Pakistonomy

Episode 210 - What happened in Bangladesh and what comes next?

In this episode, Uzair talks to Amb. Shamsher Mubin Chowdhury about what led to the collapse of the Hasina regime in Bangladesh and what comes next for the country. We focused on the reasons why younger citizens were angry with the government and reports of violence against Hindus over the last few days. We also discussed whether foreign agencies led to Hasina’s ouster.

Amb. Chowdhury is a war hero who took active part in the Bangladesh War of Liberation in 1971. For his bravery and contribution in the battlefield the Government of Bangladesh conferred upon him the gallantry award Bir Bikram. He has also served as a top diplomat for Bangladesh around the world, including as Ambassador of Bangladesh to the United States of America, with concurrent accreditation to Colombia, Brazil and Mexico from 2005 to 2007.

Chapters:

0:00 Introduction 2:20 What just happened? 17:40 Claims of foreign involvement 29:20 Secularism in Bangladesh 40:05 What comes next?

Duration:: 48m
Broadcast on:: 12 Aug 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to another episode of Pakistanami. My name is Uzair Yunus, and today we're gonna be talking about not Pakistan, but country to the east of Pakistan, Bangladesh, which has had a pretty interesting and news filled a few days. There has been, if you've been following around what's been happening in the country, there have been a series of protests in Bangladesh going back a few weeks, starting with the students and the quota restrictions related to the students, the who came out on the streets. Since then, there was acts of violence. Hundreds of people lost their lives. And a few days ago, Sheikhasina, the country's prime minister, left the country and departed for India. Since her departure, a new interim government led by Dr. Mamad Yunus, Nobel laureate, has taken oath and what comes next remains to be seen. But in all of this, there has been a lot of misinformation, a lot of confusion about what happened in Bangladesh and the reasons for that. So I figured I would host somebody who can tell us a bit more about what is going on and what comes next. And my guest today is Shamsher Mobin Chaudhuri. He's a war hero who took active part in the Bangladesh War of Liberation in 1971 for his bravery and contribution in the battlefield. The government of Bangladesh conferred upon him the Gallantry Award, Beard Bikram. He's also served as a top diplomat for Bangladesh around the world, including as ambassador of the country to the United States of America with concurrent accreditation to Colombia, Brazil and Mexico from 2005 and 2007. So, sir, thank you so much for taking out the time today. I know it's a bit late in the evening for you and it's been a lot of action in Bangladesh. So I'm really excited for this conversation. And once again, thank you for taking out the time today. - My pleasure, absolutely. - I want to begin with sort of, you helping us understand exactly what happened and why the Hasina government collapsed in such a sudden manner. A lot of people thought this was a very stable regime. Elections had just happened, although with a very low turnout of about 40%. So to many of us, it all came as a surprise and just help us understand what the drivers of this were and what exactly happened in Dhaka. - Well, yes, the final exit of the former prime minister was really at a very, very fast pace and something that none had anticipated. She and the government felt quite comfortable unless about a month, month and a half ago. And it started with, well, it started this time with the issue of quota in the government jobs. There was a protest earlier in 2018. The students were saying that the quota system needs a reform because a lot of people with merit get left out from getting government jobs because of the quota system. So the prime minister in 2018 on the floor of the parliament announced that she's going to abolish all quotas. Now, the students never wanted the abolition of the quota system, they wanted to reform office. Suddenly, sometimes in June this, if I remember right, the high court, somebody moved a petition in the high court saying that the prime minister decision of 2018 to scrap the quota system altogether was illegal. So one of the high court said that obviously it meant the quota system was restored. And this upset the younger generation, the university students started off with the protest coming up from the public university, the government owned universities and then it went into private universities and even colleges and schools. And in the end, the general public sympathized with the protesters. The reason for that is in an effort to quail the protest, the police started a very brutal action of firing on the student and brutally trying to stop the protest from getting any longer. And that actually backfired because the student became even more unified, far more active and it spread like wildfire. Now what happened in the meantime is after the high court called the rule that the prime minister decision to abolish what has to say was illegal, the government did file an appeal against that in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court had set a date of seventh of August for a