In Yunus visit to China, a clear message to India

New Delhi: It is a measure of how far Bangladesh as a country has changed in the less than
eight months since Sheikh Hasina was ousted as prime minister that the
country’s head, Chief Adviser Mohammad Yunus, chose March 26, the
country’s Independence Day, to travel abroad, to make his first visit to China.

On March 26, 1971, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman declared Bangladesh's
independence from Pakistan, marking the beginning of the Bangladesh
Liberation War, and since considered its Independence/ National Day.
It was not just ironic that Yunus chose the day to visit China, Pakistan’s “all-
weather friend,” that day. It was also intended to signal clearly to the world (and
particularly, India) that Pakistan was back in Bangladesh. And India was out,
certainly not favoured.

After Yunus met Chinese President Xi Jinping, China has been awarded the
project to develop the Teesta river basin, a project Hasina had awarded to India.
Meanwhile, a Pakistani ship docked at Mongla port earlier this month, after the
first ever direct maritime contact between Bangladesh and Pakistan happened
last November, when a cargo vessel from Karachi docked at Chattogram
(formerly Chittagong) and offloaded its cargo of rice.

Since the elected Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, was forced out of Bangladesh
on August 5, 2024, within seven months of assuming office for her fourth
consecutive term as PM, the interim government, headed by Yunus (and formed
in cooperation with the Bangladesh army, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party
(BNP), students’ organisations and various radical Islamic elements) has shown
clear intent to restore Pakistan’s favoured presence in Bangladesh. The ban on
the Jamaat-e-Isami (JeI) and its student wing, Islami Chhatra Shibir (ICS),
imposed by Hasina, was lifted and the administration took a radically
fundamentalist turn. The JeI seeks to establish what it calls an “Islamic welfare
state” in Bangladesh. The Hizb-ut-Tahrir has also been active in campuses
across the country.

Hasina, who was genuinely secular in her outlook for the country, spent a
considerable part of her last two terms trying to cement her family’s legacy (she
is the daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, universally recognized as the man

who powered, and delivered, Bangladesh’s independence as a nation) while
choosing to ignore allegations of huge corruption in her party and government
and other genuine grievances of citizens. Ironically, her end came when she
called students protesting against a quota in government reserving 30% of jobs
for children of freedom fighters as ‘Razakars,’ a derogatory term for traitors and
Pakistani collaborators in the Bangladesh liberation struggle.

For students and youth, frustrated at the post-Covid economic downturn and
lack of employment opportunities in the country, to be called ‘Razakars’ was
the last straw, uniting them in waves of protests that forced Hasina to flee the
country and seek refuge in India.
Bangladesh under Hasina was India’s closest partner country in the region, but

New Delhi chose to look away as she increasingly isolated herself from the
majority of people in Bangladesh, feeling secure in the knowledge that her
choices were limited. India did make repeated attempts to warn Hasina that her
policies needed to change and be less confrontational, but she chose to ignore
Delhi.
In fact, she was first cautioned as long back as 2013, by (then Indian President)
Pranab Mukherjee, to curb her party’s corruption and listen and interact with the
‘awam’, or common man, whom her party the Awami League claimed to
represent, and be less autocratic.

India, having invested almost all its political and economic goodwill in the
Hasina establishment, finds itself increasingly sidelined, with the Yunus-led
establishment paying token heed to Delhi’s concerns. Predictably, the BJP-led
NDA government’s reaction has been narrow and primarily confined to seeking
the welfare of the Hindu community and their assets. As the Indian media
continues to focus on these concerns, there is little outrage that minority
communities in this country are becoming less than equal.

The Indian government has chosen to ignore the fact that if today the Jamaat has
regained a foothold in Bangladesh, it is in large measure because of its own
perceived Hindu majoritarian agenda. As the largest country in the region, its
majoritarian internal agenda sent ripples of unease across the neighbourhood,
allowing Pakistan to regain its radical Islamist hold among the fundamentalists
in Bangladesh, patronised by the BNP.

Policies and legislation such as the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) caught
the then friendly governments of Afghanistan and Bangladesh and the Maldives
in a difficult bind. Trying to explain to their people why Islam was being
demonized with impunity in India, while maintaining close ties with the Indian
government, proved very difficult for them.

India, which was once the most favoured nation among Afghans, became
anathema after the CAA and, particularly, once New Delhi refused to help even
friends when the Taliban took over power in August 2021. Expounding the
benefits of the Hindu way of yoga in the Maldives saw a similar backlash, with
a government severely critical of India now in power there.

Similarly, for Hasina, associating with an Indian government pursuing policies
widely perceived as biased  towards Muslims, gave the Jamaat and
its allies leverage to propound the theory that, under Hasina, Islam was in
danger. The treatment meted out to the Rohingyas further compounded Hasina’s
(and India’s) credentials as detrimental to Islam. India was tarred by association
with Hasina and found itself at the receiving end of popular outrage.

The rise of radical fundamentalism has seen a rise of lawlessness, largely
targeted towards minorities, with the Jihadi element within Bangladesh society
now operating with impunity. The Yunus-led administration is unable, and
perhaps unwilling, to curb the surge in crime and lawlessness to the point that
even residents of Dhaka have complained that they feel unsafe to venture out
after dark.

An effort by some students who led the movement to oust Hasina to reclaim
their primacy from the fundamentalists and create space for the kind of
Bangladesh its founding fathers sought, saw the formation in February of the
National Citizens Party (NCP), headed by Nahid Islam, who was pivotal in
leading those protests.

However, as the caretaker government and its radical partners are trying to
establish their hold over the country, the continuing lawlessness and the rising
economic crisis is preventing the possibility of election dates being set or any
political activity from beginning. Without political stability, providing gainful
economic activity and stability appears a distant possibility. Whether Yunus can
deliver on any of these goals with his visit to China remains to be seen.

(The views expressed in this article are writer’s own)

—–INDIA NEWS STREAM