Anti-India, pro-Islamic forces conspired to oust Sheikh Hasina

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh, who fled to neighbouring country India on 5 August 2024 after massive violent street protests, fought a political guerrilla war for years against her successor Muhamad Yunus, a 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner.

She defeated him in 2011 when a court kicked him out of Grameen Bank, a world-famous institution he built from the ground up.

The legal battle was part of Hasina’s game plan to cut down the U.S. protégé to prevent him from becoming too strong to replace her with himself.

In the end, however, she lost out to the U.S.-trained development economist.

Three days after Hasina’s ouster, Yunus became de facto prime minister, albeit unelected, fulfilling the wishes of anti-Hasina agitators.

On the surface, it appeared that the students led the successful street protests, but in reality, deep-rooted religious-political cliques in the Muslim-majority South Asian nation of 170 million Bengalis fomented the unrest from behind the scenes.

This is evident from the fact that the agitation, which started with a simple demand to repeal a special job allocation policy that allegedly favoured ruling party followers, suddenly transformed into a mass ultimatum for the prime minister’s resignation.

The dynamics of the protest shifted even though Hasina had accepted the protesters’ demands earlier.

The demand for the quota reform, which culminated in the ouster of Hasina, was merely a facade used by anti-Hasina, pro-Islamic, anti-Hindu, and anti-India factions to incite public sentiment aimed at toppling the prime minister.