Bangladesh

After nearly seventy years, it appears that India and Bangladesh may at last resolve their border issues, a legacy of the partition of India in 1947. Following the failed effort of the previous Indian government to ratify a Land Boundary Agreement negotiated with the government of Bangladesh, announced in 2011 but never passed by the Indian parliament, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has voiced his support. As I argue in the Indian Express this week, what may appear to be a local, low-profile regional development actually has significant impact for India and its role in the world. The border itself—see the map below—is an astoundingly complicated matter. It isn’t an issue of positioning a line here and there, but rather a Queen Anne’s lace of extraterritorial islands on either side. In an excellent scholarly study of the border, Willem van Schendel offers the details of how this border came to be, and the impact on citizens living in these islands of territory, known as “enclaves,” on both sides. Schematic map of the Cooch Behar enclaves on the border of India and Bangladesh. The top of the map points to the east. Yellow dots represent small enclaves of India surrounded by Bangladesh, while green dots represent small enclaves of Bangladesh surrounded by India. Photo by Jeroen licensed under Creative Commons BY 3.0. India and Bangladesh first attempted to resolve the border in 1974, shortly after Bangladesh’s separation from Pakistan and emergence as an independent country. Modifying the border requires constitutional amendments in both countries to bring a bilateral boundary agreement into effect. The Bangladeshi parliament passed the Land Boundary Agreement in November 1974, but the companion bill on the Indian side never made it through. India’s previous government, the Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance, placed a high priority on strengthening relations with Bangladesh, and worked to revive the Land Boundary Agreement among other initiatives. During then-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Bangladesh in 2011, resolution of the border was hailed as historic progress. As in 1974, once again the necessary legislation was not able to make it through the Indian parliament in order to ratify the agreement. Among the objecting parties were the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Trinamool Congress, and the Asom Gana Parishad. Since this constitutional amendment requires a two-thirds vote in parliament, the previous Indian government simply never mustered enough votes for it to pass. So it’s good news that Mr. Modi has decided to move ahead with Bangladesh. He’s rising above partisanship and advancing legislation that his own party rejected a year ago. To read more about why resolving this border at long last will matter greatly for India, take a look here. Follow me on Twitter: @AyresAlyssa

Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center released the second of two major reports detailing findings from a global public opinion survey on economic issues conducted last spring in forty-four countries. Read together, the two reports reveal something you might not have guessed: Bangladesh is among the countries most supportive of the free market, and certainly the most free-market, trade-oriented country surveyed in South Asia. At least as far as public opinion is concerned, the People’s Republic of Bangladesh is a capitalist haven. First, the data. The spring 2014 survey asked a variety of questions about the benefits or losses from trade, beliefs about inequality, optimism or pessimism about the future, and support for a free market. A report released last month focused on beliefs about trade, and this month’s looked at inequality as well as beliefs about capitalism and the market. Across all forty-four countries surveyed, Bangladesh emerged as the world’s second most supportive of a free market economy. Eighty percent of those surveyed expressed support. Vietnam was the only country with higher levels of support, with 95 percent of respondents supportive. The next three countries most supportive of the free market were South Korea, China, and Ghana. Source: Pew Research Center, October 2014, “Emerging and Developing Economies Much More Optimistic than Rich Countries about the Future.” In addition, in comparison to the two other South Asian countries included in the survey—India and Pakistan—Bangladesh once again exhibited higher levels of approval for trade and foreign investment. Public opinion in Bangladesh greatly favors open trade, believes trade creates jobs and leads to better wages, and sees foreign investment as a net positive. We hear much more about India’s post-reforms tiger economy, but Bangladeshis are eight percentage points more supportive of the free market than India (72 percent) and eighteen percentage points more supportive than Pakistan (62 percent). When asked for views on growing trade, 91 percent of Bangladeshis surveyed