Perhaps we will have a bridge over the Padma someday, somehow. But this shame, for both the Bangladesh government and the World Bank, will be there for quite a while.
Tajuddin Ahmed relented after 1972, enough to see Robert McNamara in Washington in 1974. An eager McNamara was ready to offer Bangladesh goods of immaculate quality. Tajuddin, socialist of conviction that he was, had need only for bullocks, for the new nation's agrarian economy needed bullocks. He had a point.
Should we have heeded Tajuddin Ahmed in 1972? The answer to that question might come through a simple exercise: let the torch shine on every country into which the World Bank has gone. How many such states have risen to economic wellbeing through World Bank largesse, through the conditionalities the bank has imposed on the world's poorer societies?
The writer is Executive Editor, The Daily Star.
E-mail: bahsantareq@yahoo.co.uk