The interim government’s decision to ban Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League, the country’s oldest party, is not the step towards stable democracy people were hoping for
When Bangladesh’s Nobel Prize-winning economist Muhammad Yunus was called back home to head its government as ‘chief adviser’, there were hopes that the country would finally break out of the see-sawing despotism it has endured since independence in 1971. Many of those serving in his new government were young and apparently idealistic students who had emerged from the movement that toppled long-serving Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. Perhaps a vibrant democracy would re-emerge in Bangladesh once the dust settled?