Manash Ghosh | Yunus’ Mess: Can Tarique Tackle Dhaka’s Challenges?

With the passing of Begum Khaleda Zia, former chairperson of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), an extremely acrimonious phase of that country’s politics has come to an end. It also coincides with the beginning of a new era marked by the homecoming of her 60-year-old son, Tarique Zia, now BNP chairman, after 18 years of forced self-exile in London.

Immediately on his return, he is saddled with the responsibility of navigating his party through the tortuous crosscurrents of electoral politics and coasting it to victory in the coming polls, which will be a tough challenge. The February election will be totally different from those in the past. The big question is if Tarique will measure up to the challenges he will face before, during and after the elections despite inheriting the rich political legacies of his parents.

The coming election will also severely test his leadership skills and political acumen, besides his ability to hold his own while steering his party to victory at the hustings.

For the first time, the BNP will face the Jamaat-e-Islami-led 12-party Islamic alliance as its main rival. The BNP had earlier always had Jamaat as an electoral ally, with which it formed governments and even shared key portfolios with. This time both are fighting one another with no-holds-barred “josh”. With interim government head Muhammad Yunus having unjustly barred the Awami League and Jatiyo party from contesting, the BNP’s chances of victory are brighter. But there are many imponderables that might rob it of success, most important being Mr Yunus’ deliberate failure to create a level playing field. His highly partisan actions have besmirched his “neutral” image so badly that the election’s credibility is undermined.

The poll process is on amidst total lawlessness in Bangladesh, with sophisticated arms and jihadi outfits abounding in the political arena. Besides, the political ideology of those outfits are linked with the Jamaat, which will help it electorally. Also, Mr Yunus’ proximity to Jamaat is an open secret, which may prevent free and fair elections. His “neutral” image has taken the hardest hit from the very student leaders who had installed him as interim government head after Sheikh Hasina’s regime collapsed. They are now openly accusing him of being involved in a “deep-rooted conspiracy” over the recent targeted killing of radical student leader Osman Hadi in broad daylight in Dhaka.

It's now clear why Hadi was killed and with what heinous intent. This accusation was further buttressed by Hadi’s brother who has levelled similar charges against the government. The purpose, they claim, was to indefinitely postpone the elections, citing the worsening law and order situation. Hadi was illed for having campaigned for Bangladesh making a smooth democratic transition through free and fair elections and also for declaring himself a candidate. The other objective was to fulfil Mr Yunus’ much-cherished wish to prolong his unelected rule indefinitely.

Mr Yunus’s undeclared strategy remains to create a situation that will plunge the country into instability and anarchy, maybe leading to civil war. His government knew such a strategy gave an excellent opportunity for the US-backed Jamaat-e-Islami and ISIS-supported jihadists to fish in troubled waters as they have large stockpiles of arms looted from police armouries in the 2024 “uprising”, which they could use for a power takeover and declaring Bangladesh an Islamic republic. The Jamaat and jihadists made no secret this was their ultimate goal: to run Bangladesh based on the Sharia. What Khondokar Mushtaque, Ziaur Rahman and Pakistani-minded Bengali military officers who conspired to kill Mujib failed to do in 1975, Mr Yunus, with help from local Islamic cohorts, besides Pakistan, Turkey and the Muslim “Ummah”, is trying to achieve at any cost. The recent spate of medieval-style unprecedented killings and the burning down of leading newspaper offices and iconic cultural institutions are pointers to that end. He wants to complete the unfinished task of Mushtaque and Zia of banishing secularism from the statute as an ideal and establish Islam’s primacy in every walk of life.

Osman Hadi’s killing signalled a series of unparalleled and well-orchestrated violent incidents the likes of which Bangladesh had never seen before. Taking advantage of the political instability, the Jamaat and armed Islamist groups, like Hizbut Tahrir (HT), Harkatul Jihad (HUJI), Ansarullah Bangla Team and others had made bids and are still trying to establish Islamic rule in Bangladesh.

The other reason why Hadi’s killing was followed by a spate of arson cases -- including the burning down of the offices of two prominent dailies, Daily Star and Prothom Alo, and famed cultural centres is to showcase the message to the country’s Muslim-majority that “un-Islamic activities” were unfavourably viewed by the Yunus establishment. Also, the burning alive of a 30-year-old garment worker, Dipu Das, on trumped-up blasphemy charges, sent shockwaves through the country’s minority communities. Since August 5, 2024 until November 30, 2025, fifty Hindus have lost their lives at the hands of the jihadists, according to Jatiyo Durga Puja Udjapan Parishad. In the past few weeks, seven attempts to burn alive as many Hindu and Buddhist households were made by Yunus-backed mobs.

The most common feature in the latest round of violence is setting fire to people and their properties -- a hallmark of the Jamaat, widely resorted to by its cadres -- and also by the jihadists during the 2024 “uprising” when over 3,000 policemen were lynched, with their bodies strung up on trees, house-tops and flyovers or burnt alive inside police stations. The jihadists, who recently set fire to the offices of the dailies, did not allow the staff to use the fire escape but instead forced them to their building tops so that they would eventually be burnt alive. Fire tenders were stopped from reaching the inferno while desperate SOS calls to Mr Yunus and his advisers by the editors of the two dailies went unanswered. The Army and the police, who had arrived in time, were instructed to be mere spectators.

By killing Hadi, the Yunus regime wanted to create widespread fear among poll contestants that their lives too were in peril and they better withdraw from the polls. With the chief election commissioner expressing apprehension that more targeted killings of candidates might happen, doubts have begun to surface on whether the February 12 elections will be held at all.

The best summation of the 17-month-old Yunus regime was offered by one of the editors of the Dhaka dailies who said that Mr Yunus’ administration will be remembered for being “an era of murder, when freedom of expression too was banished from the country”.

Manash Ghosh is a veteran journalist who had covered the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war, and is the author of several books including, most recently, Mujib’s Blunders: The Power and the Plot Behind His Killing