hearing on this. Now that did not please the students. They said, why is so late? Why can the government, the Attorney General, moved to the Supreme Court and bring the date of the hearing forward immediately? But let's get a question on the Supreme Court. The government ignored that call by the students and at a press conference after the prime minister or the former prime minister returned from China, she was asked a question on the quota issue and she said that why is there so much anger against the freedom fighters? Should I not give jobs to children of freedom fighters? Or should I give them to the children of rasakars? Now rasakar is a very derogative term in Bangladesh because of the involvement of some Bangladeshis with the Pakistan army in 1971, especially from the Jamaat Islam party. And they were called rasakars. Rasakar is a very, has a very huge negative connotation in Bangladesh. You see, had this press conference in the late afternoon, by midnight, distributed gathering even further, why are you calling us rasakars? And she said, I didn't call them rasakars, but they said, that's what you meant, that we are children of rasakars. And that gained enormous momentum, enormous momentum, unbelievable. And then the Secretary General of the ruling party that the murderous weapons in their hands. And of course, they're backed by the police. In fact, it came to a position where it was difficult to distinguish between the student league and the police. In many cases, the police was wearing a civil and clothes. And the student league members, or I'm kind of hired goons, I would say, were wearing helmets. So why were they trying to protect their identity? And they came to the name of the helmet, Bahini. Bahini means force, helmet force. And their brutality on the students was on life television all over the country and even outside the country. You know, this is the age of social media. You need one click on a mobile phone to record anything and everything that is happening. And the more the students, they tried to enter the university of halls and they closed it down the universities, all universities in the country, colleges, schools. And it was mayhem for a while. And it began to turn worse, especially up such certain images appeared on, you know, when viral and as you would know very well that in a situation like this, an image can have a great impact. Now, here was the image of a very smart young student, you know, standing up with his chest open arms stretched and said that, you know, shoot me. I'm standing for my right. This fellow was called Abu Sayyid. He comes from a poor family in Rangpur in Bangladesh. And the police fired on him. And that caught on like a wildfire. So the movement centered around the image and said, like this, one of the 300 people who have been killed. And they resorted to very heavy-handed actions like helicopters firing from above, not just pellets. The army bullets were real live bullets were being fired. The army was called out at one stage. There were reports that the army was also firing on the students. And then another student who was just distributing water to the protesters, you know, do you need water? Do you need water? So it's handing out bottles of water. And within 15 minutes, he was dead, shot dead. A bullet, I think, hitting somewhere on his head or neck or something, and he died. And this has even been now shown on CNN, one of CNN programs I saw there said that he was only distributing water to protest and 15 minutes later he was dead. I don't think there's very few people in the world who don't see CNN. So these images started affecting the families. Parents came out in support of these students. Ordinary people came out in support of the students. And it reached a stage where it was made clear to the prime minister that it's not able to protect you any longer. And she stood firm for a while. But the momentum was such that on the 5th of August, when the student declared March to Dhaka, people from all over, not everywhere in the country, but many parts of neighboring districts and cities started marching towards Dhaka. And by 12th mid noon, we saw news on our television scroll saying that the army chief will address the nation at 2 PM. Now, that, of course, got us pretty strange. Why is the army chief? When anybody is to address the nation, it's too tight to the prime minister or the president. But why the army chief? And one could see students moving towards Kona Bhavan, which is the official residence of the prime minister in Bangladesh. It has been since 1972. And eventually reached a point that she was asked to leave. She went to the president. She submitted her resignation. And then she took a helicopter, military helicopter, to one of the Air Force bases just on corners of Dhaka. And then from there, she took an Air Force plane. Her cue is C-130. We then took her to Delhi. Now, the Indian Foreign Minister Dr. S. Chashankar explained all this to the Indian Rajasava, how they received the request for flight of a military aircraft to India, and how it was granted. And that plane carried the prime minister and her sister to Delhi. And that's where they are right now. In the meantime, but then we had a political backbone. The head of the government is not there, so what