Chief adviser Dr Muhammad Yunus has said students who led the uprising in July will form a party and they are already organising people across the country.
He made the statement in an interview with Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times, on the sideline of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting at Davos in Switzerland. The UK-based daily published a transcript of the interview on Thursday.
Below is a significant portion of the interview, presented for Prothom Alo readers.
Gideon Rachman: Can I just press you a little bit on the elections thing? It was interesting because we were talking to Syrians. They have the same issue. Do they have elections? And some people said, in theory it’s great to have elections quickly. But actually in the Syrian case, big mistake. Don’t do it too fast. It can just split the country if you do it too quickly.
Muhammad Yunus: This is a good time because always I’m protecting the unity of the nation. I do not want to depart from that. One of the possibility is the student themselves will form a party. In the beginning when they are forming the cabinet, I took three of the student into my cabinet. I said, if they can give life for the country, they can sit in the cabinet and decide what is that they are giving life for. And they are doing good work.
Now the students are saying, why don’t you form your our own political party, we’ll take a chance. And they said, you have no chance. You don’t even get one seat in the parliament. Why? Because nobody knows you. I said the whole nation knows them. Let them take a chance, whatever they want to do. So they will do it.
Maybe in the process of forming party, they will fall apart. That’s also a danger because politics is getting in, all the politicians will penetrate into them. So we don’t know whether they can remove themselves from the politics that we have in the country. This is the kind of chance we have to take. But the students are ready. They are campaigning. They are organising throughout the country.
Gideon Rachman: Can I put to you that one of the arguments that the Indians make and they say Bangladesh, it’s very fragile. Yunus may not be OK, but there are Islamists who are going to take the country over. What do you say to that?
Muhammad Yunus: We don’t see such signs. At least I don’t see any such signs. Young people are really committed. They have not a touch of ill will or a personal desire to make a political career for themselves. They are joining or creating political party under the circumstances.
This is needed because they have to protect the things they have earned by their blood. Otherwise, they will be taken away by all the people who are looking for opportunity to repeat the previous kind of administration and so on. That’s our political kind of environment with Bangladesh. So they are trying to protect that. So I would say students will have transparent intentions.
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