Forget About It

In 2021, Bangladesh marked fifty years of independence: a moment to reflect on the wounds of its historic liberation struggle and to celebrate its new economic ascendancy. Under Sheikh Hasina’s leadership as prime minister, daughter of the country’s founding father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh had evolved into a Global South success story. GDP more than quadrupled from 2009 to 2021, and it briefly surpassed India in per-capita income. For outside observers, the narrative was intoxicating: a Muslim-majority, low-income democracy that empowered women through the garment sector, pioneered climate diplomacy, digitized governance, and was even beginning to try and include its transgender citizens. Prosperity and social transformation seemed within reach.

But this transformation came at a cost. Hasina’s rule bore unmistakable authoritarian marks: clampdowns on the press, disappearances linked to the Aynaghor detention center, electoral manipulation, and the weaponization of a notorious national police unit called the Rapid Action Battalion. Still, the ruling Awami League’s legitimacy rested on its secular, pluralist, anti-Islamist stance, rooted in the 1971 Liberation War. This was the uneasy bargain: development in exchange for democracy under constraint.

The contradiction eventually collapsed. In July 2024, student-led protests demanding reforms for the quota system for government jobs—nominally for the benefit of descendants of Liberation War veterans but widely seen as entrenching cronyism and special treatment for privileged groups—morphed into mass uprisings calling for Hasina’s resignation. The protests, initially led by university students, soon drew garment workers, university faculty, opposition activists, and even disaffected members of the middle class, who coalesced around demands for free elections, judicial independence, and an end to police impunity. The state cracked down brutally, with mass arrests, internet shutdowns, and tear gas. Up to 1,400 may have died. But public anger only grew. The repression failed because it confirmed the protesters’ core claim: that the regime feared accountability and no longer represented the people. On August 5 of last year, Hasina fled the country, reportedly under pressure from the army, which feared mutiny within its own ranks.

Into this vacuum stepped Muhammad Yunus, microfinance pioneer and Nobel Peace laureate, who was appointed “Chief Adviser” to a caretaker government. For a brief moment, it seemed democratic restoration might begin.

Yunus had long been a darling of the international development elite. In the 1990s and 2000s, his microcredit model—the distribution of loans as small as five dollars to working people, though at extortionate rates of interest—was celebrated by the United Nations, the Clinton Foundation, and the World Bank. In 2006, during a speech at the Clinton Global Initiative, Bill Clinton gushed: “I have thought for years that [Yunus] deserved the Nobel Peace prize. The committee could not have selected anyone better.” However, from the early 2010s, the relationship between Yunus and Hasina began to sour. In 2011, Hasina forced Yunus out of Grameen Bank—the bank he had founded—citing Bangladesh’s mandatory retirement age and denouncing him as a “bloodsucker of the poor.” Over the years, she has characterized him and his NGO network as corrupt self-dealers using external political channels and foreign patronage to influence national decisions about development. Yunus, in turn, has denounced Hasina as autocratic, appealing for support internationally while his allied civil society groups condemned her crackdown on NGO autonomy and democratic norms. Nonetheless, such was Yunus’s global standing that according to a June 25, 2024, press briefing, Hasina’s government attempted to placate him by injecting $34 million (in 2024 dollars) into Grameen Bank to keep it afloat. 

After Hasina fled on August 5, the military brokered the formation of a caretaker government under international pressure. Yunus was appointed chief adviser the same week, charged with overseeing a democratic transition within ninety days. But instead of preparing for elections, Yunus reorganized key ministries, placed loyalists from the NGO sector in technocratic roles, and purged civil servants associated with the Awami League. Police and intelligence services were restructured under an internal security directorate reporting directly to his office. The new regime styled itself as a “corrective government,” but real power flowed from an informal coalition: parts of the army, Islamist street movements, and donor-friendly NGOs repurposed as governance bodies.

Since August 2024, Yunus’s administration has quietly released Islamist militants once affiliated with Al Qaeda, Ansarullah Bangla Team, and ISIS franchises. Groups like Hefazat-e-Islam and Hizb ut-Tahrir have returned to public prominence, their leaders openly threatening women, minorities, and secular activists. In May 2025, the regime authorized a Hefazat rally in Chittagong where clerics declared that women should not pursue higher education or work in NGOs. No minister—all of whom were personally appointed by Yunus—condemned it.

