BANGLADESH: Not Yet A Country

At 5:30 a.m. last Sunday, the city of Dacca resounded with the thunder of a 31-gun salute that marked the beginning of Bangladesh's first independence day. A year and a day earlier, on March 25, 1971, Pakistan had launched its military crackdown against rebellious East Bengal, which led to the brief, bloody war between India and Pakistan, the death of as many as 3,000,000 Bengalis—and the birth of a new nation.

Today, as TIME Correspondent William Stewart reported last week from Dacca, the Bengalis have a homeland, but they do not yet have a united country. "The present government, fearful of opposition, devotes itself to patronage rather than crisis; the government of reconstruction and reconciliation has yet to appear. If it does not, then the high Administration aide in Washington who referred to Bangladesh as 'an international basket case may yet be proved right." 

Across the vast, hot stretches of flat, brown delta, which awaits the life-giving monsoons in late May, there is a state of unease. Mutual distrust is pervasive. It is no longer sufficient to be 

Bengali; one must be a Bengali with the right inflection in his voice. "Collaborator" is an easy word to use, and the effects can be devastating. In Dhanmandi, Dacca's most fashionable quarter, residents are now accustomed to having groups of armed youths enter their houses in quest of money and goods. Acts of revenge against the non-Bengali minority of Biharis have subsided in the capital but have continued 

sporadically elsewhere; at the city of Khulna two weeks ago, a Bengali attack on the Bihari community reportedly left some 2,000 dead. Bitterness against the Biharis is widespread. "Those bastards," says Altafur Rahman, a Dacca law student. "Let them go to Pakistan." 

During the nine months of struggle in Bangladesh, the real freedom fighters, the Mukti Bahini, battled as best they could with little outside aid. The Mukti resent the fact that the government has given them few jobs and little patronage, and they have retained most of their firearms. Ranging from ardent patriots to outright thugs, the Mukti are among the most resentful critics of the ineffectual Dacca government, which has been accused of consolidating the position of Sheik Mujibur Rahman's Awami League instead of concentrating on reconstruction. 

Moscow Links. Only Mujib himself, the country's Prime Minister, escapes such criticism. Despite his undiminished popularity, Mujib has yet to provide the kind of leadership that Bangladesh needs. Since his triumphant return to Dacca last January, after spending nine months in prison in Pakistan, he has visited Calcutta and even Moscow, but has scarcely ventured out into his own country at all. 

Two weeks ago, Mujib welcomed India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to Dacca—where she was greeted at the airport by a pipe band skirling Skye Boat Song—and signed with her a treaty of peace and friendship. Mrs. Gandhi promised that India would hand over to Bangladesh all Pakistani military prisoners who have been accused of committing war crimes against Bengalis during the fighting (the list of suspects is said to total 1,500). The most important effect of the treaty is to link Dacca closely to India in matters of foreign affairs, and thus make Bangladesh in effect a member of the Delhi-Moscow entente. 

Drop of III Will. While the U.S. has paid a heavy price in South Asia for backing the loser of the India-Pakistan war, the Soviet Union has strengthened its position on the subcontinent. The Soviet mission in Dacca already has a staff of 90, with more to come, and the Russians have undertaken salvage operations at the ports of Chittagong and Chalna. By contrast, the U.S. appears to have extracted the last possible drop of ill will out of Bangladesh. The handful of American officials in Dacca, however, make no secret that they would like to see U.S. diplomatic recognition at long last, as well as a small but hardhitting aid program. 

Such assistance is urgently needed at the present time, for Bangladesh's most pressing problem is the threat of hunger. The population of the capital has been swollen by thousands of famished, unemployed refugees from rural areas. As Toni Hagen, director of the U.N. relief operation in Dacca, puts it, the situation is "desperate." "Blankets won't do, baby food won't do, midwifery kits won't do," says Hagen. "Cash is required for 

employment and reconstruction—plain cash." Food is urgently needed, of course, especially in the next two months, before the arrival of 700,-000 tons of wheat pledged by India. But vital repairs of roads and bridges must be made in order for such supplies to be distributed. Factories, too, lie stagnant for lack of operating capital—a reminder that their former owners, the majority of whom were Pakistanis, repatriated almost all the money in the country to West Pakistan.

