Yunus: Not the Superman Bangladesh Hoped For
Nobel Laureate struggles with broken country
By: Nirupama Subramanian
The interim Bangladesh administration led by Nobel Laureate Mohamed Yunus, which replaced the autocratic 15-year regime of Sheikh Hasina, has been unable to live up to the expectation of a dramatic transformation of the country after he took charge in the chaotic aftermath of a student-led rebellion that saw Hasina fleeing for India by Army Aviation helicopter a year ago.
Bangladesh marked the first anniversary of Hasina’s departure earlier this week with an announcement by the 85-year-old Yunus that elections will be held next February, but the future remains uncertain. His commitment to hold the election and transfer power to a duly elected government has come amid concerns that the promise of democratic rule that Hasina's forced departure held was slipping away. He hasn’t been able to enforce the rule of law, or put an end to the mobocracy and violence targeting political rivals and ethnic minorities. The chaos in governance and on the streets is all too apparent.
Yunus, a former banker and founder of microlending pioneer Grameen Bank, has tried to walk a fine balance between various forces and interests: the students who led the rebellion against Hasina and put him in charge; the politics of Jamaat-i-Islami that collaborated with Pakistan to crush the 1971 liberation movement and was punished by Hasina four decades later with trials, executions and a ban; the ambitions of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the party that was the main opposition to Hasina and was sidelined by her from 2009; the concerns of the powerful Army, and his own political ambitions.
Since Yunus took office in the wake of the chaos, his administration has been preoccupied with two big themes. The first is “reforms” of politics and governance, the second is to bring Hasina and others to justice. Committees have been formed for the first time with the aim of checking the capture of government, judiciary, and elections by an authoritarian leader, essentially to prevent the emergence of another Hasina-like leader.
But despite its high-minded objectives, the reform process has raised concerns, first about the interim administration's legal standing, crucial especially due to the sweeping nature of the changes being contemplated. The second is if such reforms can heal a broken country when the process is not rooted in national consensus. Other concerns relate to what may be introduced and what is proposed to be eliminated from the Constitution.
On August 5, Yunus unveiled an anniversary document called the “July Declaration,” which proposes to give constitutional status to the “student-people” 2024 July uprising, and the status of “martyrs” to protestors killed by the police in those weeks. The entire document is to be included in the Constitution.
A separate document called the National July Charter is being prepared as the framework for the new “inclusive, democratic” Constitution. The task of adopting this will fall to the political parties after the next election. By itself, the July Declaration has attracted comment for being too partisan, and its planned inclusion in the Constitution doesn’t augur well.
The National Citizens' Party, newly formed by sections of students who took to the streets last year, is the force behind the July Declaration. It wants a time-bound legal commitment by all political parties that a new constitution will be adopted immediately, rather than over a period of two years.
In fact, the NCP's preferred way forward was to postpone elections and for Yunus to stay in office indefinitely, or until the reforms were implemented. Perhaps recognizing his own limitations, Yunus appears to have decided to heed the BNP’s and Army's demand for elections at the earliest. Before announcing it would take place next February, the Chief Adviser, as he is known, had said “by the middle of next year,” changing that to April, after the holy month of Ramzan. Now it is to take place a month ahead of the festival.
The second theme is to bring Hasina and other accused leaders of her Awami League to trial to provide judicial closure to the killings during last year's protests, and also for the violence inflicted on political opponents through her three terms in office.
A UN investigation at Yunus’s request concluded that it had “reasonable grounds to believe” that “the serious human rights violations, including hundreds of extrajudicial killings, other use-of-force violations involving serious injuries to thousands of protesters, extensive arbitrary arrest and detention, and torture and other forms of ill-treatment” were carried out “with the knowledge, coordination and direction of the political leadership and senior security sector officials, in pursuance of a strategy to suppress the protests and related expressions of dissent,” and may attract international criminal laws applicable to crimes against humanity.
While these charges are serious, ironically the administration has used the same “International Crimes Tribunal” that Hasina set up to try leaders of the religious right-wing Jamaat-i-Islami, which at the time were decried as kangaroo courts both at home by JeI and BNP and abroad. The tribunal has already convicted Hasina, who is facing multiple charges, in a couple of cases, and in one, sentenced her to six months in prison. This time too, the process is not problem-free.
