Muhammad Yunus’ new statement is as laughable as it is outrageous. He has informed a couple of visiting American diplomats that the moment is not ripe for reconciliation with the Awami League or, in his words with the ousted regime.
Why does he say that? He thinks that unless the Awami League ‘confesses’ to its ‘crimes’, there can be no reconciliation between his illegitimate regime and the party which led Bangladesh to independence fifty-four years ago.
Yunus is clearly living in a world of make-believe. He would like to convey the impression that Sheikh Hasina and her party are waiting for him to tell them that all is forgiven and that they can return home and engage in politics.
The reality is quite different and Yunus and his coterie of advisors and supporters know it. The sheer nervousness the illegal regime has begun to show is a sign of its growing feeling that the ground is shifting from under its feet.
When Badiul Alam Majumdar, no friend of the Awami League, publicly speaks of elections being free and fair only under a non-partisan caretaker government, it is a sign of the enervation Yunus and his friends are going through.
The point today is not what Yunus thinks of the Awami League.
It is one of what the Awami League thinks of him and the well-planned, meticulously designed anarchy he has presided over since he and his cabal were foisted on Bangladesh’s people seventeen months ago.
In all these months, the crimes the Yunus regime has committed have piled up to a point where a future elected Bengali nationalist government cannot but work out the modalities by which the current unconstitutional regime and its functionaries, as well as followers, will be brought to justice.
The question is not one of whether the Awami League will ‘repent’ for its ‘crimes’, but whether Yunus, having led the country down the road to disaster, indeed to the abyss, will apologise to the nation when his moment of reckoning comes.
Yunus knows only too well that neither Sheikh Hasina nor the Awami League is in the mood for reconciliation with him.
The former Prime Minister has already made it clear that the national goal at the moment is for Yunus to go, to quit office, before any talk of democratic politics can be entertained.
On a larger canvas, the sheer scale of the criminality the Yunus regime has indulged in has not escaped the attention of Bangladesh’s people, as also people around the world.
Yunus and his followers have systematically gone on an assault on Bangladesh’s history.
All symbols of the country’s struggle for freedom and the attainment of liberation were destroyed by the mobs whose activities Yunus has not once condemned and has instead patently condoned. In simple terms, a coordinated move has been underway to reject the idea of Bangladesh, to hold patriots to account for their loyalty to the foundational principles of the state.
The list of crimes goes on. Politicians, journalists, civil servants, jurists, chief election commissioners and others have been carted off to prison and have not had any right to bail or release given to them.
Grassroots Awami League activists have been hunted down and no perpetrators of the crimes have been punished.
Cultural bodies like Chhayanaut have come under mob assault. Bauls have been humiliated in public.
Media offices have been occupied by mobs, and even a couple of newspapers considered friendly to Yunus have been set ablaze by mobs.
Members of the Hindu community have been persecuted, with several of them lynched by fanatics arrayed against Bangladesh’s secular ethos.
Judges of the High Court and Supreme Court have been forced out by mobs and replaced with people who have remained unabashedly silent in the face of the increasing slide of law and order in the country.
Such are the crimes that have been committed on Yunus’ watch. Historians in the future will keep the record, for the record will have been the darkest period in independent Bangladesh’s history.
The bigger truth is that under Yunus, it is Bangladesh’s sovereignty that has come under assault.
An instance: the import of a Bangladeshi-American academic from abroad and entrusting him with the responsibility of meddling with the nation’s constitution, going to the extent of suggesting that the constitutionally adopted name of the republic be replaced.
The sheer audacity of such criminality is not to be forgiven. It is on this score that a future Bangladesh, led by nationalist forces, must deal with the men and women who have since August 2024 played havoc with the country.
Reconciliation? That is a pipe dream for those who expect the Awami League to approach the Yunus regime in the search for a solution to the crisis that has been hollowing out the country since August 2024.
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Beyond and above everything, the need is for Bangladesh’s people and its nationalist and secular forces to undertake a campaign, a vigorous one, to take the country back from the forces of fascism which commandeered it in 2024.
