In Bangladesh - Telecolonialism Replaces the British Raj
By Andrew Robinson, Pacific News Service, June 14, 1995

48 years after the departure of the British Raj, 24 years after the war of independence against Pakistan, and four years after installing democracy, Bangladesh remains mired in a form of colonialism as oppressive as any in the region's history. Bangladeshis and others in the third world call it telecolonialism. PNS correspondent Andrew Robinson reports from Dhaka in a continuing PNS series on the global telecommunications era.

Telecolonialism - elusive, ubiquitous and almost impossible to combat - is the newest form of colonialism to grip this country's 120 million residents.

Just as the British Raj once controlled tax revenue and Pakistan controlled the official language, the communication powers colonizing Bangladesh today control something equally important - information.

One hundred years ago Bengalis depended on England not just for the luxuries of life - chandeliers, tea cups, face creams, cigarettes - but for their daily attire. In today's Bengal, not only luxury information - business management, computer programming, marketing, English grammars, GRE books - but ideas about justice, democracy, domestic development, the very concept of the modern world itself, are made and controlled by foreigners.

"It's not uncommon," says Philip Gain, a local investigative reporter, "that to get important information about Bangladesh, I must call America. Getting information here is a long and arduous process."

Part of the problem is a lack of telecommunications infrastructure. The cost of a telephone in Bangladesh, including bribe money, is over $1,000. And even after receiving the money, the Telecommunications and Telegraph Board (BTTB) may drag its heels on the connection. Widely considered the most corrupt government body in Bangladesh, BTTB has, according to a U.S. Embassy official, the worst record of any telephone board in South Asia.

Combine this lack of internal infrastructure with a powerful external mass media (from the New York Times to the BBC), the public relations departments of large international human development organizations (Amnesty International, UNICEF, CARE, the World Bank), and a plethora of foreign supported NGOs training the journalists, "empowering" the women, educating the children of Bangladesh, and you have what some intellectuals here call a bigger problem - "telecolonialism."

A recent study of the Bangladesh media found that almost all of the country's visual comprehension of the outside world, through TV and published photographs, comes from outside sources. In seven of the leading Bangla language newspapers, 88 percent of the information about America carries a Western media logo.

At the same time foreign-funded development and media organizations - not their Bangladeshi counterparts - are the ones that dissect Bangladesh into bite size data packets for global dissemination. They are the first to tell the world about the "subjugated" status of women in Bangladesh, the employment of child labor, or the death toll of another cyclone. If they want to sound positive, they inform the world about the success of their own development projects.

"We get foreign reporters here all the time," says Tajul Islam, public relations director of the Bangladesh Rural Advance Committee, the largest foreign-funded domestic NGO in the world. "Ninety-nine percent of the articles they write about us are positive."

One effect of this information imbalance can be seen in the trade debate over child labor. While such communication-rich countries as France and the U.S. try to persuade the World Trade Organization to withhold trade privileges from Bangladesh because of its child labor practices, many international organizations are persuading consumers to boycott South Asian garments.

Yet it's virtually impossible for Bangladeshis to learn about the controversial practices of foreign companies - how, for example, Chase Manhattan Bank has been trying to influence politics in Mexico for years, as reported in Harper's Magazine; or the way many foreign companies use sexual images of women to advertise their products (something forbidden in Bangladesh). Bangladeshis would never be able to boycott these companies because they lack both access to such information and the means to publicize it.

Before their democratic revolution in 1991, Bangladeshis were portrayed by telecolonialists as a country lacking in democracy and human rights. After all, they had only a few daily newspapers - unlike the dozens of major papers now running AP, Reuters, the International Herald Tribune; no CNN, BBX or Zee TV; no "Santa Barbara" soap operas, only a few private cars, hardly any English-medium schools, and almost no teenagers with feathered bangs, sunglasses, rock-n-roll T-shirts.

Today with a democratically elected parliament that hasn't convened since March 1994, opposition strikes that shut the country down for weeks at a stretch, a fertilizer crisis that could lead to widespread famine, election fraud scandals and a voter registration fiasco that has stalled government operations for weeks, one can't help but wonder if the telecolonialist idea of a democratic state was right for Bangladesh.

In perhaps the ultimate conquest of telecolonialism, Bangladeshis today fight in the telecolonialists' wars - just as their ancestors joined British troops during the Raj and the Pakistani military after independence. Over 3,200 Bangladeshi "Blue Helmets" are stationed around the world, fought in the Gulf War, helped enforce democratic elections in Cambodia, accompanied the U.S. into Haiti and are holding the frontlines in Bihac - not because of any ideological agreement with the cause but "for the money, the thrill of adventure, and the opportunity to serve humanity," as Nurul Momen of Dhaka University puts it.

That's just it. In the age of telecolonialism, the telecolonialists provide Bangladesh with the one thing Bangladesh has been struggling to achieve all these years: the ability to define its own humanity.