Bangladesh in 2021
Bangladesh turns 50: Economy, Politics, International Relations
Bangladesh celebrated its 50th year in 2021, marking significant improvement in the lives of its citizens. However, the celebrations were muted by not just the ongoing pandemic but also increasing authoritarianism. The economy was hit hard by the pandemic, but a recovery appears to be underway. A resolution to the Rohingya refugee crisis remains elusive, and in the long run the country remains acutely vulnerable to climate change.
Bangladesh turned fifty on March 26, 2021, celebrating economic development that would have been unthinkable in the aftermath of the war with Pakistan in 1971 and the natural disasters of the early 1970s. Depending on the treatment of differences in price levels, the average Bangladeshi earns a similar amount or even more than their Indian and Pakistani neighbors. They also tend to live longer, and enjoy a higher standard of living as measured by various social indicators such as immunization rates for children or women in formal employment.
Celebrations of these achievements in 2021, however, were marred by the outbreak of the Delta variant of the COVID-19 pandemic in the middle of the year. Further, with dissent stifled, media censored, and the space for political activism curtailed, the country’s politics were still characterized by easing authoritarianism. That is, the trends noted in the previous year-end review in this journal—economic and social progress coupled with censorship and suppression of dissent, along with the looming climate crisis (Jalais 2021)—sharpened in 2021.
DELTA IN THE DELTA
As of mid-November, nearly 1.6 million COVID-19 cases had been confirmed in the country, over a million of which were recorded in 2021. The confirmed death toll of the pandemic stood at nearly 28,000, of which over 21,000 occurred in 2021. The Delta variant, which swept through the Indo-Gangetic delta in the middle of the year, was particularly virulent, leading to a sharp uptick in case and death numbers.
However, as with elsewhere in the developing world, and indeed in many parts of the developed world, these statistics probably underestimate the true extent of the tragedy. For example, according to the Economist (2021), the actual death toll in the Philippines and Thailand during the peak of the Delta outbreak might have been two to four times the official figures. Similar estimates may well hold for Bangladesh.
To combat the pandemic, the government had formally maintained a set of strict social distancing and other public health measures. Except a few days around the Muslim festivals of Eid-ul-Fitr (May) and Eid-ul-Adha (July), Bangladesh consistently scored over 80 in the Oxford Covid-19 Stringency Index—a composite measure from 0 to 100 (100 being the strictest) based on nine response indicators, including school and workplace and travel bans—in the year to August. However, other than school closures (some of the longest in the world), the formal lockdowns and other measures had, more often than not, been honored in the breech.
This is not surprising, as lockdowns severely test livelihoods, and the government cannot afford to pay people to stay at home. Further, concerted efforts by the government and NGOs notwithstanding, as of mid-November less than a fifth of the population had been vaccinated, less than in neighboring India and Pakistan.
Against that backdrop, a large study by Mushfiq Mobarak (of Yale) and colleagues offered hope. The researchers found that free masks and regular reminders of the benefits can significantly increase mask wearing, and surgical masks, in turn, reduce symptomatic infections (Abaluck et al. 2021). Based on the study, BRAC, a large Bangladeshi NGO, has started rolling out masks to 80 million people.
A RECOVERY OF SORTS
Bangladesh’s economy was already slowing, albeit from very high growth rates, in late 2019. As the world economy shut down in 2020, economic growth in financial year 2019-20 (the year ending June 30, 2020) came in at 3.5%—the slowest since the 1980s, though still faster than elsewhere in the region.
The full extent of the damage wrought by the Delta variant has yet to be ascertained, but the economy is likely to have grown by 4.5–5.5% in the 2020-21 financial year. The government expects a swift economic recovery from the pandemic. International financial institutions and private-sector forecasters are somewhat less upbeat, but around 7% growth is widely expected by 2023. To put that in context, annual growth averaged around 7.5% in the years before the pandemic.
The sharp slowdown in economic growth primarily reflected a steep decline in demand for the country’s readymade-garment products—Bangladesh being one of the largest producers in the world —during the initial months of the pandemic. A strong recovery in exports, and thus production, was in full swing by the winter of 2021. But the pace at which this rebound translates into incomes for the country’s working poor remained to be seen as of late 2021.
