Democratic order must be defended to meet challenges of inequality and exploitation

COUNTRIES in South Asia should create equal opportunities for the poor in order to cut inequality that poses threats to societies, analysts said. Inequality is a serious danger to societies and a threat to smooth performances of trade and industrial activity, said MA Jabbar, a board member of Pakistan’s Sustainable Development Policy, at the ninth South Asia Economic Summit.

Policymakers should act to correct injustices in the society and reduce inequalities to build an inclusive and peaceful society and avoid the risk of social unrest, Prof Rehman Sobhan, a leading economist said a stable democratic order would be sustainable only if enough people across South Asia could be invested with a sufficient stake in defending this order against challenges from a variety of extra-democratic forces.

According to him, injustice originates from four sources -inequitable access to assets, inequitable participation in the market, inequitable access to human development and unjust governance. An economic order where millions of young women are condemned to earn $50 a month and a handful of people can aspire to a first world life style because such low wages make their enterprises more export-competitive, is neither just nor sustainable.

It is certainly true that a just society is at the same time fair and also dynamically efficient over a period of time as in such a society there is no capacity for either corruption or misgovernance. However it is equally certain that simply increasing education without improving its quality or basic infrastructure building – the old paradigms of growth, no longer work as intended in the 21st century. It is also not necessarily true that an economically fair society can grow – the old communist economies had some of the most equal ratios of distribution of income and wealth yet could not keep up with the more dynamic, yet on the surface highly inequitable societies of the West.

Without fighting corruption and without a people’s government for serving the people, it is no use of talking of removing economic injustice among the poor. A government only for development politics not being the people’s government, simply means an exploitative government for the benefit of the self-serving corrupt ones to be richer.

Our Anti-Corruption Commission has not earned any faith about fighting corruption, the greatest reason for causing economic inequality. It is running after weak ones for their own benefit. Anti-Corruption Commission has no justification for harassing small thieves for whom police action is enough. Bangladesh has become a country where corruption is good business like politics. Intellectual dishonesty is our greatest shame.