Even more ominously, Yunus has refused to commit to elections within the constitutional ninety-day window for caretaker governments. Instead, he has scheduled polls for February 2026—eighteen months after assuming office. The army and the opposition Bangladesh National Party (BNP) have demanded polls by December 2025. The delay is framed in the language of reform and “inclusive accountability,” but the reality is far more cynical: a regime consolidating power while evading both public consent and institutional scrutiny. Nowhere is this betrayal more vivid than in the treatment of the garment sector—the very engine of Bangladesh’s economic rise. During Hasina’s tenure, workers—primarily women—gained modest but meaningful protections: minimum wage hikes, factory inspections, subsidies for housing and schooling. These were implemented by government decree, often after pressure from international buyers, the International Labor Organization, and workers. Since Yunus took office, all of this has come under threat. The government has accused labor activists of disloyalty, smearing them by alleging connections with the “former administration”—the Awami League. Repression of organized labor has also turned violent. In September 2024, violent crackdowns on protests by garment workers resulted in nearly two dozen injuries and at least one fatality; two more workers were injured by police fire the following month. National media linked this crackdown and politically motivated firings and investigations of striking civil servants months later to growing executive overreach, as labor rights groups warned of backsliding on worker protections.

Meanwhile, the economic “reform” program has inflicted heavy pain on the urban poor. VAT has increased on basic goods. Electricity tariffs are up. Cuts to fuel subsidies are planned. While the Grameen family of companies and elite contractors enjoy regulatory shelter, this favoritism is part of a broader climate of corporate permissiveness—rewarding regime-aligned firms with selective enforcement, fast-tracked approvals, and tax leniency. Ordinary citizens, by contrast, are being squeezed. The result: stagflation, capital flight, and a dramatic drop in growth, forecast at just 3.3 percent for fiscal year 2025—the lowest in thirty-four years outside the pandemic.

This downturn has been compounded by an unnecessary trade war with India, stalled infrastructure projects, and the freezing of disbursements from the International Monetary Fund. The $4.7 billion IMF program signed in 2023 is now under review, with the Fund’s latest report flagging concerns over eroding governance benchmarks. Unless transparent elections and civil liberties are restored, the remaining loan tranches may be suspended. That warning marks a rare shift: for years, the IMF and other Western actors tolerated Bangladesh’s illiberalism so long as economic targets were met. But Yunus’s blend of repression, revisionism, and Islamist volatility now threatens not just governance norms but investor confidence, supply chain stability, and the broader regional balance. The IMF doesn’t demand Bangladesh become Japan—only that it stays stable, fiscally disciplined, and predictable. Yunus’s regime is none of the above.

Parallel to this has been Yunus’s weaponization of the NGO-industrial complex, using donor language to mask sectarian governance. Ministries are staffed with technocrats fluent in “good governance” jargon, while Western embassies praise “transparency” amid rising repression. Major donors like the United Nations Development Program and the Gates Foundation remain silent—too invested in the microfinance myth to confront Yunus’s contradictions. But the most alarming shift lies not in economics but in memory. The Yunus regime is attempting a comprehensive revision of Bangladesh’s foundational narrative.

The police atrocities of July 2024 against Hasina have, under the interim government, been elevated by state media to “genocide” status. Meanwhile, the actual genocide of 1971—when the Pakistani army in partnership with local Islamist paramilitaries killed an estimated three million Bengalis, raped over two hundred thousand women, and drove ten million refugees into India—has been recast as an intra-Muslim civil war between West and East Pakistanis by Islamists and Yunus’s advisers. On June 3 of this year, the regime redefined the term “freedom fighter” to exclude the republic’s founding fathers— Bangabandhu (Friend of Bengal) Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (also called Mujib), Syed Nazrul Islam, Tajuddin Ahmad, M. Mansur Ali, and AHM Qamaruzzaman.

This is exclusion not just as a legal class of beneficiaries, which the anti-quota movement protested, but a wholesale attempt to erase national memory. Mujib—whose memory symbolizes secular pluralism and Bengali nationalism, which the regime seeks to discredit to legitimize its pan-Islamist realignment—has been removed from currency and textbooks. Mobs desecrate Liberation War memorials with impunity. Even the 1971-era slogan “Joy Bangla,” or “Victory to Bengal,” is under assault, putatively a slogan of the “fascist” Awami League. This is not historical debate. To deny 1971 is akin to Holocaust denial: a calculated effort to erase pluralism, vilify the secular, and normalize a supremacist worldview. Globally, the consensus is firm. Genocide Watch and the International Association of Genocide Scholars recognize 1971 as genocide. Dhaka intellectual circles now frame 1971 as an Indian neocolonial intervention. The new regime’s revisionism is not just inaccurate; it is dangerous.

