About ten years ago, the popular narrative about Bangladesh changed from the world's 'basket case' – a land of harsh Malthusian circumstances – to an awakening Bengal tiger, an exemplary, if cautionary, tale about development in globalising times. It was an unlikely trajectory. The first half of the 1970s had Bangladeshis facing what must have felt like a cosmic effort at annihilation: one of the deadliest tropical cyclones in history and a genocidal war that resulted in mass murders, rapes, and creation of refugees in their uncounted millions, destroying livelihoods, infrastructure, markets and institutions. They also endured floods and a major famine. All of this was before the human tragedy and political crisis of 1975 that gave rise to a decade and a half of military rule.
Yet only a quarter century later Bangladesh was spoken of as a modest success. It got children, particularly girls, into school; brought down fertility rates; invented micro-credit; tackled natural disasters; took effective immunization, diarrhoea and TB programmes 'to scale'. The landscape was transformed with women going to work in the export garment factories, public service or NGOs, or just going about their business – remarkable in a conservative, agrarian society. Jeffrey D Sachs lauded these achievements in his book The End of Poverty: Economic Possiblities for Our Time, with a foreword by Bono, no less. Special issues of the Lancet dissected these achievements. Bangladeshis won the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to tackle poverty – which has not been without critics and 'discontents', as anthropologist Lamia Karim documents in her study of microfinance, the antipoverty technology for which the country is so well known.
We have a good understanding of what made this unexpected success possible, thanks to the work on 'political settlement' by Mushtaq Khan at SOAS, London University, and also by Mirza M Hassan at BRAC University in Dhaka. In short, contending elites came to agree on a way of dividing the spoils of power that brought them broadly in line with what the aid world terms a 'pro-poor agenda'. They agreed – or did not disagree – on the terms of development projects that would bring stability and modest economic growth, while establishing institutions and policies that would protect and support people in their efforts to survive. The politics of this settlement, the question of why the elites came to such an agreement with so few obvious immediate benefits for themselves, requires us to turn away from the nationalist political history of elite bargains in high places. It means turning towards a more ecologically-centred understanding of the visceral politics of disaster and food crisis that dominated this period. In The Bengal Delta: Ecology, State and Social Change, 1980-1943, Iftekhar Iqbal argues that the environment is not "a fixed ecological bow from which the arrows of all kinds of history take flight" – that ecology, politics and society have been mutually formed in this unstable, fecund, hostile, riverine landscape. We are accustomed to thinking about the politics of Southasian nationhood as the politics of communalism and of class, a domain of elite power games and negotiated interests. The ecological drivers of history are lost to view when discourses of political economy are limited to the bargains struck around conference tables. They come into sight only when we consider how a series of disasters – cyclone (1970), war (1971), famine (1974) – shook lives in Bangladesh.
The political ramifications of the Bhola cyclone of 1970, and how these reverberated in the fallout of the 1974 famine, the last in independent Bangladesh, are key to this understanding. At a time when climate change and global economic turmoil highlight the country's exposure to external shocks, it is important to recognise the origins of Bangladesh's development success in the painful political lessons of these two historic crises.