The New Nation - Internet Edition

RMG sector needs focussed attention

THE Bangladesh Garments Manufacturers and Exporters' Association (BGMEA) issued an ultimatum on Monday urging the government to provide security to the readymade garments (RMG) factories within a week. The association would launch an action programme to realise their demand. The ultimatum is a reflection of the very distressed conditions facing the RMG industry as a whole. The RMG industry has continued to suffer from ruinous troubles with the pattern of few workers egged on by outsiders that led to burning, pillaging and other destructive activities against RMG units for the last two years. Security agencies found out that elements external to the sector were encouraging the violence. But this has not led to follow up actions.

Meanwhile, a leading vernacular daily reported in its recent issue that 40 per cent of the garments industries have shut down operation in the course of the last two years from various troubles. The registered number of garments industries is 4,625 and out of them 1,885 have closed down. Apart from labour troubles and inability to meet the rising demands of workers, these industries also brought down their shutters due to falling prices of products in importing countries, increasing reluctance by the local banks to support the sector, insufficiency of gas and power and related infrastructural troubles.

Thus, it is high time for the government to give very focussed attention to this sector as it is one of the two main pillars on which the viability of the entire economy is dependent. The government should ease the infrastructural problems of this sector taking emergency measures. More significant would be the engaging of the law enforcement bodies with much greater effectiveness to guard the industries. The government should also consider the establishment of a separate ministry - exclusively and immediately - to give focused attention to this sector.

The Asian poverty line

THE Asian Development Bank has offered new ways to measure poverty in Asia and the Pacific and fixed US $ 1.35 a day as a new poverty line for the region. The ADB provided a 'comparable rates of poverty' using price data specific to the Asia and Pacific region, and critically to the poor. This is a landmark study for two reasons - for the first time though sensitivity analysis of the internationally comparable poverty estimates has been carried out and second, a poverty line that is relevant specially to the Asia and Pacific region has been adopted.

A person who earns less than US $ 1.35 a day is considered poor. Referring to ADB's chief economist Dr. Ifjal Ali, it was stated that while the US$ 1 - a day poverty line remains an appropriate benchmark for counting the extent of extreme poverty in Asia, and the developing world more generally, in a region that has witnessed rapid economic growth it might also be time to evaluate poverty incidence using a benchmark that reflects the region's dynamism. A major contribution of the report is to examine the sensitivity of poverty estimates to different methods for evaluating 'purchasing power parities' (PPPs).

The World Bank's US$ 1 a - day poverty estimates are based on PPPs developed for comparing household consumption across countries known as consumption PPPs. From the perspective of poverty comparisons, however, it was considered more appropriate to use a set of PPPs that are based on comparisons of prices of goods and services that the poor purchase. The ADP report, using original data collected specifically for its study, examines where the poor shop, what they buy, in what quantity as well as the quality of the products they purchase. The prices paid for the products purchased by the poor are used to generate a new set of PPPs, called 'poverty PPPs'.

Not all Americana are in reverse

Maswood Alam Khan

Anybody used to Bangladeshi styles visiting USA for the first time will be puzzled when s/he would attempt to switch an electric light on or off.

We are used to pressing the lever of an electric toggle switch down to put the light on and to pressing the lever up to put the light off. But in America you have to follow just the reverse: press the lever up to lit and down to unlit.

We Bangladeshis are followers of British styles and manners, thanks to the legacy of British colonial era that has moulded our ways of living. And after liberating ourselves from the British colonial rule and then from Pakistani oppressive regimes we didn't attempt to revert to our own language, culture and style and it took about 30 years for us to embrace our mother tongue Bangla as our official language since the British had left our soil.

But, Americans are all along doggedly opposed to what are British even before their independence; they always wanted to stand out as the biggest, the tallest, and the sturdiest and, to top it all, as the un-British. Americans hate to follow anything un-American; they want others to follow their styles and élan. Americans, I guess, vowed to avenge the British discriminatory rule upon them by shunning anything British.

If there could be a way Americans perhaps would have rejected the very language English and would have embraced altogether a different language named "Americana" with dissimilar alphabets and grammar as their official language; but they failed to eschew British English though they tried their level best by at least coining a multitude of new American English words and phrases in their efforts to liberate themselves from the British linguistic predominance.

