While travelling recently in rural Bangladesh, one of us (Manzoor Ahmed) visited a government primary school. Sitting in the third row of a rather crowded Grade 3 class of about 40 boys and girls was Khaled. With the teacher’s permission, Manzoor asked Khaled to read. His teacher readily agreed, and Khaled read a passage from a story in his Bangla textbook. The story had been taught to the class. He read with reasonable fluency, halting once or twice, but pronouncing the words correctly. Manzoor praised Khaled’s performance and asked if he would read from the Bangla newspaper he had to hand. Khaled stood quietly and was not responsive. Encouraged by the teacher not to be shy, he tried to utter the syllables of the words in the headline. He could not read full words or the sentence.

Khaled, a nine-year-old Grade 3 student, obviously could not read an unfamiliar text. The textbook passage had been read out and repeated in the classroom and he could repeat it. However, he had not really learned to read. Reading requires mastering and decoding letters of the alphabet, assembling them into words, and giving appropriate meaning to the string of words. If Khaled cannot read a Bangla text unless it has been drilled in class, he will not be able to read textbooks in higher grades. He will not be able to do his math studies, because that requires reading the instructions for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. How many primary students across South Asia are in Khaled’s shoes?

By general consensus the most important objective of primary schools is enabling students to read and write the relevant regional or national language. If children do not pursue at least five years of reasonable-quality education, they are unlikely to achieve literacy – and are unlikely to read and write later in life. In a survey undertaken simultaneously among adults in a Dhaka slum and in a low-income rural village in Bangladesh, three quarters of the adults sampled had not advanced beyond Grade 2.¹ Among them, 3 per cent reported being able to read. Among those who had studied to Grade 5, two thirds reported they “can read well” and the remainder reported they “can read a little.” Only among the small percentage who had studied to Grade 6 or above did all report they “can read well.” This result has been replicated many times.

We referred to the need for five years of “reasonable-quality” education. Unfortunately, in much of South Asia, primary schools are not of reasonable quality. How to go about improving them is the central theme of our forthcoming book. The most definitive evidence of the crisis in school quality in South Asia are results of surveys undertaken by ASER,² an Indian NGO, which has recently extended its school assessments to Pakistan. ASER reports are based on large-scale surveys conducted in children’s homes – over 600,000 in the most recent sample in India, in 2016. In this survey, only 25 per cent of rural children in Grade 3 could read a short story in the regional language of the state’s Grade 2 curriculum. As expected, children in more prosperous states performed better than those in poorer states, but in no state was the average ability of Grade 3 students to read the Grade 2 text above 50 per cent. In Pakistan, the comparable statistic among Grade 3 students was 17 per cent. To date, the only rigorous application of ASER’s protocol in Bangladesh is a small pilot study undertaken by two of us in a northern district in 2017. In our sample, 30 per cent of Grade 3 students could read the Grade 2–level text.³

To pose a little more precisely the question as to how many are in Khaled’s shoes, consider the ASER results in the terminal primary year (Grade 5). Slightly under half of the Indian children successfully read the Grade 2 sample text, slightly over half in the Pakistani sample. There are approximately 200 million children in primary school in South Asia, about 40 million of whom are in Grade 5. If half these children cannot read at the Grade 2 level, about 20 million are in Khaled’s shoes at Grade 5.

The second core primary school objective is that children learn the four basic mathematical operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division). In the same ASER surveys, 28 per cent of Indian children in Grade 3 could perform two-digit subtraction problems (such as 73 – 36 = 37) from the Grade 2 curriculum. The comparable Pakistani statistic was 44 per cent, and in our pilot Bangladesh study it was 18 per cent.

The third core objective is that children learn some basic scientific ideas. Pursuit of basic literacy, numeracy and scientific understanding is universal in school systems across the world. Obviously, achieving these three outcomes cannot define the full curriculum. A good primary school teaches children to interact socially and to learn cultural expectations and ideas. This component of the curriculum must be anchored in local culture and values specific to the country in question.

Why does it matter?

Why does it matter that all children receive a quality education – starting with a solid basis at the primary level? The question is worth asking, even if the answers seem obvious.

• There are four basic answers – based on the crucial role played by quality primary education (for which we use the literacy rate of the country’s adult population as a proxy) in realizing four important goals:
• economic development (measured by per capita GDP);
• good public health outcomes (illustrated by under-five mortality);
• reduction in poverty (measured by per cent below the World Bank’s lower middle-income poverty threshold of US$3.20 per person per day); and
• enabling people to continue learning and developing their capabilities, on their own or by participating in further education.

If we are discussing South Asia, the first observation is that Sri Lanka is an outlier in terms of per capita GDP, under-five mortality and poverty (see table 1). Its outcomes are closer to those in Thailand and China than to those of the four other South Asian countries.

We refer to adult literacy as a proxy for the “human capital” created mostly by the primary school cycle. Literacy should be considered as a continuum, from recognition of an alphabet and words to fluent reading of texts. However, to undertake any quantitative analysis we need a benchmark. In what follows, we use literacy statistics as reported by UNESCO. A respondent is deemed literate if he or she can read a simple sentence. By this very modest benchmark, UNESCO estimates that the adult literacy rate in South Asia averaged about 68 per cent over the last decade, well below the average of 74 per cent among countries labelled “lower-middle-income” (see note 6) by the World Bank. Given South Asia’s large population, more than half of the world’s illiterate adults, as defined by UNESCO, reside in South Asia (389 million out of a total of 758 million).

Literacy and per capita GDP

Not surprisingly, there is high correlation between literacy rates and per capita GDP among low-income and low-middle-income countries. Association is not necessarily explanation. Perhaps the story to tell about education and prosperity is not that higher literacy plays a crucial role in increasing per capita GDP. Perhaps the story should be reversed: once families have higher incomes, for whatever reason, they want higher education levels for their children and, given higher prosperity, more families can afford to pay higher taxes for government schools or fees for private schools. In the long run, the reverse story, or a story of mutual reinforcement, is important. It does not, however, undermine the argument that literacy, as proxy for human capital in low-income countries, is a crucial determinant of future economic development.

Figure 1 illustrates, for 12 countries, the change in per capita GDP from 2000 to 2016 against adult literacy rates in 2000 – which avoids the reverse causation dilemma. The criteria for inclusion are that the countries be in south, southeast or east Asia; that in 2000 their per capita GDP (measured in 2000 and 2016 in constant 2011 purchasing power parity dollars) be below US$10,000; that their population exceed five million; and that reliable data be available.

