Professor Mosharaff Hossain: Committed to welfare of the people

Professor life and work have been devoted to trying to persuade his fellow countrymen and the international community to address more effectively the poverty of the great majority of the people of his beloved Bangladesh.
In 1970, as a young staff member of the Ford Foundation in Pakistan, I was commissioned to explore where serious work was in progress on the issue of rural poverty, so that it could be better supported. This soon led me to seek out Professor Hossain, and one day I arrived on the campus of the University of Rajshahi, where the elder of his young sons found me before I found his father. Thus began a friendship of more than four decades.
Less than a year later, I was visiting Professor Hossain and his family in Calcutta. They had left Rajshahi ahead of the savagery which the Pakistan army unleashed upon the university and town, and helped by villagers, had crossed into West Bengal, where he put himself at the service of the Bangladesh government established in exile. Already he was planning for the economic recovery and future of an independent Bangladesh, and before long I was meeting him again in Dhaka when he was a member of the Planning Commission of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's first government.
His commitment as an economist to alleviation of poverty could not be separated from his political commitment to an independent, democratic, secular Bangladesh. His love and admiration for Sheikh Mujib was unchanging but clear-sighted: he was one of very few in any comparable position who refused to join Baksal and endorse the single-party state. He was devastated by the murder of Sheikh Mujib and his family, and unforgiving in his hatred of those who were complicit in it.
When he returned to Bangladesh after a period of exile in Oxford, which happily for me enabled his family and mine to see more of each other, he became president of the Bangabandhu Parishad. It was characteristic of him that while he would not join in obsequious deference to a leader in power when he believed him mistaken, he would take the lead in public tribute when this was unwelcome to the regime then current.
Professor Hossain's students can testify far better than I to his influence as a teacher. But I was privileged to watch over the years his interaction with members of the international community, and to hear his private reflections about their engagement with Bangladesh. At one end of the scale were close friendships -- such as those with George Zeidenstein, the first full Ford Foundation Representative in independent Bangladesh, later President of the Population Council, and Borje Ljunggren, the first Head of Swedish Sida, later Swedish ambassador to China -- in which he educated many of us to better understand the society, politics and economics of his country. At the other was trenchant criticism -- expressed with such subtle humour that its victims sometimes failed to feel its full force -- of those international institutions which he believed encouraged economic policies ignoring or contributing to impoverishment.
His retirement from the University of Dhaka resulted not in relaxation but in an intensification of research and writing. For many years he devoted long hours in his home to encouraging those active in politics who he thought had honest commitment to socialist values, but his growing disillusionment with the state of Bangladesh politics left more time for private study.
His deepest contempt has always been for any form of corruption. He referred to his own occasional international consultancies as “racketeering,” although he always used them to deliver serious analysis which promoted the consistent values of his work, much of which he financed from his own pocket. His alliance with nutritionists gave him crucial evidence with which to challenge those whose over-optimistic assessment of trends contradicted what he knew to be the reality of the rural poor.
The influence of a teacher, writer and friend is in a literal sense incalculable. The majority of contributions to this felicitation volume will testify to Professor Mosharaff Hossain's influence on Bangladeshi development scholars and practitioners. I can testify to the profound influence he has had on many in the international community who want to see, and where we can assist, a Bangladesh in which his values are expressed in honest, committed politics and economics which truly serve the majority of its people -- who, in the midst of ostentatious wealth and corruption, continue -- to his deep dismay -- to live in poverty.

The writer is a former Secretary General of Amnesty International.