Dhaka: Chief Adviser to the Government of Bangladesh, Muhammad Yunus, interacts with a police officer during the inauguration of the three-day Police Week 2025 at Rajarbagh Police Lines in Dhaka, Tuesday, April 29, 2025. (Photo: IANS)
New York, Aug 1 (IANS) Muhammad Yunus’s transition from economist to head of Bangladesh’s interim government has proven fatal for Bangladesh as the rise of radical Islamic influence under his watch threatens to transform the country from a secular democracy into a theocratic state, a leading American think tank detailed on Friday.
The political situation under Yunus reveals a government sliding into being another failed state, ripe for terrorists, and unable to chart a constructive course, a Gatestone Institute report highlighted.
“Since assuming power in August 2024, Yunus has presided over a nation sliding into political chaos, radical Islamism, economic distress and social fragmentation. Bangladesh has devolved into a governance crisis that threatens Bangladesh’s economic stability and democratic future,” it stated.
The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and the Islamist party Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami are two of the main beneficiaries of the protests led by the Students Against Discrimination which led to the ousting of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in August, 2024. Since then, the secular forces in Bangladesh represented by Hasina’s Awami League party have faced a backlash.
“Organisations such as Hizb ut-Tahrir openly rally for a caliphate, while Hefazat-e-Islam Bangladesh, a Deobandi Islamist advocacy group, pushes against women’s rights. Mufti Syed Muhammad Faizul Karim, who is the leader of the radical Islamist Jamaat-Char Monai, stated that his party wants to implement Islamic Sharia law and redesign the nation’s system of governance based on Taliban-style rule in Afghanistan. The passive response of Yunus’s interim government to these demands signals either weakness or tacit approval of the country’s Islamization,” the report highlighted.
As minorities, especially Hindus, continue to fight for their survival in Bangladesh, the report detailed the interim government’s failure to protect them, calling it as its most damaging moral failure.
“Despite Yunus’s attempts to downplay the violence against Hindu minorities and other religious groups, the systematic attacks on these communities have continued and increased. In 2024, at least 100 homes and shops of the indigenous people belonging to the Chakma community were burnt down in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts. The Bangladesh Army did not intervene, revealing the government’s passive complicity”.
It added that, despite being an economist, Yunus’s most visible failure has been its inability to control spiraling inflation, which reached 10.87 per cent, up from 9.92 per cent in September 2024, with food inflation soaring to catastrophic levels of 14 per cent.
“The promise of economic recovery under a Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist, who has been a darling of the US Democratic administrations, has turned into a nightmare for millions of Bangladeshis who struggle with basic necessities as their purchasing power decreases daily,” the Gatestone Institute report mentioned.
Quiet significantly, spotlighting another big failure of Yunus, the report details how he managed to alienate Bangladesh’s most important neighbour and economic partner, India and instead sought courtship of China and Pakistan.
“His frequent attacks, blaming India for various domestic problems including floods, demonstrate a tendency to scapegoat rather than solve problems. Meanwhile, his courtship of China and Pakistan reveals a foreign policy that lacks strategic thinking. In April 2025, Yunus invited China to establish an economic base in Bangladesh, stressing that Dhaka is the ‘sole guardian of the ocean’ in the subcontinent,” it says.
The warming ties with Pakistan, despite the absence of a formal apology for the 1971 genocide, dishonors the victims of that brutal period, the report added.
“As Bangladesh approaches what should be a democratic transition, the country finds itself more divided, economically weaker, and internationally more isolated than at any point. The interim government has failed in its fundamental responsibilities of maintaining law and order, protecting all citizens regardless of religion, preserving press freedom, managing the economy, and preparing for free and fair elections,” the report concluded.
The political situation under Yunus, it stated, reveals a government sliding into being another failed state, ripe for terrorists, and unable to chart a constructive course.
–IANS
/as