do we do? So the consensus after the army chief, the navy chief, the Air Force chief, met the political parties, met the students, protested leaders, what they call the coordinators group, a very bright set of young boys and girls. And the consensus was that Nobel laureate Professor Yunus would seem to be the best choice, to be sworn in as head of an interim government. And the president can do that in such a vacuum. We will have to, of course, be ratified by the parliament as and when we have a parliament, after the next election. And then Professor Yunus, who was in Paris, as a guest for the Olympic, came back from Paris. And I think the same day, same evening he was thrown in, along with 17 advisors from retired. One is a retired military officer, two former diplomats. It's a mixed kind of group of people, civil society, university teachers, and that kind of a thing. So that's just where we are, but in the meantime, what happened happened, we saw a mayhem on the other side, a lot of looting, a lot of vandalism going on, shops being looted, house, even the prime minister, the residence was ransacked, but then the students, when they took charge, they made sure that everything is returned, not that everything got returned. Many houses were burned, you know, how many leaders, empty houses were vandalized, shopping malls were vandalized. It's continued for about 24 hours, something like that. And then there are attacks from some minority groups as well. Official, not official, I would say, reports coming from some sources said that these were being done by the Jamaat Islami and the Shibi and all that, which is the student being of the Jamaat Islami. But we really don't know, unless a picture is clear, who was actually behind the attack on minorities and many minorities left the country. And but now more and more images are appearing that there are a lot of photoshopping of this minority attacks. In the meantime, also over the last two and a half days, the Hindu community and the minority community has also come out of the streets demanding protection and safety for their life and livelihood and the government, Professor Yunus himself, has assured them and the police were absent because the police was also a target of the protesters because the police had become very politicized and the trust between the police and the public went down south absolutely to zero. So the police then went off work and now the government is negotiating with the police for them to come back, some have come back. Today, I understand Professor Yunus was supposed to meet the police people at the police headquarters, but something went wrong, it didn't happen. I think the police are demanding their own protection and that they are not be treated because they were said, "We are working under orders of the government of the day." Why blame us? And I guess most of the police people, Mr. Al would have a valid point in that. You know, they're supposed to be part of a disciplined force because they're asked to do something to do it. The top leadership of the police, of course, has been fired, the new inspector general police, something called a rapid action battalion, which had gained notoriety for a lot of extrajudicial deaths. They have a deechie, they now have a new deechie and the intelligence agency are also being, you know, trying to look like they're spared. But this process is still going on. In the meantime, the advisors have gone to work in their respective ministries. Advisor for Foreign Affairs is a former Foreign Secretary, Tawitusan, he had a meeting with the press yesterday. He also had a meeting with the press today. You know, try to explain where we go from here in terms of image of the country that minorities are being attacked, people are leaving. And that the former prime minister in India, even now, the confusion, is that going to be her destination for the foreseeable future or is she going to go somewhere else to Europe, to the UK or somewhere else? We do not know that, that is not yet clear. - Before we go to sort of what comes next, I wanna you mentioned the former prime minister who is in India now. Over the last 48 hours or so, we've had some new statements from her. And before that, there were reports as well. Her son had said that somehow Pakistan was involved in all of this. She's alleging somehow that the United States has involved the listeners for this podcast. No, a familiar name, Donald Do. The Assistant Secretary of State has been mentioned again, responsible for regime change in Islam by the year or so ago as well. According to many, what do you make of these claims that somehow this was a regime change operation, so to speak, by the CIA or the ISI out of Washington or Pakistan? - Well, this narrative started, was started by the prime minister herself very early on. And typically, our leaders of our party started repeating that same narrative. This is a US game. The US wants a regime change. They want a base in Bangladesh and I'm not gonna give them a base. No, they want me out, et cetera, et cetera. And then they're saying, oh, there's an ISI hand because Yamath is involved. So ISI must be involved in this. A, we saw a kind of a screenshot of a statement purportedly by former prime minister saying that if I had agreed