responded that it was either "very good" or "somewhat good," compared to 76 percent of Indians answering in the same way. Bangladeshi public opinion also much more broadly believes trade creates jobs and leads to higher wages in comparison with public opinion in India and Pakistan. The question on which Indian responses exceeded Bangladeshi responses focused on optimism for a better life at home, with 78 percent of Indians surveyed stating that they would recommend staying in India (instead of going abroad for work) for a better life, and 71 percent of Bangladeshis surveyed recommending the same. Source: Pew Research Center, September 2014, “Faith and Skepticism about Trade, Foreign Investment” and Pew Research Center, October 2014, “Emerging and Developing Economies Much More Optimistic than Rich Countries about the Future” For those who follow South Asia these findings make sense. The Bangladeshi economy has benefited greatly over the last two decades from an export-oriented push at the entry level of the manufacturing space—garments. Bangladesh is now the world’s number two garment exporter, just after China. As I have written previously, despite known problems with workplace safety and labor rights in this sector, its more than 5,000 factories employ some four million Bangladeshis, mainly women, and the sector has significantly boosted Bangladesh’s economy. The garment sector is export-oriented, supplying some $20 billion in exports to the world. That Bangladeshis see trade and the free market system in a very positive light, despite the “People’s Republic” of the country’s official name, makes a great deal of sense given the positive impact Bangladesh has seen from trade and the free market. It’s a good news story about globalization that the world often misses. For further reading, see: Pew Research Center, “Faith and Skepticism about Trade, Foreign Investment” and Pew Research Center, “Emerging and Developing Economies Much More Optimistic than Rich Countries about the Future.” Top photo credit: Dhaka, April 2014. Photo by Sharada Prasad CS licensed under CC BY 2.0.  Follow me on Twitter: @AyresAlyssa

Amelia M. Wolf is a research associate in the Center for Preventive Action and the International Institutions and Global Governance Program at the Council on Foreign Relations. During the frenzy of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, thirty-one countries met on September 26 for a summit on “Strengthening International Peace Operations,” during which the importance of expanding the participation of women in peacekeeping operations was the theme. To reverse the imbalance, the UN launched an initiative to recruit more female police officers in August 2009, with the goal of women comprising 20 percent of police by 2014. However, between 2009 and today, women involvement in police increased by a mere 2.5 percent—from 7.3 to 9.8 percent. And shockingly, recruitment for involvement of women in military forces has been even less successful as women comprise a mere 3.2 percent of military forces, down from 4.9 percent in 2009. This isn’t to say the recruitment of women to uniformed positions has been a complete failure. Three all-female police units have served in peacekeeping missions. India deployed a unit to Liberia in 2007, and Bangladesh deployed a unit to Haiti in 2010 and one to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 2011.  In the civilian sector of peacekeeping operations, gender diversification has been progressive, with women now making up 30 percent of personnel. However, much progress has yet to be made. Women make up less than 4 percent of uniformed peacekeeping operation personnel—approximately 3.2 percent of the 84,743 military forces and 9.8 percent of the 11,465 police. The role of women in peacekeeping operations is vital, not only because they contribute to the same extent as men, but they are more suitable to carry certain essential tasks. This includes interviewing and working with victims of sexual and gender-based violence, relating to and working with child soldiers, and assisting female ex-combatants with demobilization and reintegration into civilian life, for example. In her latest book, Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention, Severine Autesserre found that the lack of female peacekeepers in the DRC—making up just 2.26 percent of peacekeeping troops, primarily in administrative and medical positions—diminished the capacity of agencies on the ground to respond to sexual abuse. “The mass rapes that took place in August 2010 in Luvungi illustrate the negative effect of the lack of female soldiers among the peacekepeers,” Autesserre wrote. According to a UN investigation, one reason local populations did not alert UN peacekeepers patrolling the area during the three-day assault was because the women could not find any female peacekeepers with whom they would be comfortable to raise the issue of sexual abuse. Gender balance can have other benefits such as