Almost every new nation in century has had an unpropitious start, but few could have begun so perilously placed as Bangladesh, Pakistan’s eastern wing for the past 24 years. The region is utterly luckless, one of the worlds worst long-term problem areas - perhaps, indeed, the worst. Its story is one of misfortune on almost every count - history, geography, economy, politics, sociology, even culture, and now for having become the cockpit of a major war. It is an area which has been successively plundered by foreigners for seven centuries, first the Moguls, later the East India Company, latterly the rapacious mercantile and military “coteries” of West Pakistan.

It is an area of great and repeated natural disaster, the region where 500,000 people died in one night a year ago when cyclone struck the Ganges Delta. Death-dealing cyclones and monsoon floods are an annual commonplace, and death tolls running into five figures are not sufficiently remarkable to merit more than a paragraph or so even in the newspapers of neighbouring India. Such catastrophes bring in their wake, to a chronically malnourished people, all the dread diseases which poverty fosters, cholera, smallpox, typhoid and the rest, which account, too, for thousands of deaths and thousands more of stunted, half-lived lives.

DENSE POPULATION

Basic to all this is the still unsolved, barely tackled and perhaps insoluble problem of population. Even after the ravages of war and the brute martial law suppression this summer in which tens of thousands were killed, Bangladesh is vastly over-populated. An area (55,126 square miles) about the size of England and Wales has today to support a population (75 million) more than half as large again as that of Britain, and that population is increasing at a net rate of between two and three million annually. So fast is the rate of increase now, that it feeds upon itself : it has reached the state of increasing significantly each year, so that by the end of the decade it will be well over 100 million - cyclones, epidemic, wars and famine not withstanding.

The immense population pressure, producing a countrywide population density, in a predominantly rural society, as high as an average Western urban area (1,360 to the square mile) has led to an acute pressure on land. This has meant that for years the region has been, unable on its own to sustain its people even with their staple food, rice. In this highly fertile country, there is no cultivable land left to farm. Even in “good” years, Bangladesh needs at least 1.5 million tons of imported food. The economic prospects for Bangladesh, then, could hardly seem less promising. But there are, even so, grounds for hope that it could become economically viable. It was, after all, the foreign exchange earnings of East Pakistan which contributed so greatly to the relative prosperity of West Pakistan. Bangladesh by itself will be a net earner of foreign exchange. Even though that will now be partly offset by the new nation’s need to pay its own defence bills, there will not be the immense drain of past years on resources which Bangladesh vitally needs for itself.

If, in addition, foreign aid is resumed, once the present convulsions cease Bangladesh should get its fair share : this should be more than half of what previously went almost entirely to West Pakistan, which sedulously purloined developmental and project funds intended for the east wing. Perhaps, then, a start could be made on the flood control and irrigation work which has been a vital but neglected requirement for so long. For floods in Bangladesh, quite apart from the death and wretchedness they bring, cause losses of between £50 million and £125 million annually - large sums by any standard but vast in the context of one of the poorest nations in the world. The problems of reconstruction will clearly be considerable and will consume many valuable resources, not least time. The economy has a basic potential, for all the natural and man-made handicaps.

There is every prospect that rice production can be increased, greatly and rapidly, with higher yielding varieties of seed which are readily available, and would have been in use by now but for the disruption of the past ten months. The curbing of crop losses, which are due to plant disease and pests, inadequate manuring and lack of agricultural skills is a matter merely of simple education and elementary aid logistics. That there are fewer than 100 tractors in the entire country is an index of how ample the scope is for increasing food production, both by intensifying yields on available land and by reclaiming land from the rivers and estuaries. There are, too, vast fishery resources which have not yet been fully exploited.

On the industrial side there is very little organised heavy manufacturing except in jute production, a large foreign-exchange earner, but small beginnings have been made in sugar, fertilisers, cement, paper production, steel and machine tools. All these are still fledgling industries and will probably need major rehabilitation before they are even able to start again at square one. While the difficulties that face Bangladesh can hardly be overstated, it need not be assumed, because it is such a desperately poor country and in such desperate straits, that its economic outlook as a newly independent State is hopeless. But it is scarcely brilliant, to be sure and the political prospects are even more unpromising than the economic. The alluvial soils of Bangladesh may be splendidly fertile for jute and rice, but will not sustain so tender a plant as stable Parliamentary democracy unless given the most careful nurturing.

And it is here the volatile temperament of the Bengalis may come into play, for stability, which they so need to nurture, is not in their nature. The Awami League swept the polls last December in a steady surge of fervour for autonomy largely inspired and channelled by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. But that was a year ago. Today, those brief enthusiasms have turned into an angry, sour chauvinism in the face of repression, and in part this disillusion is disillusion with Awami League leadership. To extremists, the League’s endeavour up to March 25, when the army cracked down, to forge a compromise with the military junta was a policy of blindness to reality and was, above all, a failure. Certainly, without Sheikh Mujib, or even with him, the Awami League leaders who will now form the first government of Bangladesh inspire little confidence and hold out little promise of being anything much better than the tools of New Delhi.

To many of the Leftists, revolutionary, Maoist and other political impatient elements who have found power in the Mukti Fouj (“liberation” struggle), and who have found what truth there is in Mao’s dictum that power comes from the barrel of the gun, the unchanged league must seem a moribund irrelevance in a situation so radically changed from a year ago. And there is no reason to expect that they will readily relinquish the power they have won so dearly.

OLD SCORES

Finally, if Bangladesh is to survive intact at all, let alone stabilise and develop, its people will somehow to find new ways to settling their internal differences. There are 100,000 West Pakistanis in Bangladesh and perhaps one million non-Bengalis, chiefly the Biharis and an unreckonable number of those who “collaborated” with the West Pakistan Government. There are many scores to be settled. But the favourite methods of doing so are a proved prescription for anarchy and could mean that Bangladesh becomes a permanent international trouble-spot.

To learn to live and let live will not be easy for people whose methods of settlement include bayoneting their adversaries’ babies through the eyeballs. But Bangladesh cannot possibly afford continued communal mediaeval blood baths if it is to have any chance at all of solving its real problems and surviving in the modern world.