At school, it was taught that hartal is a Gujrati word but its popularity among political parties here virtually made it a native one. There are many ways by which people can protest against undesirable situations. In Bangladesh, hartal is the most favourite option for the political parties to fight the incumbent regimes.
People here became familiar with hartals even before the emergence of this country as an independent entity. With the passage of time Bangladesh has grown economically and socially. Like most countries, trade, commerce and business constitute the backbone of its economy. Exports, especially, contributed immensely to the expansion of its economy over the last decades. However, the culture of hartals has considerably hindered this flow of economic growth. From a pure economic point of view, hartal is an act of outright insanity. It could be termed a self-destructive weapon and an occasion for destroying civilian property. Hartal compels every sphere of life to come to a standstill, makes the country unstable and brings in a hell of anarchy. The recent series of hartals obstructed business activities severely. It hampered every sector of the economy like export-import, transportation, banking, and caused havoc in the lives of the impoverished millions who have to earn their bread on a daily basis.
The upcoming national budget (2012-13) is expected to be of Tk 160 billion and export-import constitutes around 60 per cent of Bangladesh's present GDP of US$ 110 billion. Bangladesh captured nearly US$ 23 billion from exports in the fiscal 2010-2011. These are commendable indicators. Besides, because of the country's huge population and their dire need for survival, hundreds of thousands of crores of taka are circulated in the economy everyday through businesses. A hartal, needless to say, stalls all these activities, big or small, and more importantly, demoralises the drive of the people to go on. Because of the recent countrywide hartals and political turmoils, Moody's international has warned Bangladesh about the erosion of the county's image to potential and prospective foreign investors and a downgrading of credit rating. It mentioned in a report that political instability is detrimental to investor confidence, and is credit-negative. Attributing to the recent unrest it refers "if the political stability deters the foreign investment, or worsens the external payment position or the government's fiscal balance, the IMF credit may not be sufficient to buoy investor confidence."
Business today is an ever competitive phenomenon. A failure to retain international customers means that the customers are captured by the competitors. In RMG business our strongest competitor is China and it is very likely that our market could be occupied by them if the current situation persists for long time. The large business houses and industries might somehow cover up the losses caused by hartal but for new, small or medium enterprises it is deadly and many a time they cannot sustain the loss and may eventually get ruined.
Beyond crippling businesses, especially export-import and port operations, it is increasingly becoming a common activity of hartal at times to vandalise public property. Vandalism begins even from the previous evening of the hartal day. Setting public buses and private vehicles on fire is the most frequent of the scenes that people have to witness almost routinely.
There are innumerable other hazards that one has to experience on a hartal day. During the recent hartalsm, the worst victims, among others, were the HSC examinees. It was indeed a horrendous task for the authorities to reschedule the dates for the examinations for a vast number of students throughout the country and also to coordinate with the examination centres. The awes of the students cannot be perceived by none other than themselves.
Can we, under the circumstances, expect that good sense will prevail among our political parties to try to understand how dreadful a weapon this hartal is to the citizens, collectively as well as individually? It need not be reiterated that continuation of the hartal culture will give rise to anarchy in all spheres of society. Not that it has not already done so.
This Article was published in The Financial Express, Editorial, (Monday, May 14, 2012)
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