In Dhaka, the street art is still visible: a cuffed hand clenched in a fist; an injured student being rushed towards aid on a bicycle; the words “the blood of martyrs shall not go in vain”.
These murals were daubed in July and August, after police opened fire on people who had gathered to protest against a job scheme favouring Bangladesh’s ruling Awami League party. With hundreds dead, students from Dhaka University seized control of the uprising and forced the country’s authoritarian ruler, Sheikh Hasina, to flee to India. It has been one of the most striking victories for people power of recent times.
The three months since what the students call a “revolution” have been equally extraordinary. In August, they invited Muhammad Yunus, the 84-year-old Nobel peace prizewinning economist and entrepreneur, to serve as “chief adviser”, in effect caretaker leader. Yunus has embarked on a sweeping reform of Bangladesh’s broken political system and institutions. Elections are promised at a yet-to-be defined point in the future. And the students sit in a privileged place, with two holding cabinet positions in the interim government. Yunus insists he has no ambition to continue in politics after his current role.
When he meets world leaders, Yunus presses upon them a recently published book featuring Dhaka’s protest art. “They are the heroes of the country,” Yunus says of the students in an interview with the Financial Times. “They are the winners . . . The revolution was brought by them.”
In vigour and ambition, the changes Yunus and his young government are attempting are of a type unseen until now in South Asia’s hidebound politics — analogous to reforms that began in central Europe following the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989, or Myanmar’s decade-long break with military rule after 2011.
Yunus, who accuses the Awami League of espousing “fascism” because of its co-opting of institutions like the police and the courts, has convened reform commissions tasked with remaking compromised arms of the state. These range from reshaping the country’s constitution and election system to attempting to account for the hundreds — possibly thousands — of people who, according to human rights groups, were tortured or killed in secret prisons during the regime. The commissions have been tasked with reporting back by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, a newly installed central bank governor, Ahsan Mansur, is tracking down and trying to recover some $17bn he estimates was taken abroad by bank owners close to the old regime — just one part of the massive corruption Hasina and her associates have been accused of.
It’s a moment rich with promise, but fraught with risks for the leader and his small team — and a gamble, too, for one of the world’s most populous countries, whose political journey after independence in 1971 has often been bumpy.
Time is short, and much could yet go wrong. Protesters are continuing to rally in Dhaka’s streets, last week demanding the resignation of the president, Mohammed Shahabuddin, who was installed by the old regime. And the country is still recovering from the chaotic days after August 5, when many Awami League supporters were arrested, attacked or killed.