[🇧🇩] Mujib and his rule from 1972-1975

[Saif]

Date of Event: Jan 19, 2025 Source : https://www.thedailystar.net/business/news/govts-become-illegitimate-when-people-suffer-hunger-3802381

'Govts become illegitimate when people suffer from hunger'
says Naomi Hossain on her book that focuses on 1974-famine

The 1974 famine in Bangladesh, which caused the death of 15 lakh people, taught policymakers that governments become illegitimate when people suffer from hunger, said Naomi Hossain, a professor in the Department of Development Studies at SOAS University, London.

Since then, Bangladesh has become a site for numerous foreign aid experiments, she said at the launch of her book "The Aid Lab: Understanding Bangladesh's Unexpected Success" in Dhaka today.

The University Press Limited (UPL) organized the event at The Bookworm in Dhaka.

Naomi, a Bangladeshi-Irish academic who has lived in Bangladesh, Indonesia, the UK, and the US, said her book focuses on the 1974 famine.

Unfortunately, there are not many films or books on this period of extreme food scarcity, even though it caused the deaths of 15 lakh people, she said.

"This is because the elites do not talk about it—they survived, while the poor died," she said.

However, the famine led to significant policy changes, and since then, the government has ensured food security for its citizens, she added.

Asif M. Shahan, an associate professor in the Department of Development Studies at the University of Dhaka, said that the memory of the famine continues to haunt policymakers.

As a result, they recognize that they must prioritize food security to gain public support, maintain legitimacy, and stay in power.

However, he added that, in an ideal situation, democracy and voting should also be equally important for ensuring legitimacy.

Afsan Chowdhury, a researcher and writer, and Navine Murshid, a professor in the Department of Political Science at Colgate University, also spoke at the launch event.​

 

[Saif]

Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League - Banglapedia

en.banglapedia.org

Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League

Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League (BAKSAL) the only legally recognised party of Bangladesh founded on 7 June 1975 following the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of Bangladesh. Under the Fourth Amendment (Article 117A), bangabandhu sheikh mujibur rahman was entrusted with the responsibility of forming a new 'national party' which would try to tackle the social, political and economic destabilisation consequent upon the war of liberation on the one hand, and on the other, reconstruct the nation from the debris of the war. Thus authorised, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman formed a national party which he named Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League. The rules of BAKSAL required all other parties and associations including various services and forces to join the national party and work unitedly in fighting corrosive forces and in rebuilding the nation. Elaborating on the various aspects, scopes and prospects of BAKSAL, Sheikh Mujib characterised it as a 'second revolution'.

In seeking national unity, the Fourth Amendment provided that no person could continue to remain a member of Jatiya Sangsad unless he joined the national party before a time fixed by the President. BAKSAL, the new national party, was scheduled to replace officially the nation's other political organisations and associations on 1 September 1975. Many restrictive regulations coming from the BAKSAL included the promulgation of the Newspaper Ordinance (June 1975) under which the declarations of all but four state owned newspapers were annulled.

Organisationally, President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the BAKSAL chairman, appointed for the national party a fifteen-member executive committee, a 115-member central committee, and five front organisations, namely, Jatiya Krishak League, Jatiya Sramik League, Jatiya Mahila League, Jatiya Juba League and Jatiya Chhatra League. All members of the executive committee were to enjoy the status of ministers. BAKSAL was also designed to overhaul the administrative system of the country in order to make it people-oriented. Reforming the elitist bureaucracy was one major aim of the party. The reorganised bureaucracy under the new system was to stand on two pillars, the central committee at the national level and the administrative council at the district level. Every existing sub-division was to be turned into a district headed by an elected governor.

The administrative council would comprise the members of the Jatiya Sangsad of the district, BAKSAL representatives, and district officials belonging to civil, police and security forces. The governor would be the chief executive of the district with deputy commissioner as his secretary. Such a scheme of local government was a complete departure from the colonial and post-colonial systems that Bangladesh had inherited. It was felt that the district governor system would destroy the vestiges of the exploitative colonial bureaucracy and bring the administration closer to the people and make independence politically and economically meaningful to them. BAKSAL also envisaged large scale nationalisation of private concerns with a view to eliminating social and economic inequalities and exploitations.

In short, BAKSAL, as a system, aimed at achieving an exploitation-free and socialist economic and administrative order more or less close in spirit and contents to the systems of government in contemporary socialist countries.

