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Elite Perc eptions of poverty in Bangladesh Naomi Hossain, author of the book Elite Perceptions of Poverty in Bangladesh, unravels how Dhaka’s ostentatious elite perceive the wretched poverty that surrounds them photo by Andrew Biraj That the rich care at best little for the poor is an article of faith among the chattering classes of Bangladesh. It’s a theme in civil society dialogues, newspaper articles, the increasingly vocal diaspora, and in popular culture through the page and the screen. Many decry the lack of feeling for the poor among the moneyed, powerful class, treating this lack as partly to blame for persistent, severe mass deprivation. A recent piece in the magazine Forum articulated the position most clearly, demanding to know ‘why the privileged few in Bangladesh are so reluctant to think beyond themselves?’ (The Bubble Boys, by Asif Saleh, Forum, January, 2007).    Years of thinking about these issues leads me to believe the problem has more twists and turns than that: it’s no crude matter of ‘let them eat cake’ – disdain, or worse, for the poor. There is awareness and sympathy among the Bangladeshi elite, more than outward appearances might suggest, and more than is the case for the elites of some other countries. But they lack a sense of urgency about the problem that might encourage them to support serious action against poverty, fast. Poverty is not an urgent priority for the Bangladeshi elite.    When I started researching these issues, it was easy to understand why the Bangladeshi elite should hold these views. Nine years on, some things have changed. The economy has grown and the proportion of the poor has declined. NGOs and government work ever more directly with a growing number of the poor, the political situation is reportedly making halting progress in the direction of deeper democracy. Above all, the working masses have demonstrated a growing assertiveness against failures to protect their most basic interests. These are some of the factors currently at work to alter the relationship between the elite and the poor in Bangladesh. But let us first turn to an account of elite perceptions of poverty in Bangladesh, how I found things to be in the 1990s, and about what may have changed since.        The threat from the poor    Fear that deadly disease could spread from the poor, that they might resort to crime or revolt, or that they were a drag on economic or military efficiency were defining features of how elites historically perceived poverty in other, now-rich countries. The response to such threats was typically oppressive, as immortalised by Dickens: the ‘poor houses’ and other places of punishment for the poor and the deviant; life in prison or transportation for the pettiest of thefts. At times these threats became so acute that the ruling class came to recognise that they had shared interests in reducing poverty, to remove the causes of such threats. When equipped with means to tackle poverty, this created an opportunity for powerful elites to support government policies in sanitation, mass education, and welfare, which were to have a material impact on the vulnerabilities of (the ‘deserving’ sections of) the poor.    Recognising that there may be lessons here for poor countries in the present day, colleagues in the UK and Brazil explored these issues, with support from the UK’s Department for International Development. We interviewed elites in Brazil, South Africa, Haiti and the Philippines as well as Bangladesh. Here I was helped by a team of able young researchers with the kinds of connections necessary to interview members of the elite - politicians, senior military and civil bureaucrats, leaders of the business, media, religious, NGO and academic communities. Getting access can be tricky, as I found the first few times I tried to interview a prominent businessman. (I was finally introduced to him by my father at a glittering Dhaka wedding. He immediately granted me an appointment and explained that I ‘should have said whose daughter I was’). The experience of gaining access told me something about how very personalised connections are among this group.    We asked the elites for their views on the extent and nature of poverty in their country, and to comment on the causes and priorities for action. We also tried to identify sources of threats or other motivations the elite might have for wanting to see poverty reduced. We compared the responses across and within the countries, and tried to make sense of what people told us, by putting them in the context of their various histories and political cultures. Below is an account of what we found.        Separate worlds?    It’s easy to forget that to outsiders, the poverty that surrounds us, even on the leafy streets of super-deluxe Gulshan, comes as a horrible shock, with which many struggle to cope. People cope in different ways. Western psychologists have a theory that people often blame the victims of social injustices (such as poverty) for their plight. The ironically-named ‘Just World Theory’ says that blaming the victim is the only way some people can cope with the fact that the world is a terribly unfair and unpredictable place. Looking at how well the Bangladeshi rich and powerful live, apparently at ease amidst the most extreme forms of deprivation and squalor, suggests they must possess such a way of thinking. The visitors who typically experience ‘culture shock’ when they first arrive are just as horrified by what they see as the vast gap between the starvelings and waifs of the street and the callous, careless, rich elite.    