On 10 November, Muhammad Yunus, the chief of Bangladesh’s interim government, expanded his cabinet by inducting four new advisers. This move has triggered widespread anger on the Dhaka University campus. Several leaders of the Anti-discrimination Student Movement, which spearheaded the anti-Sheikh Hasina mass uprising, joined a protest demanding the removal of newly appointed cultural affairs adviser, film director Mostofa Sarwar Farooki, and others accused of being ‘autocratic allies’.
Meanwhile, social media was flooded with Farooki’s past photos and Facebook posts, where he glorified an array of people—from Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to former police chief Benazir Ahmed, who, according to The Daily Star, forced poor Hindus to sell their lands to him. Farooki even defended a rigged mayoral election.
Now, the filmmaker has made a U-turn and is portraying himself as a victim of Sheikh Hasina’s despotic rule. However, Facebook is flooded with images of him smiling alongside Sheikh Hasina, often accompanied by his wife Nusrat Imroz Tisha—who played Hasina’s mother in Mujib’s biopic. After becoming an adviser, Farooki even claimed that he has played a pioneering role in “ousting (India’s) West Bengal’s Kolkata-centric hegemony of Bangla from Bangladesh”.
Another newly inducted adviser to come in the line of fire is Sheikh Bashir Uddin, who faces a murder case in which the deposed Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is also listed as an accused. In his defense, Bashir said he was unaware of being an accused in the case, filed over the killing of a young man during the July uprising.
Bashir Uddin, allegedly a Jamaat nominee, is the brother of former Awami League MP Sheikh Afil Uddin. Bashir claims they parted ways 25 years ago in 1999 when the family property and business were divided. Yet, his appointment as the head of the Ministry of Textiles and Jute—despite owning jute mills—is strange. Even though he says he has left his obligations behind, it is surprising that the government failed to find someone without such conflict of interest for this portfolio.
This failure is evident in other appointments as well. Take senior journalist Golam Mortoza, now Press Minister at the Bangladesh Embassy in Washington. Mortoza, formerly an editor of the Bengali section of an English newspaper, has never written anything of significance in English. It’s inexplicable why he has been bestowed with the responsibility of representing Bangladesh to the United States, especially under Donald Trump’s hawkish administration and spy chief Tulsi Gabbard, who openly spoke against oppression of Hindus in Bangladesh.
Several other appointments smack of favouritism to friends or relatives. Nurjahan Begum, a banker who held the fort of Yunus’s Grameen Bank after he left the institution in 2011, is now Bangladesh’s Health and Family Adviser. She faced protests during a visit to a hospital treating those injured in the July uprising. Protesters blocked Begum’s car, criticising the lack of proper treatment, forcing her and British High Commissioner Sarah Cooke to hurriedly leave the scene in another vehicle.
Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha, a government-owned news outlet led by another beneficiary of the ‘jobs for the boys’, didn’t cover the protest. Instead, it showed Begum showering motherly affection on an injured boy. It was like the bad old days of Hasina’s rule.
Not that a banker cannot run the health ministry, but like a lot of appointments, Yunus’s administration seems to have bypassed more qualified professionals in favour of loyalists. Advisers like Sharmeen Murshid, Faruk-e-Azam, Supradip Chakma, and Dr Bidhan Ranjan Roy—Yunus’s wife’s doctor—haven’t done any significant work.
It is indeed ironic that the best-run ministries in the 84-year-old Chief Adviser’s interim government are led by two 26-year-old student leaders, Nahid Islam and Asif Mahmud. They were not chosen by anyone—but are products of the very movement that brought Muhammad Yunus to power.
Also read: Bangladesh needs big reforms before elections. Students didn’t die just to bring BNP to power
‘This government is a circus’
A BRAC University survey conducted two months ago showed Yunus enjoying a whooping 71 per cent approval rating. This reflected the immediate euphoria following the fall of Sheikh Hasina—to be fair, the number should’ve been much higher.
But discontent is now brewing.
Pinaki Bhattacharya is an exiled Bangladeshi human rights activist who lives in France. Famous for his colloquial language and firebrand speeches against the Indian establishment for its mishandling of Bangladesh, Bhattacharya, whose YouTube channel enjoys three million subscribers, called Yunus’s government ‘a circus’ in an interview, claiming that “whoever is lobbying hard is getting into the council of advisers.”
His sentiment is echoed by Umama Fatema, a central coordinator of the anti-Hasina movement, who accused some advisers of not caring about the plight of the people. “You’ve made the Advisory Council over the dead bodies, if you think you can’t deliver, why aren’t you resigning?” she asks.
To its credit, the Yunus administration has brought a semblance of stability—the economy is running smoothly and mob violence has reduced to a minimum. Furthermore, it has established commissions to reform national institutions that the Awami League left in tatters. But their progress has been painstakingly slow.
The government should remember that its legitimacy rests solely on being established through the will of the people. And people’s expectations are running high. Soon, they will grow impatient.
The challenges ahead
Bangladesh’s food market is plagued by monopolistic behaviour, thanks to market manipulators and oligarchs. The essential commodity imports are controlled by a handful of businesspeople, resulting in immense financial hardship for the poor. Despite the lofty promises of economic growth made by Hasina, according to the World Bank, the rate of unemployment among university graduates has tripled over the past nine years and “nearly one-fifth of young women remain unemployed.” Challenging business environment has ensured that foreign direct investment remains low.
These factors were the driving force behind the anti-Hasina movement, and they have not gone away.
Yunus doesn’t have a magic bullet, but his first 100 days in office have failed to meet people’s expectations. Rising unemployment, spiralling prices, and a lack of an electoral roadmap are eroding the government’s legitimacy. It is true that, like all unelected governments, the Yunus administration is not accountable to anyone. But it must remember that a relatively minor issue like discrimination in government jobs, where a little over 5 percent of the workforce are employed, snowballed into a crisis that Hasina couldn’t handle despite the killing of 1, 000 people. Economy is where the bets are.
Also read: Bangladesh can’t afford another coup. Yunus govt must not trust all army officers with power
Can Yunus bring reforms?
With the present set of people unable to read the pulse of the youth, the Yunus administration is poised to fail in delivering the reforms it so grandly promised, such as pressing the reset button to make a fresh start away from corrupt politics. However, before he can fix the country, Yunus must first set his own house in order—ordinary Bangladeshis do not want to remember their first Nobel Prize winner as someone who, instead of encouraging meritocracy, promoted sycophancy and turned a blind eye to nepotism.
Yunus should keep in mind that Bangladesh is not an NGO or a microfinance lending institution. A government is a government, not a private company, and it has to be run by all its stakeholders with a shared common goal.
At this critical juncture in Bangladesh’s history, Yunus has three options—he can gaze long and hard at the abyss, take his sweet little time and walk the country into it; he can reboot—or in his own word “reset”— and course correct; or he can call early election, something all constitutionally legitimate ‘caretaker governments’ have done between 1990 and 2001. The previous caretaker governments have held an election in 90 days. Yunus is already 10 days late.
The tectonic shift in Bangladesh’s politics has shaken South Asia. Yunus and his team are in dire need of realising the consequences of their actions.
Ahmede Hussain is a Bangladeshi writer and journalist. He is the editor of the anthology “The New Anthem: The Subcontinent in its Own Words” (Tranquebar Press; Delhi). Hussain has just finished writing his first novel, which is set in the background of Bangladesh’s Independence War. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @AhmedeHussain. Views are personal.
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