The new system, in fact, created a lot of misgivings and revulsion amongst the bureaucracy, army, and the civil society. Many of the people who had supported Bangabandhu for his role as a democratic activist, were unhappy to see him as the champion of an authoritarian single party system. However, before the BAKSAL system was put to full operation, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was brutally killed (15 August 1975) with other members of his family at his residence. BAKSAL was neither abrogated nor operational until April 1979 when it was removed from the Constitution and a multi-party system reintroduced. [Sirajul Islam]​

 

[Saif]

HC questions fourth amendment to constitution

The High Court on Tuesday raised questions over the legality of the fourth amendment to the constitution, enacted on January 25, 1975, during the presidency of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

www.newagebd.net

HC questions fourth amendment to constitution
Staff Correspondent 20 November, 2024, 04:33

The High Court on Tuesday raised questions over the legality of the fourth amendment to the constitution, enacted on January 25, 1975, during the presidency of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

This controversial amendment abolished the parliamentary system, ushering in a presidential form of governance and institutionalising one-party rule under the Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League (BAKSAL), effectively ending multi-party democracy.

The High Court bench of Justice Farah Mahbub and Justice Debasish Roy Chowdhury issued a rule asking the government to explain why the amendment should not be declared unconstitutional.

The court’s directive followed a writ petition filed by freedom fighter Mofazzal Hossain on October 23.

Lawyer ASM Shahriar Kabir, representing the petitioner, argued that the amendment fundamentally altered the democratic principles enshrined in the original constitution framed in 1972.

The cabinet secretary, principal secretary to the chief adviser’s office and the law ministry secretary have been directed to respond to the rule.​

 

[Saif]

The lessons of the 1974 famine

People did not talk about the famine because it was deemed acutely politically ‘sensitive’. Sheikh Hasina did not look kindly on the inglorious topic

en.prothomalo.com

The lessons of the 1974 famine
Naomi Hossain
Published: 13 Dec 2024, 13: 32

It is difficult to learn lessons from a catastrophe nobody talks about. There are no films, few novels, and bar Amartya Sen’s famous essay, precious little scholarship about an event that killed 15 lakh of the world’s newest nation, two per cent of the population of the time. Shilpacharya Zainul Abedin was famed for his charcoal sketch series of the 1943-44 famine, at a time East Bengal was still under the yoke of the British Empire. But of the 1974 famine, I have only found one sketch. Its composition and subject, a prone starving figure that closely resembles one of his 1943 drawings, serves as his sole commentary on the catastrophe that benighted so recently-liberated Bangladesh.

Nobody talks about the 1974 famine, yet it was the turning point for Bangladesh. After 1974, the state changed: some part of it, somehow, put protecting people against the crises of ecology and subsistence – of cyclones and starvation – first; it did what was needed to stop the repeated cycles of disaster. The famine was one of the several reasons Bangladesh opened up to markets and donors and civil society organisations. It started to invest in its people. Gradually, it stabilised and began to grow. Perhaps this would have happened without such a disaster, but in the origins of the policies and the politics of the time, we can trace the effects of the famine in the motives and actions of those with power.

There are many reasons people might wish to forget the horror of famine. Fifteen lakh people, two per cent of the Bangladeshi people, died. Sit with that figure for a moment. Nothing since has ever been even remotely as disastrous for Bangladeshis. Watch the video footage available on YouTube. Once you have seen them, the scenes of hundreds of thousands of people waiting listlessly, starving, for help from a government that had no cash, food, authority, or international goodwill, will never leave you. It was horrific, yet it happened only three years after Bangladeshis of all classes had come together in a glorious struggle for freedom from neo-colonial rule.

For many years, people did not talk about the famine because it was deemed acutely politically ‘sensitive’; the long and increasingly oppressive regime of Sheikh Hasina did not look kindly on the inglorious topic, not that there was much chance to raise it. The public academic discussions that took place 50 years after independence passed swiftly over the years following liberation, with the famine rarely receiving the mention it is due. Publishers were reluctant to take on the subject.

The sensitivities were both obvious and hidden. Sheikh Mujib’s Awami League government was evidently to blame: governments are always culpable for disasters on their watch, even if, as was the case in 1974, they had very little choice about their response. Nothing absolves the failure, but it is notable that the 1974 famine stands out by virtue of being governed by a regime with powerful incentives to prevent it. Haile Selassie famously refused UNICEF assistance for starving Ethiopians in 1973 because famine reportage was too embarrassing. Mao’s government pushed through with its Great Leap reforms even while tens of millions of peasants starved. The imperial powers that presided over the Late Victorian Holocausts of Mike Davis’ famous work were unabashed in their genocidal projects of hunger across the global South.

