RE: Shafiqul Alam Yunus Press secretary 15yrs ago 👍6 Dec 2025 09:50
It’s interesting reading some of the comments below the article…….
Here are a couple of……
Let’s be brutally honest: the Fulbari episode wasn’t some heroic “people’s victory.” It was one of the most economically disastrous self-inflicted wounds in Bangladesh’s modern history — celebrated only because we allowed pro-Indian ideology to overpower basic national interest.
For years, a loud section of leftist activists, aided by self-appointed “progressive” newspapers, sold a fantasy that Bangladesh could reject coal while the entire industrial world — from China to Australia — was powered by it. They screamed about environmental collapse, displacement, and apocalypse, yet offered zero realistic alternatives for powering a growing economy whose gas reserves were already collapsing before their eyes.
And what was the outcome of their moral grandstanding?
We left billions of dollars’ worth of coal under our own soil and then spent the next decade begging the world for gas and importing coal from India and Indonesia at exorbitant prices. We crippled our balance of payments, sacrificed energy security, and made ourselves permanently dependent on foreign suppliers — the very thing any serious nation avoids at all costs.
The irony is grotesque:
We rejected mining our own coal in Fulbari, but we built massive coal plants anyway — now fueled by imported Indian/Indonesian coal. We refused open-pit mining “to save the environment,” yet 10,000 brick kilns today burn high sulphur content dirty Indian coal and have become the single largest source of air pollution in Bangladesh. And then we locked ourselves into long-term power deals, including with Adani — ensuring that, once again, others profiteer from our ideological confusion.
The world’s serious nations don’t behave like this. China — with the world’s largest solar network and trillions in reserves — still treats coal as a non-negotiable pillar of its energy security. But Bangladesh? We acted like a country allergic to common sense. We surrendered our strategic resources because a handful of activists shouted louder than the economists, the engineers, and the realities of the global energy market.
This wasn’t environmentalism.
It was economic suicide, serving Indian interest — dressed up as moral superiority.
Bangladesh was poor then. It is still poor now. We never had the luxury of denying ourselves the very resources that could have powered our industries and stabilized our economy. And the proof of our folly is painfully clear: every time global energy prices twitch, our economy bleeds.
Fulbari was not a triumph.
It was a tragedy, a glare example of how our leftist politicians serve the interest of India — and we’re still paying the bills of importing of LNG, fuel using precious foreign exchange remitted by our patriotic soldiers working abroad.
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