Who will really be running Bangladesh now?

Bangladesh’s Parliament has been dissolved and though the Army Chief had earlier announced consultations with academics, retired judges, civil servants and ex-armed forces officers to form an interim government, self-appointed student leaders prevailed and got their choice, 84-year-old Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus to lead that dispensation. They thus signalled their veto, but as these “leaders” are unelected, what legitimacy does their choice or veto have?

All the heroes of this “students protest” are cited as area “coordinators” of an outfit called Baisamyabirodhi Chhatra Andolan (BCA) or Anti-Discrimination Students Movement that spearheaded the agitation against the reimposition of quotas for freedom fighters’ kin in government jobs. However, the students’ ire was not directed at the High Court for resurrecting that quota but against Sheikh Hasina’s government, which had junked that very rule in 2018.

Odd but not inexplicable as it soon became clear their real target and single-point agenda was removing Sheikh Hasina and her government, with the quota issue merely a convenient flash point to galvanise mostly male, mostly older looking “students” to swarm out across Bangladesh to confront the police. With no visible organisation or clear leadership, being arrested made many of these coordinators into de facto “leaders” and those killed into martyrs for ‘democracy’.

The police and Army—whether deliberately or due to incompetence—escalated tensions by firing on the protesters, killing hundreds and effectively making the Prime Minister’s position untenable. Despite the heavy cost in terms of lives, the protesters prevailed, with Sheikh Hasina fleeing to India on Monday. So now they have given themselves veto powers and got whom they want as the country’s interim leader, with voluble promises of restarting a democratic process.

Last time round, it took two years for the interim government to get round to elections but geopolitics are rather different in 2024 than in 2007. The inexorable rise of Islamist groups especially among students, and reports that Chinese funding (via Pakistan) have fuelled the agitation cannot be dismissed given the overt anti-India tenor of the protesters, not to mention the attacks on Indian assets there including burning the Indira Gandhi Cultural Centre in Dhaka.

Though Sheikh Hasina reportedly likening the students to ‘razakars’ (locals who collaborated with West Pakistani forces in 1971 to murder lakhs of East Pakistani Bengalis) was promptly posited as a vicious and uncalled-for attack on the protesters, she may not have been entirely off the mark. That at least some of the protesters’ real agenda was—and probably remains—different from what they had been claiming, and foreign involvement is now becoming clear.

On August 1, 2024, the Bangladesh government had banned the Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) and its students wing, Islamic Chhatra Shibir (ICS). The JeI had earlier been barred from contesting elections by the High Court in 2013 as its constitution violated the national Constitution by opposing secularism. Not barred from other political activities, ICS pivoted to meetings, rallies and statements. The parallel rise of the well-coordinated BCA now seems too much of a coincidence.

More so as its anti-quota protest dovetailed neatly with JeI’s agenda. Is that pure coincidence? Was it also a coincidence that winners of students’ union elections in the past three years in major universities like Dhaka, Chittagong, Sylhet and Rajshahi all had ICS support? Or that ICS cadres were active in these protests? As Goldfinger famously told James Bond, “They have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance; twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”

It has been pointed out that Yunus is “friendly” with the Clintons and other powerful people in the US political system. His first wife was American and his elder daughter holds dual citizenship. However, it is unlikely that the students who have propelled him into running the interim government are pro-American, though a social media post by one of them said “In Dr Yunus, we trust” which sounds curiously close to the US motto, “In God We Trust”.

That Grameen Bank has long a China unit should also not be forgotten even as Indian and Bangladeshi intellectuals rejoice over Yunus’ elevation. Though he founded the world famous micro-finance institution, tellingly, with the help of the Ford Foundation (whose links to the US government are well known), the subsequent insidious role of China in all of south Asia’s economies—including wooing Bangladesh—for the past 25 years cannot be ignored either.

His popularity among those ‘protesting’ students in Bangladesh notwithstanding, it may be recalled that soon after winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, Yunus visited China at the invitation of the Chinese government. Top Chinese leaders and the deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China met him in Beijing and he also visited the university. Then in December 2014, he founded Grameen China. But curiously, it functions just as a “consultation service”.

Yunus was particularly close to India during the Congress years; he was even awarded the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development in 1998 by Sonia Gandhi. When Rahul Gandhi visited Bangladesh for five days in 2008 at the invitation of Grameen Bank, Yunus received him at the airport. And in 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic was spreading, Yunus too part in a video interaction with Rahul Gandhi discussing challenges and the way ahead.

Though Yunus was reportedly miffed by India’s stance that the protests (before Sheikh Hasina’s ouster) were Bangladesh’s internal matter, about Prime Minister Narendra Modi he said yesterday, “I have met him many times. We had good discussions. He admires the work that I do. He invited me to speak to his officials and his ministers many times. Personally, we share a very warm relationship.” Will his new colleagues and ‘coordinators’ be pleased with this?

Some may recall that the previous time the army stepped in to install an interim government—also in 2006—there were widespread student protests then too. One solution was an interim government, but without both ‘begums’—Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia of Bangladesh Nationalist Party. And who was deemed suitable to lead after the ladies were shoved aside? Yunus. But back then he did not want to accept what the Army rulers had in mind: chief adviser.

Now Yunus accepted the same title, offered by ‘students’. But he surely cannot forget that the last time he was asked to restore democracy, Begum Khaleda had been PM but was removed before the elections as she and the BNP were seen as the corrupt arch-villains, much like Sheikh Hasina is today. Ironically, Begum Zia has been released from imprisonment and is mulling a comeback along with her controversial son Tarique Rahman, who currently lives in the UK.

Can Yunus work with them and other tainted prominent political leaders, forgetting their past but not Sheikh Hasina’s? Will his ‘student’ backers allow him to do so? Will they decide whose sins he should overlook and whose he cannot? Will Begum Zia trust someone who was called to be part of a solution in 2006 that included her permanent sidelining? Will the ‘students’ have veto powers in the running of the interim government as they have had in its formation?

It all boils down to the tricky question of who will actually run Bangladesh in the coming days. A Nobel laureate economist and renowned ‘banker to the poor’ leading a motley bunch of civil society notables? Or the students who put him there but have not been elected to take decisions? Or those lurking behind them, who provided the money and support to mobilise and ‘coordinate’ the movement that toppled a PM? Probably Yunus himself does not really know.

The author is a freelance writer. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.