The clear mood of happiness being felt in the country over the completion and inauguration of the Padma Bridge is understandable. Few have been the occasions when we in Bangladesh have been able to undertake such a gigantic task and accomplish it on our own.
Let it not be forgotten that for years, indeed decades, we as a people were castigated as a bottomless basket. Yes, we have had a tough time overcoming that pejorative comment about us, one that has been bandied about by people beyond our frontiers in relentless manner.
And that was not all. The many phases when constitutional rule was undermined in Bangladesh, together with the tales of murder and mayhem, beginning with the assassinations of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the four national leaders in 1975, have been hurled at us for a long time. Politics in our country, we were informed, was not achieving its goal — that of ensuring the common weal.
The Padma Bridge should be that instance we needed to prove to the world that we are quite capable of ensuring our own welfare through means fully and happily our own. When the World Bank and critics at home and abroad smelled corruption — for no good reason — in the project even before it got underway, they did not quite realise that their apprehensions could turn out to be wrong. And they did turn out wrong.
The withdrawal of the financial resources it would have provided for the Padma Bridge by the World Bank swiftly led individuals, many within the country, to question the nation’s ability to have the bridge span the mighty Padma on local resources. All of them have been proved wrong. It only goes to show that even the wisest of men and women, when they are guided by cynicism, can go badly wrong in their expressions of opinion on crucial national issues.
The question now is simple: How did the Padma Bridge come to be? The answer to that question is equally simple: The bridge is there as a result of focused, committed political leadership in Bangladesh. That Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina deserves credit and indeed the gratitude of an entire nation for the boldness she demonstrated in bringing the Padma Bridge project to fruition will be part of the historical record. Her determination to prove Bangladesh right and its critics wrong was the engine behind the philosophy that worked in her and in her administration.
The Padma Bridge, from that broad perspective, is a sign of what strong and purposeful leadership can achieve. It is also a reminder that a nation which called forth the courage more than a half century ago to go to war to free itself of colonial domination possesses in its soul the wherewithal to build that free nation in the economic and social sense of the meaning. The six-plus kilometres which link the banks of the Padma one to another are but a broad hint of the resilience of the people of Bangladesh.
We are the people. Throughout a very large segment of our history we have been battered by circumstances of a varied sort; we have been brought low but we have never been broken in spirit. The Padma Bridge is the metaphor speaking of our mettle as a nation, of the truth that when political leadership is determined to uphold the self-esteem of citizens it is history that is created anew. Over the restless waters of the Padma, across that bridge is that metaphor writ large.
The Padma Bridge inaugurates a new frontier in our collective life as a nation. And we speak not just of faster means of communication. We speak of the growth of industry, of employment generation, of opportunities promisingprosperity in the south-western region of the country. We dream of progress which comes of connectivity, of education spurring the young on to a better and clearer understanding of the world in their classrooms. The Padma Bridge connects, in an emphatic way, our fellow citizens in the south-west to the wider world that is Bangladesh and beyond.
With the Padma Bridge we cross a river and not merely in the literal sense of the term. With the bridge we step into a wider terrain of possibilities, those which inform the rest of the world that we are now level with that world. It is a bridge to a refashioning of dreams, to that exalted place in the community of nations we have always aspired to.
The bridge links, firmly and meaningfully, our generation with the generations to be. It is beauty sparkling in the waters of the mighty river it has triumphed over.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a veteran journalist and author of biographies of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Tajuddin Ahmad
