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Paradox that Bangladesh is
   Despite making impressive and sustained progress in socio-economic fields outperforming many South Asian and other developing countries, Bangladesh largely remains an under reported and misunderstood country both within and without. The nature of highly partisan, violent and confrontational politics that has been dominating the country since the 1970s, dividing it politically by half and depriving the nation to exploit its true potentials probably answers some of these questions. This also, in a way, explains that even though the country did outperform its neighbours in the region and other low income countries by a considerable margins in many social and developmental areas, its cross-country governance indicators has put it as a poor performer on four important measures of governance.
   The first generation politicians that took over the reign after Bangladesh became independent are seemingly failing to provide the correct leadership to the nation by rising above their petty politics and rivalries. These unsavoury examples have frustrated the brighter and better educated new generation leaders who are opting out of politics making room for the inferior and sleazy elements to enter the arena. This perhaps explains why different international agencies such as the World Bank and the IMF specifically underline the weaknesses concerning the country's governance issues.
   In this otherwise gloomy scenario, the World Bank in a report published in connection with the last 15-17 November meeting of the PRSP Implementation Forum projecting a mixed picture for the country's development prospects. The report entitled 'Bangladesh PRSP Forum Economic Update: Recent Developments and Future Perspectives' provided quite a balanced insight to the short and medium term prospects as well as problems for the economy.
   The report reviewed at length the possibility of Bangladesh's achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 and said that the country made remarkable progress in several fronts. These areas are gender parity, consumption poverty and child mortality while several other MDGs are within reach but the report says 'will require special attention and concerted efforts.' This is where the nation's potential comes face to face with actual performance or the lack of it because here in the absence of a consensus on important national issues the divisive politics intervenes. The general perceptions of a weak governance environment in this country have also affected its global image, severely hurting prospects for long-term foreign capital inflows. The WB report excellently portrayed the paradoxical nature of Bangladesh without being too explicit.
   For example, the report says: 'Bangladesh is among the handful of countries that have sustained positive per-capita growth in each year since the early 1990s. This performance has been underpinned by rising agricultural and non-farm rural output and a rapid expansion in export of readymade garments.' Besides, the progress in social sectors has been encouraging. Primary enrollment for both genders is near universal, and the secondary enrollment rate has more than doubled since independence. The country has already met the MDG on gender parity in school enrollment at both secondary and primary levels. The child mortality rate has halved, and life expectancy has increased by more than 15 years. The decline in infant and child mortality rates, from 140 and 95 respectively in 1972 to about 60 and 30 in 2000, was among the fastest in the developing world.
   In addition, fertility rate also declined from 6.3 children in 1975 to 3.3, reducing the population growth to 1.5 per annum by the mid-1990s. The fertility rate has further declined to 2.9 by 2003, a pace not matched by most countries in the developing world.
   
   Higher GDP growth needed
   The prospects appears to be reasonably good for achieving five to six percent GDP growth over the next two to three years assuming that current level of macroeconomic stability would be sustained. But what is now needed is to put the scale for GDP growth target further up by at least another two percentage points to achieve the MDGs and also to make a real impact on the poverty alleviation programme. In the past decade, the country has experienced a dramatic expansion in export - export proceeds for FY2004-05 reached US$8.6 billion, almost three times the level of FY1991-92. Besides, the remittance from the migrant Bangladeshi workers has been progressively rising at a much faster rate than hitherto thought possible provided the much-needed support to put the balance of payment situation at ease. The remittance earnings are expected to exceed US$4 billion mark during the current fiscal year.
   However, targeting an accelerated rate of GDP growth is the easy part and its implementation actually calls for some positive thinking on the part of the government leadership and showing the political will and the skill to implement the reform measures needed to deliver. That is the hard part but doable and unless the political will is firmly applied, any increased target will remain illusive. The relevant government leaders including the Prime Minister are well aware of what it requires to deliver but are hesitant to do it because the interest of their cronies would be hurt.
   Basically what is needed - as the expert report has suggested - to do to achieve the accelerated rate of GDP growth is to reduce the government's regulatory costs, to address basic infrastructure constraints (such as frequent power outages; port problems orchestrated by trade union leaders with covert support from political parties), improving the efficiency of the financial sector and addressing the labour quality. Once the government effectively tackles these problems, the local and foreign investors would reciprocate with increased flow of investment to show their appreciation. Already some of the major foreign investors are waiting in the wings in anticipation. Major donor agencies are also likely to support these measures by providing sustained financial assistance.
   
   Can Bangladesh meet MDGs?
