A Nation in Transition

BNP’s sweeping victory ends Bangladesh's interim phase, but economic distress, US trade conditions, and strained ties with India leave the new government navigating a perilous strategic landscape

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The strained Indo-Bangladesh relations remain the most critical challenge for Tarique Rahman.

In the Holi Month of Ramadan, Bangladesh got an elected government after a gap of nearly nineteen months when the previous Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, had to abrogate power and leave the country on August 5, 2024, under an extremely volatile political situation due to prolonged protests led by students against her misrule.

Nearly 1,400 people laid their lives, and thousands were wounded during the ‘July uprising’ that led to the regime change in Dhaka. Since then, the former Prime Minister of Bangladesh, the chairperson of the then ruling party Awami League, has been staying in India.

On August 8, three days after her ouster, Muhammad Yunus was sworn in as the head of Bangladesh's interim government. A day before he was sworn in as the chief adviser to the interim government with prime ministerial powers, Yunus was acquitted in a labour violation case in which he had been sentenced to six months in jail. Subsequently, he has been acquitted in a graft case filed by the nation’s Anti-Corruption Commission, just days after he was sworn in to run an interim government. Significantly, on September 25, 2024, during his address to the Clinton Global Initiative on the sidelines of the 79th session of the UN General Assembly, Yunus said that the student revolution in Bangladesh was not organic, but a meticulously designed agitation which did not just come naturally. Standing next to his old friend Bill Clinton, Yunus introduced Mahfuj Abdullah (also known as Mahfuz Alam), a student leader who was accompanying him, as the mastermind behind Hasina’s ouster. Yunus introduced him to the former US President, Bill Clinton, as the “brains behind the whole revolution’. Mahfuj Abdullah has not contested the February 2026 election.