Bangladesh’s Permanent Liberation Struggle: Constructing an Inclusive Democratic Society

Abstract

The response to the challenges of governance demanded even greater entrepreneurial capacity. Bangladeshis had, as the end result of years of external domination, no experience in ruling themselves. Even within the Pakistan state all critical decisions, policies, and control of the principal institutions of governance were appropriated by our Pakistani rulers. As a result the newly created state had to discover extraordinary capacities for entrepreneurship in governance to create a functioning nation state. This exercise in nation-building within the rubble of a bankrupt war-ravaged country was, at that time, and even in later years, under-appreciated. To nurture a new nation extracted through blood and fire from the diseased womb of another sovereign state required undiscovered qualities for which there was no available training manual developed from innumerable case histories of post-colonial states. So by definition the leaders and those who served them in constructing the Bangladesh state, had to be entrepreneurs, learning from their own bitter experiences, through trial and error, how to first build and then manage a nation state.