"Not a single new BMW car was sold in Bangladesh in 2007 as the country's luxury car market collapsed in the face of the government's anti-corruption drive, officials at the sole distributor of the prestigious German brand said (The Daily Star, 19th January 2008, page 1)."
This was capitalism under democratic Bangladesh: a few people riding BMWs and the rest getting themselves in hock to the NGOs in the name of development. Consider BRAC.
BRAC may have started as a NGO, but today it is a giant conglomerate: there is BRAC bank, BRAC University, BRAC business alliances with public and private limited companies, such as a giant hatchery a few kilometers outside Dhaka. BRAC University is for the super-rich, fees being some of the highest (like that at any private university); BRAC bank is not for slum-dwellers, needless to observe. Besides, these institutions give BRAC enormous leverage: professors from American and European universities, expatriates as well as foreigners, moonlight at BRAC University, and thereby polish their CVs – in return they maintain a conspiracy of silence regarding BRAC and its activities. It must be observed that BRAC alone is not part of this racket – all the NGOs are. They are funded by western donors to purchase the loyalty of the elite, not to help the poor, as some misguided western citizens might artlessly assume.
Indeed, it was a darling of the donors – Mohammed Yunus, Nobel-laureate and founder of Grameen Bank, a microcredit institution – who was pushed forward as a possible political participant to replace the two ladies, the two "begums", as they are known. "Many newspapers and civil-society groups [read NGOs] have called for a new party to be formed by local hero Mohamed Yunus, who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize for his pioneering work in microcredit.(TIME, 5th February 2007, page 32)." But that plan appears to have been shelved – perhaps the Nobel laureate got cold feet, which would be understandable, given the – literally – murderous nature of Bangladeshi democracy.
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