The Yunus administration wants to implement more reforms before calling an election, but the largest political party demands polls before and changes after.
Shailaja Neelakantan/Washington
When a popular uprising against her authoritarianism drove Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina from Bangladesh in August, its populace went delirious with joy – buoyed by hope for the swift dawn of a true democracy.
A Bangladeshi Nobel laureate chosen to lead an interim administration days after the government fell, however, made an impassioned plea to citizens eager for change after more than 700 people were killed during anti-Hasina protests in the weeks before her ouster.
“I would just request that you be a little patient. … It is difficult to overcome this situation overnight. Our society is built on a shaky foundation,” Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, said in a speech to the nation on Aug. 28, nearly three weeks after being sworn in.
“[W]e want to build Bangladesh from here in such a way that the people are the real source of all power in this country. … If we lose this opportunity, we will be defeated as a nation.”
The efforts to build a new Bangladesh involved “mountain-like challenges,” Yunus said, adding that the sacrifices of university students who led the uprising should not have been in vain.
Hasina fled following a students’ protest that turned deadly and became a mass movement demanding she step down.
The protests were peaceful, but as a Human Rights Watch investigation discovered, senior officers had ordered police on the streets to shoot at the demonstrators. When angry citizens nationwide took to the streets to condemn Hasina and her administration, the police trained their guns on them as well.
All together more than 1,423 people were killed in shootings and clashes that members and supporters of Hasina’s Awami League incited, student activists say.
Following this turmoil, the interim administration’s immediate task was to calm the nationwide unrest, after which it had to prepare conditions for the country to hold a free, fair and inclusive election.
Yunus and his advisers said they needed to undo the politicization and destruction of state institutions carried out by Hasina’s Awami League administration over 15 years.
Implementing even basic reforms for a fair election would be a monumental task, analysts had said. That would require time – and patience.
And the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), the country’s largest, which is expecting to win, is losing patience.
Amid such challenges, here’s a rundown of what Yunus and his team of advisers have achieved in key areas in the six months at the helm of the interim administration:
Why reforms?
As it is, Bangladesh has a history of holding dodgy elections, with only four of 12 held being considered relatively fair.
When they led the government, both main parties, the Awami League and BNP, brutally crushed opponents and critics, and politicized state institutions by appointing lackeys to head them.
So any reforms implemented need to be sound, invulnerable and immutable, having, of course, been agreed upon through a consensus especially with the students, political analysts said.
The interim administration would have to establish an unbiased election commission – it set up a new one in November – revamp the judiciary to decide potential electoral disputes without fear or favor, and ensure the voters’ list does not include the same names multiple times but does include the tens of thousands of new voters’ names.
Law and order
While not nearly as anarchic as it was in the immediate aftermath of Hasina fleeing the country, the law and order situation remains tenuous for a variety of reasons.
The public’s trust in the police has plummeted because of the force’s actions against the protesters in the July-August uprising. The police, in turn, have not fully returned to their posts, fearing reprisals, although the situation has improved.
As a result, some ex-police officers told local media that crime had soared with an indifferent force’s members turning a blind eye to transgressions.
Additionally,as an unshackled people realized they would now be heard, a plethora of special interest groups has taken to protesting on the streets post-Aug. 8 to press its demands – some of the demonstrations have turned fatally violent.
Still, the country’s largest party, BNP, which has lately been critical of Yunus, last month acknowledged the “relative stability in governance” brought by his administration.
Enforced disappearance, extrajudicial killings
A Jan. 27 Human Rights Watch report commended the interim government for its “significant progress” in naming some perpetrators of enforced disappearance and identifying secret detention centers.
HRW’s report said that the unearthing of these facts by the Yunus government-appointed inquiry commission was “a monumental step after years of denials by the previous government.”
While no extrajudicial killings or custodial deaths had been reported under the interim government until Friday, news broke over the weekend that a BNP youth-wing member had died allegedly in military custody.