TIME Magazine :  Monday, Apr. 03, 1972

Anti-Corruption Protests In India : I, The People

An anti-graft crusader steamrolls a hapless government.

SQUELCHING barefoot in the sludge at Ramlila Maidan, a park in central Delhi, a middle-aged man praises the people’s love for his guru, Anna Hazare. His eyes shine with zeal and hunger. His legs have cramp from fasting, for over a week, beside his 74-year-old leader. So what? We train our bodies to go without food for 30 days, he says. To lose flesh is to gain energy.

Mr Hazare, who has himself lost 6kg, is prone on a platform nearby, framed by a huge poster of Mahatma Gandhi, whose methods he has adopted. A bank of television cameras and a devoted crowd, tens of thousands strong, watch him intently, day and night, cheering and chanting in a sea of mud. Groups of uniformed schoolboys march about, flourishing the Indian tricolour. Young men sport white Gandhi caps with “I am Anna” penned on the sides.

Trade is brisk in Hazare rosettes, headbands, T-shirts, and badges. Five rupees (10 cents) gets three swipes of paint—saffron, white, green—on your cheek. Even police X-ray gates have “corruption-free India” scrawled on them. Dozens of cities have their own marches and protests. The country’s thicket of excitable cable-news networks reports on nothing else.

Mr Hazare’s campaign has turned him from a noted social reformer into a national figure. He has demanded that, by the end of the month, parliament pass a bill his team has written setting up an anti-graft ombudsman, or Lokpal, to oversee every part of government from the serving prime minister and Supreme Court down, holding every government body accountable for corruption and potentially becoming a powerful new arm of the state.

On August 24th, after talks with Mr Hazare, the ruling Congress Party called an all-party meeting at the prime minister’s residence, which agreed to resist the activist. A day earlier the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, had been rebuffed after begging Mr Hazare to call off the fast for the sake of his health and a “shared” goal of wiping out corruption.

In the end the government may have little option but to give in to the street protesters, but as of August 25th it was playing for time. Although one ageing but spirited opposition leader, L.K. Advani, has urged the government to quit and call a fresh election, nobody else seemed keen. Even Mr Advani’s Bharatiya Janata Party quickly said it did not want early polls.

Quite how Mr Singh’s government justifies its keep, however, is growing harder to see. By turns it has been inept and indecisive over this affair, while failing to get anything else done either. Last week it briefly jailed and tried to muzzle Mr Hazare, which guaranteed him wide publicity and sympathy instead. That was followed by a daft claim by Congress that the Americans were egging on the protesters. Rahul Gandhi, who with three others is supposed to run Congress while his mother, Sonia, gets medical care abroad, has been deafeningly silent, absent from Delhi and offering no leadership.

Those dismayed by both graft and politicians’ hopelessness have felt increasingly inclined to fall in behind Mr Hazare. Protesters moved from public squares to camp outside the Delhi homes of government ministers and MPs, unsettling the occupants. One protester set fire to himself on August 23rd.

By mid-week Mr Hazare’s supporters claimed they were within sight of a great triumph. They brushed aside questions about parliamentary democracy being undermined by a minority of street protesters. A bunged-up system needed a jolt, they retorted. A newly assertive urban middle class looks ever readier to push elected leaders (and unelected ones, like Mr Singh) to act in their interest.

Cooler heads, however, are wary. To craft a campaign against corruption into a movement around a single figure is faintly troubling. The claim that “Anna is India, India is Anna” sounds close to cult-speak. As it happens, the Supreme Court, the auditor-general, a panoply of civil activists and a more assertive press have all helped to hold the corrupt to account this year. Several powerful figures have been jailed.