The Awami League has been banned from carrying out any activity, and its registration as a political party has been suspended, meaning it can’t contest the election. The exclusion of Bangladesh's largest party, and the party of its liberation, will taint the election and its winner, just as Sheikh Hasina's election victories did. The party still has followers in the country, though in the atmosphere of revenge political violence, and the killings of many Awami Leaguers, they may hardly want to be identified.
The ouster of the Hasina government was a shock and setback for India, which had close ties with her for historical reasons. Delhi aided Bangladesh's liberation war by training the Mukti Bahini and sealed the break-up with a decisive defeat of the Pakistan Army in what was then east Pakistan. Hasina and her sister sheltered in Delhi after her father and Awami League founder Mujibur Rehman was assassinated along with all other members of his family except for the two daughters.
Hasina was also a dependable ally in the region, delivering India's security asks along its tough North-east border, on the other side of which is a hostile China. It was inevitable that the hatred for Hasina would transfer to India.
To India's annoyance, Yunus is courting Beijing and, reversing years of policy, Islamabad as well. The three countries held a trilateral in the Chinese city of Kunming. The Pakistani foreign minister Ishaq Dar is due to visit Dhaka on August 23, which can only add to the tensions.
Relations between India and Bangladesh are the worst they have ever been. India has not responded to Dhaka's request for the extradition of Hasina to face trial for her alleged crimes. Also, the targeting of Hindus in Bangladesh and the Hindu nationalist government's politically driven rhetoric from Delhi have contributed significantly to the deterioration.
Signaling that it won’t engage with an “illegitimate” government – though Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Yunus met at the sidelines of a regional conference in Bangkok earlier this year – Delhi has stood by its demand for early elections. But what domestic or foreign policy changes an elected government will bring is not clear. Bangladesh's problems are not going to disappear, especially if the February elections produce a massive majority for a single party.
Mohamed Yunus would never have declared himself "Superman"; this is just Nirupama Subramaniam's imagination. But I do think calling for elections within two years of the student-led coup of the corrupt, murderous, anti-human rights Hasani regime, including all her collaborators, is too early for a country still trying to find its feet after the 1971 war between two villains, India and Pakistan (they're both alike despite their so-called religious differences). It's hard to imagine demands for a new -- and balanced -- constitution can be drawn up in a short time, even after the next elections, if they're held. There are far too many competing interests waiting to grab state power and all its spoils. You only have to look at Pakistan, and also the wildly corrupt, rightwing Hindu racist-nationalist, bloody-minded BJP regime under Modi. In any political contest, it'll be the weak masses in society -- if there is a society at all in Bangladesh -- who lose even more, who'll be further marginalized, as if their lot hasn't been less characterized by the late Frantz Fanon as the "wretched of the earth".
Under those conditions it's seem to me impossible for Yunus to being any kind of political order to a Bangladesh that keeps tearing itself apart. There's almost a non-existent economy in Bangladesh to speak of, whilst it continues to export its labor to countries in the Middle East and Malaysia where manifestly corrupt operators -- almost all of whom are connected to the Malaysian state -- fundamentally exploit indentured Bangladeshi laborers, those who come in legally but especially those illegally imported under the very nose of the Malay regime.
That the hideous and violent Modi regime harbored Hasina after he escape from Dhaka from the hands of students to India deserves outright condemnation. If Modi has an ounce of principles and morality left in his sagging old body, he would ensure Hasina held in prison until the ICC can launch and issue a warrant for her arrest for her crimes against innocent Bangladeshis, including dissidents against her corrupt regime. Or better still return her to Dhaka and let Bangladeshis stone her to death. It's what she deserves.
Being one of the most impoverished countries in the world, it's unsurprising that Yunus has tried to forge relations with a murky China. Yunus must know to be careful over what he wishes for from the ideologically bankrupt, untrustworthy Xi-CCP regime, as is the ideologically-bankrupt and murderous Putin regime in Russia. China-Russia don't make strange bedfellows, per se, but a Bangladesh-China union will be, as bankrupt Pakistan found out after it towed Beijing's line for money and the relationship began to crumble.