While the figure includes data from only 12 countries, they cumulatively comprise half the world’s population. Of total world population, three in eight reside in either China (19 per cent of the world total) or India (18 per cent). Pakistan (3 per cent) and Bangladesh (2 per cent) rank respectively sixth and eighth in terms of national population; Nepal and Sri Lanka are relatively small. Collectively, the five major South Asian countries comprise nearly a quarter of the world total.

As recently as 2000, China’s per capita GDP was not an outlier relative to South Asia (see table 1). Admittedly, it was more than twice that of Bangladesh and Nepal, and roughly one and a half times that of India. But its per capita GDP was only two thirds of Sri Lanka’s, and essentially equal to Pakistan’s. Since the beginning of this century, China’s massive rural-to-urban migration in combination with advances in basic education and literacy has led to its emergence as the world’s dominant manufacturing nation – the outstanding economic and development event in the world in this period. This migration has had a major impact on Chinese labour productivity and, not surprisingly, even after adjustment for adult literacy rates in 2000, China’s increase in per capita GDP is well in excess of the increase among the 11 other countries.

GDP is an imperfect measure of economic prosperity. Nonetheless, it is a useful first approximation of national economic development. Per capita GDP is an average; it cannot tell us anything about the distribution of income within a country between poor and rich.

Similarly, adult literacy rate is a useful, if imperfect, measure of the average per capita human capital available to a nation’s economy. National literacy rates underestimate inasmuch as they ignore both human capital transmitted intergenerationally via “learning by doing” and human capital generated among the minority who proceed to secondary and tertiary education. On the other hand, current literacy rates overestimate human capital inasmuch as many of those deemed literate by the UNESCO benchmark have a very limited ability to read and to use their reading capacity in daily life.

Figure 1 also illustrates an equation arising from a very simple regression of national changes in per capita GDP from 2000 to 2016 in terms of national literacy rates at 2000, plus an index identifying China. The index variable acknowledges the uniquely successful Chinese exercise in rural-to-urban migration and industrialization. The resulting equation fits the data remarkably well.⁴ Among these low-income countries (in 2000), the literacy rate appears to be a crucial variable for predicting subsequent economic development.

In their analysis of per capita GDP growth among 50 countries over the four decades between 1960 and 2000, Eric A. Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann undertake a similar exercise, initially using mean years of national schooling as a measure of national human capital.⁵ The variable is positive and statistically significant, but the explanatory power of the resulting regression is weak. When they add an education outcome variable (the average of several mathematics and science student assessments), the explanatory power of the regression becomes impressive, and the mean years of schooling variable becomes statistically insignificant.

Their sample countries are at the upper-middle-income level or higher; hence, they concentrate on measures of secondary school performance. While their study includes a few control variables, both their 50-country analysis and our 12-country exercise are statistically simple (some would say simple-minded). Certainly, many institutional factors, ignored in both these studies, matter. However, adding complexity does not blunt the central conclusion: achieving reasonable-quality primary education outcomes is a necessary condition for escaping low-income status.

The process of economic development cannot be reduced to the organization of good schools. If a supply of workers with appropriate skills at the country’s level of development is necessary, so too is the presence of employers wanting to hire them and an institutional framework conducive to entrepreneurship. Channelling entrepreneurship requires an appropriate regulatory framework.

Literacy and health: Beyond its narrowly economic effect is the role of literacy, in particular female literacy, on a range of public health outcomes. Figure 2 displays under-five mortality rates against adult female literacy. (Here the causal direction is obvious.)

It is worth distinguishing between the six countries with female literacy below 70 per cent (which include all South Asian countries other than Sri Lanka) and the remaining six with female literacy at 90 per cent or higher. Among the first group, mortality rates are above 30 per 1,000 live births; among the second, all have realized a rate below – most well below – that threshold. The large deviations from trend in Pakistan (with mortality well above projection) and Nepal (mortality below projection) indicate that, independent of female literacy, the quality of health services is an important factor.

Many factors other than female literacy are relevant here; however, the association between female literacy and public health outcomes is one of the most robust of epidemiological results. There are many routes whereby literate mothers are in a better position to raise healthy children than those who are not literate. They are better able to make appropriate use of public health services, such as prenatal and postnatal checkups, and follow written health advice. If literate, women can earn more and thereby increase family income. All else being equal, children fare better with fewer siblings, and there is a powerful association between higher female literacy and lower number of children per family. Presumably, the underlying dynamic with respect to family size is that literate women exercise more influence within the family and, in general, they want small families. Admittedly, there is more to an analysis of fertility than the empowerment of women. China’s “one child” policy has been a powerful external incentive in determining family size in China.

Literacy and poverty: Defining poverty thresholds inevitably entails debatable criteria. If the threshold is defined in terms of income required to enable physical survival, it will be very low. If the threshold incorporates a relative component (the threshold is defined, say, as some fraction of median income), it will probably be much higher. The World Bank defines its lowest threshold, often applied among countries classified as “low-income,” at US$1.90 per person per day. We use the threshold applied to “middle-income” countries (11 of our 12 countries qualify as middle-income): $3.20 per person per day.⁶

A common feature of low-income countries undergoing economic development is high income inequality. In low-income countries, the well educated realize very high incomes relative to median country income; government ability to redistribute income via taxes is weak; only a minority of the rural labour force enjoy the education required to gain access to higher-paying urban employment. Given these realities, countries that prioritize primary education and achieve high adult literacy substantially increase the supply of workers able to participate in nontraditional jobs, which in turn can dramatically lower the proportion living in poverty.

Figure 3 illustrates the population share living below $3.20 per day against adult literacy rates. As we have come to expect, there is a sizable difference between the average for countries with adult literacy above 90 per cent and the remainder, which have literacy below 75 per cent. Four of the five South Asian countries are in the relatively low-literacy group.

