Anti-government protestors in Dhaka, August 5, 2024. Photo: Indian Punchline.
By M. K. Bhadrakumar – Aug 9, 2024
There is a problem, fundamentally, in viewing the regime change in Bangladesh as a ‘stand-alone’ event. The caveat must be added right at the outset that when it comes to processing situations, nothing happens for no reason at all. There is very little awareness in India, especially in the media, about what has been going on. Mostly, it’s ‘cut-and-paste’ job culled out from the jaundiced western accounts from a new Cold War angle.
Aren’t we suffering from a tunnel vision by hoping India could insulate itself by working with the Americans once they are in charge in Dhaka? Surely, Americans will be looking at India as a ‘counterweight’ to China? Such notions have already appeared in print.
The very fact that it was the NSA, Ajit Doval who was deputed to receive Sheikh Hasina at the Hindan Air Force Station speaks volumes about the government’s narrow vision. We are nervous about offering political asylum to Sheikh Hasina at a time when she has been virtually blacklisted by the US and the UK.
In a comparable situation, it took about an hour for our Mission in Islamabad to get a response on the ‘hot line’ from the Foreign Secretary late JN Dixit conveying the verbal approval of then-PM Narasimha Rao granting political asylum for Afghan President Najibullah who was abdicating power in real time. Rao apparently took a split second to make up his mind.
Rao’s decision was consistent with our cultural ethos and history. We didn’t agonise whether the Mujahideen groups or their mentors in Rawalpindi — or the high command in Washington (who detested Najib) — would resent it. On the contrary, we were confident that India’s stature would only rise in the esteem of the Afghan nation. And that was precisely how it turned out to be.
Just watch the video clipping of an interview with Mohammad Yunus by Times Now (below) who heads the interim government in Dhaka. Don’t have any illusions that he has warm feelings towards India. Yunus alleged that it was Awami League cadres who slaughtered Hindus and burnt down their properties. He is non-committal about friendship with India and advises New Delhi to work harder to earn respect and friendship.
Such a combative tone comes only because the Americans are solidly backing him. Yunus has been assiduously built up by the Americans through decades. It is not a secret that Nobel Prize is awarded for promising proxies.
True to an established pattern in colour revolutions, the proposal nominating Yunus as the head of the interim government apparently originated from an obscure self-styled student leader who was himself lionised in the western media as a rising star — and was likely prompted to plant the idea. The proposal was immediately accepted by the president!
The chronicle of Nobels has an interesting story to tell — they hail overwhelmingly from countries that are regarded as unfriendly by the US and chosen for their potential to bring disrepute to their own countries’ ruling elite or discredit certain regimes whose independent policies and ‘strategic autonomy’ are resented by Washington.
Take a cursory look at the past 5-year period alone. The chosen few were Narges Mohammadi, Iranian human rights activist (2023); Ales Bialiatski, Belarusian ‘pro-democracy activist’ (2022); Dmitry Muratov, Russian journalist (2021); Maria Ressa, Filipino-American journalist who focused on the human rights record of former President Rodrigo Duterte whose ‘anti-Americanism’ was a legion (2020).
The Deep State spotted Yunus as early as in 1965 when he was taken away as a Fulbright Foreign Student to Vanderbilt University and spent the next few years in America. (In the recent decades, Americans use Singapore as the training ground for their proxies.) Over the years, American mentors lavishly patronised Yunus’s NGO known as Grameen Bank, which, since its creation in 1983, provided a whopping $7.6 billion (as of end of 2008) in collateral-free loans in over one lakh villages in Bangladesh, creating a vast network of influence in the country!
In September 2010, the House of Representatives of the US Government unanimously passed a bill to award Yunus the Congressional Gold Medal, which is, by the way, along with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Presidential Citizens Medal the highest civilian award in the United States the highest awards given by the USG.
President Barack Obama promptly signed the bill. Only the previous year, in 2009, Yunus was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama. Thus, Yunus joined the pantheon of America’s world heroes who received all three distinctions — Nobel Peace Prize (2006), Presidential Medal of Freedom (2009) and the Congressional Gold Medal (2010). The only other 6 heroes keeping company with Yunus were Martin Luther King Jr., Elie Wiesel, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Norman Borlaug and Aung San Suu Kyi.
Yunus never looked back.
But, as Americans would say, there is nothing like free lunch. From circa 2010, Yunus was launched as a participant in the campaigns of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a platform created by Ronald Reagan in 1983, to provide the CIA with a convenient tool to destabilise foreign governments by sponsoring projects of non-governmental groups for ‘democratic roles.’
NED is a unique, well-rounded institution funded by the US Congress. Its ‘nongovernmental’ character gives it flexibility that makes it possible to work in difficult circumstances, and respond quickly when there is an opportunity for political change. Simply put, it enables the CIA to hide its hands in the destabilisation game.
NED claims to be dedicated to fostering the growth of a wide range of democratic institutions abroad, including political parties, trade unions, free markets and business organisations, as well as the many elements of a vibrant civil society that ensure human rights, an independent media, and the rule of law.
With seamless backing from the US Government, NED has grown by leaps and bounds and in recent years acquired a sharper focus on strategic priorities — such as in Georgia, Ukraine, Armenia, Thailand. Yunus’s main qualification as the choir boy of NED’s ‘democratisation’ project was that he ran an NGO backed by US funds. Suffice to say, a mythical halo was created around it by the Americans, which of course, they are good at while building up the profile of their proxies.
In 2011, Bangladesh government forced Yunus to resign from Grameen Bank, sensing his political ambitions.
The big question is what next? It is highly improbable that Yunus, 84, is equipped to be a nation-builder in the rough-and-tumble Bangladeshi politics.
The Americans, however, need some breathing space before replacing him – likely elevating him as next president. The colour revolution was hastily staged although conditions were ripe for mounting one. The students are demanding power-sharing; the conservative, centre-right Bangladesh Nationalist Party is raring to go; the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, the largest of the country’s Islamist political parties, is cadre-based and can be storm troopers of the highest bidder.
If a US-UK-Pakistani intelligence axis was indeed instrumental in the dethroning of Hasina, as seems the case, all bets are off. Trust them to keep the new set-up going by hook or crook — as in Islamabad since 2022.
The US secretary of state Antony Blinken in his first remarks to the media pointedly avoided any demand that the country should hold early elections. Blinken said, “we’re monitoring the situation very closely. I would just say that any decisions that the interim government makes need to respect democratic principles, need to uphold the rule of law, need to reflect the will of the people.
“We for our part take very seriously the safety and security and well-being of American citizens, of our personnel. We went, as I think you know, to ordered departure of our non-essential personnel, and of course we’ll be watching this day in, day out.”
To be sure, Washington is nervous whether it has bitten more than it could chew. It is entirely conceivable that the pattern in Pakistan may be repeated in Bangladesh — a comprador class ushered into power through ‘elections’ while the military calls the shots from behind the scenes with the support of the US-UK-Pakistani condominium, which engineered the overthrow of Hasina. The future is foreboding, because, for Washington, geopolitics by far supersedes regional security and stability.
M. K. Bhadrakumar
M.K. Bhadrakumar is a former Indian diplomat who served as India’s ambassador to several countries in Asia and Europe during three decades of his career in the Indian Foreign Service. He analyses Indian and geopolitical issues in his blog, Indian Punchline.
