1. THE NATION IDENTITY AND ECOLOGY

THE nation of which we speak is about 80 million strong; God willing, it is likely to be in the year 2000 A.D. nearly 115 million. The habitat is approximately 55 thousand square miles to-day and we assume, will continue to be that in the 2000 A.D. It is probably the most densely populated 55 thousand square miles on earth. The volume of production, processed, semi-processed and unprocessed, after necessary exercise, gives us nearly the lowest per capita income in the world. These indubitable and unflattering facts have enabled international jesters to exercise their wit at the expense of Bangladesh. We have heard epithets such as "international basket case".

It is possible to make a catalogue of unflattering facts about other people and nations at other times. Even as late as the middle of the 19th Century the British press did not have a very flattering view of American commercial morality. Spain in her heyday entertained a rather poor view of England. A hundred years ago Japan, or the USSR would have been very differently described than they are today. The facts singly or even taken in conjunction are not particularly meaningful, or at least lend themselves to very different meanings. For one thing, I do not know of any developing society which has effected the development with a declining or stationary population. In fact, a decline in society has invariably shown itself in a stationary or declining population. No doubt, there is in a society, at least in an isolated society, a definite ratio between food production and its population which it is dangerous to ignore. But changes in food habits-one has only to notice that changes in the pattern of food consumption in the developed wes-tern world during the past 150 years are sometimes far more important than strenuous, nearly futile attempts at increasing the cereal quota of food production and consumption of a society. There is no doubt that misconceived and misguided policy decisions may sometimes retard desirable consummation. But the point we are trying to make is that one has to go more deeply into the obvious hard facts before these can be used as data to describe the state of the nation.

To begin with, how firm is the foundation of the nation we are considering? Nearly 75 years ago the Bengali speaking people of the British Indian Empire, at least the vocal and vociferous section of it, vowed to unsettle a settled fact and to a large extent succeeded in unsettling it. The Bengali speaking people were to live together ever after, presumably happily too. In 35 years time a vocal and vociferous section of the Bengali speaking people, albeit a minority section of the Bengali speaking people, would have nothing to do with a future in which it did not have the right to lose itself in the great identity of an Indian nation. I do not know how well it has succeeded in its renunciatory task