EVEN though the chief of the Bangladeshi army had taken over the reins of power, requested the president to dissolve the parliament, and swear in an interim government on August 8, there is still a vacuum as far as the day-to-day running of the country is concerned.

It will take a few months for the new regime to settle in and take charge with some semblance of various parts of the government and society functioning.

It is therefore important to get a sense of what exactly this interim government is. In trying to decipher the trajectory of this government it will be illuminating to understand the antecedents of the head of this government and effective prime minister Professor Muhammed Yunus.

Who is he? What are his political ideas, if any? Why are so many forces backing him to succeed? Why does it appear that he is being held as a messiah? Can we find any consistent set of views that this 84-year-old Bangladeshi espouses?

He was born in and hails from the port city of Chittagong, where he finished his early education before graduating in economics from Dhaka University.

He completed a PhD from Vanderbilt University in the US. While there, in 1971, he was active in support of the national liberation movement and war that established Bangladesh. He returned to Bangladesh and became an academic at Chittagong University.

The rest, as they say, is history. He became the pioneer of micro-credit and founder of Grameen Bank, earning the epithet of “banker to the poor.” Later he went on to get the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.

What, then, are his views on the social and political front and what set of ideas is he bringing to the table?

Broadly and in a summary fashion we can say that he advocates the concept of the “social business” or “social enterprise” as the engine to unleash “social capital” and thereby usher in a “capitalism with a human face.” It very much smacks of the “third way” that dominated the corridors of power during the Blair-Clinton-Schulz era after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The agents who will spearhead this “idealised nirvana” are a set of “meritocratic” individuals who are professional technocrats nestling in successful NGOs. This will be further underpinned by the moral do-goodery of the Boy Scouts movement which was Yunus’s original and consistent love and ethical guide.

His forays in politics proper in Bangladesh over the past 30 years were to articulate a form of political intervention that was intended to depoliticise representative politics itself.

Between 2006 and 2008, after engineering to put his friend and fellow economist Fakhruddin Ahmed as head of a caretaker government, he attempted to form a political party in Bangladesh with the support of the “civil society” gurus and the NGO elites.

He took advantage of the disenchantment with conventional politics and political parties and argued to have that replaced by unelected technocrats, civil society representatives, NGO practitioners, and individuals who were projected as being part of the meritocracy. This added up to what we in the West call the “good and the great.”

That attempt of Yunus failed in 2006-08. Will this strategy work in 2024?

Such a vision has great attraction when people have lost faith in conventional politics and politicians and are convinced that elected representatives are all self-seeking and corrupt. Sounds familiar. Unlike 2006 the situation in 2024 is more “anti-politics” because of the abject failure of bourgeois political parties and governments in Bangladesh.

Yunus will attempt to use this public mood to go beyond simply changing electoral laws and frameworks to create a lasting and permanent legacy by reforming the institutions of the state and representative politics in the country.

What is different today is the uprising itself and the new social forces it has unleashed. The antipathy towards politicians is complemented by the widespread urge to “clean up” institutions of the state and government after the 15 years of extreme autocratic rule that has practically decimated a significant part of the state machinery and its functioning. This has erased the distinction between state institutions, government and the Awami League itself.

In order to pursue his agenda, Yunus is already taking advantage of the disenchantment with the two bourgeois parties Awami League and BNP and also riding on the wave of the “people’s clout” and prestige of the student leaders who gave leadership to the mass upsurge. In spite of this bonhomie and honeymoon period, an underlying and crucial debate has already emerged.

Should Yunus and his team be simply restricted to preparing the groundwork for a free and fair election or should they be allowed to extend their tenure and thereby permitted to drastically reform the state structures?

Should elected representatives sitting in a parliament determine the modalities of the state and the government or should a technocratic elite set up commissions, committees and task forces and bring in consultants to enact substantial changes which at the end of the day need legislative endorsement?

I don’t think the interim government itself is clear about what it wishes and can do.

Riding the popular mood the regime has already initiated a set of measures which commands broad support: changing the upper echelon of the central bank, supreme court, police and paramilitary, universities and educational institutions, stock exchange, various private banks, etc.

Additionally, they are setting up two commissions to clean up the sheer plundering of the financial and banking sectors by the sycophants, acolytes and members of the deposed Awami League government.

Above all the bringing in of the International Court of Justice alongside the United Nations to investigate all the killings and injuries during the uprising is being mooted along with internal investigation of misuse of the courts and police to conduct harassment and repression.

Such seemingly “populist” measures will generate support for the immediate future, but it will not be enough to resolve the issue of representative governments and how and when they will be elected.

Yunus failed to create his own party in 2006. Will he succeed in creating a king’s party in 2024? We also have to remember that he is 84 years old. How long will he need to do this? Will the existing bourgeois parties allow him to pursue his earlier agenda of minus two (getting rid of Hasina and Khaleda Zia)?

That is a tall order and will require not only internal support but massive external political and economic backing. Is that forthcoming? That is bound to reveal the links between Yunus and external powers and the effect of geopolitics.

It is this crucial nexus that we will elaborate on in the final part of the article to expose the machinations of Western imperialist powers and their relations with the Yunus project. The regional geopolitics will further complicate the future evolution of the mass uprising that has generated such immense hope for the future of the country.