Is Bangladesh under pressure of security threat?

Dr. Forqan Uddin Ahmed :

Security simply defines one’s safety from danger and challenges.

In life, one shall have to face many challenges.

Life is not always a one-way track.

There are ups and downs in life.

As people of state face multiple of hurdles, so an individual or a nation can in no way run its function safely.

History says that, no nation is safe or secured until she is developing a safe mechanism to defend from the enemy.

We see that there are security threats in and around the world.

The strong have the tendency to dominate the weak, suppress, deprive, humiliate and even speak for their existentialism.

It is for the lack of strength, strategy, capabilities, over and above for the loss of integrity and personality.

When a man or any individual is unsafe by the pressure of the strong, he becomes vulnerable to his race, state or nation.

When we speak of a man’s security we speak of a safety free life from his/her enemy.

One man tries to capture another man; one nation tries to capture another nation.

So for the safety of state’s sovereignty, it is required to develop some safety measures to protect her.

This is one side of human and nation’s security.

There are securities, which we may call a comprehensive security.

When we talk about different securities like food, health, environmental, economic, social and cultural security- we must understand its inner meaning.

For human security, the safety of food, safety of environment, health, economy and social safety all are very vital.

Without those, human security is at threat, life undergoes distortion.

Even nation becomes vulnerable without their absence.

So comprehensive security is the pertinent part of state’s sovereignty.

Security has its wide spectrum covering many phenomena.

I have simply tried to give a short pen picture of security in regards to defense and development.

Security, in the present day, has undergone paradigm shift and may be analyzed in its comprehensive perspective.

For better sustenance and development of Bangladesh, security parameters should be evaluated in political, economic, social, military and environmental dimensions.

A package of policy options encapsulating both military and non-military aspects should be formulated and tried for Bangladesh.

Defense and development should go together for Bangladesh. However, one should strike a balance in allotting resources, keeping in view the meager resources it has and the geopolitical and geo-strategic realities of the region.

Improvement of its politics, economy, diplomacy, military modernization, and above all ensuring people’s participation in the defense of the country should be what Bangladesh should aim for a better secured tomorrow.

For the sake of its existence, Bangladesh has to manage and balance its neighbors specially the two giants and internal security problems that include strengthening its democracy, which should be upheld as balancing a core value of the nation.

Bangladesh should pursue the policy engagement, like multilateralism, options strengthening national power through military modernization and improving its internal security and resilience.

Bangladesh cannot afford to antagonize its neighbors nor should she, as a self-respecting nation, embrace submissiveness. She should not bandwagon but she should fine-tune its balancing abilities.

What Bangladesh needs today are both developments i.e. human security and the traditional internal and external security in an environment where both India and China are probably playing a power game of dominance both economically and militarily. Bangladesh is a self-respecting nation; it would not like to be the pawns in their power game but again Bangladesh has to fine-tune its diplomatic maneuvers that would ensure a secured internal and external environment, which would ensure a sustained economic, political and social development for its people.

The broader concept of core values of Bangladesh may be listed here: the territorial integrity, state sovereignty, democracy, religious values, social and economic progress for its people.

Unless the entire spectrum is taken care of, Bangladesh would continue to fall short of coming out of the stigma of a small, weak or soft state. This is the stark reality.

Now, in order to take care of the core values of Bangladesh, which relates to its very existence keeping aside the concept like shared as a sovereign state – sovereignty – both the concepts of defense and development come to the fore.

It is a delicate game for an economically weak go state like Bangladesh, to decide how much of the pie should defense in order to ensure an uninterrupted sustained economic growth.

It is generally believed that with eight percent growth rate annually Bangladesh could run into middle power group.

Authoritarian and confrontational politics have bred political instability and uncertainty in Bangladesh since it gained Independence.

Although elections of one kind or the other have been held on a regular basis, they have neither solved the fundamental political problems (that is, the prevalence of authoritarian and agitation politics) nor brought durable political stability.

A volatile political atmosphere prevails in the country.

In the absence of checks and balances in the political system, whoever was in power created an elaborate state patronage system and monopolized political power.

Along with politicians and their cronies, the major beneficiaries of the patrimonial political system were the civil bureaucracy and the military.

Consequently, both of them have become politicized and interfered in the political affairs of the state.

In the end, politics has become an attractive business proposition for different interest groups.

Given that economic stakes were high, those who lost political power either through elections or extra-constitutional means reacted violently and engaged in agitation politics to oust those who had replaced them.

Bangladesh is a small country with endemic political, economic and social problems.

Coupled with those, it suffers from the tyranny of geography.

It is yet to resolve some of the seemingly intractable problems with the neighbors.

For Bangladesh, for its very existence, security is to be understood in its widest sense encompassing political, economic, social, military and environmental dimensions.

Confrontational politics should be taken care of and then democracy has to be institutionalized. Parliament should be allowed to function as the nerve center of all political activities of the nation.

Its economy has to be revitalized specially by bringing discipline in the sector and diversifying exports.

Diplomacy should cater for multilateralism and work as the first line of defense.

It should take notice of the geopolitical and geostrategic realties of Bangladesh.

It may try for balancing rather than bandwagoning.

Prospect of regional security arrangement may be looked into that could smoothen relations between the nations.

Bangladesh should take advantage.

(The writer is former Deputy Director General, Bangladesh Ansar & VDP).