Days after Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned and left the country, Nobel prize winning-economist Muhammad Yunus took oath as the chief advisor of the interim government along with 13 others on Thursday, August 8. The new government will prioritize bringing normalcy in the country marred by large-scale violence since Hasina’s resignation.
There are three more members of Yunus’ interim cabinet who will take oath of office on Friday taking the total numbers in the interim administration to 17.
The interim administration will oversee the process of new elections in the country as mandated by Bangladesh’s constitution within 90 days of the dissolution of the parliament. The country’s president, Mohammad Shahabuddin, had dissolved the parliament earlier this week following the PM’s resignation.
After reaching Dhaka from Paris on Thursday, Yunus immediately visited the president who administered the oath to the new cabinet. Yunus called the student movement’s success as “the second independence” for the country which came into existence after fighting a war of liberation against Pakistan’s army.
Some leaders of the quota reform movement were also included in the interim government, student leaders Nahid Islam joined the interim government as advisor for the information and broadcasting ministry and Asif Mahmud as youth and sports ministry. Students and youth had been organizing agitations demanding reforms in the reservation quota system in government jobs for weeks which ultimately turned into large scale anti-government protests earlier this month and forced Hasina to leave the country.
Otherwise, Yunus’s interim cabinet is full of mostly technocrats or rights activists. Some of them are former military officials as well. However most of them, including Yunus, have no prior experience of running a political office. Their first major task would be to restore law and order in the country.
Yunus, a former professor of economics is the only Bangladeshi citizen who has won a Nobel peace prize in 2006. He was awarded the prize for his experiments with microfinance and microcredit under the banner of Grameen Bank. He had briefly formed a political party in the mid 2000s which he later disbanded. He faced hundreds of cases during Hasina’s rule largely seen as political persecution. In January this year, a court had found him guilty for violations of labor code and sentenced him for six months in jail. He was granted bail pending appeals. The student movement had insisted he lead the interim government after Hasina’s departure.
Tahia Islam and Suhail Purkar wrote in Liberation News that Yunus is “most widely known for his implementation of ‘microfinance’ through Grameen Bank, for which he won a Nobel Prize. While institutions like the International Monetary Fund tout micro financing as a magical solution, a type of ‘kind capitalism’ where loans would enable the recipients to become entrepreneurs and lift themselves out of poverty, it in practice serves as an extremely predatory practice that traps the poorest people in the Global South into deep poverty and debt, leaving them at the mercy of loan sharks.”
Return to normal and protection of minorities are key concerns
Since Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned and left Bangladesh on August 5, the country has witnessed incidents of looting, arson attacks, and violence all across the country. Mobs have unleashed violence against members of the minority communities and Awami League supporters under the pretext of the absence of security forces on the streets, most of whom have failed to report to their respective duties. Several Awami League offices were vandalized and local level leaders were reportedly killed in the violence.
There were reports of violence against party offices and cadres sympathetic to the Awami League government or those merely considered as supporters of Hasina’s rule such as the Workers’ Party of Bangladesh (WPB).
The failure of the state machinery to implement the law and order led various voluntary steps by the student movement to protect the minority institutions in the country. However, unity councils of religious minority groups demanded immediate intervention by the state to protect the minorities in the country.
In a press release on Wednesday, WPB welcomed the political change in the country and expressed hope that the student movement will guide the country towards a democracy and secularism. It demanded the new government take immediate steps to end all attacks on minorities and political parties and restore law and order in the country. It called on all the left and progressive forces in the country to join in united action for the establishment of a progressive Bangladesh.
After taking oath, Yunus appealed for peace in the country asking the violence to subside. He warned that “whoever spreads anarchy, the law enforcement agencies with the help of mass people and victorious students will deal them with an iron hand.” He also assured “democracy, justice, human rights, freedom of expression without any fear and [with full] ease for all irrespective of [their] political affiliations.”
