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It was January 2007. The army had taken over power in Bangladesh. Former Prime Ministers Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia were both in jail on corruption charges.
The army tried to appoint Bangladesh’s Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus as the acting Prime Minister to run the country. However, Yunus backed out from taking such a big responsibility.
After 17 years, Bangladesh is again in political turmoil. Sheikh Hasina has fled the country. Now the responsibility of running the interim government has fallen on the same Mohammad Yunus, who had rejected the post of Prime Minister 17 years ago. This time Yunus has also accepted the proposal.
He will be the chief advisor of the interim government. After Yunus’ name came out, he is being discussed all over the world. Yunus is not an unknown person. He has received the Nobel Prize for becoming a means of eradicating poverty.
Who is Mohammad Yunus, who is said to be Sheikh Hasina’s staunchest opponent, how did he become such a big name in Bangladesh politics and how did his enmity with Hasina begin 16 years ago…his personality in the story
Yunus believes that Sheikh Hasina became a dictator at the instigation of India.
After teaching economics for years, I called it useless
Mohammad Yunus is a social worker, banker and economist. He was born on 28 June 1940 in slave and undivided India. He was born in Chittagong, Bengal to a jeweler, Haji Mohammad Shoudagar. After initial studies in economics from Dhaka University, he moved to America. Where he did PhD and started teaching economics.
Yunus returned to the country after the independence of Bangladesh. He took over the post of Economics Department Head in Chittagong University. This was the time when the condition of the country was not good. After the 1971 war, millions of people in Bangladesh were starving for two meals a day.
Seeing these people struggling with poverty on a daily basis, Yunus lost interest in teaching economics. He called it a useless subject. In an interview to Time magazine, he said that economics did not tell him how to end hunger. After this, Yunus started wandering in the villages around him and started looking for opportunities to do good for the people.
I gave a loan of 500 taka to a woman, this changed her life
According to the Daily Star report, one day while passing through a village, Yunus noticed a woman who was making a bamboo table outside her hut. On talking to the woman, it was revealed that she had taken a loan of 500 Taka (Bangladeshi Rupees) from a moneylender.
The moneylender has put a condition that he should not sell this table in any market. He buys and sells these tables at arbitrary prices. Yunus said that this is not a business but slavery in which the moneylender has bought the skill of a woman by paying her just 500 taka.
Yunus gave 500 taka to the woman and asked her to repay the loan. He told the woman to return the money only when she gets the money. After this Yunus gave loans to groups of 42 women. This was named microcredit. The special thing about this was that those women did not have to deposit any security for this loan.
Yunus formed his own party after winning the Nobel Prize.
These groups of women soon repaid Yunus’ loan. After the success of this system of lending, the foundation of Grameen Bank was laid in Bangladesh in 1983. The Grameen Bank established by Mohammad Yunus has given loans worth more than 4.3 lakh crore taka (3.1 lakh crore Indian rupees) to more than 1 crore poor people in the last 40 years. Most of them are women.
Seeing the success of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, other countries also adopted it. Now the trend of microcredit has spread to more than 100 countries. Developed countries like America have also adopted it.
After the success of Grameen Bank, Yunus started Grameen Phone Company in 1997. This company was the first company to start prepaid mobile service in Bangladesh. Today Grameen Phone is the largest mobile network company in Bangladesh. It has 48% market share. It has more than 8 crore customers. It is the company that pays the highest tax to the government.
Entered politics after receiving Nobel Prize
Because of lifting people out of poverty, Muhammad Yunus came to be known as ‘friend of the poor’ and ‘banker of the poor’. In 2006, Grameen Bank and Muhammad Yunus were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for eradicating poverty.
On 18 February 2007, Yunus formed a political party named ‘Nagarik Shakti’. He said that he would include only people with clean image in this party.
Yunus intended to contest the 2008 elections. For this, he added big names to his party, which included professors and famous journalists. However, it was said at that time that the army was behind Yunus’s move.
Without naming Yunus, Sheikh Hasina had said that such people can be dangerous in politics.
Yunus incurred the enmity of Hasina by forming a new party
Although Mohammad Yunus had formed a new party, he was still associated with Grameen Bank. Pressure started mounting on him to leave Grameen Bank. His party did not have people connected with politics, so this party was not able to create any special appeal. Not only this, he had now started becoming a thorn in the eyes of the leaders.
Sheikh Hasina saw Yunus as a threat to politics. Without naming him, she said, “Newcomers to politics are often dangerous. They should be viewed with suspicion. They do more harm than good to the country.”
On May 3, just 76 days after the party was founded, Yunus announced his decision to leave the party. Even after he quit politics, Sheikh Hasina continued to consider him an enemy. Immediately after forming the government in 2008, Hasina sent investigative agencies after Yunus.
Yunus’s bad days had begun. He was accused of taking money from abroad without informing the government and breaking telecom rules. The staff of his own company filed a case against Yunus. Sheikh Hasina now started attacking Yunus openly.
When he received death threats, he hid in the American embassy
Sheikh Hasina alleged that Yunus gives loans to the poor at high interest rates. He is not a helper of the poor, but a blood-sucker of the poor. After this, in 2011, he was forcibly removed from the Grameen Bank which he himself had established. It was said that even after completing the retirement age of 60 years, he was the managing director of the Grameen Bank.
Hasina called Yunus a puppet of foreign powers. Whenever something went wrong in the country, she would blame Yunus for it.
In 2012, the World Bank refused to give funds to build a bridge over the Padma (Ganga) river. This angered Hasina so much that she said that Yunus used his connections to mislead the World Bank.
Yunus had to hide with his family in the US Embassy in Dhaka for a while after receiving death threats.
Ten years later, in 2022, the bridge over the Padma River was completed. After this, in a meeting of the Awami League, Sheikh Hasina said that Yunus should be drowned in the Padma River and when he starts gasping for breath, he should be pulled onto the bridge so that he learns a lesson.
Earlier Sheikh Hasina used to praise Yunus, later the animosity between the two increased.
A staunch supporter of the father became the enemy of the daughter
There was not always enmity between Sheikh Hasina and Mohammad Yunus. In 1997, Yunus had organized a program in America in which Hasina was made the co-chair. In this, Hasina had praised Yunus a lot and called him the one who removed poverty from the world.
Yunus was a staunch supporter of Sheikh Hasina’s father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. While teaching in Tennessee, Yunus launched a newspaper to raise awareness about Bangladesh’s liberation struggle, but his decision to contest the election soured his relations with Sheikh Hasina.
In January 2024, Yunus had more than 100 cases pending against him. The court had sentenced him to 6 months in jail in a corruption case. Mohammad Yunus calls Sheikh Hasina the killer of democracy in Bangladesh. He says that Hasina became a dictator at the instigation of India and forcibly captured power in Bangladesh.