Beyond the humanitarian goal of reducing the hardship associated with poverty, countries with lower poverty rates, in general, enjoy greater political stability. The Worldwide Governance Indicators provide measures of governance along six dimensions, one of them being “political stability and absence of violence or terrorism.”⁷ The correlation between percentage living below $3.20 a day and per cent rank (among approximately 200 countries) on this index dimension is modestly negative. Among the five South Asian countries, the negative correlation is high.⁸

Completing the primary cycle is a low rung on the education ladder. For middle-income countries to prosper, they also need to realize quality secondary education among a substantial share of the next generation. That brings us to our fourth goal: a good-quality primary education is the necessary condition for people to continue learning, either on their own or via further formal education. To sum up, if we accept the importance of economic development, good population health outcomes, low poverty rates and education beyond the primary level, and the importance of literacy in realizing these goals, then the case for quality primary schooling is overwhelming.

Why is school quality a serious problem in South Asia?

In 2000, the United Nations launched the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Among the goals, MDG2 (universal primary education by 2015) ranked second, after reduction in world hunger. In the 15 years following 2000, India, Nepal and Bangladesh dramatically increased primary school enrolment, to a level above 95 per cent among children in the relevant age cohort. In the process, they realized enrolment gender equality. They also dramatically increased primary school completion, to approximately 80 per cent. (As for the two others, Pakistan increased enrolment and completion rates, but to much lower levels, and Sri Lanka had realized near-universal primary enrolment and primary school completion by 1980.)

Given these results, India, Bangladesh and Nepal could claim to have more or less satisfied the “letter” of MDG2. But they did so by ignoring its “spirit.” They lowered standards for certifying primary school completion. The best quantitative evidence of very low standards is the ASER results discussed above. A question that immediately arises is: Why has there not been massive public pressure to improve standards?

There are several answers. The first is that those best placed to protest have little personal incentive to do so. Elite families rely on high-fee private schools to educate their children. Among low-income families with some discretionary income, an increasing share now choose “low-fee” private schools. In India and Bangladesh, the share of primary school students in nongovernment schools has risen from about 20 per cent to 30 per cent over the last decade.

A second reason is that low-income parents, many of them illiterate, do not have the ability to judge the quality of government versus private schools or the discretionary income to pay for private schooling. To the extent that the truly poor abandon government schools, it may be for a no-fee charity school (such as a madrassa) with standards no better than government schools. The combination of elite and middle-class families disengaged from the public-school system and the difficulty of low-income families in gauging school quality has enabled politicians and administrators to maintain the status quo with little public outcry.

A second question then arises: Even if they have avoided public criticism, why would governments want low standards? Surely, senior politicians and public officials understand the basic rationale for improving education levels and the importance of quality primary education.

To be fair, many do understand. However, at this point we must bring quality of governance into the discussion. Reputable indices such as the Worldwide Governance Indicators and Transparency International provide depressing evidence: relative to most low-income countries, South Asian countries (Sri Lanka and some Indian states excepted) display high perceptions of corruption, high perceptions of political instability and low perceptions of government effectiveness in delivering basic services such as health care and education. Only on the dimension of relative honesty in elections and freedom of the press do South Asian countries match or outperform other low-income countries.

Principals and agents

Parents who want a decent education for their children have a primary interest in how schools function. In the language of principal–agent analysis, they are the principals – not to be confused with school principals. At the same time, administering schools entails agents – senior-level administrators, school principals, teachers and so on. Many of the agents’ activities positively contribute to realizing children’s education, but some of those activities do not.

This may seem obvious. But only in the last decade have development agencies and educators come to grips with the severity of the governance problem in the context of education. Annually, the World Bank publishes a major synthesis report. The 2018 report is devoted entirely to the obstacles to quality in education posed by problems of national governance.⁹

A central feature of principal–agent interaction is the role of information: agents have knowledge that the principals lack, and it is costly if not impossible for the principals (parents in the context of schools) to get the relevant information and act on it. For example, parents presumably want teachers hired on the basis of competence and willingness to teach diligently in the classroom during working hours. However, the custom appears widespread across South Asia that applicants for government teaching posts offer to education officials or local politicians a substantial sum (as much as US$10,000) as a precondition for being hired. This leads to the hiring of teachers on the basis of applicants’ financial resources and not on an evaluation of their potential as future teachers. From the perspective of parents this is adverse selection – an incentive structure that increases the probability of teachers being hired who are likely to be inappropriate and who cannot effectively serve as role models for students.

Once they are hired, supervision of teachers is often lax and they are in a position to engage in private tutoring of their students, for which parents pay. Here is moral hazard – an incentive structure that encourages teachers not to carry out their duties in a manner that parents would prefer.

Given opaque decision-making, interagent collusion arises. For example, senior administrators and politicians share the boksheesh paid by applicants for teaching positions. In exchange, administrators tolerate lax supervision of teachers who economize on time spent teaching in the classroom, and prioritize paid private tutoring.

Interagent collusion differs by country. In the last decade, the government of Bangladesh introduced a mandatory nationwide exam (Primary Education Completion Exam) in Grade 5. The stated purpose was to standardize the criterion for primary completion, relative to the status quo ante in which local jurisdictions exercised autonomy over evaluating completion. However, exam questions are frequently leaked and teachers engage in extensive private tutoring. Much of the tutoring requires that students in their final year memorize answers to exam questions.¹⁰ This increase in tutoring can reasonably be interpreted as an extension of collusion between teachers’ unions on the one hand and senior administrators and politicians on the other.

Another feature peculiar to South Asia – especially Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan – is that a preservice qualification and certification for teaching is not a requirement. In many countries – including China and other southeast and east Asian countries – young people after the higher secondary level are first recruited for a four-year university general degree program, with education as a major subject of study. Thus the graduates are prepared professionally, intellectually and emotionally to take up teaching as their life occupation.

In South Asia, teachers are sent for pedagogy training after they are employed in a school. School teaching is among the last choices for university graduates, a fallback position, and those recruited are not the more capable graduates. Among those appointed as teachers, many look for opportunities to move to other jobs. Quality of teachers – their recruitment, preparation, professional development and incentives – is a major obstacle to quality assurance in primary education in South Asia. No solution to this problem is available in the context of the prevailing principal–agent dynamic.

Centralization of school management

Another aspect of principal–agent analysis is the impact on outcomes from alternative allocation of responsibilities to the various agents in the system. South Asian school systems are extremely centralized. In India, individual states are responsible for primary education. Given the population of Indian states (the largest is over 200 million), and of Pakistan and Bangladesh, the number of students per school system is very large. (In Bangladesh there are 20 million primary school students in more than 100,000 primary-level institutions run essentially by the Directorate of Primary Education in Dhaka.) Centralized responsibility may realize scale economies (e.g., a lower cost per textbook if the central ministry contracts to supply all textbooks.) On the other hand, centralization increases the chain of decision-making; in general, it slows decision-making, expands the information requirements for the making of managerial decisions, and often ignores critical local conditions.