Anti-India rhetoric has long served as a proxy for Islamist politics in Bangladesh. But under Yunus, it has deepened into a theologically inflected paranoia. India is recast not just as hegemon but as Hindu wannabe occupier. This framing fuses Islamism with global conspiracy theories—blending anti-Hindu bigotry, antisemitism, and Salafist utopianism. It builds on decades of Islamo-nationalist suspicion toward India and the secular elite, long cultivated by military and Islamist actors alike.

Geopolitically, the implications are alarming. Reports suggest Bangladesh may offer the Lalmonirhat airbase, in the north of the country, to China, placing Chinese assets close to India’s Siliguri Corridor—the narrow land bridge linking India to its northeast that is often described as the most vulnerable point in India’s geography, its “Chicken’s Neck.” Control or disruption of this corridor could sever India’s connection to seven of its states and would have destabilizing consequences for at least eight, a provocation which some irredentist figures associated with the Yunus government have voiced as being in line with Dhaka’s desired medium-term strategic objective of changing the border with India.  

The BNP today, despite being seen as the natural successor to Hasina, remains paralyzed. Factionalism, aging leadership, and poor grassroots coordination have left it unable to mobilize effectively. Its diaspora arms have issued statements but failed to build alliances on the ground. Many Bangladeshis see the BNP not as a credible alternative, but as a spent force—still haunted by its own history of corruption and enabling Islamist extremism. In what may come as a surprise for foreign observers who have tuned in recently, for decades, Pakistan and India symbolized two contending futures for Dhaka: theocratic nationalism versus secular pluralism. For many in Bangladesh’s middle class, India once offered an aspirational model—rooted in the Bengali intellectual tradition of Kolkata, in figures like Tagore, Amartya Sen and Satyajit Ray. But India under Modi has lost much of that symbolic power with the rise of Hindu nationalism, the passage of the racist Citizenship Amendment Act, the marginalization of Muslim communities, and the demonization of undocumented Bangladeshi immigrants and Rohingya refugees.

In India, the very light that once drew others in dims—and with it, the credibility of pluralist alternatives in its periphery. India lost 3,900 soldiers to secure its neighbor’s independence as a secular, Nehruvian democracy in its own image. Yet fifty-four years after Bangladesh’s independence, it is the post-2014 Hindutva revolution and the post-Hasina transition that represent the ironic fulfillment of the promise that Dhaka would one day come to resemble New Delhi.

Yet discontent is building. While the BNP remains fragmented and the Awami League de facto banned and disoriented, strikes are growing. Minority groups are organizing. Dissident civil servants are leaking documents. A wave of student protests in Chittagong and Rajshahi has shaken the regime’s confidence. The ambitions of the Yunus regime are now unmistakable. It is not simply holding power. It is trying to change the foundations of Bangladesh’s republican identity. The regime speaks in the language of reform and transparency but acts in service of theological nationalism. It weaponizes NGOs, co-opts donor language, and manipulates international institutions. It frames repression as a moral correction and deploys soft diplomacy to disguise sectarian aims.

Western media discourse remains by and large muted, even as rights groups such as Human Rights Watch raise concerns. The most straightforward explanation? Embarrassment. In 1971, it was the West that backed the perpetrators of genocide, while India—a non-Western democracy—emerged as the unlikely defender of so-called “Western values.” Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger even went so far as to threaten nuclear escalation against India, backing down only when the Soviet Union intervened. That memory still stings in Washington. But there are deeper factors at play. Since the onset of the global war on terror, the United States and its allies have increasingly accepted soft Islamism, so long as it stays clear of transnational jihad. Bangladesh, having never figured centrally in that conflict, escaped both close scrutiny and strategic engagement—allowing regimes like Yunus’s to pose as morally upright at home and diplomatically cooperative abroad. For many in the West, still haunted by the legacies of Iraq, Libya, and Syria, the threshold for “stability” has become dangerously low.

But with every passing day, global indulgence of Dhaka’s “transition” comes at a steeper cost. What we are seeing is not modernization but majoritarianism: the attempt to build a messianic, theocratic order atop the erasure of pluralist memory. It succeeds by branding secularists as foreign agents, by wrapping repression in the language of justice.

But above all, Bangladesh is not just a warning—it is a test. A test of how far a regime can go in erasing national memory under the cover of global indifference, donor complicity, and development-speak. What is unfolding in Dhaka is not an exception but a prototype: theocratic nationalism posing as reform, repression outsourced to mobs, and legitimacy propped up by revisionist lies the world no longer bothers to verify. The silence is not accidental but structural. And in that silence, we see the return of something once thought unthinkable: not just repression but state-sponsored négationnisme, a calculated effort to erase history to consolidate power. Bangladesh now forces us to ask: What happens when forgetting is official policy, and memory itself becomes subversive?