to give said much in Ireland to the USA as a base, I would have still been power. But I resigned in the interest of, stopping bloodshed, more bloodshed in the country. I know I lost this time, but I'll come back again. Initially, the son, I mean, she's immediate reaction after his mother left the country, said, my mother is 76 years old. This was going to be her last term anyway. And he even said on an NDTV interview that she was not going to continue to do politics. But then it changed that statement later on saying, she said, no, no, she's still interested to go back and do and pick up the thread where she left it. Interestingly, the son has also come up with another statement saying that my mother made no statements since, or before or since leaving Bangladesh. And otherwise that screenshot we saw, he said that's a fake one, they never made it. But dood darshan in India and NDTV carried that. And it also said that she may be talking to the Indian media shortly. And he said, no, she made no such commitment and Indian media is not meeting her. So we do not know if there's a foreign hand, but the way I saw it as it evolved, because very organic, very totally Bangladeshi, youth, new generation, 50% of population are youth. And Bangladesh is a very politicized nation. We like to vote. But this is a huge number of young people. For the last three elections, they never had a chance to vote because the elections of 2014, 2018 and 2024, were seriously rigged. My mother's argument has been that BNP boy quoted, so why should you rig? But in 2018, when the BNP did take part in the election, we know that everybody knows that. The ballots were stamped the night before the election. They didn't even wait for the election day. And much of it came out when the former election, chief election commissioner, said that we are putting in place a system, but in the next election, there'll be no voting at night. In other wise, he kind of accepted, or I've been kind of exposed that yes, there was voting the night before. - There was a loophole and now we're gonna fix that loophole. That's as far as he was willing to go. - Right. So the night stamping was not during his election committee, it was the previous election committee. So we have seen this. Unfortunately, the total absence of accountability, the dark future, many of the youth were looking up to, unless you were linked with your mommy league in one form or the other, I ran in the election myself, and again, a victim of a rigged election. And I could say that our polls closed at 4 p.m. in the afternoon, and 3.30, I could see barely 8, 9% of voters turned out. And in the next half an hour, suddenly the numbers went up to 25%. Now, when I was campaigning in one of my areas in Sylhet, that is in the north of Bangladesh, it borders Megaloy in India and Assam in India also. So what happened is, well, I was addressing a public meeting in the evening, a young boy, and he said, he introduced himself as a university student, or just about to graduate. He said, "I want to say something." Usually, you know, in campaigns to be politicians, talk, and we make all these lofty promises and everything. But he said, "I want to say something." So I said, "Please give him the floor. "Let me hear the new generation." And he said, I know you from, because I was a common foreign secretary, a freedom fighter, a decorated freedom fighter. I heard about you, I saw you on television, I saw you on YouTube, I have read respect for you. My question is, what is my future? And that is an issue that bothers every, or majority of the youth, who are not aligned to the ruling party. And is there a future for us? Can I do, can I get a job with a bribing someone? Can I get a, can I do business with a bribing someone? You know, what we call pay rent? And this was a very burning issue. And the reason is, yes, a huge amount of corruption, lack of accountability, lack of transparency, in recruitment, partisanship, in recruitment. But Professor Raman Subhan, a very respected economist in Bangladesh, was very close to Raman Subhan, he was one of the key players of the historic six points. A point that Sheikh Mughib had raised in Lahore in 1966, devolving according to all the provinces of Pakistan, except foreign defense. And he himself has been very disillusioned with a lot of things, he's written a couple of books, which sold widely here in Bangladesh and in outside. So the fact that you have to pay what they call the conism, you know, capitalism is one thing, but conism is worse. So those things, and it was affecting the future generation. They're really looking out into the dark, as for the future is concerned. And that's why this protest which started as a protest, and eventually I must say, it took the shape of a revolution. And I say something like the French Revolution of 300 years ago, when the Bastille was raided by the protesters, and a lot of beheading took place. Here, no beheading didn't take place. No, the former prime minister was allowed to leave the country's safety. The president is actually the head of the government, and the interim government is answerable to the president. And because there are advisors to the president, and it's a constitutional post for the president. But in this situation, it is the