Shunning everything British was not possible due to opposition imposed by Americans many of whom were British loyalists---a problem that also adversely affected the American Revolution. Many Americans, the British supporters, had chosen to remain loyal to the mother country. In 1780, the Americans suffered a major blow to their hopes of emancipation when one of their heroes, General Benedict Arnold, joined the British army.

Nevertheless, their electric switches, plugs and sockets, their traffic rules, their language, their accent, their lookout, and many things deemed American are quite different from those deemed Britannic or Bangladeshi.

The next thing, after using an American toggle switch, that would puzzle a Bangladeshi, especially if s/he knows how to drive a car, is the American way of driving vehicles. My head reels whenever, during my present sojourn in USA, my sister-in-law Mini drives me in a car as she, sitting on the left-sided driver's seat, frenetically negotiates the busy roads and highways always driving on the right side of the road allowing traffics flowing from the opposite directions on her left side. At each turn and twist I get scared to death imagining every time a head-on collision of our car with vehicles moving in from other sides.

America has many prides to boast about and not many shames to feel guilty about. They may not yet have succeeded in composing a comprehensive American lexicon full of words and phrases completely different from those of British. But, they have proven themselves superior to Britannia by introducing right-hand-traffic that is being followed by the majority of nations the world over though originally most traffic following the British custom drove on the left worldwide. Only 34 percent of the world's people now live in left-traffic countries and 66 percent in right-traffic countries.

In the early years of English colonisation of North America, English driving customs were followed and the colonies drove on the left. After gaining independence from England, however, they were anxious to cast off all remaining links with their British colonial past and gradually changed to right-hand driving.

The trend among nations over the years has been toward driving on the right; but Britain has done its best to stave off global homogenisation. In the 1960s, when Great Britain was contemplating to change their driving habit from left to right traffic, the country's conservative people in power who could not imagine compromising with their heritage did everything they could to nip the proposal in the bud.

Today, only four European countries still drive on the left: the United Kingdom, Ireland, Cyprus and Malta. Countries like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Malaysia that were part of the British Empire adopted the keep-left rule, although there were some exceptions. Canada, for example, where the Maritime Provinces and Vancouver drove on the left, eventually changed to the right in order to make border crossings to and from the United States easier.

There is a confusion we face while understanding right-hand-traffic (RHT) or left-hand-drive (LHD) and left-hand-traffic (LHT) or right-hand-drive (RHD). Almost always, in countries where one drives on the right-hand side of the road, the cars are built so that the driver sits on the left-hand side of the car. Conversely, driving on the left-hand side of the road usually implies that the driver's seat is on the right-hand side of the car.

Among the shames almost all Americans including many Republicans feel guilty about is Bush presidency for its mishandling of Iraq war. American voters are now anxious to find among the presidential candidates---Obama or McCain---a person who is least like Bush, no matter whether he is a Republican or a Democrat. So are both Obama and McCain anxious not to display their characteristics that may smack of those found in Bush.

In their quest for the best Presidential candidate who they can vote to White House most Americans depend on someone or some institution else to do the home work as they don't have time to do the research themselves. Most of the Americans besides casting a cursory gaze over the headlines can't delve deep into a news item, let alone read the editorials and analyses, while reading a newspaper.

Two institutions, as I could find out talking to friends and relations, are doing their roaring business in spoon feeding the Americans in general ideas and knowhow on who should be their best candidate to be trusted with the onerous job of alleviating their sufferings and navigating their nation towards the goalpost of their dreams.

One institution, comprising an army of pollsters, is one of many opinion polls agencies and the other, comprising a plethora of rumourmongers, is one of many rumour factories, as is chosen by an individual American voter.

How reliable are those polls? I asked this question to one of my relations. His answer: 125 percent bogus! Why? 'I have never been polled', he complained. 'Some pollsters call us on the phone asking us for our opinion; but, most Americans are tired of calls from commercials and pollsters and most of them hang up on those callers. Of course, some people take time to respond and give their opinions. But, the opinions on a common issue or on a presidential candidate finally churned out from those polls agencies differ greatly depending on who the pollsters were. On a McCain-Obama opinion poll, for example, sited by the media Obama was shown ahead by about 9 percent, while on the AOL poll McCain was ahead of Obama by 63 percent to 37 percent. Which one to believe?'

