Monthly Archive

“She is part Radcliffe and Oxford, with an extremely well stocked mind, full of feminist literature, peace marches, the Oxford Union, and with a very liberated social life. She is also part feudal Sindh, a haughty aristocrat, the daughter and granddaughter of immensely wealthy landlords, whose inheritance gave her the right to rule…She is an Eastern fatalist by birth, a Western liberal by conviction, and a people-power revolutionary…She is an expensively educated product of the West who has ruled a male dominated Islamic society of the East. She is a democrat who appeals to feudal loyalties.”

–1993 Profile by Mary Anne Weaver for the New Yorker

Benazir is no more. Pakistan’s tryst with misfortune continues. Her loss is catastrophic and  irreparable.  It  is difficult to see how anything good could result from this. Benazir’s return home brought some hope that democracy would be restored, if not immediately, then eventually. These hopes rose high especially after she nixed the pact with Musharraf. In addition, she seemed to be taking a determined stance against extremists, although the Taliban did expand its foothold in Pakistan during her second term. Maybe this was a ploy on her part to gain US support, but if in fact she was being sincere, this was exactly what Pakistan needed.

Pakistan has been in desperate need of credible and legitimate leadership for years. Benazir’s death has only strengthened the dictator’s hand and created chaos and confusion that actually helps extremists expand their grip. Benazir was a consummate politician, no stranger to corruption charges (must read fascinating report from the New York Times), unsavory deals of expedience, but also not free of the oversight of the all powerful army and burgeoning Islamists. Nevertheless, Benazir was a true leader and a liberal one at that. Read the first page of the Dawn newspaper from yesterday (before her death) and you will be shocked at the number of forces ripping this state apart. Her death could not have come at a worse time. Pakistan is not too far from becoming the next Afghanistan.

Love them, hate them, given the cult of personality that defines politics in countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan, loss of leaders is a major blow to stability and national unity especially when those leaders are substantively committed to some (albeit imperfect) form of democratic government. I, like others before me, wonder how Pakistan would have fared if Jinnah hadn’t passed away so shortly after independence.

No amount of condemnation and condolences will make things right again. The finality of death is a jarring but indelible fact. Nor is there much hope for justice. News channels are reporting that the evidence was literally washed off the streets hours after the blast. The Musharraf government doesn’t really have to answer to anyone, anyway. As the Dawn editorial below makes clear, political deaths in Pakistan tend to remain shrouded forever. We Bangladeshis need to learn from that alternate reality. All politicians in captivity must have speedy, fair, open trials. We must  insist that democracy is restored without delay. There really is no defensible alternative form of government. We certainly don’t want to end up like Pakistan. 

http://www.dawn.com/2007/12/28/top3.htm

Via Marginalrevolution.com, yet another lesson in arbitrage:

What high tech wonder-tools does RMG use to defeat Ticketmaster’s captchas, the annoying jumble of characters used to prove your humanity? Is it Optical Character Recognition? Something even more futuristic, maybe web 3.0-ish? Nah. Cipriano Garibay, president of RMG Technologies, boasts: “We pay guys in India $2 an hour to type the answers.”

And lifted from the comments at MR:

“We pay guys in India $2 an hour to type the answers”

Smart, but spammers have had another better solution: They hosted their own pornographic site and needed users to solve a captcha to view their pics.

Guess where this captchas came from?

Not only is the UK visa authority raising fees (what’s new?) and halving stay time, now sponsors may also have to post cash bonds to keep their errant relatives in line! Yup, that’s right, sponsors of visitors to the UK may have to pay up to 1000 pound deposit to ensure that their visitors return home. This legislation, if passed, will definitely prevent poor people from visiting their relatives in the UK. If you didn’t feel like a criminal (on bail) yet for having a Bangladeshi passport, you will if this legislation gets passed and you happen to have family in the UK that you’d like to see every once in a while:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7146527.stm
What a sad world we live in. I would have thought the required in person interview would be enough.
There are few easy answers to the immigration debates raging across Europe and the US. Prof. Amy Chua of Yale Law School wrote a tough but mostly fair piece in the Washington Post. It’s a few steps right of “kumbayya” which is probably more realistic anyway.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/14/AR2007121401333.html

An incredibly powerful piece from the inimitable Rumi bhai:

It’s a Mess

The demolition of Rangs Bhaban was a symbolic equivalent of the 1/11 military government. ..

