It is not necessary to go too much into the pre-colonial or colonial history. Generally speaking, the Mughals had established Dhaka as the Bengal Empire’s capital as it was well-positioned in terms of defensive capabilities. Later this was moved to Murshidabad by an eccentric prince and eventually to Calcutta. Within the colonial history, the British destroyed the Bengal textile industry by disrupting its production process (including cutting off the thumbs of weavers, according to some sources) but also by flooding the market with cheaper British machine-woven textiles. Following the partition, Bangladesh went through a second period of colonization by Pakistan where again its resources were extracted and it acted as a dumping ground for products. Added to this was the fact that jute was the primary export of Bangladesh but jute mills had been concentrated in Calcutta, and Pakistan had no intention of developing the “East Pakistan” infrastructure so Bangladesh ended up exporting raw jute to Calcutta, losing a lot of its added value, and despite jute mills being built in East Bengal eventually, the demand for jute eventually crashed due to the production of cheaper synthetic material.
Thus we find Bangladesh post-independence in 1971 after the West Pakistani occupiers of a lot of the economy had been chased away. The first leader went on the path of nationalization and socialism but this led to problems in the economy (e.g. unaffordable fixed prices in society and huge deficits from dilapidated and backwards infrastructure), and he was assassinated and replaced by two military regimes, Ziaur “Zia” Rahman (1977-1981 when he was assassinated and replaced by an interim leader), and Hussain Ershad (1983-1990). During this time, the Bangladeshi government sold the nationalized industries to rural landowners and other power brokers at far below cost in order to create legitimacy and appease World Bank and IMF structural adjustment policies with work in Bangladesh constantly undermined by powerful landowners that deprive the majority of resources.
Within Dhaka, however, the Keynesian import substitution industrialization policy was abandoned for an export-driven economy, and with the “Multi-Fiber Agreement” governing textiles from 1974-1994 that allowed developed countries to have protectionism in the garment industry, Bangladesh leveraged its status as a Least Developed Country to bypass quotas. Apparently, the first big move into the market was a partnership with South Korea’s Daewoo, which was able to circumvent textile quotas via production in Bangladesh. Thus, the textile industry grew substantially with demand from East Asia until China undercut Bangladeshi pricing in the early 2000s. The industry grew from a first wave of speculators in the 1970s to a group of spin-off entrepreneurs in 1980s who learned from working in the first wave, and then in 1990 with the textile industry well-established, an increasing number of entrepreneurs with no experience, such as doctors, engineers, academics, politicians, etc. bought into a burgeoning industry that has in many ways held up the Bangladeshi economy and begun to change the demographic due to the rapid increase in female workers.
Since the end of the military regime in 1990, the “democracy” is a duopoly that is in many ways similar to the United States (and India), yet it practices a sort of “illiberal democracy” in that the opposition party tends to spend their time outside of parliament rallying supporters to protest on the streets. The patron-client network is similar to India where the informal bosti settlements are considered as vote banks and work within a power hierarchy of external political leaders connected to parliament, who hire internal local leaders to work within the community, who themselves have their mastaani strongmen to bully individuals in order to implement the “organized encroachment of the powerful” on any sort of public space or resources. There is also the mosques that have their own type of power. As with India, promises are made around election time for vote-buying and some small things are implemented but then once the election is over they are ignored. Moreover, if a local leader is affiliated to the losing (opposition) party, then they essentially have no power because the bosti community will bypass them to a representative of the party in power so that things can get done. Within the bostis, there is a landowning class that rents out rooms and maintains a fixed income from rents, justifying this by “needing time to attend to duties in the community”, as those barely surviving on small incomes and incurring deficits and debts to loan sharks have little time for political involvement. All land aside from small public spaces (that are slowly encroached on) have private claims made on them even though a lot of the land is supposedly public (informality for patronage). Thus, when NGOs try to install tube wells, toilets, or other “public infrastructure”, they must be built on claimed land and are eventually clawed into the private network of some owner or patron somewhere.
The status and place of women in Bangladesh is extremely interesting because under purdah there is supposed to gender segregation, women are supposed to be domesticated to men and are traditionally there for reproductive labour. The rise of the garment industry, which employs 80% women, has changed this in some ways. It implies that women making some income get a more equitable share of decision making at home and because of long hours, often the men have to take part in domestic work. Yet as Quayyum notes, the garment factories reflect “the home under capitalism” with women constantly harassed and expected to kowtow to the will of the company and male overseers, noting with a nod to critical race theory that worker devaluation is greatest when work can be gendered and racialized. Typically, poor and illiterate women join the garment industry out of desperation, meaning they are easier to manipulate and also live under a cloud of shame (especially from the rural areas) that they must labour rather than be confined to domestic labour under the care of a husband. The empowerment of women as workers with agency is a touchstone of potential insurgency for NGOs and workers’ collectives, and it is suggested that because they are used to being docile, they tend to gain consciousness as workers through the creation of communal relations with other women with similar experiences. This gives rise to “group culture rather than individualization”.
The garment industry is under constant tension between keeping prices low and ensuring worker safety. Because industry leaders are well-connected to politicians, this is difficult. In addition, logistical costs are high because of bottlenecks, corruption, and poor infrastructure at Chittagong port as well as the need to import much (as much as 80%) of the raw materials needed for the industry because cash crops like cotton tend not to be grown locally. These issues, along with blackouts and load-shedding increase lead-times for potential buyers and reduce competitiveness of the garment industry.
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