Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: With only 35 days remaining before Republican leader Donald Trump re-enters the White House as the 47th President on January 20, 2025, and potentially tightens the screws on it for Hindu-bashing, as he has publicly pledged, a harried Bangladesh is now trying to flatter the United States, while still sharpening knives against India.
Gone are the days when the Democrats supported him to the hilt and managed a Nobel Prize for Peace for him in 2005. The ‘economist of the poor’ is now leading his relatively better-doing country back into poverty.
That is why, Muhammed Yunus, Bangladesh’s “Chief Advisor” to the military-and-terrorist-controlled interim government, on Monday said parliamentary elections would be held late next year or in early 2026—by that time his ruling clique may eliminate the challenge of the Awami League.
Now viewed as a puppet of terror gangs like Jamaat-e-Islami and Hifazat-e-Islam, besides so-called student leaders he showcased in the US to the Democrats, including former President Bill Clinton, two months ago, Yunus, 84, was ‘appointed’ in his interim post after the uprising that overthrew the elected Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed in August 2024.
Amid relentless Islamist attacks on the Hindus and other minorities, rising prices, and shortages, he said on Monday he is trying to tackle an “extremely tough” challenge of restoring democratic institutions in the South Asian nation of nearly 170 million people.
“Election dates could be fixed by the end of 2025 or the first half of 2026,” Yunus said in a broadcast on state television.
Under pressure from violent, rampaging mobs nationwide and the army’s indirect support to it, Hasina, 77, fled by helicopter to neighboring India as thousands of protesters entered her official residence in Dhaka on August 5, 2024.
Ever since, the Yunus-led government has clamped several cases against her and other Awami League leaders, the way Islamabad’s ‘democratically-elected’ Shehbaz Sharif government did unto former PM Imran Khan and his party leaders.
Her government was also accused of politicizing courts and the civil service, and staging lopsided elections in January 2024, to allegedly dismantle democratic checks on its power.
Hasina’s 15-year rule saw “widespread human rights abuses,” including the mass detention and extrajudicial killings of her political opponents.
Yunus has launched commissions to oversee a raft of reforms he says are needed and setting an election date depends on what political parties agree.
“Throughout, I have emphasized that reforms should take place first before the arrangements for an election,” he said.
“If the political parties agree to hold the election on an earlier date with minimum reforms, such as having a flawless voter list, the election could be held by the end of November,” he added.
But including the full list of electoral reforms would delay polls by a few months, he said.