Look at the mess this government has put us into. This is what happens when the wrong people embark into a job which they do not know how to handle and which is not their job either.

If there is one piece you will read in the Bangladeshi blogosphere this week, let it be this one. Read the whole thing.

Via Marginal Revolution.com: Faux Indian Government

A fake government office has been discovered in northern India that collected taxes, provided civic services and even handed out birth and death certificates, a report said Monday.

An office was set up outside Jhansi town in Uttar Pradesh state and 20 people were employed to carry out jobs such as street sweeping.

Officials believe the operation originally started as a scam to collect fees from residents in return for one municipal janitor.

But the leader of the operation, named as Shyam Valmiki, allegedly branched out, opening a functioning office that employed a team of janitors.

“He later seems to have decided to carry on with the office as it did not appear to be a loss-making proposition,” an unnamed police officer was quoted by Times of India saying.

(My italics)

Which naturally leads one to ask - were they providing the services better than the government run offices?

This also has some relevance to the fascinating discussion about industrialists v. entrepreneurs that’s going on in the comments of Leela’s post. My quick Taka 1.372 (under prevailing exchange rates): the appropriate distinction is to worry about is between access capitalists and entrepreneurs/industrialists, rather than between industrialists and entrepreneurs. Managerial ability should not be as easily discounted as I have seen in it be in that discussion. Just ask the Indian guy who’s about to be appointed CEO of Citibank.

OK, back to Administrative law. ‘Cause lawyers are uncommonly bad managers.

I haven’t seen any news of the SOE government releasing the cartoonist Arif. From what I understand, he’s still in custody. I cannot imagine how bad the conditions are that he has been held under. I shudder every time I think of where and how this completely innocent individual is. It was a travesty of justice to send him to prison. Every minute that he is kept there is a travesty of justice as well. No fair-minded person should think otherwise.

In light of the recent “pardons” of the RU professors, I say that the government “pardon” Arif as well. I do not have any doubt in my mind that Arif did anything wrong, that there is no crime per se that he needs to be granted forgiveness for. I have not a shred of doubt in my mind that his imprisonment was unjust.

But I beg, beseech, the government to pardon Arif. If they can save face and even gain advantage by doing so, let them. Let them portray to the world that they were right to send him there, and now they are merciful and generous in letting him out. But let Arif go free. Pardon him, please.

Via Shadakalo:

“Syed Muztoba Ali once wrote about someone that his brain is so twisted, if you drive a nail through it, it will come out as a screw.”

I’ll have to use this line someday.

Still writing that darn paper. It has to get done in the next two days.

AsifY bhai rightfully complains about Mainul Hossein’s statement about the filing of the cases against the Jamaat leaders “belittling Bangladesh”. It’s meaningless rhetoric, insulting both to the speaker and the audience. I’ll tell you what belittling Bangladesh is. It’s the clear injustice of this (and he’s still not free, it must be added). And the absolute disproportionality of this.

That being said, I can’t help wonder if the claim that individuals cannot file sedition and treason charges without government support does not have some merit. Consider (some quick thoughts - I apologize for the incoherence of them given how quickly I am typing this out):

1. The crime of sedition is by all accounts a serious one, and one that has serious consequences for the one who is accused of it. Do we really want all and sundry to be able to trigger a government reaction to something someone says by bringing such complaints? What kind of safeguards do we want to build into the process? What should the standards be for triggering such a process? I would claim that given the seriousness of the crime and its consequences, the standards for bringing such a claim should be pretty high?

