Shamima Chowdhury
Politics of Corruptions in Bangladesh is a brand name of present day Bangladesh. After the August uprising that toppled 16-year old Sheikh Hasina’s iron-fits government, the leaders of the ‘meticulously designed operators’ of the Students Uprising known as Bishombo Birudi (anti-discrimination) movement opted to appoint Dr. Mohammed Yunus, a Nobel Laureate with global reputation with high hopes that his selection would end corruption and guarantee huge US aid flow. More so, as he is a generous contributor to the Democratic Campaign fund.
Although five months have elapsed, neither corruption has stopped nor Biden administration came up with billions of dollars as expected. However, once Dr. Yunus became the Chief Adviser, he could manage the judiciary and the government to drop all corruption verdicts and charges against him amounting to billions of taka. In addition, he is successful to influence the nation’s tax department, the NBR that collects taxes to exempt his organizations from paying taxes till 2029. This is truly a great achievement of his Interim government!!
But corruption and extortion has not stopped at all. Rather increased. His Commerce Adviser apologized to the nation and said, due to corruption and extortion, his government failed to reduce runaway inflation of essential food items including rice, potatoes, cooking oil, onions and eggs. The retailers and small shop owners often complain that they had to pay bribe to the extortionists. Even lorries and truck drivers have to pay extortionists to bring essential items to the market place. All these extortions add to price hikes for suffering consumers.
Added to this, since police are highly demoralized after the August uprising as few thousand policemen were mercilessly killed by jehadis and terrorists by burning nearly 460 police stations and hundreds of police vehicles plus vandalized and looted their guns and weapons after Sheikh Hasina’s debacle. More importantly, as many dead policemen were put on display with rope in their necks in crowded public places, nation’s policeforce are highly demoralized. Yunus government, therefore, is recruiting thousands of new policemen and officers to replace the demoralized ones. The families of the dead policemen want justice and withdrawal of Indemnity so that they can solicit justice.
Yunus government at the insistence of student leaders hurriedly granted “indemnity” to their killers. His government also do not allow media and officials to publish the exact number of fatalities of the police force. As police became ineffective, corruption, theft, robbery, murder out of rivalries or revenge have increased manyfold. In many areas, local residents are patrolling their neighborhoods at night.
Interestingly, many student leaders that toppled the past government reportedly amassing corrupt money overnight. They made good money as they were instrumental in appointing, promoting and transferring government officials and teachers. Few thousand officers have either been appointed or promoted or transferred to lucrative positions and new leaders managed to get enough cash from them. In addition, when severe floods occurred, hundreds of citizens enthusiastically donated cash to a charity fund of the anti-discrimination students group but instead of distributing cash to the flood victims, they kept it in their bank accounts.
As media is highly controlled by Dr. Yunus government (although he often says media is free) social media is full of unverified stories. We don’t know what to believe and no wonder, rumors spread like wild fires.
The government cancelled the accreditation cards of hundreds of journalists and reporters, and many are imprisoned. However, Dr. Yunus met META and Goggle chiefs with a request to stop spread of unverified stories and now a few thousand accounts have just disappeared.
There was euphoria when Dr. Yunus met President Joe Biden during the UN General Assembly High-level meeting in New York last September. His Press Secretary and his Finance Advisor and also his Bangladesh Bank (BB) Governor made public statements hoping to have massive funds inflow. But massive flow of funds are yet to arrive and now the exchange rate sharply depreciated creating volatility. However, his government printed billions of taka currency for financing few banks that were about to be bankrupted pushing inflation higher. BB also raised the interest rate to 10% yet its impact on the market is negligible.
As his administration failed to stop lawlessness and uncertainty, revenue collection has gone down, and both domestic or foreign investment basically halted. In addition, due to uncertainty, many factories and business houses have shut down creating huge unemployment. An emerging economy of Bangladesh that recorded an average 6.7% growth rate in last 15 years is now declining. The nation’s lenders; the World Bank, IMF and ADB have recently downgraded their estimates for GDP growth rate for Bangladesh for 2025 from 6.8% to 3.8% now. If Yunus government continues for a longer period in the pretexts of reforms, the economy is likely to go down further. Already, incidence of poverty has sharply increased and as per RAPID, a research group, rising inflation have pushed an additional 7.8 million people into poverty with 3.8 million slipping into extreme poverty. A further 10 million are at the risk of falling below the poverty line if current inflation continues.
To divert people’s attention from increasing inflation, factory closures, and unemployment, his administration picked up two issues. One is corruption and murder politics, and the other is India bashing.
His administration has brought corruption and murder charges to thousands of the supporters of the past government, and at times, such charges are so much cooked up, imaginitive and out of context that people have no faith in them. No wonder, people on the streets want immediate ouster of Dr. Yunus government.
In fact, many political and bureaucratic leaders of the past government were involved in corruption and instead of identifying them, Yunus government is blaming every officials of the past government and filling murder and corruption cases against them. Number of false accusations and cases surpassed 300,000 and such false charges are a boomerang for corruption. Extortionists are demanding money to drop names from these murder and corruption cases and it has now become talk of the town. Even many journalists are threatening honest citizens to pay them handsomely. Otherwise, they would publish false and cooked out stories of corruption against them.
Bangladesh has a history of losing opportunities for reform. It lost its opportunity to reform in 1991 and again in 2007. Now in 2024, it again is losing its opportunity for improvement and instead becoming a hub of ‘corruption politics’ and ‘innovative extortions’. A police officer who is known as honest recently remarked “sir, some form of corruption is in every country but in Bangladesh, the Bangladeshis has a mindset that they would not hesitate to blame even an angel or a prophet as corrupt’.
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