   No doubt Bangladesh has made remarkable progress in different socio-economic development sectors, the success in these areas alone cannot possibly enable the country meet all the targets set by the UN in its Millennium Development Goal by the stipulated time. As mentioned, it has already attained the goals in terms of reaching gender parity in primary as well as secondary level enrollments; and it is the only country other than Sri Lanka in South Asia to have achieved these twin goals. The World Bank report has made special remarks on this progress: 'This is an impressive achievement for a country that is one of the poorest in the world, with a per capita GDP of over $400.
   Two other MDGs - reduction of consumption poverty and under-five mortality - are also possible to achieve with a combination of interventions, which the report says includes expansion of immunisation coverage and reducing pupil-teacher ratio, economic growth, improved coverage of infrastructure, and social safety-net programmes.
   The MDGs that are more challenging and more difficult to attain are child nutrition related to MDGs as well as the education MDGs relating to universal net primary enrollment and primary completion. Projections of child nutrition suggest that the country could come very close to, say within 5 percentage points of MDG of having only 34 percent of the children remaining underweight. What is still unclear is that whether this country would be able to achieve net primary enrollment and primary completion exceeding 83 to 86 percent by 2015.
   Despite having the lowest maternal mortality in South Asia - the region's indicators are amongst the worst in the world - to meet the target, the rate in Bangladesh has to be reduced to 143 per thousand live births. This will need a major change in the behaviour of mothers and also far greater access to quality reproductive health services. Bangladesh had nearly achieved the safe water goal with 97 percent of population having access to pathogen-free waters. But with arsenic contamination posed a second round of challenges with access to pathogen and arsenic-free water now stand at roughly 80 percent in the urban areas and 70 percent in the rural areas.
   Likewise, to ensure MDG agenda of environmental sustainability it would mean reversing the trend of deforestation and implementation of mechanism to increase energy efficiency. This appears to be quite a daunting task especially in view of shortage of financial and institutional resources required to meet the objectives.

Philip Hensher: Yes
   The first thing to say about the contested cartoons published by a Danish paper last September is that some are, indeed, offensive. Jyllands-Posten took up the case of a Danish author who could find no one to illustrate a book about the prophet Muhammad. The paper, presenting this as a case of self-censorship, asked 12 illustrators for depictions of the prophet, and the one that has caused immense offence shows the prophet wearing a turban that conceals a fizzing bomb.
   The cartoonist can't be accused of ignorance or lack of research - he has scrupulously transcribed a verse from the Qur'an on the turban - and there's no doubt that this is seriously offensive, and not just to Muslims but anyone who values truthful debate. It just isn't true to say that, from its founding, Islam would inevitably lead to suicide bombing, or even that its founder's teachings bear responsibility for this particular brand of atrocity.
   That accusation, if made of any religion or secular school of thought that has spawned violent followers - a comparable image of Marx, say, or, quite plausibly, Darwin - would in most cases be just as offensive and wrong. In this case there is a special, deliberate offence to Muslims because the religion has an edict against such depictions.
   Whether action should be taken, in a western democracy, against an argument that is just wrong, or against deliberate offence caused, however great, is another question. It's difficult to see that personal offence should be the basis of legal action in a state professing commitment to freedom of speech. The state takes a view on when personal offence is reasonable and when it threatens to infringe someone else's liberty, largely based on whether offence is caused generally, or just to a section of the community. Do the Danish cartoons cause offence only to isolated individuals? Or do they so attack anyone professing to be a Muslim that they would be caught by the UK's religious hatred law?
   The cartoons almost certainly look very different to a Muslim living in a western democracy and to someone in the Muslim world. It's easy to sympathise with a Muslim living in Denmark, who would feel directly persecuted by these images. The Copenhagen Muslim interviewed in yesterday's Guardian certainly had a point when he compared them to the comments of a Danish MP who apparently called Muslims ‘a cancer in Denmark’. Many people in his situation live difficult lives, and such images won't improve matters much.
   But along with the sympathy one has to feel for people in that beleaguered situation, the uses that the Danish cartoons have been put to in the Muslim world must be challenged. Around the world, the anti-Danish campaign is being used by Islamist political groups to rally support for extreme causes. The aim of many such groups is, through pressure, to limit free speech on religious matters in the west, and entirely suppress it at home.
   It is often forgotten to what degree law-making in the west is still seen across the globe as a model of good practice; and for that single reason our freedom of speech, even if exercised for the purposes of causing offence, even if simply wrong in practice, can't be eroded. To take an example: in Bangladesh in 1994, an attempt was made to introduce a law limiting what could be said on religious subjects. It failed because, it was argued, its terms could not be paralleled in the laws of any democracy. Britain's new law on religious hatred, even in its limited form, removes that defence from liberal voices outside Europe.