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an ambitious survey of student performance in three subjects (reading, mathematics and science) at the upper secondary level, conducted at three-year intervals by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The 2015 round comprised samples in 70 countries: all OECD members plus many others, including several middle-income countries. In addition to surveying students, the 2015 PISA survey posed a series of questions to school principals in the sampled schools of each country. PISA used the results to undertake a comparative analysis of the impact of alternative school governance arrangements on student outcomes.

The analysis disaggregated school governance into five functions:

• decisions on human and financial resources (hiring/firing teachers, setting salaries and school budgeting);
• determination of curriculum;
• exercise of student discipline (e.g., penalties for poor attendance);
• student evaluation (e.g., “high-stakes” examinations of student learning outcomes, “low-stakes” core competency assessments); and
• student admission.

Simultaneously, PISA identified five administrative levels for potential exercise of each function: school principal, teachers in the relevant school, school district governing board, regional government, and national education ministry. Responsibility for individual functions may be shared among various levels. (For each function in each country, PISA averaged the school principals’ perceptions as to the relative weight of each administrative level in exercising each function.) Figure 4 illustrates a scatterplot of national school systems by an index of school autonomy constructed from this PISA survey. Decentralization is not a panacea, but the trend is evident: systems affording more autonomy to regional school boards and individual schools tend to achieve better science outcomes.¹¹

Few independent analysts consider a government school system as centralized as is typical in South Asia to be optimal. UNESCO has forcefully given its support to reforms aimed at decentralizing school administration, but warns would-be reformers that doing so inevitably generates political opposition from beneficiaries of the status quo.¹²

Decentralization of public services with accountability and responsiveness to the beneficiaries’ circumstances enjoys rhetorical support in South Asia. South Asian countries have local government structures with officially stated roles and functions, which could include the management of basic education services. Effective decentralization, however, is subject to admnistrative history, the ideology of those concerned and vested interests at play.

In all South Asian countries – with the exception of Bangladesh, which seems to take pride in its unitary government – local government bodies, such as the panchayat raj in India or its equivalents in other countries, are supposed to exercise certain functions in delivering primary education for the children of the local community. In reality, local control is minimal throughout the subcontinent; the centralized bureaucracy, aided and abetted by politicians, plays the dominant role. What can be done to change this reality is a political economy puzzle yet to be solved. The PISA analysis makes a strong case for greater decentralization of public education system management, and may suggest clues as to how South Asia can go about it.

by John Richards, Mohammad Shahidul Islam and Manzoor Ahmed

John Richards, co-publisher of Inroads, has undertaken numerous social policy research projects in Bangladesh over the last two decades. Shahidul Islam, currently USAID education team leader in Bangladesh, has specialized in primary school innovation. Manzoor Ahmed has occupied senior positions in UNICEF, was founder-director of the Institute of Educational Development at BRAC University in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and has played a major role in research and advocacy on behalf of early childhood education. His most recent publication deals with the role of schools in teaching values. This is an excerpt from the manuscript of a forthcoming book on primary education in South Asia, to be published by University of Toronto Press.

Continue reading “Why is South Asia Poor: The Role of Primary Education” →

Four days prior to the second-round election on May 7, the two remaining candidates for the French presidency conducted a televised debate. Marine Le Pen opened with the following tirade:

Electing Mr. Macron means choosing savage globalization, Uberization, economic uncertainty, the war of all against all, economic pillage of major social groups, asset stripping of France and communautarisme … The French have been able to see the real Macron in this second round: benevolence has given way to slander, the studied smile turns into a smirk in the course of his meetings, the enfant chéri of the system and the elites has let fall his mask.¹

Emmanual Macron’s initial response was measured. He accused Le Pen of lacking in “finesse d’esprit.” By the end of the two-and-a-half-hour debate however, the ferocity of his attacks matched hers:

Your political project lives on fear and lies. They are what animate you, they are what animated your father over the decades; they are what has animated the extreme right in France. I do not want any of it in our country. The France that I want is better than that. It will not be divided. But to achieve it, we must escape from a political polarization that you have helped create. You are one of the products of the status quo you denounce. You thrive on the status quo. You are a parasite.²

Le Pen’s overture was an ad hominem attack that, with a few modifications, could have been a Trump campaign speech attacking Hillary Clinton. In return, for someone wanting to heal wounds in the French body politic, Macron’s tirade against her had the feel of Clinton’s denunciation of intolerant “deplorables.” If exploitation of “fear and lies” is one pole of French politics, what is at the other pole? As an iconic representative of the cosmopolitan elites that Le Pen attacked, Macron might have at least hinted at the sins of the Parisian technocrats who have run France for the past half-century. He lectured Le Pen on the incoherence of her proposals; he did not “feel the pain” of her supporters.

Ultimately, the French opted, 66 per cent against 34 per cent, for the enfant chéri over the parasite. Like many in the French political elite, Macron is a graduate of the École Normale d’Administration, a technocrat who had never previously run for office. During the campaign, Le Pen’s strength was to articulate deeply held frustrations of native-born French who feel abandoned. While Macron made tepid claims to understand her supporters, he remained at the level of the earnest liberal wanting everyone to be reasonable. He remained excessively vague on how to reform the country.

And the country needs reform. Unemployment and immigration are two examples. To tackle the decades-long persistence of a disastrously high French unemployment rate, among the young and immigrants in particular, requires German- or U.K.-style relaxation of the labour code. It is an understatement to say that this will be controversial. Will Macron dare to touch it? On immigration, Macron has acknowledged the failure of immigrant integration. His proposals, which turn on better education starting at the primary level, make sense. But it is far from clear whether he can make progress on this dossier without controversial initiatives such as a dramatic limit on immigration, especially from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa. Imposing tough border controls would violate the Schengen Agreement, which eliminates border controls among most European Union (EU) member countries and a few non-EU countries. An immigrant who enters a Schengen-member country has the right in principle to move freely to any country in the Schengen zone.