improved situational awareness, reduction of uncertainty in operation plans, increased acceptance of a UN force by local communities, and the prevention of unintentional negative consequences of operations. These consequences could include the temporary and unsustainable stimulation of the local economy, fueling of resentment for minority populations by including them in political processes they might not otherwise have been a part of, or increasing corruption resulting from the influx of aid and assistance without adequate legal bodies in place. Awareness of gender components of conflict can also increase the effectiveness of the mission. “Attention to both men’s and women’s distinct experiences in conflicts reveals comprehensive information on the area of operation, including the identifies of local power brokers; division of labor; access to resources; kinship and patronage networks; and community security threats, risks, interests, and needs,” according to the International Peace Institute. In essence, peacekeeping units with a balanced gender component can better understand drivers of conflict or peacebuilding mechanisms, and therefore, are greater enabled to uphold their mandate of keeping the peace. In peacekeeping units, a primary challenge to the recruitment and retention of women is the existing gender imbalance and the male-dominated culture that is deeply engrained, leading women—particularly in small numbers—to be ostracized or discriminated against. “Gender mainstreaming”—a strategy for promoting gender equality by “ensuring that gender perspectives and attention to the goal of gender equality are central” to all UN activities—has been criticized for being vague and does not propose any suggestions for shifting the fundamental gender norms already present, but instead suggests that women should fit into existing frameworks. “On a daily basis, these attitudes regularly interfered with the UN mandated work off promoting women’s rights and responding to sexual violence,” wrote Autesserre. One way to shift culture within peacekeeping units is to ensure that units are mixed-gender rather than having women be largely outnumbered—as is the case for most police and military units—or having only one woman. This has been found to increase cohesiveness of the unit. While all-female units would have to be integrated into mixed-gender units to achieve the UN’s goal of “gender mainstreaming,” they are a step toward increasing the number of women so that they are a “critical mass” within units and would therefore have greater power to break conventional gender barriers. These include integrating women into senior decisionmaking positions and increasing recruitment by publicizing the experiences of women currently in military and police peacekeeping units to make the idea more mainstream. These efforts should be targeted to educators, professional associations, and students, as younger populations tend to make up a large percentage of forces. For example, the average age of a Chinese unit in Haiti and a Irish unit in Syria was twenty-eight-years-old. Although the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations can increase the recruitment and retention of women, member states control whether women are integrated into their peacekeeping unit contributions. Bangladesh and India are the second and third largest contributors of uniformed personnel to UN peacekeeping operations, behind only Pakistan, and are the two countries that have made the integration of women a priority, suggesting they are feasible targets for increased recruitment and retention efforts.  Though the United States currently contributes only 117 personnel to peacekeeping operations, it is by far the largest donor providing more than 28 percent of funding. Given that Bangladesh is the third largest recipient of U.S. assistance in Asia—understandable behind only Afghanistan and Pakistan—the United States has the ability to pressure and support Bangladesh to increase the role of women in its peacekeeping contributions. The United States potentially holds similar leverage with India as one of the country’s largest trade and investment partners. The United States would not face much opposition from either country, particularly given that both countries already have all-female units. But why would it be in the interest of the United States to add another item to its bilateral agendas with India and Bangladesh? First, the United States strongly advocates for, and should therefore uphold, UN Security Council Resolution 1325, which calls for incorporating “a gender perspective into peacekeeping operations.”  Second, this effort would reflect and give weight to similar initiatives to integrate women into the U.S. military. Lastly, in the long term, supporting the inclusion of women could have positive implications for U.S. peace and security engagements abroad if the documented benefits of the full integration of women into peacekeeping operations come to fruition.

