Trial and Error, Hope and Despair: Bangladesh Under Zia and Ershad, 1975–1990

Abstract

While Bangladesh under Mujib was chaotic, corrupt and a poverty-stricken “international basket case,” post-Mujib Bangladesh has witnessed a lot of ups and downs, down to the 50th year of its independence. This chapter elucidates the trial and error Bangladesh went under two generals, Zia and Ershad, during 1975–1990. While seemingly, Bangladesh was a failing state, “an international basket case” up to the mid-1970s, people at home and abroad noticed some improvements in the overall situation of the country. By the 1980s, the country was no longer a basket case or among the poorest in the world. The five-and-a-half years under Ziaur Rahman (1975–1981) signalled the departure from Mujib’s corrupt and inefficient dictatorship in the name of socialism for Bangladesh. The country under Zia was relatively less corrupt and more efficient than it was under Mujib. By de-nationalizing industries and financial institutions—which Mujib nationalized in the name of socialism—Zia introduced a market economy and accelerated agricultural and industrial growth. He pioneered a number of innovative projects, such as grow more food, establish garment factories and send millions of unskilled workers to the Middle East to earn foreign currency for Bangladesh. In other words, he turned the country into a viable entity. General Ershad, who took over the country through a military coup in March 1982, ran a corrupt and degenerated regime for nine years until his overthrow in December 1990. Nevertheless, during the nine years of autocracy, he—more or less—followed Zia’s economic policy and turned Bangladesh into a major exporter of readymade garments, and an important source of cheap expatriate workers in the Middle East, Singapore and Malaysia. In short, one needs to understand the fifteen years of trial and error under Zia and Ershad to find out what went right and what went wrong in Bangladesh since its emergence in 1971. A comparative appraisal of the Zia and Ershad regimes provides the answer to the question, of “development before democracy” or “democracy is development” for Bangladesh and other least developed countries and middle-income countries in the world. So, Zia marked a departure from Mujib’s haphazard state capitalism—which he and his “respected” economists sold as socialism—and saved Bangladesh from the Kissingeresque basket syndrome. Sadly, however, rural/peasant patron-client politics that promote factional tensions, conspiracies, mutual hatred and jealousy have again taken control of the polity.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

—Aristotle, Poetics, ch. 24, cited in Angela Partington (ed), The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Oxford University Press, New York 1996, p. 25

Mass politics occurs when large numbers of people engage in political activity outside of the procedures and rules instituted by a society to govern political action. Mass politics in a democratic society, therefore, is anti-democratic, since it contravenes the constitutional order …. Bureaucracy poses the strongest threat to social pluralism and liberal democracy.

—William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society, Third Edition, The Free Press, New York 1963