Students chant slogans as they protest to demand accountability and trial against Bangladesh's ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, near Dhaka University in the capital on Aug. 12.LUIS TATO/Getty Images
John Richards is an emeritus professor at Simon Fraser University. He visits Bangladesh annually, where he is engaged in social-policy research, NGO projects and volunteer teaching.
Distressed by political polarization at the University of Dhaka in 1990, the late professor Alimullah Miyan resigned from his tenure and founded the International University of Business Agriculture and Technology (IUBAT), the first private university in Bangladesh. A few years later, I hosted him at Simon Fraser University and he invited me to visit his campus – three classrooms, six computers, a small chemistry lab, and offices squeezed into an old rented building. I accepted the invitation and we became friends, and I have since visited his country annually. I was in Bangladesh a month after former prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s fourth election victory this past January.
My colleagues in Bangladesh and beyond loathed the authoritarian, corrupt nature of her regime, which spanned from 1996 to 2001, and then again from 2009 until recently (when she wasn’t in office, however, corruption was still rampant). My colleagues assumed nothing could be done about her stronghold on Bangladeshi politics, but they were wrong. Ms. Hasina’s imposition of excessive boksheesh (political bribery) for those wishing to obtain civil-service jobs was the straw that broke her reign. University students demonstrated against the status quo, which reached its apex on Aug. 4, or “Bloody Sunday,” when police and the student wing of Ms. Hasina’s party killed about 100 students. Students called for a March for Justice the following day, and when tens of thousands of people began a procession toward the prime minister’s residence, Ms. Hasina called on the army to stop them. Gauging the public mood and fearing a massacre, however, the generals refused. Instead, they invited Ms. Hasina to go into exile.
The student leaders, generals and others opposed to her regime decided to create an interim government, and invited Muhammad Yunus, an internationally respected economist and civil-society leader, to head a Council of Advisors. In a nod to constitutional continuity, it would nominally report to the figurehead President of the country, Mohammed Shahabuddin. On Aug. 8, after three days without a government in place in Bangladesh, Mr. Yunus and 16 others, including non-partisan technocrats and student leaders, took oaths as members of the council. To my knowledge, all are honest people; some are academics, some are lawyers, some are Hindu and some are Muslim.
Muhammad Yunus, an internationally respected economist and civil-society leader, was invited to head a Council of Advisors for a new interim government in Bangladesh.INDRANIL MUKHERJEE/Getty Images
Among the 16 members of the council, perhaps the most knowledgeable of her portfolio is Rizwana Hasan, Minister of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, who is chief executive of the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association. Before August, council member Bidhan Roy was director of the psychiatric division of the country’s national mental-health hospital. He knows about managing large institutions – the management of 15 million children in government primary schools will test his capacity (hopefully, he is a fast learner). Asif Nazrul, a novelist, journalist and law professor, is the council’s Minister of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs. In an interview with Bangladesh’s Daily Star newspaper, he described his impressive work ethic, spending 10 to 12 hours a day at his office seven days a week.
These professionals, and their colleagues on the advisory council, have a rare moment to lift the state of Bangladesh out of a decades-long pattern of political corruption. To improve the quality of life for the country’s 171 million people will take time. A quick election would probably install the major opposition party, which has a history of corruption equivalent to that of Ms. Hasina.
Tahmima Anam, a Bangladeshi novelist, has described the Shakespearean tragedy inherent in Bangladesh’s politics. After the 1971 Liberation War, which freed Bangladesh from Pakistan, the country’s political culture quickly degenerated and was marked by assassinations, bitter revenge, corruption, violence and refusals to compromise. I quote Ms. Anam’s recent op-ed in The New York Times:
“When one of the two political parties that have dominated Bangladesh … was in power, the other would often boycott parliament or refuse to participate in elections it alleged to be rigged. There has never been a healthy relationship between the people in power and those who oppose them. Party was always placed before country.
“This has been a curse, preventing solid democratic institutions. … The unexpected revolution that toppled the increasingly autocratic and corrupt rule of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina … offers Bangladesh a chance to break free of this cycle. What makes this revolution unprecedented and so meaningful is that it was a grassroots movement led by idealistic university students, not one of the warring main political parties. As a Bangladeshi, I am watching with jubilation.”
The interim government has a long list of issues to address. Its first priority is to restore non-partisan professionalism among the police and the courts, but that is not enough. The complex networks of corruption in government schools and hospitals have condemned the majority of children to remain illiterate as adults, the poor to suffer through severe environmental damage, and those who are ill to seek private care that is often dubious and overpriced. Admittedly, Ms. Hasina enabled a rapid increase in gross domestic product during her reign. However, the abysmal quality of governance polarized the country.
The student demonstrators who made their voices heard this summer are parallel to the Parisians who, in 1789, conquered the Bastille, a symbol of arbitrary governance under the ancien régime. But as we know, moderate elites governed at first, before Napoleon managed to transform a popular revolution into a dictatorship.
Many of my colleagues in Bangladesh are pessimistic. They fear failure. Predictably, leaders of Bangladesh’s major political parties have undertaken no self-reflection. As Ms. Anam summarized, these political leaders still place party before country. They expect in due course to restore the status quo ante.
If the interim government fails to place country before party, it will be a lost opportunity. Such events arise rarely in the life of a nation. Fortunately, the students who orchestrated the movement have remained vigilant in keeping a watch on the interim government.
Now is not the time to despair. Like Ms. Anam, I support the new government, and I hope for a better future for Bangladesh.