NEW South Asia

Editor's view · First written June 2023 · Updated October 2026

Bangladesh's fading promise

Most Americans know Bangladesh, if at all, as the place that made their clothes and shoes, though the labels carry global brand names. Some know Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace laureate who pioneered microcredit. Few remember that in 1971, when Bangladesh fought for independence from Pakistan, the Nixon administration backed Pakistan, ignoring its own diplomats' cables about the slaughter of Bengali civilians. Americans have forgotten; Bangladeshis have not.

The garment industry began in 1978, when South Korea's Daewoo trained Bangladeshi workers. Western buyers, Americans prominent among them, then built it into the world's second-largest garment exporter, after China. When the Rana Plaza factory building collapsed in 2013, killing more than 1,100 workers, media coverage pushed brands to pay for factory inspections, and buildings became safer. Wages and workers' rights have improved far less, and factory fires still kill workers.

For two decades Bangladesh was a development success; around 2020 its income per person overtook India's. But growth was already slowing when a student-led uprising in 2024, in which as many as 1,400 people were killed, toppled Sheikh Hasina's increasingly authoritarian and corrupt government. She fled to India. Yunus's interim government held elections in February 2026, from which Hasina's party was barred; the Bangladesh Nationalist Party won, but growth remains far below the 7 percent of the 2010s.

The hope that Bangladesh would keep growing in harmony with its neighbors has faded. Bangladeshis resent India for sheltering Hasina, who was sentenced to death in absentia in 2025; India has not handed her over. In a strange twist, Bangladesh is warming to Pakistan, the country it fought for its independence, while China works to extend its influence. On its other border, Bangladesh shelters more than a million Rohingya refugees who fled Myanmar's army, most of them since 2017, a burden that shrinking international aid makes heavier.

Bangladesh's monsoon floods, worsened by climate change, get such routine coverage that most people tune them out. Its assets are fertile land, rich fisheries, untapped gas in the Bay of Bengal and, above all, 175 million people, many of them young and eager to work. If its development stalls and its politics turn unstable, the consequences could ripple well beyond the subcontinent. Americans cannot decide where Bangladesh goes, but with China close by, we must watch it closely.

— John Laxmi