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AMIDST condemnation and criticism of Wednesday’s police excesses against members of the National Committee to Protect Oil, Gas, Mineral Resources, Power and Ports intensify, the government on Thursday termed the police action ‘unexpected and sad’ and promised legal action against the law enforcers if they were to be found guilty of having overstepped their limits. According to a report front-paged in New Age on Friday, three ministers and two advisers of the Awami League-led government also visited Anu Muhammad, member secretary of the committee and professor of economics at Jahangirnagar University who was among some 50 people seriously injured in the police attack and is now under treatment for fractures in both his legs, to express their ‘regret and sympathy’. It is indeed assuring that the government has acknowledged the monstrosity of the police action on the members of the citizens’ forum, and was quick to regret the incident and seek apology, albeit not in so many words. However, the issue at hand has more to it than the police excesses on members of the national committee, as the citizens’ forum is popularly known.
   First of all, the police action, as it is highly unlikely to have taken place without some sort of clearance from the home ministry, tends to betray what could very well be the inherent intolerance of the government to dissent. That some key members of the government termed the police action ‘unexpected and sad’ could very well be construed as the Sheikh Hasina administration’s efforts to wash its hands off the atrocities, and make the police department the scapegoat. The apologetic posture that the government has taken would thus be perceived as genuine only when it demonstrates, not only in words but also by deed, its willingness to accommodate dissenting views in the political arena as well as across society.
   Most importantly, the government needs to realise that it is its decision to award three offshore blocks to two multinational companies under what appears to be an anti-people production sharing contract, which allows exports of up to 80 per cent of the natural gas the companies will find, that is the bone of contention here. Regrettably, the power and energy adviser and the state minister for power and energy are reported to have tried to convince Anu Muhammad that the provision in the model production sharing contract has been formulated in a way that gas export may not be needed, and that the export provision was incorporated to woo investment in hydrocarbon exploration. In other words, the government may still be unwilling to revise, let alone revoke, its decision.
   To reiterate, the government needs to realise that its apology for the police excesses on the protest march of the national committee will remain in the realm of rhetoric until and unless it is followed up by action that demonstrates its willingness to accommodate dissenting views and, crucially still, revocation of the decision to award the offshore blocks to the multinational companies under questionable production sharing contracts.

Absurd, shameless BGMEA demands

THE demand that the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters’ Association tabled on Thursday that the government disburse a Tk 3,000-crore incentive package for the readymade garment factory owners, that too by September 7 so that that they may pay the workers wages and festival allowances borders on the absurd. It is all the more so in view of the fact that, in the past fiscal year, exports of woven products were up 14.54 per cent and knitwear 16.21 per cent from those in the previous financial year, although the RMG owners voiced apprehension that the exports would decline because of the ongoing global financial crisis. It is shameless too, because the RMG sector is run by the private sector, which means the profit goes solely to the owners’ pockets. According to a report front-paged in New Age on Friday, the BGMEA president also demanded Tk 10 benefit on every dollar during exchange on 30 per cent of the total export costs, and minimum five per cent subsidy on the interests accrued on the debts in the RMG sector and of Tk 10 on every litre of diesel until power and gas supply situation improves.
   True, the RMG industry is the principal foreign exchange earner and the biggest employer in the private sector. True, it has helped thousands of women, mainly from the marginal sections of society, to become somewhat financially independent, and has thus contributed to the cause of women’s emancipation and empowerment. However, it is also true that, over the years, it has been at the centre of labour unrest over systematic exploitation and deprivation of the workers by a significant section of the factory owners, which has often led to violence and vandalism, bloodletting and even death. Regrettably still, despite a tripartite agreement between the government, the employees and the workers, many garment factories continue to default on timely payment of wages, overtime and allowances and other lawful entitlements of the workers.
   Hence, before coming up with such an absurd proposition, the BGMEA should have turned its attention to addressing and redressing the maladies that many of its members have themselves given rise to and that have plague the RMG sector for years on end. Moreover, as the self-professed exponents of market economy, the factory owners should have realised that loss is as much the name of the game as profit is. Besides, if the government is to pay up for the losses of the RMG owners, it may very well claim a share of their profits, too.
   We are happy that the finance minister has dismissed the BGMEA demand outright as ‘unacceptable’. However, the government needs to realise that its responsibilities do not end with rejecting an absurd and shameless proposal from the RMG factory owners; it needs also to make sure that the RMG factories pay the workers their wages, overtime and festival allowances on time.

THE world’s second largest economy has got rid of one-party rule that went on for more than half a century. The people in Japan, as the winning leader Yukio Hatoyama said, ‘have shown the courage to take politics into their own hands. This has been a revolutionary election, a victory for the public.’ The regime change in Japan, a bourgeois-democratic one-party state and an important donor for Bangladesh, raises many questions and probable prospects within limitations.
