This account of Bangladesh's state, economy and civil society began by considering the situation of the garment industry workers, many of whom once again took to the streets during 2010 in pursuit of higher pay and improved working conditions. The protests provided an entry point into an analysis of the country's political economy and as a microcosm of issues arising from its precarious location at the periphery of the global economy. In considering the “past of the present,” it has been necessary to explore the historical factors that continue to influence contemporary Bangladesh, alongside the more familiar and well-documented worlds of the international aid regime – including struggles over land and tenancy, an incompletely institutionalised postcolonial state, the dominance of social and political patronage relationships, the country's fragile ecological interdependence with its neighbours and the pluralist religious traditions in society that have long characterised the Bengal delta.

The concluding chapter draws together the main ideas and discussions of the earlier seven chapters and assesses the key dilemmas for the future in relation to building a more inclusive politics, securing economic growth while addressing rising inequalities, operating on a rapidly changing international stage and dealing with increasing environmental challenges. An important motivation for writing this book is the fact that Bangladesh has received far less attention from researchers, policy makers and the media, particularly in Western societies, than it deserves. The case of Bangladesh should be of central concern to anyone interested in at least four important sets of wider contemporary issues: the ways that processes of economic globalisation are impacting upon low-income countries; the challenges of improving international development policies and practices; the need to understand how a stable “moderate Muslim majority” country addresses the threat of extremism within an international context in which Muslims are increasingly demonised as global terrorists; and peoples’ struggle to build viable and sustainable livelihoods under the environmental threat of climate change. In the second part of the chapter, each of these themes is discussed further.

The major difference between the correct leader cult advocated by Mao Zedong in Chengdu 1958 and its successor after the first Lushan Plenum the following year is to be observed with respect to the object of worship. At the Chengdu conference, Mao had advocated a worship of truth that postulated a dialectical relationship between leader cults and intellectual emancipation. After Lushan, the identity of opposites, of worship and intellectual emancipation, evaporated. References to Chairman Mao and Mao Zedong Thought skyrocketed in the media, especially in PLA publications. The cult, even by Mao’s standards, was turned into an incorrect cult by asking for the worship of an individual at the expense of others. Its primary function was no longer intellectual emancipation but securing personal loyalty, party unity, and control over the army. Peng Dehuai’s resistance to the public leader cult had been taken as a proof of his factional activities. His successor, Lin Biao, therefore came to champion the cult whenever possible in order to avoid Peng’s fate and to use the cult’s cohesive power to curb the devastating impact of the Great Leap Forward.

Bangladesh is a comparatively new nation that is still in the process of taking shape – hence, it remains a “state in the making.” It became an independent country on December 16, 1971, when, after a violent liberation struggle, it seceded from Pakistan. Under the hastily drawn up arrangements for the partition of British India in 1947, a homeland for Indian Muslims had been created with two wings, known as West Pakistan and East Pakistan, that were separated by more than twelve hundred miles of Indian terri-tory. East Pakistan, populated mainly by Muslim Bengalis, quickly became the subordinate partner in the new country and faced internal economic exploitation and clumsy attempts to impose Urdu as the national language of Pakistan. National elections in 1970 gave the Eastern wing a majority of assembly delegates, and after a vicious West Pakistani military clampdown, the nationalist resistance movement eventually secured victory. Events during this period of the country's formation have been vividly brought to life in Tahmima Anam's novel A Golden Age (2007). During the conflict, the Pakistan army is believed to have killed more than a million Bengalis in a systematic genocide designed to bring the renegade province back under control. With large numbers of refugees pouring across the border into West Bengal, Bangladeshi forces were also aided by the Indian army because India saw an important political opportunity to secure the breakup of Pakistan.

During the four decades that followed what was a tumultuous episode in twentieth-century postcolonial history, Bangladesh has continued to evolve and change. The country has faced serious problems throughout its history: from the terrible cost in human lives inflicted by the Pakistan army during its bloody inception, extensive and pervasive poverty, and environmental vulnerability, to a continuing set of problems relating to political instability and poor governance. Yet Bangladesh has also made considerable progress during this time, challenging those who prophesied that the new state would be unviable. Bangladesh has shown the world that it has been able to expand its food production substantially, develop important new export industries such as ready-made garments and shrimp, improve areas of its health-care and education social sectors through concerted government action and point the way to new potential solutions to global poverty problems through the innovative work of some of its NGOs. It is precisely because of the scale of problems that Bangladesh has experienced, and the resilence and creativity that this has instilled in its people, that many now see the country as a “laboratory for innovative solutions in the developing world” (Beit 2011).

