https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17245/bangladesh-despair-presumption
Sheikh Mujib, as everyone called him, sent a battered Studebaker, vintage 1951, to fetch me to his home. This was a fairly modest villa by most standards, but at that moment looked like an oasis of tranquility and, because of a garden full of flowers, even of beauty. After endless cups of tea and half a dozen delicious but unidentifiable sweets, I concluded that far from being a troublemaker, Sheikh Mujib was a fantasist, for he spoke of his people’s desire to assume control of their destiny which meant splitting Pakistan.
The energy that Mujib generated was truly amazing. The masses of the “walking skeletons” that I had seen were suddenly transformed into sizzling balls of fire. Yet, I had a feeling that all that was going to end in tragedy. And it did. Mujib won a majority in the Pakistan-wide election but was refused the right to form the government for a united Pakistan. The Pakistani leadership decided on a crackdown, which included prison for Mujib and martial law in East Pakistan.
Like most “developing nations,” it is inflicted by corruption, mismanagement and injustice. But it is feeding its people and, having enjoyed growth rates of over 6 percent since 2005, its economy is now 40 percent larger than that of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. (It was 42 percent smaller before independence.) In fact, Bangladesh is one of only 20 “developing nations” in which all seven indices of human welfare, though still below the global average, are now positive.
“Don’t get emotionally involved!” This is one of the first lessons I was told to learn when, as a young reporter in the 1970s, I was sent to cover “events” in distant lands.
The euphemism covered wars, revolutions, ethnic-cleansing operations, famines, and in their less harmful version, military coups bringing jackboots with sunglasses to power. One of the first such “events” was the general election in what was then a united Pakistan. I arrived in Dhaka one early evening and was whisked to a hotel on the outskirts of the sprawling capital of what was then East Pakistan. After a brief shower, I came down to the lobby and asked for a taxi to take me to the city. My inquiry caused a sensation. I was told it was “perhaps inadvisable” to visit the city after sunset and that waiting until tomorrow was the best option.
In any case, hotel taxis didn’t operate after evening prayers. My verbal to-and-fro with hotel personnel was interrupted by a tall thin man who offered to give me a ride in his ramshackle rickshaw. That was good enough for me and we set out. As we approached the city, I felt as if I were being sucked into a different world. This was a scene of absolute chaos with countless number of people, mostly half-naked, barefoot and obviously undernourished milling around amid rickshaws, tricycles, beasts of burden, beggars, children on the loose and men in sundry military or police uniforms, often dirty.
A couple of hours of that spectacle was enough to make me physically sick and to beat the retreat back to the luxury hotel, which now looked like a big lie hiding the truth. I felt as if my youthful optimism about the future of mankind was evaporating. I had thought that even the most abject poverty could be defeated either by technology or by ideology. My first incursion into the heart of Dhaka had punctured that optimism. In a cowardly mood, I contemplated taking the next plane out. Then I remembered that two days later, I had an appointment with one Sheikh Mujib ar-Rahman, a man described by East Pakistani leaders I had interviewed a few days earlier as “a dangerous troublemaker.”
