With two-thirds of its work force in
the rural sector, Bangladesh’s agriculture contributes just 19 percent
to its GDP. Sixty-six percent of exports are from the garment industry
that makes it the third largest clothes exporting country in the world.
It is perhaps the cheapest and most profitable place for garment
manufacturers. However, the conditions of the workers, mainly women, are
atrocious.
With two-thirds of its work force in
the rural sector, Bangladesh’s agriculture contributes just 19 percent
to its GDP. Sixty-six percent of exports are from the garment industry
that makes it the third largest clothes exporting country in the world.
It is perhaps the cheapest and most profitable place for garment
manufacturers. However, the conditions of the workers, mainly women, are
atrocious.
Textile workers. Photo: jankieOne
of these workers told a visiting journalist, “Among girls in
Bangladesh’s textile industry, it is thought that those who can enter
prostitution are the privileged ones.” They are forced into an existence
of drudgery, extremely low wages, sexual abuse and domestic violence.
Yet, they are the most militant section of the proletariat. At least 500
garment workers died in the last five years due to gruesome fires in
factories with shoddy wiring, locked gates and highly inflammable
content. Most workers have to sleep on shop floors to go on working
every waking hour, sometimes for a month at a stretch. The average wage
is $36 a month, which does not suffice for two meals. These overwrought
and mercilessly exploited workers work in factories that make garments
for major clothing brands. Some of the main US brands having their
apparel made in Bangladesh are Tommy Hilfiger, Nike, Adidas, Puma and
Ralph Lauren.
In one of these parent supply companies, a labour activist was
recently abducted, tortured and murdered by the ‘law enforcement’
agencies. An abrupt wildcat strike shut 200 garment factories in Dhaka.
Although the strike ended on May 14, it exposed the brutalities being
inflicted on these workers. It is not only the garment workers that are
facing these miserable conditions; the vast majority of rural and urban
workers are condemned to similar oppression. The physical and social
infrastructure is in shambles. This is reflected in the fact that the
labour productivity of Bangladesh is 30 percent that of Sri Lanka.
The impoverishment in the rural areas has intensified. The scandals
around Grameen Bank exposed the creepy realities of microeconomic
finance and philanthropy. Peasants trying to escape the crumbling rural
economy face even greater coercion in the cities. A World Bank report
estimated that nearly half of Dhaka’s population of more than 12 million
lives in filthy slums. Official statistics put the figure of absolute
poverty at 40 percent. One in ten children is in child labour, which is
not illegal in Bangladesh. More than two million minor girls are
domestic workers in Dhaka and Chittagong alone. One in 15 children die
before they reach five; 250,000 babies die every year in their first
month; 48.6 percent of children have a stunted growth. According to the
BBC, 50 percent of children do not even make it to school. Of those who
can afford primary education, only one in five makes it to secondary
school, but only one in 25 of the secondary level enters higher
education. More than 10,000 children are victims of child trafficking
every year. The situation in the health sector is no less harrowing.
The two mainstream parties, Awami League and Bangladesh Nationalist
Party represent the main sections of the Bangladeshi bourgeoisie.
Parliamentary democracy is weak, fragile and blatantly corrupt. In fact,
all the governments in Bangladesh over the last three decades
implemented trickle-down policies of the World Bank and the IMF, further
aggravating mass misery. There have been several bloody military coups.
Behind this facade of democracy, the shadows of the military’s might
lurk.
National unity is a deception, with Bengalis residing across the
border in Indian West Bengal. The agrarian revolution is far from
complete. Secularism is in name as social norms, morality and ethics are
dominated by obscurantist Islamic tendencies. The historical task of
creating a modern industrialised state has remained dismally unresolved,
with an uneven and combined pattern of socioeconomic development
exacerbating the contradictions in society. This is a country that has
gained independence not once but twice in the last six decades. First,
it was the partition in 1947, with a grotesque cleavage of Bengal in the
name of religion, orchestrated by the imperialist masters in connivance
with their native toadies nurtured by the British colonisers. The first
revolts and daring against the imperial rule originated here. The
hanging of freedom fighters Khudiram Bose and Kanailal Dutta in the
Alipore Conspiracy Case in Calcutta in 1908 was the beginning of the
liberation movement against the Raj. The next independence in December
1971 was from the West Pakistani colonisers who continued the
imperialist exploitative system and the national oppression of the
Bengalis. Almost three million Bengalis were massacred, over 200, 000
women raped by the Pakistan army and local religious bigots of the
Jamaat-i-Islami.
Revolutionary upheaval on a class basis had erupted in both East and
West Pakistan in 1968. The state was hanging in midair as a
revolutionary wave swept across the country. Power was there to be
seized. Lack of a revolutionary leadership prepared and determined to
carry out a socialist revolution, necessary for a victorious class
struggle, led to the derailing of the movement onto nationalist lines.
Even then, as military aggression was being defeated, in liberated
areas, people’s soviets, with JSD, communists and left nationalists in
the leadership, were taking control. A new order was coming into being
that threatened the whole system. Fear of the revolution spreading to
West Bengal and beyond persuaded the Indian army to enter East Bengal.
The defeated Pakistani army was salvaged for another occasion by its
supposed foe and transported to prisons in India to subsequently return
home. The Indian and Pakistan elites were and are terrified of a
revolutionary transformation. War was waged to divert it. The US seventh
fleet anchored with marines on board in the Bay of Bengal to intervene
in case the Indian army failed to crush the burgeoning revolt. The
bourgeois nationalist government based in Calcutta was installed under
Indian patronage. Capitalism was saved. People continued to suffer its
exploitation and repression.
The plight of the masses in Bangladesh 42 years after the second
independence is excruciating. The Bengali ruling class has failed to
solve any of the burning issues ravaging society. Society is on the
verge of volcanic eruptions. If successful, this revolutionary storm
shall vanquish capitalist slavery throughout South Asia.
The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and
International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can
be reached at
ptudc@hotmail.com
[This article was originally published in the Pakistani Daily Times]