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to participate in an excellent conference focused on Bangladesh, its development, and its garment industry hosted by Harvard University. The organizers did a tremendous job convening the many diverse stakeholders on this issue—the Bangladeshi garment exporters associations, representatives from the Bangladeshi and U.S. governments, representatives from major buyers and retailers, fashion industry associations, labor rights advocates, the International Labor Organization (ILO), and scholars examining developments in global retail and labor. The background to the gathering, obviously, was last year’s tragic collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka on April 24, 2013, which killed more than 1,100 and left more than 2,500 injured. In the aftermath of Rana Plaza, many feared that global brands and retailers—primarily in the European Union and the United States—would shift their orders away from Bangladesh, thus potentially disrupting the source of livelihood for some four million workers, primarily women. In the year since, there has been intensive negotiation and consultation among governments, international organizations, and the private sector in the United States, European Union, and Bangladesh, resulting in agreements that provide better oversight, governance, and compliance on workplace safety and labor matters. Between the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, and the EU-ILO-Bangladesh Global Sustainability Compact (which the United States endorsed in July 2013), there is now more significant focus on factory safety conditions, including structural integrity and fire safety protections, than ever in the past. Bangladesh’s garment industry is huge, the world’s second-largest garment exporter after only China, and as the Economist Intelligence Unit report, “Garment shift,” commented recently, Bangladesh’s scale is “nearly on par with total combined capacity of its main competitors in Southeast Asia.” It has nearly 5,000 factories producing exports valued around $20 billion (2013). Fixing its problems with factory and labor conditions thus has represented an effort of historic scale. And over the past year, there has been positive change. Bangladesh has made progress with a new labor law, higher minimum wage, and one hundred fifty-plus new labor unions registered. The ILO and International Finance Corporation have launched the largest Better Work program in history. Inspections of factories supplying members of the Accord and the Alliance are well underway, with remediation taking place to get buildings up to international standards. Factories found to have irremediably unsafe conditions have been shut down. Still, with such a large industry, much work remains. As the U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh noted in his remarks at the conference, Bangladesh still needs to complete hiring and training the two hundred building inspectors they committed to employ; all the buildings housing factories need to be inspected and brought to safe standards; reports of those inspections should be made public per the Compact; and harassment and intimidation of labor unions and activists should stop. Bangladesh can get this done, but it needs to keep pushing ahead. From my perspective, the surprise has been how well Bangladesh has weathered this difficult storm so far. No one knew how the global garment industry would respond after Rana Plaza—perhaps by diversifying their sourcing slightly, or greatly? Would Bangladesh’s workplace conditions present just too much risk until fully remediated? Back in January, admittedly on the heels of a violent political season that saw road traffic shut down for days on end, it seemed that Bangladeshi garment exporters were facing tougher times. Press reports detailed exports “losing steam,” with growth at 7.1 percent in January, “less than a quarter of the year-on-year growth recorded in November.” People worried that the hartals (street strikes), higher wages, and company interest in hedging supply chains was causing a turning away from Bangladesh. The latest data show that has not transpired. Looking at the latest export statistics shows only a slight drop, with textile and apparel exports to the United States falling only 0.56 percent to $1.77 billion (US Commerce data, year over year). The latest data from Bangladesh show 14 percent growth for the industry overall in the July 2013-May 2014 period. The Bangladesh Garment Buying House Association has reported that orders from “compliant” factories are rising 15-20 percent. And the U.S. Fashion Industry Association just released a survey of brands and retailers detailing that 76.9 percent of those surveyed currently source from Bangladesh, with 60 percent anticipating that they will “somewhat increase” from Bangladesh in the “next two years.” With the Accord, Alliance, Compact, Better Work program, and such focused attention to needed improvements in Bangladesh’s workplace, the systems are in place to preserve the gains the country has made over the years through the garment industry. It now depends on all parties seeing this through at the scale needed to transform the industry. Follow me on Twitter: @AyresAlyssa