State building in Bangladesh remains a work in progress, leaving a considerable amount of institutional space for a wide range of nonstate actors. These range from traditional local-level institutions to more recently established forms of national and international organisation. As we saw in Chapter 4, there is a long history of nongovernmental groups in Bengal, from professional associations to missionary groups, but Bangladesh has more recently become well-known internationally for its extensive “development NGO” sector, in which two Bangladeshi organisations in particular – Grameen Bank and BRAC – have gained international reputations. In contrast to many other developing countries, where international agencies tend to represent the most visible forms of the nongovernmental actor, Bangladesh has an unusually large number of homegrown development NGOs. Although foreign organisations have played important roles in the establishment of many of these local organisations, today the Bangladesh NGO sector displays a strongly indigenous character and can be seen as a local formation of globally determined influences. It is also quite diverse, ranging from many local, small and voluntaristic groups to large-scale organisations that are now some of the world's best-known development NGOs, managing multimillion dollar budgets and occupying high-rise offices. A few of these larger NGOs have become comparable in size and influence to some government departments, bringing fears in some quarters of the creation of a “parallel state.”

Apart from the general agreement among most observers that Bangladesh's NGO sector is relatively large, accurate and up-to-date facts and figures are surprisingly hard to come by. One source estimated that there were close to twenty-two thousand NGOs by the turn of the millennium (DFID 2000). By 2004, the Social Welfare Ministry had 54,536 NGOs registered and the NGO Affairs Bureau had 1,925. In 2005, a World Bank study cited official statistics stating that there were 206,000 “not-for-profit” organisations in the country and that the NGO sector contributes 6 to 8 percent of Bangladesh's GDP annually (Irish and Simon 2005). The wide range of figures illustrates an important difficulty facing any discussion of NGOs because the label lacks precision and is highly subjective. The defi-nition of what constitutes an NGO is far from clear – for example, although some organisations are formal, many others are not, and although any organisation receiving foreign funds must be registered, there are many NGOs that are locally resourced and therefore do not feature in official statistics.

In the late hours of 5 March 1953, Joseph Stalin died. The official announcement drafted in the name of the CCP Central Committee expressed the enormous grief his death had inflicted upon the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the course of the world revolution. For the CCP, it was likewise a loss “the tragic consequences of which could not be fathomed.” The Chinese public had been well informed about the changing health situation of the “great leader of the world revolution,” since the CCP had regularly published accounts in the media and ordered to post daily bulletins about Stalin’s condition at major public places. During the official commemoration ceremony, Mao Zedong himself laid down a wreath of flowers in honor of the deceased at the Gate of Heavenly Peace, which had been decorated with Stalin’s portrait, and called upon the Chinese to turn their grief into renewed strength for the revolutionary cause. For three days, all of China was to commemorate the dead. All flags were to be lowered, all public institutions closed. The leader of world communism had died and despite his frequent quarrels over the correct path of the Chinese Revolution with the CCP leadership and Mao Zedong in particular, his commemoration could leave no doubt about the importance and influence Stalin had exerted on the communist movement. The enormous consequences of Stalin’s death were not only reflected within the party leadership but led to discussions among the lower-ranking cadres and the populace as well. Doubts were uttered as to whether the Soviet–Chinese alliance could carry on as it had before and questions were asked regarding how the socialist states could continue to attract further members without Stalin’s personality. By means of frequent propagation and regular study sessions, the local party committees were to counter the rising tide of skeptics and to stop the spreading of rumors about what would happen now that the helmsman of the world revolution had died.

The first months of 1967 witnessed a drastic widening of the impact of the Cultural Revolution. Middle and high school students had played a dominant part in the early stages of the movement. Now it spread within production units and the countryside after official restrictions had been lifted in December 1966. The CCP leadership effectively allowed for the creation of rival organizations that resulted in violent clashes about resources of power, such as party institutions, propaganda devices, and military equipment. At the same time, Red Guards were to participate in short-term military training to secure the concordance of their thoughts and actions with the aims of the Cultural Revolution. The parallel trends of employing the cult for disciplinary functions and the increasing lack of state control fostered multiple ways of instrumentalizing Mao Zedong’s image for different purposes. Although up to this point the main way of expounding the cult had been Maoist rhetoric, the physical presence of Mao icons, including statues, badges, and images, now grew indomitable, despite the efforts of the CCP Center to restrict the spreading of what was referred to as “formalism” (xingshi zhuyi). The open-textured nature of the revolutionary symbols invoked in different settings was revealed with increasing clarity from mid-1967 onward. To regain control over the factionalized patchwork of revolutionary groups and to quell the growing civil unrest, the CCP returned to the methods of emotional and exegetical bonding. Basically, every Chinese citizen had to take part in the guided study of Mao texts that was organized from central study classes down to household study classes within families.

