The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Protests Cause a Mass Exodus of Bangladesh || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: August 12, 2024

The situation in Bangladesh has worsened, forcing the Prime Minister to flee the country. Let's recap what led us to this point and look at what the future might hold for Bangladesh and India. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/protests-cause-a-mass-exodus-of-bangladesh

Hey, everybody, Peter Zine here. It is August 5th. Fifth. And the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Hesina, has fled the country after nationwide riots, which have killed a few dozen people. This started out as a group of young people who were basically desperate for jobs. Government jobs are basically guaranteed to people who fought in the revolution or their descendants. And if you're not one of those people, you're kind of out of luck. Because all that's left in the economy is becoming a wage slave for the tech. style industry, and when I say wage slave, I literally mean wage slave in horrible, horrible conditions. Basically, we've decided to get rid of sweatshops and so everything just went to

Bangladesh. Or to do an incredibly dangerous job, which is called shipbreaking, which takes old vessels, physically breaks them down and then recycles the steel. Very easy to get maimed doing that job. Anyway, that's it. That's the entire Bangladeshi economy. And anyway, what started out as protests about jobs, basically spread to a concern about corruption and in competence. And if you're looking for corruption and competence, Bangladesh is the place for you. You basically have a couple of political parties that have switched back and forth and back and forth and forth over the course of the last entire existence of the country since the 70s, turning everything into a patronage network. So we had a period, you know, 15, 20, 25 years ago where most services for most

of the population were not provided by the government because that was all corrupt. You basically had foreign NGOs coming in to do social services. Well, over the last 20, we're not provided. We're not provided. 20 years, those NGOs have basically been brought into the patronage network, and so most of them stopped operations, and the ones that remain are not exactly doing a lot of great work. So there's nothing going on here from a positive point of view, from a community point of view, except for generating most of the world's ready-to-wear knitwear. So, for example, if you're into fast fashion, you are taking advantage of the near slave conditions in Bangladesh and massive of corruption. So congratulations to you. Anyway, where does this bring us? Well, this is a country

of, you know, 100 odd million people. And it's on a very small footprint of land with very few economic opportunities, with almost no resources. Agriculture is largely subsistence and the government has now failed. Neither of the political parties are in a position to take up governance. I mean, the ruling party just lost the prime minister. They don't have anyone who's less corrupted in the ranks. And the opposition is fractured to stay the least. They do have a history of having military coups and military rule from time to time. But one of the positive, if that's the right word, things the most recent government has done is gutted the military to make military coups less capable. So the military probably doesn't have the skill set that's

necessary to take over. So barring some sort of surprise breakthrough and an internal night and shining armor, which I have a hard time envisioning, we're probably going to see a lot of economic destitution and civil breakdown, which means we're probably going to see millions of refugees and immigrants leaving Bangladesh for some other place. Here's the thing. The only land border that Bangladesh has is India, perhaps around the country. So in India, we've got a government under Modi, who has been in control now for well over a decade, but he hasn't faced an international crisis at all. There's really only two countries that matter in terms of near-abroad relations.

One is Pakistan, nuclear threat, a few wars in the past, but relations there have been pretty calm. Most of the drama has been on the Pakistani side of the equation, which has kind of kept Pakistan bottled up in its own juices and allowed the Indians to relax a little bit. And the other one is Bangladesh, which has also been calm until now. So the Modi government, unfortunately, doesn't have a lot of experience in dealing with crises because there hasn't been one in the last 10 years. And now you're talking about an economic one where you're talking about a surge of people potentially coming into India, that India simply doesn't have the facilities, the infrastructure, the capital, or the jobs in order to absorb these people competently.

There's also the issue that the Modi government has very few connections to the Bangladeshi government. Yes, in past years, there have been reasonably strong connections between Indian governments and the Bangladeshi parties, but most of that was under Congress, which is now in opposition. So we get kind of a double crisis here with Bangladesh potentially falling apart and with India not really having the traction it needs to deal with the situation in a meaningful way. So a lot of moving pieces in this, and none of them are really moving. in the right direction, but we're going to find out real soon what the Modi government is made of when it comes to an international issue that actually matters to it right on its own border, as opposed to dealing with some sort of non-line movement issue that has broader political connotations around the world, but is mostly about atmospheric. I mean, this is where the rubber

is going to hit the road, and we're going to find out real soon.