Spread the love

By Devendra Gautam

As I write this piece, Bangladesh, a South Asian country home to 170 million people, is not at peace with itself, with more than 200 people already dead and hundreds to thousands possibly injured in the worst violence in the country’s living memory since its independence from Pakistan in 1971.

Will an order from the country’s Supreme Court to scale back a controversial quota system for government job applicants pour oil on troubled waters? It will be too early to tell.

First, let’s try to understand this system fueling the flames in a (roughly) half-century-young country, which had been doing remarkably well on the economic front surpassing even its next-door neighbor and the global military-economic giant in terms of economic growth.

The system spoils  

After its creation in 1971, the Bangladeshi state made arrangements to reserve 30 percent of government jobs to the relatives of freedom fighters, who fought in Bangladesh’s war of independence. The protesters, including the supporters of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party under Khaleda Zia, are demanding a merit-based system in place of what is primarily a spoils system that has been benefiting the supporters of the chief of the Awami League and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, a daughter of the champion of the independence movement and the founder of the league, ‘Bangabandhu’ Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

After weeks of violence and a near-total shutdown, the country’s apex court, responding to an appeal, has ordered the government to slash the quota meant for relatives of freedom fighters to five percent from 30 percent, allocate 93 percent of jobs on merit and set aside the remaining two percent for members of ethnic minorities and transgender and disabled people. Notwithstanding the order, the situation remains quite volatile.

Concerns beyond borders

With large swathes of her territories gone in the 1814-16 war with the Brits, our dismembered country no longer has a direct land border with Bangladesh. But this does not mean Nepal’s concerns do not go beyond her borders. Media reports that around 2500 Nepali students have already returned home from a violence-hit Bangladesh through the Kakarbhitta transit point the situation is alarming.

The spate of violence in Bangladesh comes even as the situation remains precarious in parts of our immediate and extended neighborhood.

No pain, no gain

Our political and bureaucratic leadership can learn vital lessons from a strife-torn Bangladesh as there’s no dearth of thorny issues in this land of milk and honey. But the rotund-bellied political and bureaucratic leadership feasting on remittances and exorbitant domestic taxes despite poor service deliveries hasn’t learnt anything from the Sri Lankan economic crisis and chances are that it won’t take any gyan from the Bangla crisis, either.  

Fresh turmoil

Fresh turmoil in the restive neighborhood should be a matter of utmost concern for Nepal, in view of a long border with the immediate neighbor that is open on our side, allowing easy access to humanity from across the neighborhood, on the move for various reasons like a perennial search for jobs and putting an ill-guarded, ill-governed and chronically unstable state at a huge disadvantage 24/7.

Because of a long border that’s literally open on our side and our officialdom’s refusal to acknowledge the associated risks, Nepal, a country with a double-digit unemployment rate of nearly 11 percent (per World Bank Group estimates for 2023), a country that exports muscle and brain powers to every imaginable foreign shore while its leadership remains perennially exposed to a constant influx of populations via land, turning into a global hub for humanity in crisis because of forced evictions, hunger and unemployment, among others. However, all that this country gets all too often for providing for some of the poorest sections of humanity is its portrayal in the free press right across the border and in the remarks of its officialdom as a hub that shelters elements that pose a huge security threat to the global economic-military giant on the ascendance.

A self-serving narrative

In this one-way narrative, the failure of some of the most competent and well-equipped defence-security mechanisms deployed across the border for netting such elements in their territories and repatriating them finds no mention.

In this narrative, concerns of a weak neighbor with the best of intentions do not even figure as footnotes. So much so that neighborly media outlets even blame Nepal for ‘opening the floodgates’ of the Koshi barrage and the Gandak barrage, among other water regulatory structures dotting the border, many of them built unilaterally by inundating the territories of a country that is 22 times smaller than the world’s most populous country. This is despite the fact that it is their very own state authorities that operate those structures, though they stand on swathes of Nepali territories inundated permanently. This level of toxicity against Nepal is simply unexplainable.

The writing on the wall

Despite formidable security threats, successive governments of a disaster-prone country that lies in a seismic fault zone have been all for increasing regional and sub-regional connectivity, in particular through fossil fuel-intensive transport networks that wreak havoc on fragile flood and landslide-prone terrains, in the name of regional integration that will only accentuate our security challenges while serving the interests of the next-door regional power with global ambitions. If recent monsoon disasters resulting in a massive loss of lives, properties and big infrastructure do not open their eyes, what will?

Whether it’s evictions at the hands of a military regime or a regime that has found tremendous happiness after evicting more than one lakh of its citizens after unleashing brutalities against them in the 1990s, not to mention unchecked influxes from right across the border, the writing on the wall is clear for Nepal.

Even amid long-unresolved border disputes, Nepal should put air-tight defence-security arrangements in place along her long border to stem a constant influx of different shades of humanity, something which has been overwhelming this ill-governed and poorly-defended country for decades, something which has been causing a massive headache for our next-door neighbor.

This will be a win-win for both the neighbours.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect People’s Review’s editorial stance.