   Debate on a great many subjects is already severely limited in the Muslim world. Reading Robert Irwin's brilliant new book, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies, it is a shock to learn that serious scholarly work by historians on the first years of Islam has to be expressed in code, lest it cause offence to the faithful by contradicting the received account. It is unlikely that a newspaper in a Muslim country will ever want to commission a cartoon along the Danish lines. But we are really talking about groups, even in relatively liberal Muslim countries, that want to draw the lines of permitted debate much tighter than they are at present.
   In practice, our freedom of speech is not seriously threatened. Cartoonists will probably be careful about exercising good taste in such an area, as they already do on parallel subjects - for instance, in drawing an Israeli or Jewish politician, a cartoonist will probably avoid the hateful conventions of anti-semitic caricature. After the boycotts and a few noble-sounding words, we will probably go on much as before.
   And that's probably the best thing to do. If anti-democratic forces in the Muslim world can make such effective use of a cartoon in a small European country, they would be much more encouraged by any signs of restriction on our part. Anyone in the Muslim world arguing for freedom of speech, on religious or other matters, has only one place to look to - the west. We ought to take into account the sorts of factions in the Muslim world who would regard legal restrictions on our side as part of a wider victory.
   Gary Younge: No
   In January 2002 the New Statesman published a front page displaying a shimmering golden Star of David impaling a union flag, with the words ‘A kosher conspiracy?’ The cover was widely and rightly condemned as anti-semitic. It's not difficult to see why. It played into vile stereotypes of money-grabbing Jewish cabals out to undermine the country they live in. Some put it down to a lapse of editorial judgment. But many saw it not as an aberration but part of a trend - one more broadside in an attack on Jews from the liberal left.
   A group calling itself Action Against Anti-Semitism marched into the Statesman's offices, demanding a printed apology. One eventually followed. The then editor, Peter Wilby, later confessed that he had not appreciated ‘the historic sensitivities’ of Britain's Jews. I do not remember talk of a clash of civilisations in which Jewish values were inconsistent with the western traditions of freedom of speech or democracy. Nor do I recall editors across Europe rushing to reprint the cover in solidarity.
   Quite why the Muslim response to 12 cartoons printed by Jyllands-Posten last September should be treated differently is illuminating. There seems to be almost universal agreement that these cartoons are offensive. There should also be universal agreement that the paper has a right to publish them. When it comes to freedom of speech the liberal left should not sacrifice its values one inch to those who seek censorship on religious grounds, whether US evangelists, Irish Catholics or Danish Muslims.
   But the right to freedom of speech equates to neither an obligation to offend nor a duty to be insensitive. There is no contradiction between supporting someone's right to do something and condemning them for doing it. If our commitment to free speech is important, our belief in anti-racism should be no less so. These cartoons spoke not to historic sensitivities, but modern ones. Muslims in Europe are now subjected to routine discrimination on suspicion that they are terrorists, and Denmark has some of Europe's most draconian immigration policies. These cartoons served only to compound such prejudice.
   The right to offend must come with at least one consequent right and one subsequent responsibility. If newspapers have the right to offend then surely their targets have the right to be offended. Moreover, if you are bold enough to knowingly offend a community then you should be bold enough to withstand the consequences, so long as that community expresses displeasure within the law.
   So far this has been the case. Despite isolated acts of violence that should be condemned, the overwhelming majority of the protests have been peaceful. Several Arab and Muslim nations have withdrawn their ambassadors from Denmark. There have been demonstrations outside embassies. Meanwhile, according to Denmark's consul in Dubai, a boycott of Danish products in the Gulf has cost the country $27m.
   The Jyllands-Posten editor took four months to apologise. That was his decision. If he was not truly sorry then he shouldn't have done so; if he was then he should have done so sooner. Given that it took yet one more month for the situation to deteriorate to this level, these recent demonstrations can hardly be described as kneejerk.
   ‘This is a far bigger story than just the question of 12 cartoons in a small Danish newspaper,’ Flemming Rose, the culture editor of Jyllands-Posten, told the New York Times. Too right, but it is not the story Rose thinks it is. Rose says: ‘This is about the question of integration and how compatible is the religion of Islam with a modern secular society - how much does an immigrant have to give up and how much does the receiving culture have to compromise.’
   Rose displays his ignorance of both modern secular society and the role of religion in it. Freedom of the press has never been sacrosanct in the west. Last year Ireland banned the film Boy Eats Girl because of graphic suicide scenes; Madonna's book Sex was unbanned there only in 2004. American schoolboards routinely ban the works of Alice Walker, JK Rowling and JD Salinger. Such measures should be opposed, but not in a manner that condemns all Catholics or Protestants for being inherently intolerant or incapable of understanding satire.
   Even as this debate rages, David Irving sits in jail in Austria charged with Holocaust denial for a speech he made 17 years ago; the Muslim cleric Abu Hamza is on trial in London for inciting racial hatred; and a retrial has been ordered for the BNP leader, Nick Griffin, on the same charges. The question has never been whether you draw a line under what is and what is not acceptable, but where you draw it. Rose and others clearly believe Muslims, by virtue of their religion, exist on the wrong side of the line.
