Professor Yunus’s government: Are we blaming the victim?

Never have I been more hopeful about Bangladesh—Professor Yunus is at the country’s helm. When enlightenment, accomplishment, and diligence culminate, a Professor Yunus comes along. His potential to transform the nation is undisputed. Never have I been more upset about Bangladesh, either—Professor Yunus has replaced Sheikh Hasina, who was a dictator and left the country in a mess. What cancer does to the human body, dictatorship does the same to a country. Cancer disrupts the regular functioning of the human body until it becomes completely dysfunctional. Dictatorship, likewise, cracks every code of economic, judicial, electoral, and bureaucratic conduct, when a country is primed to crumble under its own weight. When Hasina fled to India on August 5, 2024, she left behind a wasteland of mismanagement and miseries that Professor Yunus inherited. Whatever his government did—and does—doesn’t seem adequate. People complain. That’s understandable.

The law and order situation, for example, seems to have deteriorated since Professor Yunus’s government took over. Statistics corroborate such a claim, too. Attributing the failure entirely to this government is simplistic. Dictatorship thrives on accruing and abusing absolute power, as Hasina did. The country was already reeling under three sham elections, enforced disappearances, mindless extrajudicial killings, and co-opted judges in pliant courts. Justice was a commodity on sale, and anyone with money and political connections could buy his version of it. Hasina’s police were ruthless to the core. The shooting in July and August last year that killed and crippled thousands of people across the country was the final nail in the coffin of the police. Police have been plagued by a deficit of trust and an erasure of authority since. They are still not fully functional. Under such circumstances, Professor Yunus’s government faced logistical nightmares in establishing discipline, as it took over on August 8, 2024. The context that has created the current disorder is more complex than a leadership failure of a government having inherited a failing state.

Responsibility yet rested on the current government to restore law and order destroyed by the dictatorship of 15 years. The army swung into action with magistracy. Police and paramilitary joined hands as they gained confidence and credibility. Crime and violence didn’t disappear altogether, as they never do in any functional society. Bangladesh suddenly didn’t shift from a safety haven to a brutal hell, either. Yet panic and paranoia seemed to have gripped the whole country, especially following February 17, when a bus traveling from Dhaka to Rajshahi faced robbery, followed by the alleged rape of at least one woman, on the Dhaka-Tangail highway. As the news surfaced on electronic and print portals, the nation cringed in fear and repulsion. BBC (Bangla) followed up on the news immediately, as it claimed that no one saw anyone being raped. A passenger onboard the bus informed BBC that a woman may have been raped, as they heard her screaming. Prothom Alo published an investigative report on the news on February 27, having talked to the lady, who was apparently the rape victim. She was not raped on the bus that night, she confirmed. She blamed the media for spreading false news. The government had to bear the brunt of carefully crafted propaganda, anyway.

Why did our media go gaga on this piece of news, when they knew that misinformation from and beyond Bangladesh by the agents of the fallen regime smacked of the renewal of fascism? Our press apparently seems free following the ouster of Sheikh Hasina. Unfiltered news, along with misleading and sensational headlines even from frontline news portals, have also been alarmingly on the rise recently. What gets printed and telecast contributes to manufacturing consent. Some news portals, for example, have already attempted to prove that Professor Yunus’s government is Islamist, so the frequency of attacks on the people of the minority has increased during his tenure.

Subho Basu, an associate professor of History and Classical Studies at McGill University, discredited such a complaint upfront, as he claimed in his interview with The New Yorker in August 2024, “he [Professor Yunus] had nothing to do with Islamism.” He further claimed that minorities are always targeted in South Asia, when there is upheaval. Because the Sheikh Hasina regime was identified with India, and a significant percentage of the minority are the supporters of the fallen regime that also had leaders at the local levels from the minority community, targeting supporters and leaders of the fallen regime has gained a communal slant, which some right-wing media in India have magnified, he claims. This government is not complicit in minority repression whatsoever, but the governments that preceded it were.

Any attempt to whitewash a government, including Professor Yunus’s government, is infantile—angels and prophets have never run a government. Blaming the government for everything is impulsive, too. This government is the outcome of a revolution. Following a revolution, as history teaches us, people’s expectations soar. Chaos erupts. Uncertainties loom. Pessimism grips. And a post-revolution government totters. Professor Yunus’s government has been through this typical phase. It’s not a weak government, as it is popularly dubbed. Its strength is fortitude. Its skill is negotiation. Almost everyone seems to have a demand following Hasina’s departure (I have a demand, too. Where is a commission on education, Professor Yunus?), and they want their demand fulfilled immediately. They reach the government following protests and road blockades. The government negotiates and settles. However disruptive the hundreds of protests the government has had to face already, this is democracy in action. Suppressing it is fascistic. Attendant chaos towards democracy is inevitable, as Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci famously said, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.” If we are frightened by the monsters around us, it’s not pathological. Most of them are, however, the harbingers of hope and healing for the reformed Bangladesh in the times ahead.

Some of these monsters are not agents of hope and healing, unfortunately. Dictators depart and die, but their legacy lingers. The more chronic a dictatorship is, the more expansive and intractable it is. Having ruled for 15 years, Hasina left the country upended. Hasina was psychologically deranged. Leading a country was not her call. In the worst-case scenario, someone of Hasina’s class and calibre could have been someone else’s personal problem. She must never have been allowed to become a national problem. Because she was, the crisis is intergenerational and transnational. A family, for example, that lost someone or had someone with life-altering injuries in the July Revolution (approximately 1,400 people were killed and thousands were injured, the UN Fact-Finding Report, published in February 2025, confirmed) will have to endure the loss for generations. Our relationship with India is a political bloody shirt that triggers statements and actions from both sides as if we are eternal enemies. It’s apparently clear that our ties with India during Hasina’s regime were lopsided and un-examined to create an impression that Bangladesh was India’s vassal state. Some monsters use these fault lines to destabilise Bangladesh, which is not yet on an even keel since Hasina’s departure. False-flag movements and mobs are Hasina’s ghost re-surfaced. Professor Yunus’s government is more helpless than responsible in such situations.

Bangladesh has been through a phase of transition, so the situations are often volatile—sometimes, even dispiriting. Frustrated, we forget that Professor Yunus’s government has been through hell already, but it’s still active and advancing. He is focused on his agendas, mainly the reforms. His clean-up crew (who we euphemistically call the advisers) are honest and diligent. I’m not convinced we would run from this crisis to a catastrophe. What distracts me is that some zombie politicians remind us—every day, after every nanosecond—that this is not an elected government. It is! The uprising was the election. Blood was the vote. Thinking otherwise is suicidal, for it undermines the government and belies the spirit of the uprising, along with causing tensions for the people to own the government and the government to own the people. This is NOT a placeholder government. It is a government as independent and empowered as any elected government is. While nitpicking on Professor Yunus’s government is rational, cooperating with it is ethical and patriotic. His faults and failures are often not the results of his decisions and actions. He is a victim, as we all are—were—because of the buggers and muggers Hasina left the country with.

Believing in Professor Yunus’s abilities, therefore, seems sensible. That’s what Professor Amartya Sen reminds us in his recent interview with the PTI, “I have great confidence in Yunus’ abilities.” So do we!

Dr Mohammad Shamsuzzaman is associate professor at the Department of English and Modern Languages in North South University (NSU).

Views expressed in this article are the author’s own.