One year ago today, April 24, the world watched with horror as a concrete building known as “Rana Plaza” cracked, buckled, and ultimately collapsed atop the garment workers inside its factories. It would turn out to be the worst accident in the garment industry anywhere. More than 1,100 people were killed, and 2,500 injured. I wrote this week that Bangladesh must move fast to preserve the garment sector’s successes. It may seem strange to focus on this industry’s successes when recalling such a tragedy. Yet the garment industry has been signally important to Bangladesh’s economic well-being, providing nearly 80 percent of the country’s overall exports and employing some four million people. The industry’s workforce is primarily women, and empowering them has been positive for Bangladesh as well. But basic factory safety must be met, otherwise retailers and brands will look to less risky places to source their garments. The Rana Plaza tragedy spurred the government of Bangladesh, workers, factory owners, associations, international buyers, international organizations, and the United States and European Union (EU) to mount public-private partnerships suited to addressing the scale of Bangladesh’s garment industry challenge. This will not be easy. Bangladesh is now the world’s number two garment exporter, second only to China, and it has nearly six thousand factories manufacturing for export. Given the many pieces of this issue, I thought it could be helpful to provide a guide to primary sources of information to supplement my op-ed. In 2013, Bangladesh passed labor law amendments (in Bengali; International Labor Organization comment in English here) which most importantly strengthened workers’ right to freedom of association and collective bargaining. This law made it possible for Bangladesh to at last become part of an International Labor Organization-International Finance Corporation (ILO-IFC) program called Better Work. Better Work provides in-depth assessment and advice to individual factories. The Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers Export Association is the most important association coordinating ready-made garment (RMG) exports from Bangladesh. It tracks data from its members, such as the size and growth of the industry over the last three decades, and the composition of RMG exports as a total of Bangladesh’s overall exports. In the wake of the tragedy, European and American retailers and brands came together to form organizations focused on ensuring quality, intensive inspection and remediation of problems in the factories they source from. The Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety involves Europe’s largest retailers and brands, and some American brands, along with the ILO. The Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, which grew out of an initiative led by retired senators George Mitchell and Olympia Snowe, under the auspices of the Bipartisan Policy Center, involves twenty-six American and Canadian brands. The tragedy led to a decision in Washington by President Obama to suspend trade preferences to Bangladesh under the Generalized System of Preferences, known as GSP. An action plan charts out steps Bangladesh can take to requalify for GSP. Since last July, the entire GSP program has been held in abeyance since the U.S. Congress has not reauthorized it. In July 2013, a meeting in Geneva resulted in an EU-ILO-Government of Bangladesh Sustainability Compact, which focuses on “continuous improvements in labor rights and factory safety.” The United States issued a statement later that month associating the U.S. government with the compact, and releasing the GSP action plan. The ILO also created a compensation fund, the Rana Plaza Donors Trust Fund, for victims of the tragedy. The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee has paid particular attention to the policy implications of Bangladesh’s garment sector and its workplace safety and labor issues. A report prepared by majority staff was released in November 2013. BRAC USA announced a new fund to support victims of the Rana Plaza and other garment industry accidents in Bangladesh. The fund is named the Bangladesh Humanitarian Fund. At New York University, the Stern School’s Center for Business and Human Rights released a report, “Business as Usual is Not an Option” focused on what should be done in the post-Rana Plaza world of global supply chains. Follow me on Twitter: @AyresAlyssa

I’ve been an optimist about Bangladesh for some time now—its national development miracle, amazing social entrepreneurs, strong civil society and women-led microfinance, 160 million-strong brand of moderate Islam, and consistent economic growth. Just a few years ago Goldman Sachs put this hardworking, against-all-odds country on their list of Asia’s “Next 11” ready for takeoff. But after Sunday’s election—and I write this with a heavy heart—I’m deeply worried. I’ve blogged previously about Bangladesh’s divisive politics, and the great costs its political woes present for its growth and development trajectory. Sunday’s national election gives everyone a lot more to fret about. First, on the nuts and bolts of politics, mediation efforts over the course of the past year, including those of the UN’s experienced diplomat and Assistant Secretary General Oscar Fernandez-Taranco, to reach agreement on an election process between the Awami League and the Bangladesh National Party (BNP), did not succeed in time to affect the January 5 election. Politics is about compromise and tradeoffs, and both sides refused to do either. Second, the end result was a most peculiar national election since the BNP boycotted the process, calling it a “fraud,” and called a series of general strikes and transportation blockades, including on election day. Of the assembly’s 300 generally elected seats (an additional 50 are reserved for women nominated by their parties), only 147 seats were contested. And voters did not exactly overwhelm the polling stations: According to the Daily Star, voter turnout “dipped from the highest of 87 percent just five years ago to around 30 percent.” The Bangladesh Election Commission has put the turnout figure at 40 percent. Of course, the strikes and transportation blockades called