Opinion: Making sense of Bangladesh’s ‘monsoon revolution’

When I arrived at Dhaka’s international airport before dawn on July 30, I feared for the worst. I had traveled against the advice of virtually everyone I knew, two weeks after violent student-led protests and the harsh government response had led to scores of deaths and hundreds of injuries. As a well-known mentee, collaborator and friend of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus — who had been vilified by the government led by Sheikh Hasina and was threatened with more than 170 lawsuits — I wondered if I would be pulled aside at immigration for extensive questioning. When that did not happen, I figured that once again, Bengali hospitality had overruled politics in my favor.
I began asking local friends as well as strangers what they made of the tension between the student movement — many of whose leaders, if not dead, were in the hospital or prison — and the government. I spoke nearly fluent Bengali from the time when I had lived in the country for six years in the 1990s. I heard anger at the regime but also wariness about speaking out.
In the meantime, I feared for Yunus, who was visiting Paris at the time and has also been a frequent visitor to Utah over the years. Virtually everyone I spoke to expected him to be arrested upon returning home in early August due to a bold statement calling for international intervention that he had made from Dubai, which was termed treasonous by the government. I wondered if I would ever again see him alive.
And then something shocking happened. The protests resumed, but this time the students expanded their demand for the reform of civil service recruitment quotas with nine more. When their rallies were brutally suppressed by the police and paramilitaries, they further rallied around a single demand: that the prime minister resign. When the army reportedly declined Hasina’s request to massacre the protesters on Aug. 5, she fled the country.
The military then consulted with student leaders, who in turn tracked down Yunus in Paris and asked him if he would serve as interim prime minister. Initially reluctant, he agreed, saying, “How can I say no to you students who have sacrificed so much?” He was sworn in on Aug. 8 after Yunus gave a brief but highly resonant address to the nation from the airport, which has been translated into English.
One sensitive issue quickly arose. Charges of revenge killings against Hindus began circulating, mostly from two fronts: Hasina sympathizers and critics in India. The loaded terms “genocide” and “Islamist regime” was increasingly heard. I was skeptical of these accusations. Bangladeshis, in my experience, are God-fearing but not fundamentalist. Hindus, Christians and Buddhists have lived in relative harmony with the Muslim majority for almost all of its history.
A respected Indian journalist I met for breakfast during this period shared my skepticism. In the end, he and other reporters could document no more than five Hindu killings in the entire country, most of which seemed to be politically motivated rather than based on ethnic and religious hatred.
With my three-week visit to Bangladesh coming to an end, I decided to get outside the capital bubble and visit the village where I did the bulk of the field research for my book “Small Loans, Big Dreams: Grameen Bank and the Microfinance Revolution in Bangladesh, America, and Beyond.” The village had developed since the 1990s, due to the good work of civil society groups such as Grameen Bank and BRAC, local entrepreneurship and positive government initiatives.
While there, I asked local Muslims and Hindus (who have always constituted a substantial minority in the village) whether there had been violence, threats or even tension between them. They literally laughed. They told me that relations remained harmonious; people had little time for ethnic hatred when there was rice to be harvested, fish to be caught and children to be educated.
I feel a sense of tentative optimism for the future of Bangladesh. Yes, there are all sorts of problems stemming from 15 years of misrule. But the Bangladeshi people seem to be rallying around Yunus. His Aug. 25 address to the nation was well received. Next week, he will address the United Nations as a head of state; his folksy style will doubtlessly contrast with the stilted orations of other leaders.
Bangladesh is the world’s eighth most populous country, standing at the crossroads between India and China and sheltering more than 1 million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar. The international community has much at stake in the success of its “second independence” achieved last month.
Alex Counts is the founder of Grameen Foundation and a consultant, author and educator who teaches at School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He wrote “Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind: Leadership Lessons from Three Decades of Social Entrepreneurship, Revised Edition.”