At time of writing (the day after Macron’s second-round victory), Macron’s immediate hurdle is the general election in June for the French National Assembly. His own political party, En Marche, created over the last year to support his campaign, lacks local political roots and may win few parliamentary seats. The National Front will make gains over the two seats it currently holds, but “ganging up” by its opponents in the legislative second round will limit its potential. Given public hostility to the outgoing Socialist President, François Hollande, the Socialists will not fare well. The legislative winners may well be the Republicans, the centre-right party, whose éminence grise is former President Nicolas Sarkozy – in which case Macron will wind up in effect cohabiting with a National Assembly dominated by Hollande’s predecessor.

France is déjà vu all over again

The results of last June’s U.K. Brexit referendum, last November’s U.S. presidential election and the April 23 first round of the French presidential election share obvious similarities. In all three, more than 40 per cent of voters in effect rejected core institutional arrangements that had seemed subject to electoral consensus for over a quarter-century. At the core of current populism is the argument that free trade and large-scale immigration have led to stagnant incomes for most of the native-born and unacceptably rapid change in the ethnic composition of communities. The two dimensions, stagnant incomes and fear of lost identity, are related inasmuch as immigrants are perceived not only to be culturally alien but also to be lowering wages among native-born citizens with low formal education.

Geography matters in this discussion. In the cosmopolitan cities – in London, Paris, New York and San Francisco – the majority have overwhelmingly rejected populist candidates. The populists, in general, have succeeded in regions beset by declining industries, below-average education levels and above-average unemployment.

In examining the recent French election, we can start with the map showing the winners in the first round by department. In the centre of Paris, a friend observed, Marine Le Pen could not get herself elected dogcatcher. She garnered 5 per cent of the vote. With the exception of Seine–Saint-Denis (about which more below), Macron headed the polls in the eight departments encompassing Paris and its extensive suburbs. On the other hand, Le Pen led in nearly all departments of the north and northeast, and in the Midi (south). In addition to most of the cities, Macron prevailed in departments in the west and southwest.

Unique among countries beset by populist revolts, in France left-wing populism inspired by a long tradition of Marxism has proved nearly as prominent as right-wing populism inspired by long traditions of cultural nationalism. In the first round, the four leading candidates realized popular votes within a narrow range: 19.6 per cent for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, left populist leader of a newly founded party, France Insoumise, a competitor to the French Socialist Party; 20.0 per cent for François Fillon, winner of the primary organized by the centre-right Republicans; 21.3 per cent for Le Pen, candidate of the National Front, founded by her father; and 24.0 per cent for Macron, head of the newly founded En Marche.

Random events and small shifts in turnout could readily have generated a second round – a runoff between the first and second ranked candidates – from any combination of two among the four leading candidates. Several months ago many predicted a runoff between Fillon and Macron or Fillon and Le Pen. Unfortunately for Fillon’s electoral prospects, a weekly left-wing satirical paper, Le Canard Enchaîné, revealed massive abuse of his expense account as a member of the National Assembly over the last decade.

Mélenchon nearly doubled his vote in the final month, most of his votes coming from Benoît Hamon, hapless winner of the Socialist Party primary, who ultimately received only 6.3 per cent of the vote. Had Mélenchon’s rise commenced earlier, he might have shifted even more votes from Hamon, and ranked first or second. A hypothetical shift of three percentage points from Macron to Mélenchon would have sufficed, all else unchanged, to generate a runoff between Mélenchon and Le Pen.

Worth noting, the French presidential election has once again illustrated the famous Arrow “impossibility theorem.” Kenneth Arrow is an American economist who demonstrated formally that any electoral system can be gamed. There is no guarantee that a voting system will generate the outcome favoured by a plurality.

The trouble with French Islam today

A number of years ago Irshad Manji, a liberal Muslim originally from Vancouver, wrote a book called The Trouble with Islam Today. Her thesis was the loss of critical thinking among current Muslim leaders and the retreat of many into a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, one that is deeply suspicious of Western culture. Islam in France is currently undergoing its own trials, related to the problems Manji identified but in a specifically French context.

The first large-scale Muslim immigration to France came from the Maghreb in the 1960s. At the time, France was enjoying its trente années glorieuses following World War II. Its economy was growing rapidly and this first wave found employment and integrated reasonably well. Many had had close contact with the French during the decades of colonialism; some had sided with the French against the liberation movements. Subsequently, they were joined by many from francophone sub-Saharan ex-colonies. No official statistics exist but estimates place the present share of Muslims at 10 per cent or more of the French population.

It is an understatement to note that Muslims are less integrated today than half a century ago. Why? Some blame discrimination on the part of the French, too rigidly attached to notions of laïcité. Some blame an overly generous welfare state that provides few incentives for the poorly educated to take low-paying jobs. Some blame a rigid labour market that makes it impossible to fire, and hence employers do not hire. And some blame the rise of conservative political Islam as an ideology inviting Muslims in France to reject Western culture. I give some weight to all of the above.

Le Pen’s insistence on strict laïcité and her call to extricate France from the Schengen accord in order to impose strict immigration controls are anathema to most Muslims. Fillon also adopted a “tough” stand. On July 14, 2016, a jihadist in Nice drove a large truck through a crowd celebrating Bastille Day, killing 86 and wounding well over 100. Following the attack, Fillon published a short book entitled Vaincre le totalitarisme islamique (To Defeat Islamic Totalitarianism). The title reveals the plot: France must be tough in response to political Islam, whether it be the Islamic State or terrorists within France. This is a dossier on which Macron has said little. Which left an opening for Mélenchon.

Mélenchon is a product of French Marxist tiers-mondisme, a tradition that includes celebrities such as Jean-Paul Sartre and has been maintained by papers such as Le Monde Diplomatique. To his credit, Mélenchon has not minimized the misogynist features of political Islam; instead, he has consistently articulated the social demands of the Muslim community. The result is that he captured well over half the Muslim vote. Mélenchon did well in departments and cities with large Muslim diasporas.³ The one department in the Parisian region that Macron did not win was Seine–Saint-Denis, in the northeast of Greater Paris. It has a majority Muslim population and Mélenchon won a plurality. Similarly, in France’s second city, Marseille, the Muslim share of the population is high, and Mélenchon prevailed. However, overall in Bouche-du-Rhône, the department encompassing Marseille, Le Pen prevailed. The Midi is a region where Muslim-French relations are tense. Not surprisingly, the majority in Nice voted either for Le Pen or Fillon.

