New Delhi: India is keeping close watch on the goings-on in Bangladesh after Muhammad Yunus, chief adviser to the interim government in that country threatened to resign, following increasing pressure from both the Army and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).
Pro-Yunus student leader’s, meanwhile, are planning to mobilise youths and Islamists for a protest march to the Army Cantonment in Dhaka today. This may lead to violence as Bangladesh Army chief Gen Waker-Uz-Zaman had said on Wednesday that such activities will no longer be tolerated.
Zaman had also told Yunus that a new government should be in place in Bangladesh by January 2026, so his troops may return to the barracks. The BNP is also exerting a lot of pressure. Yunus has promised to hold elections by June 2026, but the Army and the BNP want them to be held by the end of 2025.
Now that the Awami League has been officially deregistered as a political party in Bangladesh and banned, the BNP believes that it is the sole contender to form the government in that country. The party has apprehensions though that Yunus wants to cling on to power with support from students and Islamists.
Yunus is known to be close to the National Citizen Party (NCP) that was created in 2024 during the students’ uprising that led to the ouster of then Bangladesh prime minister Sk Hasina. The BNP now perceives the NCP to be a political threat that may come in the way of its plans to grab absolute power in the country.
According to NCP leaders, Yunus spoke to them about the extreme pressure he is under on Thursday evening. “I am being held hostage…..I can’t work like this. Can’t all the political parties reach a common ground,” Yunus is supposed to have told them.
According to Bangladesh daily Prothom Alo, Yunus asked the student leader’s to form another interim government as he no longer wants to continue. Several members of his cabinet apparently met him and urged him to continue.
Yunus is not in India’s good books after his remarks on the seven northeastern states. However, New Delhi knows that with the Awami League out of the running, any disposition that replaces Yunus will be just as anti-Indian, if not more. A visible enemy is less dangerous than an invisible one, India knows, hence its concern.
