A quiet end to a vocal life

For a man who loved nothing more than an animated discussion, and who, with great boldness, had once fought for his nation's emancipation, the end came quietly. 

He had collapsed just after midnight in his home in Potomac, Maryland. Paramedics had rushed to revive him, but his pulse was erratic. He was taken to a nearby hospital but nothing much could be done. 

In the early hours of 9 May, 94 years after he was born in Chittagong, Professor Nurul Islam, the doyen of Bangladeshi economists, quietly passed away in the suburbs of Maryland, his home for the last 35 years.      

I was not born early enough to have the privilege of being taught by him at the University of Dhaka where he taught economics from 1955 to 1964. Nor did I have the opportunity to be guided by him as a budding economist when he was head of the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics from 1964 to 1971. 

But for the past three decades, I had the unique privilege of being his neighbour in Maryland, a proximity that allowed me to learn so much from this erudite and kind-hearted person.

My first encounter with Professor Nurul Islam was in the 1980s, though. A fresh graduate of Dhaka University, I was then working with Professor Rehman Sobhan, his long friend and collaborator. Professor Sobhan was then a Research Director at the Bangladesh Institute for Development Studies, and he had invited me to join him in a pioneering effort to document the incidence of loan default and analyse its drivers. 

Professor Islam was, at the time, based in Rome, serving as Assistant Secretary General at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), and was visiting Dhaka. As I was introduced to him, Professor Islam immediately started quizzing me on what I was working on, how I was collecting my data and what findings I was coming up with. As I finished my short summary, he turned to Professor Sobhan and said, in his inimitable style, "Very interesting." 

I thought then that he was just being polite. I came to realise later that the interest was genuine. Professor Islam was one of the most curious people I have ever met. 

He was also one of the most argumentative people I have ever encountered. There was nothing he liked better than an animated debate. One could argue with him too. He loved being challenged. But anyone who challenged him had to be prepared for a barrage of retorts, underpinned by powerful logic and incisive dissection of arguments. No wonder an exasperated professor at Harvard University, where he obtained a PhD, suggested that he forgets economics and became a lawyer instead.

Professor Nurul Islam would have been a great lawyer if he had chosen to join the legal profession. But, for us economists, it is a boon that he chose not to heed his professor's advice. 

In 1955, he returned to Dhaka University and joined the economics faculty as a Reader (he was later to become a full professor). The following year, at the end of August, a special conference was held in Dhaka where Bengali economists met to discuss the draft of the first 5-year Plan of Pakistan. A report was prepared at the end of the conference, signed by 10 prominent Bengali economists, that laid out the basis of the now famous "Two Economies" thesis. 

The main task of drafting the report fell on the youngest member of the group, Nurul Islam. 

Drawing upon the economic concept of mobility of factors, the report argued that due to the geographic separation of East and West Pakistan, factor mobility would be limited. In plain language, labour, goods and services would not be able to move freely across the two provinces. The two provinces thus had two separate economies, with little linkage between them. This was the essence of the "Two Economies" thesis. 

Why was this thesis important? What implications did this have for policymaking in Pakistan at that time? We may recall that Pakistani policymakers, dominated by West Pakistanis, had been justifying the unequal allocation of resources between the provinces, ie, the favoured treatment of West Pakistan, with the theory of "trickle down." 

They argued that West Pakistan had a better capacity to absorb the resources and hence Pakistan's overall growth would be higher if that province received a higher proportion of resources. The benefits of the higher growth will then trickle down to the East Pakistanis, so the argument went. 

In other words, according to the Pakistani establishment, Bengalis would be better off with an unequal distribution of resources. 

The "Two Economies" thesis was a bold rebuttal to this point of view. Grounded in rigorous economics, the thesis showed why the hoped-for trickle-down will not happen given the immobility of labour between the provinces, and the difficulty of moving goods and services. The report of the Bengali economists thus argued for at least an equal allocation of resources between the provinces. In fact, it went one step ahead. 

It argued for an initial allocation in favour of East Pakistan to make up for the lost ground since 1947 and after that a more equal allocation. 

The Pakistani establishment chose to ignore the report and its suggestions. But the ideas caught the imagination of the Bengalis including their political leaders. Exactly a decade after the thesis was first presented at the Dhaka conference, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, inspired by its main message, announced his famous Six-Points program in 1966. 

Professor Nurul Islam did not have a direct role in the formulation of the Six Points, but his ideas clearly had an influence.

It is thus no wonder that when he was released from jail in 1969, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib asked Professor Islam to meet him. In their first-ever meeting held in Dhaka in 1969, the great leader gave the eminent economist a task: work out the detailed implications of the Six Points. 

Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib knew that general elections would soon be held and once he sat in the newly elected Pakistani parliament his first task was going to be the placing of a draft constitution based on the Six Points. When he did so, there would surely be a vociferous debate and he would need to defend his Six Points with all the rigour he could muster. He thus needed the help of the experts. 

When Professor Nurul Islam and his colleagues dissected the Six Points, they realised that this was only a short step away from independence. When they explained this in meticulous detail to the leader, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib was quick to grasp the implications. 

In his book, The Making of a Nation, Professor Islam writes: "Sheikh Mujib was the quickest to grasp it all partly because he had thought about it the most and for the longest period. He was very happy that the elaboration and articulation by the experts of the summary version of the programme had turned out the way it had."

This was a formal way of recalling the leader's response. In a private conversation with me, Professor Islam said it more colourfully: "When I explained that Six Points is almost a declaration of independence, Sheikh Mujib said, thank you, that's exactly what I wanted to hear!" 

The rest is of course history. A history that Professor Nurul Islam helped make and write about. But that is a story for another day. 

Syed Akhtar Mahmood is an economist who previously worked for an international development organisation. 

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.