But outward appearances are misleading. In many countries, the elites live at several removes from the poor, often in gated communities far from the favelas and townships. In the Philippines the poor and the rich do not even live on the same island. And the distance is social as much as spatial: Brazilian and South African elites are of different religious and ethnic and even racial groups to the majority of the poor. In Haiti, too, social distinctions of class, race and education create sharp divisions between the elite and the masses.    One feature peculiar to Bangladeshi society is that the elite are not (yet) in a distinctly separate physical or social space to the majority of the poor – although the distance is visibly growing. In Bangladesh, the poor are always with us. They do the grubby and heavy work in the big houses. They share the language and many the religion and culture of those who take the big decisions and control the major resources – the elite, that is. Many of those elites also have personal ties to people or places in which they can see firsthand how the poor subsist. Bangladeshi elite society still looks favourably on people who maintain a rural desher-bari home, and who build clinics or schools for the poor of ‘their’ village. Many, many people run small charities or schemes intended to help the poor and have poor relatives who visit to tell their troubles and to ask for help.    The most significant distinctions between the Bangladeshi elite and the rest of the population are those of wealth and education. The gap for both is probably growing. It is obvious to all Dhaka-bashis that the rich of the 2000s with their road-blocking vehicles and their private zoos are richer than their equivalents of the 1970s. But coming from a family willing to invest in their education was also a major factor in how many of the current elite came to their present prominence. Many of the elite quite understandably believe in the power of education to enable poor people to raise their standard of life, even though the costs of a decent schooling rise and rise. There is near-consensus among the elite that the roots of poverty lie in the absence of consciousness or awareness among the poor, which modern education can help to fill.    For all of these reasons, and perhaps others to do with how we struggled in unity for our independence against economic as much as political oppression, it is not the case that Bangladeshi elites are unusually indifferent towards or ignorant about poverty. When we compared their responses to poverty against those of other elites, they seemed less inclined to directly blame the poor for their condition, and more understanding of the problems they face. South African elites, for instance, did not even know that most of their poor are in rural areas. And social differences between the rich Brazilian, Filipino and Haitian elites and the poor masses are so numerous and so deep that there is little affinity between them. The best evidence shows that Brazil and South Africa tops the league in terms of inequality between rich and poor, yet the elites of those countries assumed the situation was worse elsewhere, notably in South Asia.    Poverty is possibly more graphic in its severity in South Asia. Or maybe it is that the poor are so much more numerous and visible. Our unabashedly anti-egalitarian hierarchical culture also vividly frames the worst aspects of our social inequality, making it appear much starker than elsewhere. Perhaps it also seems so much worse here because our elite is, compared to the elites of other countries, brand-new. It maintains the ties of blood, patronage and place that unavoidably bring its members into regular contact with the poor. The gated community has arrived in the weak form of Dhaka’s Baridhara, whose borders remain porous to its close, but considerably poorer neighbour, Badda. But few Bangladeshi elites have been rich and powerful for long enough to have severed ties from our rural origins, or to avoid knowledge of how the poor masses live.    If the Bangladeshi elite are not wilfully neglectful or ignorant of the poor, why is poverty not treated with the urgency it deserves in Bangladesh? When we talked to the elite in the late 1990s, we found four explanations.        The Bengal tiger?    As anyone who has ever travelled on a Bangladeshi passport knows, however rich and important we may be at home, to the rest of the world we are all poor would-be immigrants struggling to escape our sinking, perilously over-populated land. As the national condition, poverty is an all-encompassing problem, not distinct from problems of economic under-development. One reason poverty is not urgent is that, despite our country’s youthful flirtation with ‘socialism’, the elite were by the 1990s satisfied to let the unleashed forces of the market – the power of economic growth – lift the poor out of their poverty (along with the benefits for the rest of us). The thinking went something like this: Bangladesh is a small country short on natural resources, densely populated, the regular victim of natural calamity, and very, very poor. Many looked East and Southeast – to the countries formerly known as the Asian Tigers, for inspiration. There they saw that even heavily populated small countries could become world-leaders. And the lessons they drew from Japan, Korea, Thailand and Malaysia were those that the World Bank and other donor countries wanted them to learn: that free markets are the only foundation on which serious inroads into poverty can be possible. Investing in education, including that for the poor, is crucial to this formula.        ‘Nothing works’    There is little faith in the state or government and a strong sense that the Bangladeshi government failed on even its most basic function – tax collection – a matter on which the rich are probably well placed to comment. This means that there was little appetite among the national elite for government to take it upon itself to support the poorest in any more direct fashion. ‘Government cannot feed everyone’, we were told.        