Other doubts exist about Mr Hazare. Some Muslim leaders are suspicious of the nationalist, and what they see as at times Hindu-dominated, tone and imagery of his campaign. Low-caste Dalits, who rallied separately in Delhi on August 24th, also question his stand. They fret that if street protesters can, in effect, make one constitutional change, an attack might follow on a treasured but controversial constitutional provision reserving jobs and more for the lowest castes.

Mostly sceptics bristle at Mr Hazare’s methods. The most revered Dalit leader, the late B.R. Ambedkar, chief draftsman of India’s constitution, has been much quoted this week for an early warning about the “grammar of anarchy”, by which he meant using Gandhi-style fasts to impose your will on a democratic government. Hunger strikes, a form of blackmail, might have been justified against the British, but not against elected leaders.

Such grumbles will not dent Mr Hazare’s progress. His camp hints at possible future campaigns on electoral changes and education reform. Rival fasters might also jump in since a hunger strike’s extended drama so clearly suits live television. Yet elected politicians can push back. They have an easy way to remind voters how they matter, by getting on and passing many long-promised bills, for example on further economic reform. Dull and undramatic: but for many voters it matters at least as much as corruption.

Anti-Corruption Protests In India : No Modern-Day Mahatma

FROM his fasting-bed in the heart of Delhi, a frail old man in homespun cotton has channelled Indian rage over a string of high-profile corruption cases, tying the entire government in knots. Anna (“Elder Brother”) Hazare says he will continue his hunger strike until a rotten government passes, word-for-word, a bill creating a Lokpal, a powerful new anti-corruption body—and he has set an August 30th deadline. The Congress-led government of Manmohan Singh has already offered a Lokpal of its own, but Mr Hazare says it is too weak. Thanks to this master of political theatre, a discredited Indian government faces one of the biggest stand-offs with the people since, well, Mahatma Gandhi.

After revelations of stupendous corruption when politicians granted telecoms licences and prepared Delhi for the 2010 Commonwealth games, Indians are right to be furious. Yet Mr Hazare and his followers could end up doing more harm than good. The man is no saint, and his movement displays a whiff of Hindu chauvinism (see article). The activists’ slogan—“Anna is India, India is Anna”—is absurd. Their campaign is tinged with nostalgia for a golden age before economic liberalisation when government was, in their view, clean and decent.

This is a dangerous misdiagnosis. Corruption was rife even before liberalisation: the Bofors scandal in the 1980s brought down the government. The economic liberalisation of the past 20 years—in particular, the dismantling of the “licence Raj”—has vastly reduced the scope for corruption, not increased it. Mr Hazare’s proposed cure is equally mistaken. India already has anti-corruption bureaucrats, who have failed to solve the problem. Creating another huge bureaucracy, which a Lokpal would be, is not the answer.

The right and wrong channels for anger

Mr Singh should stand firm against the Hazarites, supporting the ends they espouse but decrying the means they propose. He deserves some credit for what he has tried to do. His economic policies, along with a 2005 freedom-of-information act, have tended to mitigate corruption. The government’s new Unique ID number scheme, in which 29m Indians are already enrolled, could have a revolutionary effect. Social benefits could be paid directly into recipients’ bank accounts rather than as subsidised fuel and food that is too easily stolen by crooked officials.

Yet Mr Singh has so far appeared listless. He should have moved faster to sack ministers in the wake of the telecoms scandal. And much could be done to make bribe-taking harder. One idea is to put public tenders online. A fairer and more open system is needed for acquiring development land from farmers. The government should do more to protect whistle-blowers. And to curb the appetite for illicit campaign funds, electoral reform should limit contributions and require that their source be revealed.

All this requires the commitment of a strong leader. As the loyal retainer to Congress’s family dynasty, Mr Singh lacks real power. But the dynasty’s matriarch, Sonia Gandhi, is unwell, while her son, Rahul, has run away from the Hazare controversy—hardly reassuring, since he is the presumed next prime minister. Given such a vacuum, it is no wonder the public does not trust political parties to clean up the system and prefers to join Mr Hazare’s crusade. The Gandhis’ hold over India is doing the country no good. If Indians want to clean up government, they need to get rid of dynastic politics.

