Bangladeshis are banking on Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus

When the protesting students approached Muhammad Yunus to head the interim government in Bangladesh, the Nobel laureate had several examples he could turn to while weighing his options. While French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre had declined to be a leader of the 1968 students and workers-led movement, Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn refused to pursue presidency in the post-Soviet Union era because he preferred an authoritarian regime with traditional Christian values. Author Vaclav Havel, though, went the other way. He accepted the offer to become president of Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution in 1989.

Yunus followed in Havel’s footsteps, and became the formal head of the interim government. This decision was made during a meeting at Dhaka’s Bangabhavan, the residence of President Mohammed Shahabuddin. The meeting was attended by representatives from Students Against Discrimination (SAD), the group that led the anti-Sheikh Hasina movement, as well as three military chiefs of Bangladesh, two Dhaka University professors and two liaison committee members.

At 84, Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, is being seen as the ideal candidate to fill the power vacuum and lead the country out of the crisis, resulting from the resignation of former Prime Minister Hasina and the eventual dissolution of her government. “He is acceptable among every section of society,” a Dhaka University professor, who was part of the meeting at the president’s residence, told THE WEEK on condition of anonymity. “He is a Nobel laureate and will help Bangladesh in restoring its international identity. His community development bank’s microcredit and microfinance initiatives have had a positive impact on the lives of the poor.”

Born in 1940 in the Chittagong district of undivided Bengal Presidency, Yunus was the third of nine children, and went to Chittagong Collegiate School. “We are very happy that Dr Yunus has been chosen to lead us,” Muhammad Sirajul Islam, the proud principal told THE WEEK. “We are confident that he will do everything needed for the welfare and development of Bangladesh.”

After completing his master’s in economics at Dhaka University, Yunus briefly worked as a lecturer before receiving a Fulbright scholarship in 1965 to pursue his PhD in the US. In 1975, four years after Bangladesh gained independence from Pakistan, he returned with the determination to alleviate poverty in his country.

The Bangladesh famine of 1974 greatly influenced Yunus. After personally lending $27 to 42 women in Bangladesh, the idea of microcredit occurred to him. He started the Grameen Bank in 1983 with the idea of disbursing small loans to the poor in Bangladesh without collateral.

Currently, Grameen Bank operates in 94 per cent of Bangladeshi villages, serving almost 4.5 crore people. As per its website, the bank has loaned more than $38.6 million to 1.06 crore borrowers, 97 per cent of them women. Yunus’s microcredit movement has since spread to more than 100 developing countries. His efforts made him the first from his country to win a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Today, he is known worldwide as the ‘Banker to the Poor’.

He has received numerous other prestigious awards and honours, including Presidential Medal of Freedom (the highest civilian award in the US) and the Ramon Magsaysay Award. Additionally, he was a founding member of The Elders, a group Nelson Mandela formed to address global challenges. A vocal critic of Hasina, Yunus has also encountered several corruption charges. Among these allegations is the claim that Grameen Bank aggressively collected loans from impoverished rural women. His supporters contend that he has been singled out because of his opposition to Hasina.

Bangladeshis are now banking on him. “The world viewed Bangladesh’s growing economy very positively. But they failed to realise the prevailing inequality in our country,” Asif Mahmud, a coordinator of SAD, told THE WEEK from Dhaka. “We are confident Dr Yunus’s policies will direct us to a better future where inequality will lessen.”

Generally, interim governments in Bangladesh have consisted of non-partisan members who were ineligible to run for office. However, in 2007, on the intervention of the army, an extra-constitutional military-backed caretaker government was formed, which ruled Bangladesh without legitimacy. People of Bangladesh are hopeful that the Yunus-headed government will not be influenced by the army, political parties or religious outfits. “I don’t think the army on any other group can influence the interim government much,” academic Rasheda K. Chowdhury, who was an adviser to the caretaker government led by Fakhruddin Ahmed from 2007 to 2009, told THE WEEK. “This is mainly because this time we are seeing a transition of power that is completely overseen by students, who are not like previous generations.”