Meltdown in Bangladesh gaining speed

While not spending money in Bangladesh, India needs to ensure that the border between the two countries gets sealed.

- M.D. NALAPAT

Bangladesh has in effect become a captive of extremists who use the standing within much of the international community of Yunus to camouflage and to whitewash the atrocities they are doing, not least amongst the shrinking Hindu and Christian minorities of the country.

Of course, the present rulers of Bangladesh have managed to influence enough whisperers and courtiers in the councils of the powerful in multiple countries to back them despite what is happening in plain sight to minorities in the country. It may be an error to believe, as many still do, that the bulk of the population of the country is opposed to the radical ideology that has long been propagated and that ideology is now being manifested in practice in the streets of the country.

What they are doing is to do on a much larger scale the very actions that a somnolent Sheikh Hasina regime allowed them to do on a smaller but rising scale during the last six years of her period in office as the Prime Minister of the country.

Having (or so she and her confidants believed) the art of ensuring not just a favourable but a completely one-sided outcome, Sheikh Hasina became complacent.

Street power is, or has the potential to be, a change factor in the usually turbulent politics of most countries.

Once it became evident that a managed outcome was going to assure her a fourth term in office, the streets of Dhaka and other cities in the country exploded in protest.

The reason given for giving Awami League freedom fighters and their families a small percentage of the seat total as being reserved for them, something unexceptionable that was hardly a cause for widespread unrest, even within the long neglected middle and lower layer of the Awami League itself.

The cause was that a few at the top of the Awami League had enriched themselves enormously, and many to a smaller extent, within the middle rungs of the party.