president and the interim government that makes the shots, that call the shots and makes the decisions and make the policies. In the meantime, because of the absence of most of the police force, the military is trying to maintain law and order. Students are trying to manage traffic on these streets, which they're not supposed to do. They're not trained to do that. They should be going back to their schools and colleges. And it's very touching to see young boys and girls, standing out in the rain and sun, trying to manage traffic. And I must admit that there's a sense of respect by most of the people who are driving to these boys and girls, because they say, okay, these are not the corrupted police. So if this one girl puts up her hand and the bus stops, right then and there, because she don't look up for her. - It's also been interesting to see that, you know, Gen Z, essentially, that so many around the world write off and say they're lazy, they're naive, they like being on the internet and don't engage with the real world. These are the young boys and girls who've made this possible. - Absolutely, absolutely. The sense of progressiveness that the girls are coming out is one real, but you see it now in social media. The young girls, she wears a hijab and saying and the TV television cameras are asking her question. And she's very boldly, very boldly answering this question. She said that, I'm out here in protest against injustice. And I have to fight as long as it needs to be fought. I'll not go back home till I get justice. So somebody asked her that, and there's any chance you can go back. She said, where can I go back? Then behind me, the police and with a very sarcastic smile, she says, behind me, the police, I can't go back. And in front of me, I see freedom. But this was spontaneous. It was not that somebody had written a script for her and believed me, it was very touching to see this young girl, what, 20, 22, 23, four years old, saying that I see behind me is the police, but when I look forward to the IC independence freedom. - If I may ask a follow-on question related to that, because it's something that you mentioned, reports of attacks on minority Hindus coming. They've also come out on the street. There have also been videos of people protecting temples and people protecting the property of minorities. - Absolutely, even the most people from the mosques have gone to protect minorities. Madrasa students are going to protect minority worship places of worship and all that. But in the first couple of hours, 12 hours, something, there were attacks on minorities. But not just minorities. I mean, look at how many ministers got their houses burned. Look at how many politicians got their houses vandalized. - And my question related to that, sir, was, there's been this emerging narrative, particularly in Indian media that I've been following, that talks about that Hasina, the former prime minister was deeply secular. And now you have potentially a return to Sharia law in Bangladesh and Sharia law is not compatible with women going to factories to work. And it's not compatible with the protection of into minorities. What do you make of this emerging narrative that somehow the former prime minister was this bulwark of secularism. And everybody else on the other side that has come out against her and has vanished to replace her regime is essentially, you know, Islamist and right-wing and radical. - Well, if you look at the faces and hear the voices of the protesters, they're anything but religious extremists. You know, they're very progressive. There's a new generation. This generation was born long after 1971. These are the dot com generation. They look at progressive movements and well-versed. And so if anybody wants to promote the narrative that Shekhasina was the face of secularism and anybody else will lead to communalism or extreme religious rule in Bangladesh are totally off the market, totally off the market. Bangladesh is, we are inherently non-communal. We grew up with our friends who are from other religions. I might look at my schooling. My first school was Holy Cross College, which is a missionary Christian missionary Holy Cross school, which is Christian missionary school in Dhaka. I spent the first six years of my schooling in that school where Christian missionaries were our teachers and, you know, we were made to take oath on not oath, but even the Bible was used widely. And then my colleagues were not today in college, a very well respected college in Dhaka, very old college in Dhaka. It's like almost a hundred years old now. Run by Christian missionaries from America. And I never felt that I was being a Muslim, going to a missionary school was anything unusual, something very, very usual. And so we did all that. Many of our Bangladeshis went to missionary schools in India, in Darchiling, in Shilong and all the places. So we are inherently a non-communal society. We never made it. You see, all the major religious events of other faiths for Hindus, the Durkapuja, for Christians, Christmas, and for the Buddhist, Durkapurnima, are national holidays in Bangladesh. You know, it's very rare. I think the only other country that does it is, I think India. Number one, number two, Bangladesh, Incorporated secularism