Bangladesh in 1984: A Year of Protracted Turmoil

Abstract

By the standards of trial and tribulation set elsewhere in South Asia and the world at large during 1984, events in Bangladesh could perhaps claim only passing attention. The seemingly endless minisaga of efforts to return the country to electoral rule, in many ways a replay of its history over the past decade, paled beside the drama of India's Punjab and the Gandhi assassination. And compared to the heartrending images of famine in Ethiopia flashed electronically around the globe, who knew or even cared that Bangladesh was experiencing its worst floods in ten years? In these respects it seemed to be much the same old story in Bangladesh, by now long bereft of its capacity to draw the eyes of the world. At the onset of 1984 the martial law regime of Lt. General Hussain Muhammed Ershad, who had proclaimed himself president of Bangladesh in December, was within three months of completing its year. His government could claim reasonable progress toward meeting many of the objectives it had set for itself soon after its inception. Not the least of these were concrete steps taken toward administrative and judicial decentralization, in which the time-honored second tier of local government, the thana, was upgraded to the status of upazilla, or subdistrict, endowed with enhanced administrative functions and becoming the primary locus of the civil and judicial court system. Between November 1983 and February 1984, 460 thanas were designated as upazillas and the court system at that level had begun to operate. Consistent with the projected reorganization plan, sixty-four new administrative districts had been created out of the old subdivisional unit of administration. A key goal of the Ershad regime had been the disinvestment of government-owned industries, and by March 1984 it was asserted that thirty-three jute mills, twenty-five textile mills, and