   The Liberal Democratic Party has been cast out by the voters, the traditionally apolitical electorate, while a landslide victory has been handed over to the Democratic Party of Japan. The DPJ has promised to reverse a generation-long economic decline, change the post-war paradigm, ease increasing social inequality by handing more money and social benefits directly to residents rather than to industry or other interest groups, strengthen the social safety net and raise the low birth-rate by giving families cash handouts of $270 per month per child, free secondary education, free treatment and delivery for expectant mothers and an allowance for children, funded by cutting government spending on unnecessary dams and roads. Japan’s population, now a problem related to pension, of 127.6 million peaked in 2006, and is expected to fall below 100 million by the middle of the century. The DPJ has proposed toll-free highways, income support for farmers, monthly allowances for job seekers in training, a higher minimum wage and tax cuts. A significant promise of the DJP is to fight the bureaucrats and to curb the power of bureaucracy. The party wants to put more MPs into junior jobs in the ministries and to bring into the cabinet the power to formulate policy, and to crack down on the practice known as amakudari, ‘descent from the heavens’ — retiring civil servants securing jobs in the industries that they supervised as government officials.
   Hatoyama spoke of the end of the US-dominated globalisation and of the need to reorient Japan toward Asia. The DPJ’s election manifesto called for an ‘equal partnership’ with the US and a ‘reconsidering’ of the 50,000-strong US military presence in Japan. One change on the horizon, New York Times said, may be the renegotiation of a deal with Washington to relocate the US Marine Corps’ Futenma airfield, on the island of Okinawa. Many island residents want to evict the base altogether. The DJP that opposed the US-led war in Iraq has also said it might end the Japanese Navy’s refuelling of the US and allied warships in the Indian Ocean. Hatoyama has taken an outspoken stand against unfettered international capitalism, promising to abandon the country’s ‘worship’ of the US and to break away from decades of unquestioning support for the US foreign policy. ‘Japan now needs to make a clear shift from diplomacy that follows the US lead, to diplomacy based on multilateral cooperation,’ he said earlier this year. ‘We must view the Asia-Pacific region, where we have increasingly close ties with other countries, as the place where Japan will live as a nation.’ The White House, however, has expressed confidence that its alliance with Japan ‘will continue to flourish’. In recent interviews, Democratic leaders have insisted there will be no major changes in that relationship. ‘It is complete nonsense that a non-Liberal Democratic government will hurt US-Japan relations,’ said a Democratic lawmaker. The DPJ has signalled a desire to promote a European Union-style Asian community and common currency.
   Japan, even during the LDP rule, took a number of steps that showed its desire to steer away from the US. Japan, Jon Halliday and Gavan McCormack tell in their book Japanese Imperialism Today, ‘was surprisingly swift to recognise Bangladesh’, and through this step ‘[i]t broke with its American ally for the first time’ while the hostility of Nixon and Kissinger to the newly independent Bangladesh was well-known. Similarly, Japan sent an official mission to Hanoi, recognised Mongolia, and allowed a Diet delegation to visit North Korea. Many other steps in the areas of trade and ‘aid’ were taken by Tokyo during the Cold War days that betrayed its desire to have an independent stand. About 50 years ago, Jon and Gavan mention, ‘Mao Tse-tung is reported to have told a delegation of visiting Japanese Socialists that Japan then belonged to one of the world’s two intermediate zones. But Japanese monopoly capital, he noted, “is discontented with the United States, and some of its representatives are openly rising against the United States. Though Japanese monopoly capital now is dependent on the United States, the time will come when it too will shake of the American yoke”.’ Okinawa was, in effect, a US colony since 1945, and its experience of the US is not a happy one. This has been reflected a number of times, in a number of incidents, by the people of Japan over the last years. To the Japanese people the US big brothership is not welcome. It is impossible for them to forget Hiroshima-Nagasaki. The election victory of the DJP reflects on the one hand the Japanese people’s frustration with the LDP and its policies, and desire for change and, on the other, the desire of a section of the Japanese capital.
   The LDP, which held or shared power for 62 of the past 63 years, led Japan from bombed-out devastation to economic powerhouse, obviously with the help of a US general, while keeping it firmly in Washington’s camp, has been wiped out from the political map, at least for the time being, by the voters. About 70 per cent of the voters, an unprecedented 14 million, cast ballots, according to NHK, the highest turnout in nearly two decades. The DPJ, a broad coalition of former socialists and Liberal Democrat defectors, has won 308 of 480 seats, a 175 per cent increase, in the powerful lower house. The DJP, which already controls the upper house with two allies, held just 112 seats in the lower house before the Diet was dissolved in July. The LDP with 119 seats saw the humiliating termination of several generations of political career, including those of at least one former prime minister, Toshiki Kaifu, a former finance minister, Shoichi Nakagawa, who disgraced himself last February after appearing drunk at a press conference in Rome, his successor Kaoru Yosano, and of a number of most powerful and experienced LDP politicians. Most of them lost their seats to decades junior DPJ candidates with little experience. The only other time the LDP was out of power was in 1993-94 for less than 11 months.
