Mob rule has marked new regime in Dhaka
Mob rule rather than any effective civil administration has distinguished the six months of Yunus at the helm
Much has changed in Dhaka six months after a popular uprising forced the Awami League government to resign and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to flee Bangladesh. The broad-spectrum alliance that mobilised the streets against the Awami League had sought radical political reforms to rebuild democracy in that country. The task of Muhammad Yunus, chief adviser of the caretaker administration, was to initiate the reforms and hold fresh elections. At least 13 reform commissions have been constituted, but an elected government seems a distant goal. Echoing Yunus, the country’s election commission told a delegation of the Khaleda Zia-led Bangladesh National Party (BNP) that it plans to hold the next general elections in December. The BNP prefers early polls.
Mob rule rather than any effective civil administration has distinguished the six months of Yunus at the helm. Awami League supporters and members of the Hindu minority have been at the receiving end of this chaotic turn of events. The Islamists have resurfaced to revive an old fault line about Bangladeshi identity: The recent legal challenges to Dhaka’s secular identity — the Constitution Reform Commission has proposed that “secularism” should be replaced with “pluralism” as a fundamental principle of the Bangladeshi constitution — and the repeated mob attacks on symbols, memorials and the memory of Sheikh Mujib are aimed at reversing the 1971 Liberation War legacy that privileged a distinct secular-linguistic identity for Bangladesh over the Partition inheritance of Islamic nationhood.
As a friend of secular Bangladesh, New Delhi is right to worry about the turn in Dhaka. Its condemnation of the destruction of Mujib’s residence in Dhaka last week reflects the understanding that the enemies of secular Bangladesh are seeking an erasure of its founding legacy and friendship with India. With the Yunus regime in no position to firewall ties from its domestic politics and Sheikh Hasina making speeches while in exile in India, New Delhi and Dhaka are drifting apart. Reversing a deep friendship enabled by history and geography will not help Bangladesh realise its potential.