This time, though, the military took swift action removing the commander linked to the incident. While Hasina wouldn’t say a word about numerous such reported violations, Yunus’ press office immediately condemned the incident.
The group of students that led the July-August criticized the Yunus administration for not swiftly implementing reforms in law enforcement.
‘Arbitrary arrests, reprisal violence’
Meanwhile, New York-based HRW said that “security forces are replicating familiar patterns of abuses from the Hasina administration” such as “arbitrary arrests and reprisal violence” targeting Awami league members and supporters.
The report did not cite names, but said political leaders were involved in forcing citizens to file criminal complaints “against large numbers of ‘unknown’ people.”
Economic strain
In December, the International Monetary Fund said that Bangladesh was seeing “a gradual return to economic normalcy,” although it faced persistent challenges such as slowing growth and steadily high inflation.
Still, the Yunus administration “has secured billions of dollars of additional financial support from multilateral financial institutions,” the International Crisis Group (ICG), a think-tank, noted recently.
According to a white paper published by the Yunus administration in December,
illicit financial outflows from Bangladesh averaged U.S. $16 billion annually between 2009 and 2023 – all Awami League government years.
Bangladesh had been looted to such a level that “when Yunus entered office, foreign exchange reserves were dwindling, and food price inflation stood at almost 15%,” the Brussels-based ICG said.
“His actions, including installing competent officials at key institutions and ministries to improve policymaking and restore confidence, appear to have averted an economic crisis.”
But the IMF said inflation would stay around the 11% it is at now, with growth only rebounding in 2026, to 6.7%.
Media freedom landscape
The human rights watchdog also noted that authorities had filed murder charges against at least 140 journalists related to their reporting on the July-August uprising and scrapped more than 150 press accreditations needed to attend official events.
HRW said that when asked about it, Yunus replied that the charges had been filed “following the old laws and practices.”
However, the interim administration announced Jan. 29 that it would soon issue revised guidelines on press accreditation to ensure transparency, local media reported.
For instance, the requirement that journalists promote government development projects and notify the government agencies before travelling abroad, will be removed.
Reforms trajectory
Yunus and others who had agreed he should lead the interim administration had said that one of the top priorities should be to put in place a free and transparent electoral system.
The interim government set up a commission to recommend reforms to the electoral system and several others on the constitution, judiciary, public administration and law enforcement, among others.
Four of them, including the Constitutional Reform Commission, submitted their reports last month.
The constitutional commission proposed drastic measures such as term limits for a PM (two), setting up a bicameral legislature (currently one) and the PM and president sharing executive powers.
Tellingly, no political party has yet commented on these reforms, not all of which have been made public yet. The next step would be to set up a meeting with political parties and other stakeholders to arrive at a consensus on the reforms.
Election conundrum
In mid-December, Chief Adviser Yunus revealed a timeline for when the election might be held – a question on everyone’s lips.
The answer was dissatisfying to some because it was imprecise and to others because it signaled “not any time soon.”
“If there is a political consensus and the voter list is prepared accurately with just minor reforms, it may be possible to hold elections by the end of 2025,” Yunus said.
“If additional reforms are needed, and taking into account the national consensus, it may take at least another six months,” he added, pointing towards early 2026.
The BNP insists it wants elections by July-August 2025 and – to the interim government’s rationale that more reforms needed implementation – the party’s argument is that the next elected government could institute reforms.
What now?
According to Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, an economics and management professor at Yale University, “citizens are willing to give an unelected caretaker government some leeway and time to govern and reform political institutions,” in the face of political instability and the challenges it has brought.
But, “to maintain legitimacy, the caretaker administration will have to perform, since it does not derive legitimacy from any election,” Mobarak wrote in a Jan. 28 paper for the Atlantic Center, a U.S. think-tank on international affairs.
The ICG said that a few “quick wins” should do the trick.
These could include the Yunus administration taking steps “to address petty corruption in public services, improve electricity supply and reduce high prices,” the ICG report said.
“Strong public support for the interim government could put pressure on other political forces, particularly the BNP, to fall into line around its agenda.”
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