The personality cult fostered around Mao Zedong had started prior to the founding of the People’s Republic and had developed in close rivalry with the projected image of Chiang Kai-shek as sole legitimate national Chinese leader. However, only after Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s secret speech had the cult been turned from an unquestioned employed device of rule into a theoretical concept in need of explanation. Although the roots of the first Mao cult traced back to Yan’an, the Cultural Revolutionary leader cult was clearly shaped by the forms of worship developed in the PLA under the auspices of Lin Biao after 1959. The ritualization of behavior and speech by way of framing conduct according to short quotations from Chairman Mao had a huge impact on the further development of the cult. Mao consciously employed the cult in the mid-1960s to mobilize the masses against the party bureaucracy. With the destruction of the Leninist party system and clear hierarchies, however, the aims and strategies of employing the cult and its symbols came to vary increasingly. The ensuing cult anarchy revealed the variety in which out-of-context citations could be invoked and the futility of steering a political campaign through the manipulation of symbols alone.

In mid-October 1956, the Central Propaganda Department reorganized its internal documentation of national and international developments for the CCP top leadership. The establishment of a highly regulated public sphere had resulted in the necessity to rely on internal party journals reflecting both international developments and trends within popular opinion. The publication of the Propaganda Department’s journal on international affairs, the Propaganda Work Bulletin (Xuanchuan gongzuo tongxun), was terminated and the relevant news items from now on were integrated into the Trends in Propaganda and Education (Xuanjiao dongtai) that formerly had been a platform for national developments only. It was to cover important developments “within and outside the party, national and international,” for its readership, ranked provincial secretary or above. The Trends were usually published two or three times a week and contained highly diverse items reflecting the input from the provincial and local propaganda departments.

This chapter examines the relationship between political and economic change, and broader demographic and environmental factors. It begins with a discussion of Bangladesh's ecological setting. The country's location within a highly fertile but ecologically unstable river-delta system is central to an understanding of its population and economy. As we saw in Chapter 6, agricultural production has increased since the 1980s through the spread of modern farming techniques and the rapid expansion of irri-gation technology, but production gains have come at the expense of heavy environmental costs. These include the depletion of soil quality through the overuse of artificial fertilisers, increased pollution from the use of chemical pesticides, the problem of saline intrusion and, in some areas, the contamination of groundwater and crops by arsenic, natural deposits of which have been disturbed by the drilling of new irrigation wells.

The next part of the chapter then moves on to a discussion of population issues. The delta has long attracted large numbers of people who come to farm its small areas of highly fertile land, leading to longstanding concerns about “population pressure” as a negative factor that affects development. Bangladesh is a country not much larger in area than England, but it now faces a population that is estimated at 162 million, and is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. For example, although Bangladesh has historically been a country of small farmers, population pressure on available cultivable land combined with long-term land fragmentation through inheritance practices means that more than half of the rural population has been functionally landless for the past few decades. The idea that high levels of population growth need to be brought down has long been an important priority among government policy makers and international development agencies. Yet people nevertheless remain one of the country's key resources.

The silent appearances during the eight receptions of the revolutionary masses had elevated the image of Mao Zedong as the “great helmsman, great leader, great commander, and great teacher” of the Chinese Revolution to previously unfathomed heights. Simultaneously, the CCP’s most prestigious brand symbol had become devoid of a clear-cut message. Mao had not provided the movement with a blueprint of how the Cultural Revolution was to be conducted, nor had he delivered any speeches in public that would have offered a coherent vision of his aims. Party cadres and masses could only rely on the often vague official guidelines published in the party press and either risk offering their interpretation or wait for the seldom impartial exegesis conducted by members of Mao’s camarilla. During the course of the movement, the instrumental character of the cult serving as a means to mobilize the masses and to strike down holders of party offices came to be widely recognized. The raids of high party officials’ homes had supplied Red Guard organizations with original Mao texts that had not been censored and reworked by the party authorities. By publishing his often coarse and musing comments, deleted in the official versions, these texts added a number of new aspects to the sacrosanct image of Mao fostered in the party media and provided the base for interpretations focused on immediate political instrumentability. The loss of the party’s exegetical monopoly led to the emergence of contradictory and conflated usages of Mao’s image and words by different groups, of “waving the Red Flag to knock down the Red Flag” (dazhe hongqi fan hongqi). Regaining control necessitated the reestablishment of authoritative guidelines about which texts and policy lines were to be studied. With the party organizations rendered by and large defunct, the only way of establishing order was reliance on the organizational capacities of the PLA.