These days Yusuf, alias Sohel, must be the most unlucky person in the country. He was born to a poor family in a remote village in the South of Bangladesh. His father died while he was only a child. The poor lad hardly attended any school; had to spend his childhood lending his small hands for harvesting. The tiny patch of land where his ancestors grew paddy was washed down by the local river as it changed its course inward towards the village. His mother took him, along with his two younger brothers, to Dhaka. There she worked in a construction site, breaking bricks. Sohel became a street hawker selling ice-cream bars. The family finally returned back to the village, this time that of his maternal parents. Sohel eventually got married; but that did not last for long. Unable to get a job he left for Dubai as a migrant worker.
Upon his return Sohel lost all his savings to a swindler. No money, no job and no family. The only thing that remained for him was a dream; a dream of becoming a rich man one day. What he desired for was perhaps a decent life; a life simple and as good as of a common Bengali. Rich is relative.
Sohel planned carefully. He rented a room beside a Bank in a mofussil (provincial) town. For long eighteen months he shovelled a tunnel through the floor under his own bed, across a narrow ally, right into the Bank. It was hard work; he toiled mostly during the daytime while buzz in the streets was at maximum. Mounds of soil he had to remove. One Friday night he felt a gentle breeze touching his fist; fist that he pushed through a hole. Sohel came crawling out of his tunnel and he found himself standing in the middle of the vault of the Bank. He truly became a Bank-heist and his plans had come true.
But the plans come true was only half-way through; nightmare was to follow. Sohel, together with his younger brother Idris, thrust the money in five full size sacks, sacks made of jute; it took hours. Dawn broke, the two brothers walked down the local rice bazaar. There they had their morning breakfast in a wretched tea-stall, tired but happy. And then they purchased sacks of rice, 230 altogether, loaded them in a truck. Inside that mammoth heap they concealed the ‘real’ sacks, ones jammed with the precious paper notes. They then put a red banner at the top of the truck, it read: Heading Towards Atroshi Darbar; Atroshi being the shrine of a local spiritual master.
The sacks ended up in a dark damp room in downtown Dhaka. Five of them remained there, 222 headed off for Atroshi in a covered van, a second vehicle rented for this purpose. Two days later the two brothers got arrested. They were charged with theft; stealing an amount of 16 crore taka. The number 16 crore surprisingly coincided with the population of the country; one taka per person.
Tagore once had written with agony, ‘Bengalis are able to start but never can finish.’ That very fate struck Sohel. Sohel and Co. was not prepared for this huge catch. They had meticulously planned how to get to the money, how to get it out of the Bank; but knew less what to do thereafter. That fate of not being able to finish haunts Bengalis time and again.
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Economic disparity between the two wings of Pakistan gave Bangabandhu’s Awami League a landslide victory in the 1970’s election. Equipped with that popular mandate Bengalis won independence through armed struggle. The constitution of this country promised economic equity; equity was one of the four pillars of the nationhood. What does the current scorecard reveal?
Let’s list down some positive achievements. During the last two decades Bangladesh has excelled in a number of health and education indicators, along with gender equality. The growth rate of the economy jumped from 4.6% to 5.6% on average. Poverty dropped from about 50% of the population to 30%, starting from the year 2000.
But what story does the big-picture scenario tell us? During the late 1960s, economy of Bangladesh (the then East Pakistan) was often compared to that of Iran, Indonesia and Turkey; Korea and Malaysia as well; at least in terms of its potentials. But Bangladesh never ‘took-off’ (following Rostow’s popular Stages of Development thesis) as opposed to the mentioned nations. What is less discussed is that in income growth, Bangladesh — over a period of 40 years — compares dis-favourably even to its neighbours; India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal. The income gap between the first three of these countries and Bangladesh has increased. The gap between Bangladesh and Nepal has narrowed in favour of Nepal. This has happened notwithstanding the fact that some of the countries of comparison have experienced considerable and prolonged disruption through civil war, dysfunctional governance and so on. (Prof. M.A. Taslim has written about this.)
The following table will reveal further. It compares Bangladesh with its four neighbouring countries in the region with respect to income and the Human Development Index, HDI (a composite index comprising critical components of well-being). Two types of income are considered; one at the official exchange rate (Ex Rt) and the other at the purchasing power parity (PPP) dollar rate. What comes out is not that all pleasant: Bangladesh is at the bottom of the table. (The data for PPP are from World Bank, Ex Rt from United Nations and HDI from UNDP; all data are up-to-date.)
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What finally about the equity, one that was promised to us in the preamble of our constitution, one that is a cornerstone of our nationhood?
Bangladesh had an approving level of income inequality in the 1970s and 1980s, a Gini coefficient between 0.32 and 0.36; lower than many other countries in Asia. (Lower the number more equal is the distribution; the range is between 0 and 1.) It started to increase sharply during the 1990s and seems to have settled around a staggering 0.46. Bangladesh now is a country with high degree of income inequality. The share of the top 10% of the population has increased substantially, from 0.28 in the 1980s to 0.36 in 2010 and the share of the bottom 20% has decreased (from 0.07 to 0.05). The income level of the middle income strata has also decreased. This implies that income has accumulated relatively more at the hands of the top rich.
This only is income; if compounded with wealth the rich strata of the society almost certainly would command a still greater chunk of nation’s opulence; bigger than one expressed through income quintiles. The poor have lost the race. The preamble of the constitution, economic justice, is violated.
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Recently the country’s economy has suffered from a series of scams and scandals of unprecedented scale; the share market scam, the Hallmark-Sonali Bank loan scandal, Destiny Group scandal and still more. These involved embezzlement in a scale of billions, causing a devastating impact on countless households, mostly belonging to middle class. Justice for these scams is yet to be done.
And in this backdrop comes the story of Sohel. This reminds me of a cynical but insightful phrase in a story of one of the greatest Bengali writers of our time, Buddhadeb Basu ‘In our day-to-day life either you have to cheat others or others cheat you. And when the act of cheating is neat, it becomes noble. Petty thieves get behind the bars, big ones are decorated. If you do it with elegance, not only is cheating excused, it becomes a virtue. Men possessing enough of this virtue, rule the world.’ The Story of Birupokkho Deb.
There is little scope of misunderstanding here. I do not know whether there is any hidden conspiracy behind the Bank theft story; no question arises of supporting act of this kind by any means. Theft has no excuse. I first saw Sohel on TV screen when he was being dragged by a group of law-enforcement folks. Watching him at that state it was hard to imagine that this very person dug a 30 metre long tunnel only a few days ago. He supposedly was put in custody and now could hardly stand on his own feet. This however is a familiar but disgraceful scene in a country where the ‘rule of law’ supposedly reigns.
What, on the other hand, I do is to fully back the dream that Sohel held. Dream for a decent life of a young man; a right firmly guaranteed in the nation’s constitution.
Source: Bd news24
