Fish out of water
ON DECEMBER 5, about three months after he took oath as the head of an interim government following the ouster of Sheikh Hasina, Muhammad Yunus urged all political parties in the country to unite. His call came at a meeting with leaders of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the country's second biggest party after Hasina's Awami League, the fundamentalist Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami and a clutch of Islamic groups. Awami League and its ally Jatiya Party, founded by former military dictator Hussain Muhammad Ershad, were not invited to the meeting.
By several accounts, the atmosphere at the meeting's venue-the Foreign Services Academy-was sombre, quite different from the euphoria over the ouster of the "fascist" Hasina regime in July-August. The triumphalism has now been tempered with a sense of anxiety over the future in the absence of a clear roadmap. Bangladesh today finds itself at a crucial juncture with the interim government busy firefighting the fallout of alleged atrocities against Hindus. The arrest of former International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) member Chinmoy Krishna Das, who had been helming street protests by Hindus across Bangladesh under the banner of Bangladesh Sommilito Sanatani Jagaran Jote (United Sanatan Awakening Alliance), added fuel to the already raging fire in Bangladesh's political cauldron. The protests and clashes after the arrest and the killing of a Muslim lawyer point to two things: One, the law and order situation remains anything but stable, and two, it has taken a communal colour.
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