A thousand flowers blooming...    Many people believe a lot is already going on, thanks to NGOs and private charity. Attitudes to NGOs were complex: in the 1990s there was a lot of suspicion but also more support than expected, given the negative press that NGOs were receiving back then. But the globe-trotting elite were already aware then that NGOs and the Grameen Bank had done a lot to improve Bangladesh’s image abroad.    Many of the elite, particularly women, see private charity as part of the solution to poverty. Some see this as an extension of Bengali cultural tradition as well as a means of defusing social tensions between the haves and the have-nots. Of course, support for charity, in Bangladesh as elsewhere, is partly about an assertion of superior status. How you behave towards the poor is treated by elite women as a marker of difference between the nouveau riche (seen to flaunt their notun poisha and fail to meet their charitable obligations) and those of more established, aristocratic credentials (whose lifestyles are tastefully decorous, and for whom noblesse oblige is the price of privilege). The disorienting effects of rapid social change, and the dizzying pace with which some of the Bangladeshi elite have enriched themselves far and above the rest of their fellow citizens is part of the story here. Many of the elites patently feel a need to rebuild their links to the poor, and to demonstrate that they have not been forgotten in the mad rush for prosperity that has characterised the well-placed few.        What threat from the poor?    A really good explanation of why poverty was not urgent is that the poor represented no threat to the elites. For business and military leaders, the sheer size of the population meant that there were always enough of the right kind of labour. Few people appeared to have considered the possibility that the diseases of the poor might spread to the rich. There was some distaste, particularly with respect to the unsanitary living conditions of the urban poor, but no fear. The option of flying off to Bangkok or other destinations with world-class medical care creates a sizeable comfort zone for the rich.    Nor was there evidence of fears that mass deprivation could lead to crime: if anything, it was the powerful politically backed mastaans and the semi-educated unemployed youths of the middle classes, not the poor, who were feared as sources of crimes that could affect the elite. Urbanisation and the growing slum population were potential threats, but by the late 1990’s these had not turned into a widespread concern about the urban poor.    Most intriguing of all given our turbulent, bloody political history, was the finding that most elites felt the poor were unlikely to revolt on a significant scale. Despite elite anxieties about how their society was changing, there was a sense that social tensions between rich and poor were manageable. Some quality peculiar to Bangladeshi society, possibly culturally sanctioned restraint and benevolence on the part of the better-off, was invoked to explain this.        Kansat and the RMG rebellion    The only one of these that has probably changed much since the late 1990s is the threat from the poor. The economy continues to grow steadily, more than matched by a faster pace of poverty reduction in the 2000’s; the government still largely fails to fulfil its most basic obligations, but has made impressive progress on health and education; and NGOs and charity have both flourished. We now have the enormous national pride of Professor Yunus and Grameen Bank’s Nobel Prize. There is something to be satisfied about.    But 2006 was a watershed, a bad year for proponents of peaceful liberal democracy in Bangladesh. Our multiparty electoral system failed, and in the process took the whole system down with it. This sort of event we have seen before, however; chances are it may not significantly affect the relationship between the elite and the masses.    We also saw the Kansat and similar riots over the power crisis and the garments’ workers rebellions over pay and conditions. In both cases, ordinary working people, many struggling in vain to keep their heads above the poverty line, amply demonstrated the limits to their tolerance. The issue was not only power or pay: both sets of protestors were also demonstrating against the inefficiencies and injustices of corruption, and their impact on the ordinary, working poor. Neither group was after government handouts, NGO loans or private charity. They just wanted that to which they were entitled.    Ever since the French Revolution, elites have chosen to interpret riots and mobs as having been stirred up by outsiders, and the Bangladeshi elite circa 2006 was no exception. It is not a coincidence that is also in the garments and other export-oriented industries that a more positive set of changes is occurring. As Bangladesh’s garments industry faces an increasingly competitive global market, some are trying to compete on quality, creating a demand for a well-educated mass labour force. The influential industry is well-placed to do something about this need.    Things have changed since last year, and an elite that wants the labour/consumer power/votes of the Bangladeshi poor, or who wants them to remain efficient/docile/moderately religious/peaceful is probably beginning to recognise the need to treat poverty as our most urgent priority.    Naomi Hossain’s book on Elite Perceptions of Poverty in Bangladesh was published by University Press Limited in Dhaka in 2005.