Were this a “normal” election, a victory of 66 per cent to 34 per cent would indicate stability, a solid majority and a “loyal” opposition. But in the age of mainstream versus populist and Muslim alienation, this is not the case. One symptom of malaise is the exceptionally high percentage of spoiled ballots, votes blancs (ballots submitted with no candidate selected) and nonvoters. Most foreign observers, understandably sympathetic to Macron, are projecting onto him their proposed policy solutions and minimizing the difficult institutional reforms required to realize them.

… and across the Channel

In early June, shortly before the French legislative election, the British will vote in a snap general election called by Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May. There is currently no British equivalent to Macron. Instead, the Conservatives are en route to winning a resounding victory and continuing their “Brexit means Brexit” strategy of rapid withdrawal from the EU. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is en route to presiding over Labour’s worst defeat in three decades.

Nigel Farage, the most prominent proponent of Brexit, is to Marine Le Pen as Jeremy Corbyn is to Mélenchon. Both Corbyn and Mélenchon view the EU as an institution whose primary purpose is to persuade the working class to accept rampant free trade. Both leaders have tiers-mondiste sympathies: they support the agenda of the immigrant diasporas in their respective countries. Both passionately dislike the legacy of the major centre-left parties in their respective countries.

Corbyn is the dog that didn’t bark in the 2016 U.K. referendum debate. Nominally, Labour supported Remain, but Corbyn’s heart was not in the fight. (Four decades earlier, at the time of the first referendum on U.K. withdrawal, he had argued for Brexit.) Conscious that Labour supporters are divided between many in the Midlands and north who support Brexit and those in the south, in London in particular, who want to remain in the EU, he mumbled.

The bitter conflicts within Labour ranks over Leave versus Remain and over the legacy of the Blair-Brown government have produced disarray analogous to that among the French Socialists. U.K. local government elections took place a few days prior to the second-round election in France. Labour fared disastrously, losing a large number of local councillors. For the Conservatives it was a resounding success in terms of councillors gained. Their hard drive to exit the EU has co-opted the majority of Farage’s supporters in the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) as well as many Labour supporters.

As a member of David Cameron’s cabinet, Theresa May nominally supported Remain in the referendum campaign. But, like Corbyn, her heart was not in it. Upon Cameron’s resignation as prime minister, she won the internal struggle for party leadership. Tactically, she has outmanoeuvred both UKIP and Labour, and the disarray within Labour has given the Conservatives a very large lead in the polls. The five polls conducted so far in May give them an average 18-point lead over Labour.

French and English political institutions are in disarray. Macron’s victory gives France a reprieve, but it is far too soon to relax. In the U.K., May is a brilliant tactician able to win battles against immediate opponents within and beyond her party, but her “Brexit means Brexit” strategy dooms Britain to a cramped marginal status.

One of the few high-profile voices to make the case for continued British participation in the EU and resurrection of the centre-left is Tony Blair. It is unlikely that he will be able to replicate the role of Churchill, condemned to political purgatory in the 1930s for his early aggressive hostility to Hitler. Blair’s reputation has been severely tarnished by accusations of his having manipulated parliamentary support for the U.S. military removal of Saddam Hussein. Nonetheless, Blair deserves some credit: he recently contributed the majority of his wealth (£10 million) to found a new foundation on behalf of centre-left politics in Europe.

As Napoleon reputedly said, on s’engage, et puis on verra.

Continue reading “The centre holds – just” →

The Western media usually limit news coverage of Bangladesh to casualties from collapsed buildings, factory fires, cyclones and capsized ferries. In the last several years, coverage has extended to brutal assassinations of “atheist bloggers” and, in the summer of 2016, to the murder of 20 foreigners in a Dhaka restaurant.¹

One evening last summer a half dozen young men invaded a popular restaurant in the diplomatic zone of Dhaka. By the next morning government commandos had stormed the restaurant and killed them. During the night the terrorists killed two policemen and the 20 foreigners who had the misfortune to choose this particular restaurant. Seven of the victims were Japanese engineers designing a subway system for Dhaka; nine were Italians involved in the garment sector.

The terrorists were not psychologically disturbed loners; they were from prosperous families, well educated and idealistic. During the night, Nibras Islam, their leader, lectured the restaurant staff. A staff member later reported that Nibras reassured them:

We are not here to kill you who are Muslims. We are here to kill non-Muslim foreigners who, by helping the government and business elites, are providing an undeserved legitimacy to a corrupt non-Islamic state. Bangladesh needs devout Muslim leaders committed to governing on the basis of shari’a. Both major parties are equally corrupt and non-Islamic. As good Muslims, you should never vote.

With approximately 170 million people, Bangladesh is the world’s eighth most populous country. It deserves closer attention from the world’s media. What follows is a very brief introduction to the country’s political history over the 20th century, the paralysis afflicting its governance and the threat that it could follow the unfortunate path taken by Pakistan.

An ineffective democracy and an Islamist response

In the 1940s, the last decade of the British Raj, Bengal was a province with an elected assembly enjoying sovereignty over domestic matters – not unlike Canada in the mid-19th century. Its residents shared a common language, the great majority were farmers, and its one metropolitan centre was Kolkata. What Bengali did not share was a common religion: the majority were Muslim, a large minority Hindu. At the time, many among the Muslim elites, including the Bengal chief executive (i.e., premier), favoured a postcolonial future as a sovereign country, separate from the rest of South Asia.

It was not to be. The Hindu elites adamantly opposed becoming a minority in a sovereign Bengal. The Muslim League, dominated by elites in the Indus Valley, wanted to assemble all Muslim-majority regions of the subcontinent into a new – inevitably noncontiguous – state. The provinces of East and West Pakistan remained formally one state from 1947 until the 1971 “war of liberation” whereby East Pakistan seceded. Constitutionally, Bangladesh emerged as a secular, socialist republic. Many of the first generation of Bangladesh leaders and senior civil servants subscribed to the Marxist tradition of Bengal, which was prominent from early decades of the century.

Why, over the last half century, has idealism in Bangladesh evolved from a secular rebellion against a government in Islamabad, dominated by feudal elites in the Indus Valley, to a religiously inspired rebellion against a government in Dhaka, dominated by nominally democratic elites engaged in modern activities such as managing garment factories? There are many answers. We might start with the answer given by Nibras: secular democracy as practised in Bangladesh has not lived up to minimal expectations.

