LENDER TO LEADER

Bangladeshis are banking on Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus

- NILADRY SARKAR

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.