Uncertainty Looms Large Over Transit Deal

As the arrival of the Indian Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh is coming closer, conflicting signals are becoming thick in the air as to whether or not a framework agreement on transit will be inked on this occasion.

Latest news reports and comments by people at high places are only adding credence to this confusion indicating difference of opinion among the Prime Minister’s advisers and between some cabinet ministers on some basic points before inking the deal.

There is nothing clear as the government remained tight lipped keeping the nation in the dark on the latest situation. Prime Minister’s adviser Dr Moshiur Rahman told the press recently on return from Delhi that he was not aware of whether the transit deal would be signed during the forthcoming visit of Dr Manmohan Singh.

His disclosure took political observers here aback with total surprise. However, the next day foreign secretary Mijarul Quais made similar comments to reporters saying he did not know whether a deal on transit is in card when the Indian minister is scheduled to sign several agreements in Dhaka with Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

Quais said he can only say about it seven to ten days from now, that is only few days before Dr Singh actually arrives. It is really confusing. To a question whether the ministry of foreign affairs is marginalized on this issue and sitting in a limbo, the foreign secretary however replied in the negative. 

Big delegation   

News reports meanwhile said, the Indian Prime Minister is coming with a big delegation comprising of several cabinet ministers, top advisers, members of the press and on top of it five chief ministers of the Indian states having common border with Bangladesh. They include Chief Minister of West Bengal Momta Benarji, Chief Minister of Tripura Manik Sarkar, Chief Minister of Assam Tarun Gogoi, Chief Minister of Meghalaya Mukul Sangma and Chief Minister of Mizoram Lalthanhawla.

It is going to be gala event to highlight a turning point in the regional politics with the two neighbours entering into strategic understanding of cooperation in almost all fronts. Monmohan is therefore taking the chief ministers of the neighbouring states to become part of the celebrations.

But the latest disclosure that the draft of the transit agreement may not be ready by that time and that the differences need to be sorted out among top policy makers and may be also with India on some issues may thus delay the signing of the agreement.

News reports said Bangladesh’s Prime Minister’s adviser Dr Rahman who is exclusively dealing with the transit issue favours a quick deal even by making short cut to the standard protocol of signing agreement. But some others want a comprehensive deal with the provisions to be settled with India be equally applicable on transit to and from Nepal and Bhutan. Some cabinet ministers moreover, remain sceptical of the opening of the road communications to transit.

They may have become concerned after the recent break down of the country’s roads and highways largely from lack of maintenance and especially from down pour of monsoon rains which is a regular phenomena in Bangladesh. Some cabinet ministers reportedly favour transit by railways and waterways in view of the deplorable road conditions and its capacity which is not enough to sustain loads of heavy Indian vehicles.  

There are also indications that basic disagreement on water sharing of Teesta River may also be working as a dissuading factor. Others say it may be a ploy to dump peoples’ interest on transit as it may be agitating their mind.  People wonder at this stage, why the government is moving blindly on transit issues ignoring protest from all quarters which also include Awami Lerague leaders and workers, besides protest from the major opposition BNP and other left and right wings political formations.

Only the Prime Minister and her inner policy makers appear firm to entertain the Indian desire and political analysts say and wonder why she stands to be so adamant. What is her compulsion?

Revolutionary Communist Party of Bangladesh echoed similar concerns when it wrote in its regular broadsheet publication The Peoples’ Democracy saying “the daily bitter experience of people reminds us how incapable and insufficient is the country’s present road communication system in carrying passengers and cargoes.”

It then raised the question about the likely scenario when hundreds of Indian vehicles would enter daily into Bangladesh to use the same poor infrastructure. Why the policy makers are not thinking and speaking out on it, it wondered. It said especially when big Indian container vehicles will take on the road local 

motor vehicles may be required to keep off the road to make room for them. How far the country is prepared to face such a situation, it wondered.