The collapse in 2013 of Rana Plaza, a garment factory, is worth a detour. At least 1,100 workers died; most of the 2,000 survivors suffered serious injuries. By far the most serious industrial accident in the history of Bangladesh, Rana Plaza was the result of appalling government laxity in regulating industrial safety.² Many members of Parliament have direct or indirect ownership stakes in garment factories and the building’s owner was a local leader of the governing party. It is a reasonable hypothesis that political influence prevented adequate regulation.

Hizb ut Tahrir, founded in Palestine, is a prominent international Islamist organization that proselytizes on behalf of shari’a and reestablishment of a caliphate. The organization is banned in Bangladesh but it has an underground presence. While its leaders are ambiguous about use of violence to realize their goals, its publications provide arguments similar to those of Nibras. Below is the text of a Hizb ut Tahrir media release, widely distributed online, following the Rana Plaza tragedy:

The Only Way to Free the People from the Clutches of Politics is for the Sincere Military Officers to Overthrow the Ruling Regime and Transfer the Authority to Sincere and Aware Politicians who will Establish Islamic Rule

… Democracy has been killing the people of the country all along and in numerous ways. The desperate cries of those who lost their loved ones in Rana Plaza still ring loud in our ears. We can make an endless list of killings by democracy. Furthermore all of the following hold true of democracy:

Democracy = corruption and looting

Democracy = half the people living in poverty

Democracy = oppression of women

Democracy = vilifying Islam and

Democracy = imperialist domination

One does not need to subscribe to the solutions posed by Nibras and Hizb ut Tahrir to acknowledge that their critique of the political status quo rings true. The bitterly polarized “winner take all” tactics adopted since the 1980s by the two major parties have deeply disappointed the majority of Bangladeshi. Since its birth, Bangladesh has oscillated between corrupt, ineffective, nominally democratic governments and somewhat more effective but also self-serving military-led ones. During the most recent general election, in 2014, the governing party won reelection by default, gaining a majority in parliament by acclamation. It kept the leader of the major opposition party under house arrest. This is not to imply that the major opposition party is much better. When in office, it adopted similar tactics.

The young have known nothing better all their lives. Is it surprising that some among them, at this point only a small minority, advocate violent opposition to the status quo?

The governance factor

How bad is Bangladesh governance? The short answer is “pretty bad.” Comparing governance among countries is inevitably subjective, but many organizations prepare indices of national governance quality
. The exercise illustrated in figure 1 relies on two dimensions of the comprehensive governance indicators prepared annually by the World Bank.³

Quality of governance and economic prosperity are linked in reciprocal ways. Citizens of more prosperous countries can more effectively demand, and usually get, better governance than do citizens of poorer countries, but causation also runs the other way, from better governance to higher incomes. Bangladesh has suffered a “winner take all” dynamic whereby the political party that manages to win an election does its best to crush opposing parties and buy loyalty via clientelism in appointments at all levels of the public sector. These practices are so excessive and so obviously counterproductive to social and economic progress that they are undeniably part of the explanation for the country’s low per capita income, slow rate of per capita income growth and high income inequality.

For the five major South Asian countries, figure 1 plots each country’s 2014 per capita income against its percentile ranking on two governance dimensions.⁴ For each dimension, the horizontal axis illustrates the country’s percentile ranking relative to all countries (approximately 200) included in the World Bank assessment. The two trendlines illustrate, among the five countries, the bilateral association between each governance dimension and per capita income.

For both control of corruption and effectiveness of delivery of basic services the association is obviously positive. In terms of control of corruption, Bangladesh is lowest; in terms of effectiveness, second lowest. On both dimensions, roughly 80 per cent of the world’s countries display higher governance quality.

There are qualifications to make. India’s population is 1.2 billion, and its most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, has a population larger than that of any of the other four countries. The quality of governance among Indian states varies widely. In general the quality is superior in the south; in some northern states governance quality is similar to that of Bangladesh and Pakistan. In 2009 India, at the 11th percentile, ranked highest in terms of political stability (not shown in figure 1). In 2014, the three populous countries (Pakistan, India, Bangladesh) remained below the 20th percentile. The two others improved domestic political stability dramatically and rose above the bottom quintile: Nepal from 7th to 22nd and Sri Lanka from 10th to 35th.

Currents from the Middle East

Pakistan and Bangladesh are respectively the second and third most populous Muslim-majority countries in the world. Counting 140 million Muslims in India there are 500 million Muslims in South Asia, more than in Arab countries of the Middle East plus North Africa. The overwhelming majority are Sunni – as opposed to Shi’i or some other minority denomination. However, the theological centre of Sunni Islam is not South Asia. In explaining the changing role of Islam in Bangladesh, we cannot understand events such as the recent assassinations without taking account of religious and political currents transmitted from the Middle East.

The fundamental religious shift over the last half century in the Middle East has been the waning influence of Islamic “modernizers” in the tradition of Atatürk, Nasser and Bourguiba, and the rising influence of Islamist political parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Wahhab-inspired imams of Saudi Arabia. Many political and religious leaders in the Middle East subscribe to a variant of Salafism, an austere reform tradition in Sunni Islam that claims that the writings of Muhammad and the early generations of his followers are to be read literally. Salafist teachings are dismissive of modernism as practised by Muslim leaders in the last century, and highly critical of all theological traditions that do not subscribe to Salafist ideas.

Why Salafism has achieved its present prominence among Sunni Muslims is open to several explanations, not necessarily contradictory. Nibras’s lecture to the restaurant staff embodies one of them: like Bangladesh, most nominally democratic, nominally socialist postcolonial governments in the Middle East degenerated into corrupt hypercentralized states dependent on a politicized police force. Salafism provides a counter-discourse.

Another explanation is the role of Saudi Arabia, where imams in charge of the two holiest sites of Islam enjoy an implicit contract with the Saud family. They legitimize family control of the country, provided the state finances an ambitious proselytizing campaign throughout the Islamic Ummah on behalf of a Salafist interpretation of Islam. The most extreme manifestation of Salafism is the Islamic State (IS) caliphate.

Jamaat, the largest organization with Salafist tendencies in South Asia, was founded in the 1940s. It is active in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. In 1971 it opposed secession of East Pakistan, and many Jamaat leaders actively collaborated with the Pakistani army in combating the guerrillas fighting for a sovereign, secular Bangladesh.

