In Muhammad Yunus, Bangladesh has an opportunity to end 15 years of autocratic rule with a new leader who will give women the opportunity to participate more fully in society.
One cannot think of a more qualified person to lead Bangladesh at this time. Mr Yunus, a former university professor of economics, is the founder of Grameen Bank. Known as the “banker to the poor”, he is now better known as a social entrepreneur and civil society leader than as an academic. He takes over as head of Bangladesh’s interim government at a time when there is general discontent with political parties in the country.
As a result, civil society groups have come to the fore. Mr Yunus is undoubtedly the most prominent face of Bangladesh’s civil society groups. He obviously has the support of the students who shed a lot of blood to overthrow the Sheikh Hasina regime by leading a massive uprising under his leadership.
Her name was proposed by the leaders of the student movement and enthusiastically accepted by others. No government, neither its police nor its army, is happy to kill its own citizens for reasons that do not seem so credible. It is therefore not surprising that the Bangladesh Army refused to fire on its own people and asked Ms. Hasina to step down in the wake of the popular uprising.
Mr Yunus’s globally acknowledged initiative, the Grameen Bank, owes its existence to the inability of the banking system to lend to the poor.
Mr Yunus rebelled against his training in economics when he discovered that poor people in Bangladesh work hard but are unable to escape poverty because of their debt burden. The irony is that it is the poor who need loans, but no bank will lend to them.
First, he borrowed money in his own name and lent it to the poor. He found that the poor were indeed creditworthy. Then he experimented with a government agricultural bank and the results were similar. Finally, when he found that the state was not willing to extend microcredit to the poor, he founded his own social business – Grameen Bank.
Mr. Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for the microcredit revolution that brought women out of the home to participate meaningfully in entrepreneurial activities.
Even though there are controversies about the effectiveness of microcredit in empowering the poorest of the poor, no one can deny that it is a secular and modern initiative that has empowered Bangladeshi women. It was opposed by conservative Islamists.
Pro-market stance
Mr Yunus’s social entrepreneurship is seen as pro-market. Given his international image, the US and the EU are likely to play a more important role in the country than before. In her quest to raise development funds, Ms Hasina was more comfortable balancing between China and India. The legacy of US alienation from Bangladesh may now be reversed.
China will try to force its way to the negotiating table. Now that India has Ms. Hasina on its side, it should remember that it claims to be a strategic partner of the democratic West, which has reasons to worry about China’s rise. It cannot afford to appease the forces that the citizens of Bangladesh have overthrown.
Mr Yunus’s political acumen will be an asset to the interim government. He returned to Bangladesh from an academic position in the US economics department in the days following the birth of Bangladesh.
He was inspired by the idea of building a new nation under the leadership of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Despite this inclination, he maintained distance from both the important political parties – the Awami League (AL) and the Bangladesh National Party (BNP). In fact, the AL government led by Ms. Hasina did not allow him any political manoeuvring and attacked him with corruption and tax charges.
Given this experience, one can conclude that Mr Yunus will not side with Ms Hasina even if he does not oppose the AL as a political party.
Despite being secular in a Muslim-majority nation, Ms Hasina destroyed the democratic consolidation that brought her to power in the first place. The general elections of 2014, 2018 and 2024 gave the political opposition no chance to contest. The reasons for the downfall and ouster of the Hasina government are largely found within the regime itself.
Authoritarianism meant that citizens’ representatives became increasingly distant from them. It also didn’t help that senior officials who supported the regime were targeted for corruption.
The prime minister and his aides declared that they were fighting corruption, even though corruption had become the bedrock of the regime. Under such circumstances, even the bureaucracy may have lost interest in protecting the regime.
As the regime’s legitimacy collapsed from within, empty promises such as a 30% reservation in government jobs for the children of freedom fighters from the 1971 Liberation War began to ring hollow. In the face of massive unemployment, Ms. Hasina, while supporting job reservations, distanced herself from students who were demanding that all job quotas be abolished.
It was under these circumstances that the army intervened, when more than 500 men, women and children were killed in anti-reservation protests. After weeks of turmoil, Sheikh Hasina had to flee the country. Unlike her father’s assassination and martyrdom, her fleeing to India does not bode well for the AL.
It is unclear whether a third major political party can even emerge under the current circumstances. Mr Yunus was keen to enter politics, drawing sharp attacks from Ms Hasina. However, it is unlikely that he will revive that project.
Previous interim governments have worked under military protection, like an independent election commission, which facilitated a peaceful transfer of power in Bangladesh. This has contributed to democratic consolidation. It remains to be seen whether this interim government led by Mr. Yunus will be able to match or even better the record of previous governments.
(Rahul Mukherjee is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Heidelberg University, Germany. ASM Mustafizur Rahman has a PhD in Political Science from Heidelberg University and is an independent scholar based in Heidelberg, Germany.)
(Originally published by 360info™ under Creative Commons)