In the world of a scholar-economist

Collected Works of Rehman Sobhan
Amar Shomalochok Amar Bondhu
Centre for Policy Dialogue

Rehman Sobhan's role in Bangladesh's history has by now certainly been assured. As one of the young economists who identified themselves with the growing calls for regional autonomy in East Pakistan in the 1960s, he was one of the figures who played an instrumental role in the formulation of the Six Points. The rest, as they say, is known history. In post-liberation Bangladesh, Rehman Sobhan played a significant role in the formulation of economic policy, a task that was certainly not made any easier given the politically and socially disturbed conditions following the end of the nine-month war in late 1971. Those were tumultuous times, a period that tested the mettle of the political leadership as also of the intellectuals associated with the powers that be. Sobhan was certainly a significant pivot in the Bangladesh wheel at the time. He was, and remains, a formidable intellectual force in the country.
It is therefore the scholarly in Rehman Sobhan that comes reflected in these collected works. The essays, or call them thoughts, which have been put together in the series are not merely the workings of an individual mind but, in broad measure, are a pointer to the entirety of conditions leading to the political and geographical transformation in our part of the world. There is Volume 2 of the collected works to underpin such a point. Milestones to Bangladesh, as Sobhan chooses to describe it all, is fundamentally an enumeration and analysis of the political and cultural factors which eased the path to the creation of Bangladesh. To be sure, it is a path that has already been travelled a good number of times by other writers. But what makes Rehman Sobhan's discourse appealing in its distinctive way is the recapitulation of history as it were that comes alive here. For students of history, insofar as it relates to the twenty-four years of Bengali participation in Pakistan, this volume is a journey back in time, encompassing as it does the thoughts that Sobhan placed before the country as events unfolded one after another. Think here of the historical point at which Bengali nationalism took definitive shape. Sobhan offers his view of it, indeed reinforces it through an injection of the economic programme he believes can reinforce the autonomy programme. The old idea of disparity between East Pakistan and West Pakistan comes back once more, recreating the ambience within which Bengalis needed to wage what would be a long twilight struggle for liberty.
Move on to Volume 1 (Challenging Injustice: The Odyssey of a Bangladeshi Economist). And what you come across here is a detailed observation of the issues that have dominated thinking in Bangladesh. Sobhan disseminates ideas as diverse as planning for the poor in relation to the role of the state and underpinning human development with the concept of justice. The range is wide, to the point of being overwhelming. And what it basically does is throw necessary light on matters that have, in the pre-1971 as well as post-1971 circumstances, been the focus of public concern. In short, Rehman Sobhan comes forth with an account-by-account study of the problems that the state of Bangladesh has confronted over time and may yet be bedevilled by in the years to come. It is an entire process of individual thinking that you deal with in these works. And as you do so, you cannot but convince yourself that the issues Sobhan raises are those that call for serious public debate in these times of globalisation. As a matter of fact, the theme of globalisation too enters the debate the author presents before his reader, in the sense that he struggles to come to terms with the matter of Bangladesh's political economy, as he sees it, in relation to the whole gamut of globalisation. You may not quite agree with Sobhan's diagnoses of the issues, but you will of course appreciate that they come from an individual whose involvement with Bangladesh society has been intense and gets to be increasingly so in times defined by extremities of intensity.
And just how those extremities happen to be there come alive in Volume 3. Sobhan calls it The Political Economy of Malgovernance in Bangladesh. That says a whole lot about the subjects the author means to shed light on. Democratic governance, undermined in the past many years by both political incompetence and financial corruption, is a theme that has of late exercised minds in the country. Sobhan gives it renewed, and added, focus through dwelling on such aspects of it as municipal elections, administrative reform and the role of civil society in addressing the problem. As he sees it, there are the many dimensions, structured as they are, of malgovernance in Bangladesh. Such an observation could well raise eyebrows, and questions too. And they will surely pertain to the fact of governance having crumbled piece by careful piece while malgovernance has turned into a well-knit and well-oiled structure. And therein lies the irony. Where the country ought to have been well on its way to good, purposeful government in light of its liberation from Pakistan, it has actually --- thanks to the predatory instincts of men uncomfortable with democratic pluralism --- increasingly fallen victim to bad deeds. And yet the misdeed of malgovernance has not affected Bangladesh alone. Sobhan offers case histories of failed governance in South Asia itself, but then quickly, and convincingly, moves on to argue that the military option in politics has not been a credible one either.
It is a proliferation of ideas that the reader will go through in these volumes. Rehman Sobhan does not stay confined to issues relating to Bangladesh alone, or for that matter South Asia. In these essays, as also in the collected essays in Bengali, Amar Shomalochok Amar Bondhu, Sobhan offers a worldview that may well be the worldview of those who have been witness to the transformation that has defined Bangladesh in the nearly four decades since it achieved freedom as a sovereign state. The volume in Bengali should be a boon in the sense that it is directed at a wider mass of citizens whose understanding of the philosophy on which Rehman Sobhan has based his thoughts can now be reinforced in a bigger way.
Collected Works of Rehman Sobhan, in that larger perspective, is a stage by stage commentary on the social, economic and political conditions which have defined the Bangladesh state over the years. There was always a purpose to Sobhan's thoughts. And in these articles it is the purposeful nature of the writing that comes alive as well, given that they place before the reader a continuum of the principles that have shaped the author's comprehension of his place in the universal scheme of things. And within such comprehension, or such a scheme, arises the enduring tale of human suffering and achievement we know as Bangladesh.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star .