as a state policy in 1972. India did not do it in 1974, I think. We had secularism in our constitution long before India did. So, and that was done by, you know, father of the nation, Sheikh Madhivaraman. And so, because he realized that this is our society, you know, we are non-communal by nature. We are deeply religious, very deeply religious. But one cannot deny at the same time. The number of Madrasas have gone up exponentially in Bangladesh. The two types of Madrasas, one is the Koami Madrasa, which is much more rigid Islamic. And as the earlier Madrasa, which is and not as strictly religious as the Koami Madrasa. The other thing that has happened, the Koami Madrasa of Allah is, they don't even recognize Ahmadiyyas as Muslims. You know, in the past, the Ahmadiyyas have been subject of severe attack by the Jamaat islami. - Which is the unfortunate overlap from our shared history as Pakistan, right? - And Pakistan. - Right, right. - And the community has been constitutionally de-recognized as Muslims. - Right, right, right. Our body in Bangladesh is not the case. Now, the Ahmadiyyas have a lobby. They have a lobby in America. So the Americans have always pointed this out, they're why the Ahmadiyyas being attacked and all that. The other thing that Sheikh Hasina being the face of secularism, in 1994, '95, leading up to 1996, the Ahmadiyyas led a very active and virulent movement against then elected BNP government, saying that the BNP must make elections under non-particular government a part of the constitution. Now, in that movement, the Ahmadiyyas partner with the Jamaat islami, and there are photographs from that period showing how Sheikh Hasina and her senior members sitting across the table from with Jamaat islami leaders, trying to draw up a common program of agitation against an elected government, which actually led to a change of regime. So, Ahmadiyyas has also played hoodsies with the Jamaati, and this was reminded to a lot of the Indian in television program that I had spoken to since August 5th, and they eventually had to admit, yes, we must say that she also played footsies with the Jamaati. The other thing is, the secularism was incorporated into our constitution in 1972. In 1976, when President Zia was in office, the constitution was amended, and secularism, the word secularism was replaced by the word social justice. Now, in 1982, we had another military coup led by General Shah, he went even a step further in 1988, or in 1988 or 87, I forget, that Islam is a state religion of Bangladesh, and this was not liked by a majority of the people, because we don't want to have a state religion. We are Muslims, we are Hindus, we are Christians, we are Buddhists, but we don't want to have a state religion as such. So, when in 2011, I think it was, yeah, 2011, 2012, and normally amended the constitution, the 15th amendment, they re-incorporated secularism, but also retained Islam as a state religion. So, this is, you know, totally, I mean, contradictory. - Yeah, those two, those things don't go together, you can't be secular with the state religion. - Exactly, and she defended, she said, no, no, because this was the constitution before. So, which means that Awami League under Sheikh Hasim was also appeasing the hard-line Muslim political groups, and certain sections with textbooks were changed to accommodate the demands of the Islamists in the Biden-Prazor government. So, everybody has played, you know, ball with the Jamaat, and the BNP was perhaps more openly, there are lines with the Jamaat in the government between 2001 and 2006, which was very seen very badly by the common public, because Jamaat was opened your post-war liberation war, and they collaborated with the Pakistani military very directly, and this is a thing that remains deeply embedded. It's an incredible memory in people's mind. So, to blame that, okay, Hasina out means ISI in, CIA in, is not the case, it's certainly not the case. I don't buy the narrative even for a moment. Interestingly, even some in India, well-known people in India, like Dr. Shashita Roor, who we all know are very well, very articulate from one second, and it's a member of the Indian lower house, it looks over, he's been elected for the fourth time from the Congress party. He's repeated to say that this is the student protest, or just the tipping point of a long, festering anger and frustration of the common people, again, it's a present government, or not just present government. I would say it is a festering dissatisfaction with the way governments had been run, both by the B&B and for the last 15 years by Jawamiri, that in our system, rigged election has led to, and what we have is, it's a zero-sum game. You win, you win everything, you lose, you lose everything. There's no space for the opposition. We had a very good harmonious, not harmonious, but at least the civilised existed between the Awamiri and the B.A. B. Ashikasya Nakhalathasya in 1991 to 1995, there was opposition, there was B&B. In the 1996 election, when the B&B, 117 seats, the sat in the opposition, but all that changed. And now we have 99% of the members of Parliament over the last three elections have been Awamiri. So you have parliament, which is one of the finest buildings, things I have to do the