by the BNP and its allies, specifically to prevent voting, made it difficult and in some cases dangerous to trudge out to polling stations—so it’s not clear whether the poor turnout figures reflect sheer apathy, voter rejection of the election, or fear. While Sheikh Hasina can rightly say that her party has been returned to power, it has been under circumstances which damage the credibility of the election itself, as noted by the U.S. Department of State’s January 6 statement. But by the same token, an opposition party which not only boycotts an election but seeks to prevent citizens from voting isn’t furthering a democratic process at all. There are no winners here. Third, the descent into violence is an ominous development for Bangladesh. Indeed, the Daily Star called January 5 the “bloodiest election in Bangladesh” and throughout the run up to the date, there were reports of buses or trains and polling stations set ablaze and an election official hacked to death, said to be the work of BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami workers. Reports of the government using force, arbitrary detention, and indiscriminate firing surfaced as well. This has two immediate effects. Between the recurrent hartals and blockades which sacrificed seventy-one working days throughout 2013, there’s economic damage to contend with. Bangladesh, the world’s number two ready-made garment exporter, should be concerned that international brands and retailers will look to places without the risks of their orders being trapped in a transportation blockade. The other fear that this phase of escalated violence raises is the potential loss of Bangladesh’s well-deserved reputation as a moderate majority-Muslim country that has made great progress in tackling terrorism, and which has created its own inspirational path of progress and human development. In recent years Bangladesh has come to symbolize the progress that can be achieved through good development policy choices. It would be a great pity to see the investments made by (and in) the people of Bangladesh come unraveled. Sheikh Hasina has said she is willing to hold fresh elections if the opposition ends violence. Another election would certainly be a better outcome than the other possibility often mentioned: the army stepping in to disrupt a total law and order breakdown. A country born in blood, and which braved violence to realize the meaning of democracy in 1971, deserves better.

If I were to describe a country that has achieved around 6 percent economic growth for much of the last decade, has the eighth largest population in the world, has delivered maternal and child health improvements on a scale comparable to the great Meiji restoration of 19th century Japan, is the world’s second largest exporter of ready-made garments after only China, and has achieved a 94 percent infant immunization rate, what place would come to mind? As much as it pains me to write this, I don’t believe the average Western reader would blurt out “Bangladesh, of course” after hearing that roster of accomplishments, as true as they are. Yet Bangladesh has most often captured Western headlines over the past year due to catastrophic workplace safety disasters, most saliently the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka in April of this year, resulting in the deaths of more than a thousand workers and injury to many more. The Rana Plaza disaster resulted in an outpouring of fresh American and European attention to workplace conditions in Bangladesh, and rightly so: the major Western retailers as well as major clothing and footwear brands all have huge stakes in sourcing goods from the country. But in the past couple months, the news has been all politics and protests. The protests are about elections. Bangladesh needs to hold national elections no later than January 2014 as required by the constitution, and the main opposition party, the Bangladesh National Party (BNP), has been in a standoff with the ruling Awami League government over how the elections should be held. Without getting too arcane, the main point of dispute is whether elections should be held under the auspices of a caretaker government (the BNP’s demand), or whether they should be held under an “all party” government and overseen by the Bangladesh Election Commission. Analysts describe the BNP demand for a caretaker government as driven by the deep chasm of distrust between the two parties; BNP leaders simply do not believe that, even with appropriate international monitors observing every phase, a free and fair election can take place without a caretaker unbeholden to the ruling Awami League at the helm. So the BNP leadership has been adamant that they will settle for nothing other than a caretaker. The Awami League government has offered to negotiate, and the BNP has said it is ready to talk, but direct talks between the two heads of both parties did not go very well, as a published phone transcript illustrated in October. Meanwhile, the government has announced elections for January 5, 2014, an all-party government is now in place, and the BNP as well as the smaller Jatiya Party have both declared that they will not participate, which would undermine the goal of a free and fair election. For reasons that have never been clear to me as an outside observer, Bangladesh has a particular form of street protest known as the “hartal,” or “strike,” that involves shutting down all economic activity and can include street violence. The United Nations Development Program conducted a study of the costs of hartals in 2005, and estimated losses at approximately 0.3 percent of GDP per day. (In years with extended hartals of 28 days, that amounted to 9.5 percent of GDP lost). In an editorial earlier