2. Besides, what should the limits of the sedition laws be, given the seriousness of the charge, and given our constitutional commitment to freedom of expression? Should Hannan making statements on TV about the war be enough to bring the claim to court? Think about what such a facility do to political expression. And not just public political expression - people walking in silent rallies for example. But also semi-public political expression - this blog for example. And also private political expression - that quintessential Bangladeshi habit of whining when dining on cha, paan and fuchka.

There must be some consistency and vision to where and how we draw our lines. We cannot be both for Arif and for putting Hannan away for statements he made on national TV. I understand the emotions that animate us - but let’s keep the eye on the ball?

3. The legal case: What I’ve seen of the legislation that sedition charges are being brought on suggests that the Barrister -newspaperman-Adviser has some grounds for defending what has been done - without needed to twist himself into pretzels (or for that matter, having to resort to “belittling” rhetoric). New Age gives us some indication of some of the relevant law. From what I understand from reading the New Age article, it seems that this is the process:

* Individual shall (in the absence of reasonable excuse) bring case under 121 etc. to the magistrate or the police officer.

[sidenote - the "shall" is highly problematic, don't you think?]

* Magistrate is required to start the proceedings

* 196 bars any court of taking cognisance of any offence of sedition and treason under section 121A and 123A without sanction from the government.

* Yet the former High Court judges citing different provisions claim that the magistrates are required to start the proceedings.

A few issues:

i. I’d like to know from someone who knows the law in Bangladesh what the “starting the proceedings” means? Does it mean they have to file it? Does it mean that they are required to ask the police to file an FIR? The latter has an ultra vires feel to it. 196 clearly says that you can’t give cognisance - which would suggest that as a magistrate you can start “proceedings” only to the point where you are giving cognisance to the claim. Where is that line legally drawn? I would think that a magistrate requiring the police to file an FIR for a sedition case is “giving cognisance to the claim”, but one would have to look at the caselaw on this to be really sure.

ii. Further, I would like to know what the relevant rules are for the police to register or register file an FIR. Are they required to register an FIR? How much discretion is there under the appropriate police regulations for register an FIR? Under what conditions can they look at an ultra vires action taken by a magistrate court and refuse to register an FIR? And can starting the proceedings with mean anything less than allowing an FIR to be register - putting something in their daily GD log for example? Plus, given that 196 defines what the procedural requirements for starting an action are -requirements that include sanction from the government - is not agreeing to register an FIR really so indefensible?

iii. It’s useful to think of the need for government sanction as one of the burdens of production for bringing such a claim to a justice. The law seems to say that you have standing to file a criminal case of this nature (note - it is a criminal charge - not a civil case, where the claim is that the harm has been done to the individual bringing the case) - but you have to make sure that there are certain hoops you have jump through - including getting government sanction. I note the possible appropriateness of this in 1 and 2. And given the points I raise there, it certainly does make more sense to me that the private citizen filing the charges should bear the burden than the viewpoint of the anonymous judges who think that bringing a claim creates a duty on the the police to go out an ask the government for sanction.

4. What is interesting is what the administrative law requirement is for a request to act (here, giving sanction). In the US, for example, the Administrative Procedure Act requires that the denial of a petition to act by a government agency must be accompanied with some reasoned statement of why they refused to act. Court deference to such reasons have varied depending on the context (though generally, there’s a fair amount of deference to agencies). Is there such a requirement for a reasoned statement of why a petition to sanction is to be denied there in the relevant administrative law in Bangladesh? I simply don’t know enough - and by that I mean, I don’t know anything.

But if there is such a requirement, that reasoning might be appropriate for the media and the public (if not the courts) to scrutinize.

5. I understand that some of the claim being brought was over the activities of the accused individuals in 1971. It seems problematic to me that sedition and treason charges can be brought for activities in pre-December 16, 1971 Bangladesh. War crime charges, yes. Murder, rape and torture charges, absolutely. But sedition and treason charges against a state that was yet not independent and sovereign over its own territory?