Sheikh Mujib, by contrast, went begging for assistance at the UN. He knew the famine was the end for his legitimacy. The famine was among the factors behind the Awami League’s unpopularity – that among the anger about corruption, the brutality of the Rakkhi Bahini, the arrogance of the leadership and the loss of civil liberties, the famine may help explain the lack of public mourning when the Mujib family was so brutally murdered. This makes it more sensitive still.

There are also hidden sensitivities about the class politics. ‘They died’, one friend who is old enough to remember told me, ‘because we lived’. He meant that whatever food aid came into the country went to urban or middle class people, government servants and others seen as essential to the functioning of the state. The rural landless poor, the group hit hardest by the floods, were to receive whatever was left over. Even people with middle incomes struggled in those days, but they did not die in their thousands.

Of the pain and suffering of the people who did die in their thousands, we know little; the horrors of that time remain largely unrecorded by those who bore their brunt. Those old enough to remember will now be in their seventies.

There are good reasons to look away from this disaster, but an even stronger case for reflecting on its lessons. Bangladesh’s remarkable move from a Malthusian ‘basket case’ into a reasonably inclusive development success story owes much to the lessons of the 1974 famine. Informed commentators now regularly alight on the fast fashion industry and on innovative social organisations to explain why Bangladesh is soon to graduate from the ranks of the Least Developed Countries. They forget that fifty years ago, Bangladeshis were dying in their hundreds of thousands of hunger and its associated syndromes, having barely survived a series of ecological and man-made shocks to the foundations of their livelihoods and societies, with no prospect of an end in sight. Before they could grow, Bangladeshis had to survive.

This is one of the lessons of 1974 that the recent-past Awami League regime might itself have put into practice against the galloping inflation since 2022. If your people are hungry, your days in power are numbered.

The causes of the 1974 famine are many, but drawing from among others the definitive account, Mohiuddin Alamgir’s Famine in South Asia, and Rehman Sobhan’s Politics of Food and Famine, four big explanations suffice. Severe flooding destroyed crops and markets for wage labour. Inflation was high as a result of the OPEC oil price crisis, speculation, smuggling and localized shortages. Food aid was used for budget support and public sector wages, with little going to famine relief. And international humanitarian assistance failed, because the US withheld food aid for a year on grounds that Bangladesh had been trading with the Communist state of Cuba.

The causes may be clear enough, but what were its effects? There is no doubt it contributed to the broader discontent and disillusion with the Awami League regime, and must be factored into the political violence and military takeovers that followed. It was the context in which the government yielded to international donor pressure to devalue the currency and reorient its economy towards markets. It also ushered in a different approach to food security, with more openness in the grain markets but also more targeted support to the neediest. The Bangladeshi state has tended to monitor food security closely since, and its policies have been pragmatic rather than ideological. Social relations also changed: the famine marked a break with the old paternalist moral economy, reconfiguring people, notably women, as citizens of the nation-state, and opening space for innovative social actors like BRAC, Gono Shasthya Kendra and the Grameen Bank to emerge. Naila Kabeer’s new book, Renegotiating Patriarchy, tells the story of the social transformation that occurred over this period.

It is half a century since the famine and perhaps this moment of political and therefore economic transition is the time for a new generation to learn its lessons. For analysts of governance and the politics of development, the lessons include that even the most challenging circumstances can be tackled if the incentives to cooperate are existential. The Bangladesh state was oriented to tackle its most urgent priorities, and these priorities were protected against political interference over the long-term, across all kinds of government.

There are clear and significant lessons here for the existential threat posed by climate change, and the politics of how it might be addressed. The famine also taught policy elites and social innovators of the need to focus on the most vulnerable and powerless, particularly women, without assuming family or society would look after them. It is fashionable now to be critical of Bangladesh’s NGOs and civil society, but they undoubtedly helped in their modest way to push public policy towards a more inclusive approach to development from below.

Above all, the famine showed the high political cost of crises to people’s basic subsistence: no legitimate government could preside over a grave deterioration in living standards for a prolonged period. This is one of the lessons of 1974 that the recent-past Awami League regime might itself have put into practice against the galloping inflation since 2022. If your people are hungry, your days in power are numbered.

* Naomi Hossain, Professor of Development Studies, SOAS University of London​