Will Bangladesh Ever Have a Future?

Dec. 2 (Bloomberg) -- To an Indian who grew up in the 1970sand ‘80s, the sights of Dhaka, Bangladesh, seem to belong to apast that Indian metropolises have mostly outgrown: exuberantlybattered buses, unpainted buildings, pavement book vendors withfaded posters of Rabindranath Tagore and Karl Marx as well asthe Rolling Stones, and pitch darkness on the unlit streets andsquares where rural migrants congregate in the evenings. Thecountryside still feels closer here than in Kolkata or Mumbai.

In recent years, Bangladeshis have suffered the brutalityof security forces and massive environmental destruction. Formonths now, the news from the world’s seventh-most-populouscountry has been dominated by the fractiousness of the country’smain leaders, the trial of men suspected of war crimes duringBangladesh’s war of liberation in 1971, and the slavery-likeconditions of the country’s garment industry.