   The LDP, a once-invincible party, was organised by the defeated prime minister Aso’s grandfather, Shigeru Yoshida and his nemesis, Ichiro Hatoyama, grandfather of the present DJP leader Yukio Hatoyama. It was formed as a bulwark against the resurging socialist parties. 1948 carried the prospects of communist revolution in Japan and China. Mao Tse-tung’s victory and the Korean War saw Japan’s position reinforced in the west camp under the LDP. ‘Oligopolies—in the form of the former zaibatsu conglomerates—were supported,’ The Economist wrote in its July 16, 2009 issue, ‘even if they had been implicated in Japanese aggression. A man accused of war crimes became a notable post-war prime minister and Yakuza gang bosses consorted with top politicians and helped put down left-wing protests. The political and bureaucratic system was solidly made and has lasted, like so many things in Japan. But its origins, and its effects on Japan, were ultimately rotten. Outside the radical left, most Japanese were bought off by a social contract in which politicians, bureaucrats and big business arranged the country’s economic affairs. Businesses won preferential finance and in return offered “salarymen” job guarantees and the dream of a middle-class life. But the contract could be honoured only with high rates of growth, and the oil shocks of the early 1970s put paid to these. Perhaps this might have been the end of the LDP, but political competition had been so stifled that there was nothing to take the party’s place. Instead, the crisis of the 1970s led to a steep rise in corruption…. Corruption cemented local baronies and for a good while won votes. Even today the late Kakuei Tanaka, an astonishingly corrupt prime minister, is more often praised than cursed. A 19th-century Russian said that Europe’s democracies were moderated by corruption. Japan had corruption moderated by democracy…. Companies could no longer keep lifetime promises to workers yet the government failed to take over social-welfare obligations….The party [LDP] was the keystone of a political system that has long been crumbling.’
   The economy of Japan, a bubble in real terms but a miracle to many of the mainstream economists in Bangladesh, collapsed in the early 1990s, and the late-1990s saw the beginning of Japan’s struggle with deflation. With soaring rates of poverty and inequality the 1990s is considered as a ‘lost decade’. As Japan struggles with its deepest recession since the WWII the LDP has been blamed for the decline of this former economic superpower, its growing uncertain future, and increasing isolation in the Asia-Pacific region. The unemployment rate hit a record 5.7 per cent in July. Many analysts assume that the official number massively understates the real level of joblessness as the official method does not count persons not actually looking for work. Thus, the method may disguise a figure twice the official size. Many economists have warned of Japan’s huge hidden jobless problem and of the likelihood that the extent of the crisis may emerge over coming months and years that could reach 12.2 per cent as companies shed their giant armies of surplus labour. The July unemployment numbers and the latest consumer prices index, made public only days after official GDP numbers showed Japan slowly getting out of technical recession, paint an especially dismal picture of the one of the world’s economic giants. Toyota announced the plan to permanently close one of its domestic car production lines. With stagnating income households are cutting down spending. Heavily exposed to exports and having far too much capacity, for example, eight mobile-phone makers, Japan is suffering as overseas demand has slowed down. Its economy, according to some analysts, may contract by as much as 6 per cent this year, around twice the rate of the US. A plan approved in May allocated $21 billion to prop up the troubled companies that include Japan Airlines, electronics firm Pioneer, and chipmaker Elipda. The recent signs of recovery are hollow: after a period of de-stocking, Economist.com said, inventories fell so low that an upswing in production was inevitable. It was widely forecast to happen as far back as in January. A portion of the growth is due to the government’s stimulus measures. Money has been pumped into the economy through big public-works projects. The economic stimulus packages, however, cannot boost an economy for ever in a country with a ratio of government debt to GDP about 200 per cent, the largest of any rich country.
   There is no certainty that the DJP can materialise its election pledges, and shall not repeat the 11-month chapter of 1993-94, when the coalition that ousted the LDP fell apart. But, whatever happens, the election result brings in a possibility for change and for creating a space, a space both for the Japanese people, and for other countries in the Southeast Asia and South Asia. Bangladesh’s trading capital can try to have more favourable and ‘sympathetic’ trade terms, government can try for having ‘easier’ terms for ‘aid’, and democratic forces can call Tokyo to facilitate democratic forces in other countries by withholding Japanese aid to autocratic rulers who are stifling voices of democracy. Steps by Tokyo will show the Japanese capital’s capacity to attain independence from its post-WWII ally.
   Farooque Chowdhury mainly translates. One of his edited books is Micro Credit, Myth Manufactured.