Urban poor

Amer Ahmed

Published in the Daily Star (26 September 2007)

With its runaway growth over the past few decades, Dhaka has become a 12 million citizen strong mega-city and the center of Bangladesh’s political and economic life. Unfortunately, the city’s leadership has failed to establish a comprehensive strategy for dealing with this rapid urbanisation and urban poverty. Its failure in the former has continued to systematically exacerbate the latter, to what may soon become a breaking point.

The politics of fear

Tazreena Sajjad

Published in New Age (18 September 2007) 

Today, as a nation, are we afraid? The response is a resounding ‘yes’… Our fears reflect the concerns of our own physical safety and our desperate attempts not to lose the status quo that gives us protection. We fear death, torture, being disappeared, being silenced. We fear the loss of hope. These fears accentuate our powerlessness, and in their extreme form can lead to the erosion of any form of social solidarity,

Let’s go to the videotape

Jyoti Rahman

Published in the Forum (September 2007)

In its recently-released annual economic report for Bangladesh, the IMF notes that “the destructive political rivalry of the past three decades, together with weak accountability and rule of law, has squandered a good portion of available resources” and “Bangladesh needs political stability to restore investor confidence.” As general principles, one cannot argue with these statements. But quite often, these sentiments morph into a denouncement of political governments and an endorsement of prolonged rule by unelected technocratic regimes.

The argument that “democracy is not conducive to economic development” and “a period of disciplined rule is needed” has been doing the rounds among the chattering classes for a while now

The rise, the fall, and the future of student politics

Rumi Ahmed

Published in the Forum (September 2007)

It was the weeks after the 1991 cyclone that ravaged coastal Bangladesh. Although international relief had just started pouring in, there was an intense demand for oral re-hydration salt (ORS) and ready-made dry food in the flood-affected areas.

This prompted the student union leaders of Chittagong Medical College to organise a mass ORS-making project. A group of students first started making ORS on a row of tables at the student union office and, within a day, the line of students willing to volunteer became so long that the project capacity had to be increased 10-fold, and oral saline packet production ran non-stop 24 hours a day.

As the news spread through the town,