   As a result they are vilified twice: once through the cartoon, and again for exercising their democratic right to protest. The inflammatory response to their protest reminds me of the quote from Steve Biko, the South African black nationalist: ‘Not only are whites kicking us; they are telling us how to react to being kicked.’
   The Guardian

Holed up in each of our countries, we South Asians are too roiled by our nearest national political events. We are not really interested in what happened next door, yesterday or during the past week. Mostly, we perk up only if western tv or wire services raise enough of a ruckus that it penetrates our parochial cocoons. So, what has happened in the last week?
   Being Nepal-based, this writer is keenly interested in three developments: the suddenly escalated Maoist attacks on government and security apparatus around the country, the developing farce around what Chairman Gyanendra calls ‘elections’, and the fact that so many politicians, civil society leaders and activist are currently in jail. There are sporadic protests and they are now countrywide, not limited to just a few cities.
   But life in the rest of South Asia also continues and it deserves regular monitoring. It may be impossible to keep track of everything that goes on in a region that houses a fifth of humanity but one should surely keep watch.
   Two political explosions rocked two Indian state capitals last week, in the north and south. With the Supreme Court having found him guilty 24 January of  misleading the centre, Buta Singh dissolved the Bihar State Assembly and stepped down as governor on Republic Day, just hours after unfurling the Indian flag on the maidan.
   Post-shake-up, in the words of one editorial, Nitish Kumar is now ‘comfortably ensconced’. The following day, seeking a vote of confidence, the Karnataka Assembly also adjourned. Chief Minister Dharam Singh resigned shortly thereafter, opening the way for the formation of a new government between the Janata Dal (Secular) and the BJP. The back-to-back embarrassment for the Congress also included an exhumation of the Bofors payoff scandal: with Rajiv Gandhi long gone, it is his widow and successor Sonia who is now taking the rap.
   The strife in Balochistan has been heating up in recent months and frantic calls to quell the developing situation have reached Islamabad. But the rest of the Subcontinent is pretty clueless about what is going on at its westernmost edges. Anyone flying over Balochistan on their way westward cannot help but note how tortured the landscape is. But so is the humanscape, it seems. The Quetta provincial government recently unveiled a security plan for the upcoming month of Muharram, including surveillance cameras and law-enforcement personnel lining the routes of Ashura processions. A US congressman also recently registered his vehement displeasure with the situation, accusing Islamabad of making money on the backs of Balochistan’s suffering citizenry.
   And even while President Pervez Musharraf made his case with characteristic élan at snowbound Davos, reports from back home (through the medium of Punjab Chief Minister Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi) confirmed–and predicted–that Musharraf will remain both army chief and president after the general elections, currently scheduled for 2007.
   Bangladesh’s pre-election drama is already heating up ahead of the general polls, currently scheduled for sometime in early 2007. The Awami League-led, 14-party opposition alliance has organised a six-route ‘long march to Dhaka’, starting 2 February and ending in the capital on 5 February to join the ‘grand rally’ that day. The 20th session of parliament began on 23 January with the AL continuing to boycott the proceedings, an action that began after the August 2004 grenade attack on an AL rally. According to the constitution however, MPs will lose their membership after a 90-day absence
   Other non-participatory South Asian oppositions include the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) in Male, which stated that it would not be taking part in Commonwealth-mediated all-party talks, currently scheduled for 5 February. The MDP is protesting the continued detention of political prisoners, including MDP Chair Mohamed Nasheed (Anni), whose confinement was extended on 30 January by the Supreme Court. The following day, an MDP public demonstration protesting the same issues was called off early, after alleged threats of violence from the government. Nonetheless, the act netted the MDP a stunning MVR 50,000 fine.
   ‘It is better to go to Oslo than to go to war’ was the title of an article by Colombo commentator Jehan Perera, a reference to the reluctance of the Tamil Tigers and the Colombo government to agree on the proper venue for talks to attempt to rescue the shaky, four-year-long ceasefire. Fortunately, with the facilitation of Norwegian minister Erik Solheim, they agreed on Geneva. Now, LTTE-initiated violence has fallen dramatically. Meanwhile, more relief came when the renegade LTTE commander named Karuna subsequently declared his own unilateral ceasefire. He explained that he was taking into account the “good intentions” and pragmatic efforts of President Mahinda Rajapakse and that he welcomed the Geneva meet and was committed to sustainable peace for Tamil-speaking people who have been victims of the Tigers.
   Rounding out this incomplete South Asia roundup, there was no news from Bhutan this week because the violence on that front is the official silence on the Lhotshampa refugees. That silence continues to resound.