6. Leaving aside those who committed murder, rape and torture - for the big chunk of the population in 1971 that performed various tasks (supplying milk to Pakistani soldiers, for example) and held various views that can be clearly be shown to be seditious and treasonous to the Bangladeshi state, what is the appropriate measure to take? A few things need to be admitted here. Notwithstanding our national foundation myths, this group would constitute a substantial portion of the population. Millions, tens of millions of people. This suggests a couple of things:

i. We must be wary about judicializing what to do about these people, if only for the reasons of practicality and manageability.

ii. This really is a political issue - better taken care of in political processes. (And I would be willing to bet that if put to a vote, the vast majority of the country would not like to have this issue revisited.)

7. Those who committed rape, murder and torture are different though. I believe the criminal code and common law in the courts define these crimes quite precisely. I can understand the possible legitimacy of bringing criminal charges under the law of the time.

8. Even if legal charges are not (or cannot) be brought against the individuals who committed these crimes - these individuals must still confront the morality of their actions in 1971. I am sorry, but Mr. Hannan’s argument that this was a situation of civil war does not give moral cover to what they did, even if it might give legal cover. The most powerful response to it in the TV show where Mr. Hannan made his comments was the statement of the son of one of the intellectuals carried away, tortured and killed by the Al-Badr/As-Shams monsters. Yes, those who fought on the field of battle side by side with Pakistani soldiers against Bangladeshi muktibahini guerillas may claim moral cover under the argument that it was a civil war they were fighting.

But this justification does not extend to those who raped women and children in villages and towns around the country. We know this happened because many of these women exemplified courage and dignity by naming their rapists even in the face of social ostracization, and the camps themselves are well-documented (see Mash’s site for contemporaneous documentary proof). This justification does not extend to those who tied the hands and feet of men (under mere suspicion of collaborate, or worse, because of greed over land) and dragged them on their backs over miles of rough village roads to Pakistani camps, for torture and worse. An uncle of mine was one of these unfortunate victims. This justification does not extend to those who, in the last days of the war, targeted and carried away the cream of our intelligentsia (and civil servants and police officers) in a well-organized, well-documented campaign, committed the most inhuman torture upon them, brutally slaughtered them and left their mutilated bodies to rot in mass graves.

Even Hannan and those he would protect with his rhetoric cannot deny that these things did not happen.

The absolute number of those who died is irrelevant. Whether it was 3,000,000 or 300,000 or 30,000 or even 300 is irrelevant. Whether we choose to call it a civil war or a war of liberation is irrelevant. Whether we can define it as genocide is irrelevant.

For M is for Murder. And O is for Oppression. And R is for Rape. And T is for Torture. And no amount of prevarication or equivocation will change this fact.

We must not forget this.

I continue to work on this paper. And it continues to avoid being completed. And thus I find myself procrastinating.

Today’s procrastination notes: Strange Maps.

My favorites:

Patients per doctor Map of the World ,

The flawed, but fascinating Balkans Map of North America ,  and

Antarctica sliced differently, wherein Bangladesh gets a slice of the South Pole pie.

Also did you know that the Panama canal runs from the Northwest (Atlantic) to the Southeast (Pacific)? (No, you read that right) This is because of the curl of the Isthmus of Panama.

Thanks for your comments! I was going to post the points below in a comment but just wanted to make sure it got a wider reading.

What can we learn from the Malawi article? The state was facing a food shortage, it went against the advice of the international development community, provided steep subsidies (one third of market price), and in two years the farmers virtually tripled their output in the presence of favorable weather. The article does not tell us about the rate of subsidies in Malawi in previous years, let alone why and how subsidies worked so well this time. Nor do we find out much about how the fertilizers were distributed. But given that we too are facing a potential food shortage, I thought Malawi could provide us with a useful lesson in the sense that when farmers are given what they desperately need, the results can seem miraculous. The title ofmy post was basically a description of the NYT piece and what happened in Malawi rather than an outright recommendation for Bangladesh. It is entirely possible that our subsidies are steep enough already but there are other inefficiencies at work that are causing problems for farmers.