Remittances from the Gulf and elsewhere are a significant contributor to Bangladesh’s economy. At the beginning of the pandemic, there were widespread fears of a collapse in remittances to the developing world. Fortunately, and somewhat counterintuitively, remittances have held up across most of the world, including Bangladesh, cushioning households from the worst. Further, the country’s agriculture sector was largely unaffected by the pandemic, providing emergency support to many urban poor.
Nonetheless, the pandemic has increased poverty. In October 2019, the World Bank projected that 47.2% of Bangladeshis would be in poverty— defined as daily income of less than USD 3.20—in 2020-21, of which 11.7% were expected to be in extreme poverty, earning less than USD 1.90 a day. The latest estimates for 2020-21 have 48.9% of people in poverty, and 12.5% in extreme poverty. That translates into 2.8 million more poor people, of which 1.3 million are now in extreme poverty. The World Bank (2021) expects poverty rates to fall in 2021-22 as the economic recovery takes hold, to their 2018-19 levels. That is, even if the recovery plays out as expected, the pandemic will have cost the country three years in its fight against poverty.
More worryingly, higher food and energy prices in the international markets were adding to inflation concerns as the year ended. For example, citing high global oil prices, in November the government raised (the officially regulated) diesel prices, which has been percolating through the country’s transport and wholesale and retail trade sectors, and ultimately hitting household budgets.
CALM WATERS WITH TRICKY UNDERCURRENTS
“Politics is the price of rice,” goes an old saying in Bangladesh. However, as 2021 drew to a close, the incipient inflation, or indeed any other fallout from the pandemic, had not yet had a discernible political imprint. The government of Sheikh Hasina Wajed, elected by a landslide in a free election in 2008, and re-elected in 2013 and 2018 in elections that were marred by widespread rigging, irregularities, violence, and low voter turnout, remained firmly in control, turning ever more authoritarian. In line with the trend of the past decade, the regime continued to rely on draconian laws and a subservient judiciary to censor the media and deny political space to the opposition, and extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearance have been carried out by the state’s security agencies.
This is not to say that the regime had not faced any challenges. Early in the year, the Qatar-based news network Al Jazeera (2021) broadcast a program alleging serious corruption by the country’s army chief and his brothers, all of whom were personally very close to the prime minister. Throughout the year, there was a spate of scandals, financial as well as cases of rape and assault, involving high-profile oligarchs connected to the regime. However, the government and its supporters in general, and the prime minister in particular, would appear to have weathered the scandals unscathed.
But this is partly because any dissenting voice may face the most tragic of consequences. Take Mushtaq Ahmed as an example. Mr. Ahmed, a cartoonist, died in prison in February, after being held without trial for nine months for posting on Facebook criticizing the government’s handling of the pandemic (Human Rights Watch 2021). This incident, among others, led Reporters Without Borders (2021) to label the prime minister a “predator of press freedom.”
While draconian measures by the security agencies have stifled dissent, they could not stop several instances of violence. In October, mobs organized through social media attacked temples around the country during the Hindu festival of Durga Puja. (Hindus are the country’s largest religious minority, making up slightly less than a tenth of the population.) There were also violent clashes between several factions of the ruling Awami League during local government elections—most opposition candidates having been effectively marginalized.
The most serious violence, however, occurred in March and April, in the aftermath of the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Dhaka to mark the country’s 50th Independence Day. Mr. Modi’s visit was protested by many, including civil society personalities otherwise supportive of the regime, because of the Indian government’s treatment of Muslim and other minorities. However, it was the protests by Hefazat-e-Islam Bangladesh, a semi-political umbrella organization of orthodox Islamic seminarians and preachers, that turned the country’s golden jubilee celebrations into violent clashes across the country. The leadership of the orthodox group was arrested or otherwise interned, and the protests were soon called off. However, it was a stark reminder of the country’s complex political undercurrents, which are belied by a superficial stability.
OF DAMS AND BRIDGES
Developments in India presented the government with an unexpected, and more difficult, problem to navigate. In the lead-up to his re-election campaign for 2023, against the backdrop of the pandemic, Mr. Modi and his hard-right Hindu nationalist party have chosen to target Muslims in general, and alleged undocumented Bangladeshi migrants specifically, in several state elections, including in West Bengal and Assam, two Indian states on either side of Bangladesh. The anti-Muslim, and particularly anti-Bangladesh, rhetoric emanating from India makes for a bad look for the government in Dhaka. More importantly, there may be signs of a reassessment of foreign relations by Bangladesh.