Moreover who will pay for the big roads and other communication facilities and port infrastructures for which Bangladesh will have to take loans. How the fuel supply will be ensured to the Indian vehicles which local motor vehicles use at subsidised rate provided by the state. When gas supply is running short, should Bangladesh open gas supply to Indian vehicles at the same low rates is yet another question, it said.

Transit or corridor, it questioned and made various speculations on the country’s security risks involved. The protection of environment and how to save human habitation from adverse impacts of pollution will also be a big challenge, it said pointing to 10 to 12 transit routes India is going to secure under the deal.

Another issue relates to health hazards especially from the spread of AIDS for which Indian truckers remain the worst carriers. It said the Indian states of Nagaland, Monipur and Mizoran, sitting on Bangladesh border are highly AIDs infected regions and the risk for Bangladesh will only become endemic.

The Party raised the question what Bangladesh is going to get back by making it so much vulnerable to challenges and dangers. It said when Bangladesh is opening up almost everything, India is closing it from all sides raising barbed walls; this is only compares to Israeli wall to block out Palestine.

How come it happen from a perceived friend, the party mouth piece said and urged the government to try and secure satisfactory settlement of all outstanding disputes with India like maritime boundary, a peaceful border free from killing, water sharing and resolution of Farakka and Tipaimukh dam.

SOUTH ASIA: End Of A Bad Dream

After five days of intense negotiations in New Delhi last week, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh signed an agreement resolving the last two major issues left over from the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war. The accord clears the way for normalization of diplomatic and economic relations among the three countries and for Bangladesh's membership in the United Nations, which until now has been vetoed by China at Pakistan's behest.

Under the terms of the agreement worked out by Foreign Ministers Kamal Hossein of Bangladesh, Swaran Singh of India and Aziz Ahmed of Pakistan, Bangladesh agreed "as an act of clemency" to drop its plans to try 195 Pakistani prisoners for war crimes. The prisoners will now be returned to Pakistan, along with the remaining 6,500 of the 90,000 P.O.W.s captured during the war and held since then in camps in India. That repatriation, begun last August, is expected to be completed by the end of the month.

Bangladesh's decision to abandon the war-crimes trials was a major concession. But it had been more or less expected after Prime Minister Zulfikar

Ali Bhutto announced that Pakistan would recognize its breakaway eastern wing at the Lahore summit meeting of Moslem leaders in February. More surprising was Pakistan's formal acknowledgment in the agreement that the prisoners had, in Bangladesh's words, committed "war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide." The Pakistan government "condemned and deeply regretted any crimes that may have been committed."

Best Forgotten. The New Delhi accord was less precise in dealing with the fate of the 500,000 Biharis (non-Bengali Moslems) in Bangladesh. Many of the Biharis—so called because they emigrated from the Indian state of Bihar at the time of the 1947 partition—sided with the Pakistani military during the war, and for that reason face a painful future if they stay in Bangladesh. Most of them live in fear and squalor in huge refugee camps outside Dacca and other cities.

So far, Pakistan has returned about 110,000 Bengalis who were trapped in the western half of the country at the start of the war and has accepted or given entry clearance to 140,000 Biharis. Under the agreement, it pledged to accept all those who formerly lived in West Pakistan, ex-employees of the Pakistan government and members of divided families. Pakistan also pledged to review applications previously denied. That probably means that the number of Biharis accepted by Pakistan will not substantially exceed 140,000. Pakistan is reluctant to accept more for fear that they will aggravate unemployment.

In a magnanimous gesture, Pakistan's Foreign Minister Ahmed gave chief credit for bringing an end to a "painful chapter" in South Asia's history to Bangladesh's Prime Minister Sheik Mujibur Rahman. Later in the week, Mujib flew into New Delhi for a brief visit after two weeks of medical treatment in Moscow. Added Swaran Singh: "The trials, tribulations and conflicts of our subcontinent will become a thing of the past—something of a bad dream that is best forgotten."

TIME Magazine :Monday, Apr. 22, 1974