As far as the Bangladesh situation is concerned, I know woefully little. So, here are the questions that I have. Some of these have been already raised:

1. What are the current level of subsidies and do we actually need more or less subsidies? I too have read about subsidies being inefficient, and direct transfers being better in a strict theoretical sense in my early years of grad school, but does that work on the ground in Bangladesh? What are the intervening factors? It is a fact that subsidies are a mainstay of the relationship between the agriculture lobby and governments in Europe and the US. Why do subsidies persist if they are so inefficient? This is where politics seeps into economics pure and simple. Malawi was advised to reduce subsidies but it went against the tide. How did that work out so favorably for them?

2. How does the fertilizer market work at the international and local levels (international production and prices, current import rates, local demand, credit and domestic distribution systems in particular)? Is the current system better or worse than the previous ones? We lack basic descriptive data on this. Newspaper reports are piecemeal at best.

3. Variation in demand/ protests over time and space: Is the crisis actually worse this year than all the previous years in terms of fertilizer provision? Is there variation across the country in farmer protests? What is the variation in terms of needs and how well those needs are met? Are certain areas faring better than others? If so, what factors are at work?

Like I said I know far too little to comment knowledgeably. As for the smuggling I’m pretty sure I read a few weeks ago that fertilizer was going to Burma in an article on smugglers being caught in Chittagong… presumably there was profit to be made because prices were higher there at the time.

The fertilizer crisis is not new. I have been reading newspapers since 1991 for my own work and it comes up pretty much every year. Farmers have been protesting, often violently, over the past decade and half at least. In the past the issue was politicized and whatever government was in power was blamed.

The article that Leela posted is a fascinating one.  AsifY bhai has been goading me, I see, to post on arbitrage.  Alas, there is very little time - a big paper is due tomorrow - so all I am going to do is post a few quick notes. These might be even less coherent than my usual babbling.

* My usual attitude towards subsidies on goods like fertilizer (or for that matter, petrol) is that given the porousness of borders with India, if the post-subsidy price is set lower than the (post-subsidy) price in India, there will be smuggling into India. Back in 2005, the word on the street was that a big chunk of petrol consumption in West Bengal was being subsidized by the Bangladeshi government, since petrol and diesel was being smuggled at will to India. (Talk about Bengali unity!)

*  Aside from arbitrage through smuggling, it’s hard to do subsidies really well to actually target the ones who need it most. The history of subsidies in East Pakistan and Bangladesh will reveal this to be true.

* More importantly (for the kinds of things that fundamentally get my juices flowing), subsidies encourage rent-seeking behavior. In our country, that has often meant abasement and servility to elites with access, and corruption.

*  Basic microeconomics tells you that it makes more sense (in a utility-enhancement sense) to transfer wealth to the individuals who will receive the subsidy directly than to do so indirectly through subsidies (this is even without taking into account the costs of the system…) I can see why you’d want wrinkles in the basic model though, so I won’t push this point too much.  Sample thoughts on what kind of wrinkles to add: Dynamic inconsistency. Information and knowledge created through subsidized programs. A misalignment between the incentives of the individual and the government (with the government, or “society” wanting to push certain ends over the other). Externalities.

*  How do you explain the smuggling into Bangladesh from India? There likely is a market for fertilizers (outside of the government channels), and the difficult supply of government fertilizer is driving the price up - beyond what fertilizer sellers can get in India + transport and transaction costs. Ergo: Smuggling into Bangladesh.

The presence of this market also has implications for how well these subsidies can be targetted in the first place - as I am sure readers can work out for themselves.