Over the past decade, the Bangladeshi government had maintained a balance between improving political and security ties with India and retaining strong security, economic, and commercial relations with China. In the early 2000s, Indo–Bangla political and security relations were strained by the alleged support and sanctuary enjoyed by various Indian insurgents in Bangladeshi territory. Since 2009, the Bangladeshi government had cooperated with Indian agencies to shut down the alleged insurgency operations, and addressed other Indian security concerns. In addition, Bangladesh had allowed India to use its ports and transport network to carry goods to the latter’s isolated northeastern states—a request denied by all Bangladeshi governments before 2009.
There had been hope in Dhaka that these gestures would be reciprocated with a comprehensive water-sharing agreement between the two countries—an issue of grave concern for Bangladesh since before the country’s independence, when India started constructing dams upriver. The increasingly anti-Bangladesh rhetoric and strident Hindu nationalism of Mr. Modi, however, appear to have extinguished any hope of such a deal in the near future.
In the meantime, Bangladesh has continued to strengthen its already deep security, commercial, and economic ties with China. China has been Bangladesh’s largest arms supplier and trading partner for decades, and has assisted with several bridge and other infrastructure projects since the 1980s. Further investments are promised under the rubric of the Belt and Road Initiative. In addition, allegedly with encouragement from China, there are signs of an improving relationship between Pakistan and Bangladesh (Hasan and Ahmed 2021). Against the backdrop of increasing Sino–American strategic rivalry, Bangladesh’s geopolitical importance is also being reassessed in Western capitals (Mohan 2021).
That said, one should not overstate any tilt toward China in Dhaka. For example, Hasan and Ruud (2020) argue that Bangladesh is likely to continue to keep trying to balance between global and regional superpowers as it grapples with two significant challenges. In the near term, the country remains host to a million-plus Rohingya refugees from Myanmar. With that country descending into civil strife after the military coup earlier in 2021, any near-term resolution of the Rohingya issue appears unlikely. More ominously, factional violence among the Rohingya leadership in Bangladesh became a cause for concern this year.
Meanwhile, climate change remained the other issue of grave concern for Bangladesh. The country participated actively at the Glasgow climate summit, but it is one of the most vulnerable countries, and the impending climate crisis will dominate its foreign policy into the future.
Addendum, December 31, 2021
On December 10, the US government imposed sanctions against the Rapid Action Battalion—Bangladesh’s elite law enforcement agency—and seven of its current and former officials, accusing them of involvement in hundreds of enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings since 2009. The sanctions mean the agency will not be allowed to engage in any financial transactions with a US individual or legal entity. Further, the seven individuals, including the current police chief, Benazir Ahmed, are barred from entering the United States. Against the backdrop of big power rivalry in the region, and ahead of the elections scheduled for 2023 (the regime used its security agencies to rig the previous election, in 2018), the sanctions could have far-reaching implications.
REFERENCES
Abaluck, J., et al. 2021. “The Impact of Community Masking on COVID-19: A Cluster-Randomized Trial in Bangladesh.” Working paper, Innovations for Poverty Action.
Al Jazeera, 2021. “All the Prime Minister’s Men.” Al Jazeera Investigations.
Economist. 2021. “Tracking Covid-19 Excess Death across Countries.”
Hasan, M., and Z. S. Ahmed. 2021. “Mango Diplomacy Is More than Low-Hanging Fruit in South Asian Politics.”
Lowy Interpreter, August 13, . Hasan, M., and E. Ruud. 2020. “Bangladesh’s Balancing Act between Great Powers.” Lowy Interpreter, October 9, .
Human Rights Watch. 2021. “Bangladesh: Writer Dies after Nine Months in Custody,” February 26.
Jalais, A. 2021. “Bangladesh in 2020: Debating Social Distancing, Digital Money, and Climate Change Migration.” Asian Survey 61(1): 194–201.
Mohan, C. R. 2021. “50 Years after Independence, Bangladesh Bursts into Geopolitics.” Foreign Policy, April 10.
Reporters Without Borders. 2021. “Predator: Sheikh Hasina.”
World Bank. 2021. Shifting Gears: South Asia Economic Focus, Fall 2021, .
This piece was published in the Asian Survey on 9 February. Any reference must fully cite the publication. I am indebted to Dr Jalais, Dr Haque, and Dr Hasan.