A few years ago, I met with an activist environmental lawyer from Bangladesh. Syeda Rizwana Hasan was the first one from Bangladesh that I met since my graduate school days.
Always excited to meet with accomplished people from my old part of the world, I talked with her about her work. And then I asked her a lot about Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
In 1970, when Bangladesh was still East Pakistan, "Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, won a landslide victory in national elections. The Pakistani leadership was reluctant to accept the results because it did not want an East Pakistani political party heading the federal government."
West Pakistan, now Pakistan, was the center of all the economic, commercial, and military power. The West Pakistan government and its people couldn't care about the Bengali-speaking fellow-citizens who were thousands of miles away, separated by India. The last thing they wanted to grant was autonomy to the Bengali-speaking Pakistanis.
As the demand for Bengali autonomy grew, the Pakistani government launched Operation Searchlight,“ a military operation to crush the emerging movement. According to journalist Robert Payne, it killed at least 7,000 Bengali civilians – both Hindus and Muslims – in a single night.
On March 26, Bangladesh was declared independent and the liberation war began.
The US, mad with its supremacy and in a Cold War against the USSR, sided with West Pakistan's leaders and military. As we review history, I wonder how many times we ever sided with the good guys!
When refugees started spilling over to India in the millions, India's prime minister, Indira Gandhi, decided to employ the military against the West Pakistani forces in East Pakistan. In less than two weeks, the West Pakistani forces surrendered. India's military chief, S.H.F.J. Manekshaw, became a household name. We kids thought he was the greatest ever!
In no time at all, the Nixonian realpolitik Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, labeled Bangladesh as a "basket case."
Nick Kristof writes about how much Bangladesh has developed over the 50 years, and how we in the US can learn from it.
Life expectancy in Bangladesh is 72 years. That’s longer than in quite a few places in the United States, including in 10 counties in Mississippi. Bangladesh may have once epitomized hopelessness, but it now has much to teach the world about how to engineer progress.
Kristof continues:
Bangladesh invested in its most underutilized assets — its poor, with a focus on the most marginalized and least productive, because that’s where the highest returns would be. And the same could be true in America. We’re not going to squeeze much more productivity out of our billionaires, but we as a country will benefit hugely if we can help the one in seven American children who don’t even graduate from high school.
That’s what Biden’s attack on child poverty may be able to do, and why its central element, a refundable child tax credit, should be made permanent. Bangladesh reminds us that investing in marginalized children isn’t just about compassion, but about helping a nation soar.
I wonder what Kissinger has to say about Bangladesh now. But then, who cares for Kissinger, right?
With women like Syeda Rizwana Hasan, Bangladesh is now well on its way to even surge past India.
Well, it has.
A few months ago, the IMF reported that Bangladesh had moved ahead of India in terms of per capita income. Boy did that cause quite some issues for the Modi-toadies who believe in the superiority of Hindus!
We all can learn a lot from the 50-year old Bangladesh success story.
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