this year, Bangladesh’s textile industry publication estimated their sector’s losses due to hartals as $20 million per day. In mid-November, a garment industry article noted that road blockages have forced exporters to ship via air freight, thirteen times more expensive than sea freight, and causing international buyers to lose confidence in Bangladesh as a reliable supplier. The Dhaka Chamber of Commerce and Industry estimated overall economic losses across all sectors due to hartal as around $200 million per day. It is difficult to assess how many days this year have been lost to hartals, but to cite just one example, April 2013 had only four working days. Today is the fifth day of the latest BNP-led nationwide hartal, and we have seen firebomb attacks, beatings, and a bus set ablaze in Dhaka. Today the BNP and their allies extended their hartal “until its non-party caretaker demand is met.” Violence has resulted in deaths, critical burns, and many other injuries. This violence must be condemned. It has no place in a democracy, does not advance any democratic agenda, and hurts all Bangladeshis. Provocations by the Jama’at-e-Islami’s student wing, Shibir, have upped the ante, with the use of “crude bombs,” vandalism of vehicles, and other violence. The UN, EU, India, and the United States have all stated publicly their concerns about the ongoing violence. India, which has much at stake in ensuring a peaceful, democratic neighbor to the east, dispatched Foreign Secretary Sujatha Singh to Dhaka, where she met with all major parties today. So it’s a pity that even amidst days, weeks, and months of recurrent hartals, and with the best wishes of partners around the world, Bangladesh’s politicians remain poles apart. Violence like the past several weeks’ dominates how the world sees Bangladesh and its possibilities. It also undermines the vision of Bangladesh as a “Frontier Five” Asian tiger, as a 2007 report from JP Morgan assessed. Parties should hold protests peacefully, without impeding commerce, and get to the negotiating table. Anything else undercuts the great developments gains Bangladeshis have achieved, and will hurt their future prospects as well.

Two seemingly unrelated items caught my eye this week: one, the release of the new Legatum Prosperity Index, and the other, the release in Bangladesh of a transcript detailing an important and much-anticipated phone conversation between the prime minister and the leader of the opposition. The Prosperity Index, like any index, pulls a number of metrics together to create a ranking system; in Legatum’s description, they include factors like “wealth, economic growth, and quality of life.” This year’s index resulted in Bangladesh surpassing India in the rankings for the first time, as Quartz’s Heather Timmons noted. Legatum devotes a whole page to analysis of this unexpected ranking, especially given Bangladesh’s much lower GNI per capita (about half of India’s in purchasing power parity). According to the more detailed notes from the Prosperity Index, Bangladesh rose five places in the rankings due to better safety and security—a result of “a fall of grievances between different social groups and a decrease in state violence.” Bangladesh also moved up eighteen notches on governance, due to “a fall in perceptions of corruption and an increase in government stability.” India’s ranking this year reflected drops in personal freedom, safety, and security, according to Legatum, the result of “a drop in the tolerance of immigrants and drop in civic choice variables” along with “an increase in property being stolen, assault rates, group grievances, and drop in the perception of feeling safe walking home alone at night.” While Bangladesh faces many challenges, it has done a lot of things right on the development front, and the impact of those policy choices show up in this ranking. (I will return at a later date to a related topic—why Bangladesh has done so much better than Pakistan on development—as that deserves more focus). Which brings me back to that phone conversation transcript. The Bangladesh government, led by the Awami League, has been in a protracted months-long standoff with the opposition Bangladesh National Party (BNP) over how national elections should be conducted: under the supervision of a caretaker government (which the opposition demands) or without a caretaker government (Bangladesh has an Election Commission, and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has proposed an “all-party” government in lieu of a caretaker). There has been no resolution of this question, increasingly urgent given the constitutional requirement for elections to take place by January 2014. For months many have held out hope that only through direct dialogue between Sheikh Hasina and the leader of the opposition, Begum Khaleda Zia, herself a former prime minister, could a path to an agreement be reached. And earlier this week the prime minister at last spoke directly with Begum Zia. The thirty-seven minute conversation was supposed to inaugurate dialogue in the search for a solution to this crisis, one that has resulted in increasingly violent street protests. And yet the transcript reveals a conversation unable to move forward. I can’t help but reflect that the very factors which helped buoy Bangladesh to an increased sense of prosperity, at least according to the Legatum metric, are those now under threat: grievances between different social groups, state violence, and government stability foremost among them. Continued inability to resolve this question matters not only for the immediate fact of the actual elections, but for government stability, for governance, and for maintaining the terrific development progress Bangladesh has attained.