* The slippery slope argument that Tacit makes does not quite work. The simple answer to why give subsidies for fertilizer but not for electricity (though I do believe rural electricity is  subsidized in the ‘Desh) or say, cotton candy, might very well be because the returns from such a subsidy, taka for taka, are higher.

Bottom line: I can see why subsidies might seem attractive. But it’s hard to get subsidies right, and reach them to the right people.

There are predictions of potential famine in the air. In areas unaffected by Sidr, farmers are protesting fertilizer pricing and shortage almost weekly (most recently in Jamalpur) in desperate violation of SOE laws. At times they resort to violence against government offices and representatives in their localities, barricade highways etc.  Fertilizer pricing and provision has been a consistent problem over the past two decades.

The current administration claims that we have enough fertilizer but distribution networks are the main problem. The issue is not that simple. Newspapers often report on how fertilizer is smuggled out of the country to Burma and India. There are allegations of rampant profiteering and mismanagement. The bottom line is that the farmers are not getting what they need. There is no time to play the blame game this year. We need to extract every last bit of agricultural output from the next crop season if we are to avert food shortages. In fact, the areas unaffected by Sidr will have to produce bumper crops to cushion the devastating losses in approximately one third of the country. In light of Bangladesh’s current situation, today’s NYT article on Malawi is particularly edifying, not just for this year, but for years to come.

Excerpts:

Malawi hovered for years at the brink of famine. After a disastrous corn harvest in 2005, almost five million of its 13 million people needed emergency food aid. But this year, a nation that has perennially extended a begging bowl to the world is instead feeding its hungry neighbors. It is selling more corn to the World Food Program of the United Nations than any other country in southern Africa and is exporting hundreds of thousands of tons of corn to Zimbabwe.

In Malawi itself, the prevalence of acute child hunger has fallen sharply. In October, the United Nations Children’s Fund sent three tons of powdered milk, stockpiled here to treat severely malnourished children, to Uganda instead. “We will not be able to use it!” Juan Ortiz-Iruri, Unicef’s deputy representative in Malawi, said jubilantly.Farmers explain Malawi’s extraordinary turnaround — one with broad implications for hunger-fighting methods across Africa — with one word: fertilizer.

Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers. But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached. Stung by the humiliation of pleading for charity, he led the way to reinstating and deepening fertilizer subsidies despite a skeptical reception from the United States and Britain. Malawi’s soil, like that across sub-Saharan Africa, is gravely depleted, and many, if not most, of its farmers are too poor to afford fertilizer at market prices…..

Malawi, an overwhelmingly rural nation about the size of Pennsylvania, is an extreme example of what happens when those things are missing. As its population has grown and inherited landholdings have shrunk, impoverished farmers have planted every inch of ground. Desperate to feed their families, they could not afford to let their land lie fallow or to fertilize it. Over time, their depleted plots yielded less food and the farmers fell deeper into poverty.

Malawi’s leaders have long favored fertilizer subsidies, but they reluctantly acceded to donor prescriptions, often shaped by foreign-aid fashions in Washington, that featured a faith in private markets and an antipathy to government intervention. In the 1980s and again in the 1990s, the World Bank pushed Malawi to eliminate fertilizer subsidies entirely. Its theory both times was that Malawi’s farmers should shift to growing cash crops for export and use the foreign exchange earnings to import food, according to Jane Harrigan, an economist at the University of London.

In a withering evaluation of the World Bank’s record on African agriculture, the bank’s own internal watchdog concluded in October not only that the removal of subsidies had led to exorbitant fertilizer prices in African countries, but that the bank itself had often failed to recognize that improving Africa’s declining soil quality was essential to lifting food production.“The donors took away the role of the government and the disasters mounted,” said Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist who lobbied Britain and the World Bank on behalf of Malawi’s fertilizer program and who has championed the idea that wealthy countries should invest in fertilizer and seed for Africa’s farmers.

You can read the rest of the article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/world/africa/02malawi.html?em&ex=1196658000&en=daf2c73a7680b282&ei=5087%0A