From March 1971, when East Pakistani leaders announced secession, to December 1971, when the Indian army invaded and routed the Pakistani army, a brutal civil war raged. The great majority of deaths were due to the army, dominated by soldiers from the western provinces aided by local collaborators. Estimates of the number killed during the nine-month civil war vary widely; a low estimate is 300,000. Motivated by the need for reconciliation, Sheikh Mujib, the first prime minister of the new country, declared an amnesty on war crimes. Four decades later in 2010, Sheikh Hasina, the present prime minister and daughter of Sheikh Mujib, organized a “war crimes tribunal” to prosecute Jamaat leaders who, in their youth, had allegedly committed atrocities.⁵

An unexpected consequence of the tribunal was extensive blogging by university students on behalf of Bangladesh’s secular traditions and against the Islamist leaders on trial. Not surprisingly, the government supported this student activism. However, Jamaat and other Islamist organizations exploited the presence of “atheist bloggers” as a means to mobilize. A rallying cry was for their execution as apostates. Since 2013 unidentified jihadists have tracked down and killed several bloggers and secular liberals allied with them. Initially enthusiastic about student support for the war crimes tribunal, the government subsequently disowned the bloggers.

Initially, jihadists restricted assassinations to Bangladeshi liberals. The first among the recent assassinations of foreigners in the name of Islam took place in the autumn of 2015. A trio of jihadists shot and killed an Italian NGO worker who was jogging in the diplomatic zone of the capital. The Islamic State claimed credit and called for expulsion of all foreigners from Bangladesh. Whether IS has had a direct role in the assassination of foreigners over the last year, provided financial support to local jihadist organizations or merely claimed credit for activities undertaken independently is unclear.

Until the mass murder of foreigners this past summer, the government minimized the significance of a few random religious-inspired assassinations. Cabinet ministers implied that Jamaat, in alliance with the major opposition party, was probably organizing the assassinations to sully the country’s international reputation. While Jamaat is sympathetic to Salafist Islam, there is no evidence that the organization is responsible for recent assassinations.

What happens next?

The impact of Salafism is more evident in Pakistan than in Bangladesh. Many predict, however, that the violence and political instability apparent in Pakistan will in time loom equally large in Bangladesh. I hope those foretelling doom will be proved wrong, but maybe my hopes are naive. What is the evidence?

To be optimistic …

While partition in 1947 divided Bengal, Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal share a sophisticated culture most – although certainly not all – of whose iconic writers have promoted interfaith tolerance. The tip of this iceberg, visible even in the West, is Tagore.

The Pew Research Center has this decade conducted an ambitious series of international surveys on “religion and public life.” Table 1 provides some germane results from a 38,000-person random survey of Muslims across the world (the Bangladesh sample is 2,000). I contrast attitudes in Turkey, a relatively modernized Muslim country, with Pakistan and Bangladesh. Question 10 surveys respondents’ perception of the extent of tolerance in their country for “religions different from yours” and whether they approve what they perceive to be the present degree of tolerance. The question is somewhat ambiguous: does “different” refer to non-Muslims or solely to Muslim denominations other than that that of the respondent? Nonetheless, the overwhelming majority perceive the practice of other religions in their respective countries as “very free” or “somewhat free,” and virtually all think that that is a “good thing.”

To the extent that improvements in social outcomes predispose a society to peaceful reform over violence, Bangladesh public health outcomes, the best among the three populous countries of South Asia, are a source of optimism. Life expectancy at birth is 71, compared to 66 in Pakistan and India. Bangladesh is known as the “country of NGOs.” A network of very large, competently managed NGOs compensates, in part, for the low quality of public administration. The NGOs are more adept than the government in forging institutional compromises and improving on-the-ground outcomes. For example, over the last quarter century imams in Bangladesh have cooperated with NGOs and the government to lower the birthrate. The present total fertility rate in Pakistan is about 3.5 children per woman; the rate in Bangladesh is below the Indian rate and is now at the replacement level of 2.2. The under-five mortality rate has declined by over half since the early years of the previous decade. It is half the rate in Pakistan and a fifth lower than the rate in India.

In 1971 Bangladesh had no substantial industrial sector able to compete internationally. It is now the world’s second largest ready-made garment exporter. The garment sector employs four million workers (the great majority women) with above-average education levels, earning wages well above what they could earn in their villages or in the urban informal sector. The silver lining to the Rana Plaza tragedy is that it obliged the government and garment manufacturers to increase wages, and the major importers are imposing improvements in factory safety.⁶

To be pessimistic …

It is hard to exaggerate the importance of universal literacy as a means to enhance equality between men and women and to facilitate economic progress. Bangladesh is far from having achieved universal literacy. The second Millennium Development Goal was universal primary education by 2015. The Bangladesh government blatantly “gamed” this particular goal. Over the last quarter century the official primary school completion rate among children in the relevant age cohorts has risen from about 40 per cent to 80 per cent. However, government certification of children as having completed the five-year primary school cycle has been achieved by a lowering of standards.

As an alternative to low-quality government schools, parents may choose a religious education for their children. Currently, over a million Bangladeshi children are studying in madrassas (5 to 10 per cent of the total). Saudi Arabia generously finances these madrassas, which serve as a means to spread conservative religious ideas.

Question 58 in the Pew survey asks who should decide about wearing a veil. In Turkey 90 per cent respond that it is a matter for women to decide. In both Pakistan and Bangladesh the minority who deny women such a right is much larger. According to question 79a, in Turkey there is little interest in adopting shari’a as the basis of family law and criminal punishment. In both Bangladesh and Pakistan large majorities favour implementation of shari’a. In contrast to the tolerance implicit in responses to question 10, the distributions with respect to question 92b about apostasy are not optimistic among Bangladeshi – and even less so among Pakistani. A telling demographic statistic on the fate of religious minorities in Bangladesh is that, at the time of the liberation war, approximately 20 per cent were non-Muslim – mostly Hindu but also Buddhist and Christian. This decade that share has fallen below 10 per cent.

Bangladeshi cannot count on NGOs to preserve them from a fate comparable to Pakistan. Unless the next generation of political elites abandons “winner take all” tactics and devotes itself more diligently to better governance, it is hard to be optimistic. Continue reading “Will Bangladesh go the way of Pakistan?” →