The second alternative institution, inevitable when opinion polls results are manufactured based on pollsters' fancies, is one of many factories exclusively defaulted to churning rumours, especially those rumours which speak of voluptuously depraved stories centring around presidential candidates.

I asked a Muslim Bangladeshi-turned-American acquaintance who he thinks will come out victorious on November 4. "Undoubtedly, Obama!" was his answer in an American accent. "Why Obama"? I retorted in my Benglish accent. He answered: "Because Obama is a Muslim, many black Americans are Muslims and of late, Americans are embracing Islam in hordes."

Later I came to learn from "USA Today", a prestigious American daily, that an Email rumour that 'Senator Barack Obama is a Muslim who had lied about his religious background, including his claim to being a devout Christian' has been in circulation since January 2007. Though the rumour has been proved 100 percent false Muslims (most of whom are Obama supporters) along with political enemies of Obama are still spreading the rumour to the detriment of their own interests. Muslims living in USA idiotically think by propagating this rumour they were glorifying Islam and upholding the prospect of Obama's election. Americans would more love to see no sun in the summer than a Muslim American President in the White House.

There are of course many plaudits favouring Obama. His victory over Hilary speaks a volume about his charismatic ability to win hearts of American people. With a view to dousing the flame of his burgeoning popularity researchers belonging to opposition camps must now be manufacturing stories to tarnish his image. Ironically, such political mud-slinging and smear campaigns often work to harm the targeted candidate when voters having no time for their self-judgements bank on hearsays either from opinion pollsters or from rumourmongers.

Rumours of "affairs", of "weapons of mass destruction" and "their alleged removal to other countries", that "John Kerry is French," that "Obama is a Muslim and who is not even a US citizen," that "John McCain had an illegitimate black child", that "Sarah Palin (McCain's VP candidate) allowed her daughter to date a 23 year old grown man from the time she was 14"---all of these involve statements whose veracity is in question or are simply false. Others are statements whose ambiguous nature makes them potentially appealing to different audiences who may interpret them in particular ways and circulate them.

Experiments have shown that people pay much closer attention to criticism than to praise. When we hear equally passionate positive and negative evaluations of a political candidate, the negative evaluation carries greater weight. The research suggests that our bias towards negative information comes about for the reason that "negative information has a greater propensity to harm than positive information has to help". In this vein, Americans are no way different from Britons or Bangladeshis.

America nevertheless is already different in many respects from a number of countries: when everybody is deep asleep in Bangladesh, here in America all are busy at work, thanks to the Planet Earth's revolution every 24 hours keeping planetary inhabitants half asleep and half awake. I thought America should be different from Bangladesh in all other respects too like the way an electric toggle switch is handled. But, I was wrong.

While taking a ride in my friend's car on my way from Washington to New York I asked him in what else America is different from Britain or Bangladesh. He said: "In America you may have to turn the knob of a faucet clockwise for pouring running water and anticlockwise to stop. Americans once even planned to devise a screwdriver to turn anticlockwise for tightening a screw, but later abrogated the idea."

Thank God America didn't proceed further! Otherwise, we had to rotate the steering wheel clockwise to turn the car left and anticlockwise to turn right. Or, for a shortcut, American clocks would run in the reverse direction e.g. in American term clockwise and in British term anticlockwise. Maybe, the day would then start at 8 in the evening and the night at 8 in the morning. You never know, we would then have found all Americans hand walking on the sidewalks with their legs thrust skyward!

That K word again!

Barkha Dutt

THE war cry for 'azaadi' in the volatile valley of Kashmir has suddenly found a chorus among some of Delhi's sharpest thinkers. Ironically, and unnoticed in the current breathless discourse, the advocates of azaadi come from two entirely extreme positions. There is the ultra-liberal faction that has always seen India as the oppressor and the Kashmiri people as her throttled victims.

