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Territory in southern Asia on the Bay of Bengal, ruled since 1971 by the Gônoprojatontri Bangladesh

Bangladesh (Bengali: বাংলাদেশ Bangladesh, lit. "The country of Bengal"), officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh (গণপ্রজাতন্ত্রী বাংলাদেশ Gônoprojatontri Bangladesh), is a country in South Asia. It shares land borders with India and Myanmar (Burma). The country's maritime territory in the Bay of Bengal is roughly equal to the size of its land area. Bangladesh is the world's eighth most populous country. Dhaka is its capital and largest city, followed by Chittagong, which has the country's largest port. Bangladesh forms the largest and easternmost part of the Bengal region. Bangladeshis include people from a range of ethnic groups and religions. Bengalis, who speak the official Bengali language, make up 98% of the population. The politically dominant Bengali Muslims make the nation the world's third largest Muslim-majority country. Islam is the official religion of Bangladesh.

Geographical type: Territory

Latitude: 23.8° N — Longitude: 90.05° E

Area: 147,570 km²

ISO 3166-2 code: BD

Measures of Freedom

Bangladesh | Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2022
2016: Status: Partly Free, Aggregate Score: 49, Political Rights: 4, Civil Liberties: 4
Bangladesh continued to experience political and social unrest in 2015 as the ruling Awami League (AL) consolidated power, resisted calls for fresh elections, and clamped down on dissent. The opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) engaged in street action but found its operations hampered by the harassment of key party officials as well as by mass preventive detentions of party activists.
Human Freedom Index [PDF], The Human Freedom Index 2021
2019: 5.75, Rank: 142, Personal Freedom: 5.52, Economic Freedom: 6.05
Level of Economic Freedom, Economic Freedom of the World
2014: 6.35, Rank: 121

Articles

Sweatshops the "Best Available Alternative"? But Who Decides What Alternatives are Available?, by Kevin Carson, 20 May 2013
Criticizes Benjamin Powell's defense, in a Forbes article, of Bangladesh garment sweatshops
The question you should be asking yourself, and ... the people in the C-suite at Nike don't want you asking, is who decides what other alternatives are available in Bangladesh? ... Without "intellectual property," those factories in Bangladesh could ignore Nike's trademark and market identical shoes to the local population at a tiny fraction of the price. And without Nike to impose uniform pricing across the industry, they'd have to compete for local workers. It wouldn't matter if Nike decided to ... pull out of Bangladesh. The workers' livelihoods would no longer be held hostage to what Nike did or didn't do.
Treating People Like Garbage, by Sheldon Richman, The Goal Is Freedom, 4 Oct 2013
Prompted by the "closing" of the U.S. government during Oct 2013, examines two examples of how the state behaves towards people: an Iraq war veteran and his family, and the genocide of Bengalis in March 1971, with the support of Nixon and Kissinger
[H]ow about some 200,000 deaths? That's the minimum number of Bengalis killed in 1971 in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) by the dictator of Pakistan, with weapons and support provided by the regime of ... Nixon and ... Kissinger ... [I]n 1947, the subcontinent was partitioned into India and Pakistan. But Muslim Pakistan itself was divided into east and west with India in between ... Hundreds of thousands of Bengalis were killed—3 million, according to the Bangladeshi government—and 10 million refugees poured into India, "where they died in droves in wretched refugee camps."

The introductory paragraph uses material from the Wikipedia article "Bangladesh" as of 24 Sep 2018, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.