Why Bangladesh chose Yunus to steady the ship

By Rahul Mukherji and A S M Mostafizur Rahman, Heidelberg University in Heidelberg

In Muhammad Yunus Bangladesh has the opportunity to shake off 15 years of autocratic rule with a new leader who gave opportunities to women to participate more fully in society.

One cannot think of a more qualified person to lead Bangladesh at the moment. 

Yunus, a former university professor of economics, is the founder of the Grameen Bank. Dubbed the “Banker to the Poor”, he is better known now as a social entrepreneur and civil society leader than an academic.

He assumes charge as the prime minister of the interim government of Bangladesh at a time when there is general disgust in the country with political parties. Consequently, civil society groups have come to the fore.

Yunus is undoubtedly the most prominent face of Bangladesh civil society groups. It is no wonder then that there was near unanimity in choosing him as the head of the interim government. 

He clearly has the support of the students who shed much blood overthrowing the Sheikh Hasina regime through the mass uprising they led. 

His name was proposed by the leaders of the student protest with others accepting it enthusiastically.

No government, neither its police nor its military, is happy when they kill their own citizens, for reasons that seem not so convincing. It is not surprising then that the Bangladesh army refused to fire on its own people, asking Hasina to quit in view of the popular uprising.

The  globally acknowledged initiative of Yunus, the Grameen Bank, owes its existence to the inability of the banking system to lend to the poor. 

Yunus rebelled against his training in economics, when he found that the poor in Bangladesh work hard but cannot escape poverty because of their debt burden. Paradoxically, it is the poor who need credit, but no bank will lend to them.

At first, he borrowed money in his name and lent it to the poor. He found that the poor were indeed credit worthy. Then he experimented with a state-owned agricultural bank with similar results. 

Finally, when he found that the state was unwilling to scale-up microcredit to the poor, he founded his own social business – the Grameen Bank. 

Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his microcredit revolution that brought women out of their homes to meaningfully participate in entrepreneurial activities.  

Even though there are disputes regarding the effectiveness of microcredit for empowering the poorest, no one can deny that this is a secular and modern initiative that has empowered Bangladeshi women. It was opposed by conservative Islamists.

Yunus’s social entrepreneurship is considered pro-market. Given his international profile, the US and the European Union are likely to play a more significant role in the country than earlier. 

In her quest to garner developmental funds, Sheikh Hasina was more comfortable deftly balancing China and India. The legacy of the estrangement of the US from Bangladesh may now be overturned.

The Chinese will try to find a place on the table. Now that India has courted Sheikh Hasina, it would do well to remember that it claims to be a strategic partner of the democratic West, which has reasons to worry about the rise of China. It cannot afford to appease the forces that the citizens of Bangladesh have overthrown.

The political orientation of  Yunus will be an asset to the interim government. He had first returned to Bangladesh from an academic position in an economics department in the US, in the heydays following the birth of Bangladesh. 

He was inspired by the idea of building a new nation led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Despite this orientation, he maintained a distance from both the significant political parties – the Awami League  and the Bangladesh National Party. In fact, the Awami League regime under Sheikh Hasina did not allow him any political room for manoeuvre and attacked him with corruption and tax charges.

Given this experience, one can safely conclude that Yunus will not favour Sheikh Hasina, even though he may not be opposed to the Awami League as a political party. 

Although avowedly secular in a Muslim-majority nation, Sheikh Hasina destroyed the democratic consolidation that catapulted her to power in the first place. The general elections in 2014, 2018 and 2024 did not allow the political Opposition any space to contest. These elections were systematically rigged.

The reasons for the collapse and ouster of the Hasina government are to be found largely within the regime. 

Autocratisation meant that the representatives of the citizens became quite distant from them. 

It also did not help that officials intimately involved with supporting the regime at a senior level were targeted for corruption. The prime minister and her associates proclaimed that they were fighting corruption, when corruption had become the very basis of the regime. Under such circumstances, even the officialdom may have lost interest in protecting the regime.  

As the legitimacy of the regime crumbled from within, empty promises such as 30 percent reservation in government jobs for the children of freedom fighters of the Liberation War of 1971 sounded hollow. 

With large scale unemployment staring them in the face, Sheikh Hasina, supporting job reservations, distanced herself from the students who demanded that all job quotas be abolished.

It was under these circumstances that the military stepped in after more than 500 men, women and children were killed in the anti-reservation protests. After weeks of turmoil, Sheikh Hasina was forced to flee the country. Her flight to India, unlike her father’s assassination and martyrdom, does not bode well for the Awami League.

It’s not clear whether a third major political party – other than the Awami League and Bangladesh Nationalist Party – can also emerge under the current circumstances. Yunus was interested in entering politics, a project that was viciously attacked by Sheikh Hasina. it is unlikely, however, that he might revive that project.

Previous interim governments have served like an independent election commission under military protection that have facilitated peaceful transfer of power in Bangladesh. This had contributed to democratic consolidation. 

It is to be seen whether this Interim Government led by Dr Yunus will equal or even better the record of the previous ones.         

Rahul Mukherji is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Heidelberg University in Germany.

A S M Mostafizur Rahman holds a PhD in Political Science from Heidelberg University and is an independent scholar based in Heidelberg, Germany.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.