While they propagate self-determination in the Valley, for many of these commentators, the citizenship of a nation-state is at best an irrelevance and at worst a jingoistic anachronism. Arundhati Roy, for example, famously declared herself to be an "independent, mobile republic", while protesting the nuclear tests.

The other (and opposite) lobby is batting for freedom precisely because it believes in an idea of an India that should no longer be held back by the violent and contentious history of Kashmir. These writers, (my friend and HT's Vir Sanghvi prominent among them) make a cold cost-benefit analysis to argue that India has spent more political energy and taxpayers' money in the Valley than in any other state, but with no results to show for it. India, they say, doesn't need lecturing by two-bit countries on Kashmir; it's time to leave the past behind and embrace the future.

As always, it's a healthy democracy that can be at debate with itself. It's also a sign of how much has changed. A few years ago, I remember doing a television report on how greater autonomy, across all its regions, may be the antidote to alienation in the state. The mere suggestion evoked general indignation. My report mentioned that the state has its own flag and constitution, to underline its unique place in the federal structure. This was not opinion; it was fact. Even so, whether from ignorance or denial, everything I said was received with outrage and resistance.

Today, as we witness both mainstream and fringe voices debating azaadi, even if for opposite reasons, perhaps we are looking at an India that is less scared of itself. Or perhaps a new generation of Indians that is not haunted by the scars of Partition and has a greater detachment on the issue.

But let me strike a note of serious hesitation. Many of us agree that the democratic process in the state has not worked as it should. It is clear that conventional approaches that have alternated between dangling carrots and brandishing sticks are ineffective, and in some cases, self-destructive.

And yet, isn't there something discomforting and horrible about middle-class ennui being the driving force for change? Should urban fatigue or textbook liberalism now set the agenda for what should happen next?

More importantly, if the problem is rooted in alienation, is the solution to tell an entire people to effectively go wherever the hell they want to? In my view, bleeding heart solutions that dismiss the very notion of boundaries and maps don't have much resonance either. Yes, successive governments have been in denial about the extent of alienation. And yes, you can't want the land (and its three rivers that you tap for electricity) but be indifferent to its people. So, should the solution be to throw your hands up in the air and say we-just-don't-give-a-damn?

It's kind of boring to be a realist in these times when more provocative ideas on Kashmir have given birth to a thousand television shows. But it's my sense that the changing rhetoric on the state will not bring it either peace or solace at this time. Jammu and Kashmir has been on the boil for two months and yet this is a government that has not even thought it necessary to call in the firefighters. It's unlikely to engage in philosophical debates on whether India is strong enough to accommodate secession, when it hasn't even begun talks with protesters on either side of the Pir Panjal.

So, I'm going to be old-fashioned and say, if we still care, let's start with the basics. Our politicians need to stop treating Jammu and Kashmir like a security challenge. We need to acknowledge that a regional divide is in serious danger of growing into a religious one.

Identity politics in the Valley are driven by a deep disconnect from India, and in the Jammu region, by anger at the kind of attention Kashmir gets, from both politicians and the media. The Prime Minister either needs to step in himself or appoint a peace envoy who will talk to both the Samiti in Jammu and the separatists in the Valley. Commerce may provide an unlikely clue to peace.

Opening trade across the Line of Control was something New Delhi was in favour of. If Islamabad is the obstacle to cross-border business, the government needs to hard-sell that fact so that it can strengthen the moderate separatists against the rabble-rousers who are loyal to Pakistan. The time for diffident Press releases from the Home Ministry is long over.

Our politicians also need to pay much closer attention to the sense of neglect perceived in Jammu. You can't let its people feel that just because their sentiment is not separatist, it figures lower on the list of priorities. And if azaadi is now a palatable word in drawing-room debate, how about making a more realistic start with autonomy? Autonomy proposals for all three regions of the state have been gathering cobwebs for close to a decade. How about wiping the dust off those files and resurrecting their suggestions?

In the end, that old fox Pervez Musharraf may have had it right. Before you can seriously look at sub-nationalism, you have to first find a way of making borders irrelevant, or at the very least, porous. But the government has to first react like it understands the gravity of the problem. And we need to pull our political class out of its slumber instead of pushing them deeper into stupor by going on about how tired we are of a dispute called Kashmir.