world, and ironically, it was designed during Filmashana Yukon's time, and the architect is a Jew, Louis Kahn, who's a world famous architect from the United States. He designed this magnificent parliament building, well, I was a very unique parliament building, and the joke in Bangladesh had been, we have the biggest parliament in terms of the building size, but the smallest in terms of decision-making. - Yeah, and that's unfortunate, right? And I agree with you that it's a long-festering issue, and it's, again, a reminder to many in South Asia that economic progress with an authoritarian and crony capital packaging doesn't have a lot of legs in South Asia, at least but in many other parts of the world as well. My last question to you, sir, is obviously there's an interim government now made up of quite reputable people led by Dr. Yunus himself, but of course, the question is, well, what comes next in Bangladesh, both in terms of restoring political, economic, social stability in the near term, but also charting a better status quo, a better path forward for democracy, for rule of law, for inclusiveness in the country, something that you and I both agree that the next generation demands of the country. How do you see things playing out in the near future? Primarily because there are many also who point out and say, well, look at what happened in the Arab Spring or look at what happened with the color revolutions and other parts of the world. Things don't really end well when regimes are toppled in this way. And I would be curious to end this conversation, this fantastic conversation with your thoughts on what has to happen next in Bangladesh for truly this moment to chart a better course forward for Bangladesh. People in particular, it's huge. Well, I think the first priority right now is to ensure law order and safety and security for the people. I think that has to be the very first priority for the interim government. The second is focusing on, like parallelly focusing on the economy, because we have been hit very badly by Russia's war in Ukraine, we are an energy importing country and she's energy prices went up, our foreign reserve went down from 48 billion to something like less than 20 billion right now. Effective reserve, I do not know it could be even less. We will be having to repay many of the loans we took for the infrastructure development that we took loans from foreign countries, much like the Sri Lanka scenario. I don't think we will be as bad as the Sri Lanka scenario in terms of debt financing. But for that, we need to have stability and the economy going back into full steam. We are, our economy is dependent heavily on two things, the export of ready-made garments and the remittances from Bangladesh is abroad. Right now, the Bangladesh are holding back on repentance. They don't know if the money will reach the people. And because there was a run on the bank with the presence, perceived sense of instability and insecurity, the Bangladesh bank, central bank, or the Bangladesh bank have put the cap on cash withdrawal, not put it too like a day. But even if the worker in Saudi Arabia are Kuwait or Italy or Singapore, remits money to his family and does it through the official banks, official channels, shut the banks, then the family will have to keep on coming back. So the remittance flow has to restart, has to jumpstart, actually. The industries have to jumpstart. So the confidence of foreign players in our economy, investors and all that. And because of the perception that Bangladesh is sliding down in democracy, index, Bangladesh been hard hit by inflation, the foreign investment actually has become very, very, very slow. It'll be very high. So there's a growth rate. We have a growth without jobs. Unemployed graduates is very dangerous thing in society, such large numbers. So growth without employment is not sustainable in the long term. It's never durable. So we have 7%, 6% GDP growth rate, but the disparity between the rich and the poor became even wider. The inflation hit the people very, very hard. Believe me is that people I saw in television even before from a prime selected country, the person going to the market, she said, I used to buy, you know, buy them over jeans, buy the kilo. Now I buy them by the piece. Because I can't afford a kilo. So, and you know, over machine is a very basic vegetable or people buy. Eggs, the price of eggs have gone up, the price of rice has gone up, the onions have gone up. The things that we bring, Bangladesh's are used to, you know, daily diet. And this has hit the common people very hard. Why I say stability is also important because, I mean, the ordinary, the unofficial economy, the Rickshawalas, you know, the CNG driver, the scooter drivers, bus drivers, they survive on what they earn on a day-to-day basis. But now they are more and more visible on the streets, buses are moving, which has applying people. But sense of uncertainty hangs in the air. You know, my wife gets up every day and says, I can still feel the sense of fear. And one certainly, what can happen? What will happen? Now, the Gopal Gattans is a district where the Sheikh family comes from. And there are instances of even the automatic groups attacking the army. So, that happened two days ago. We haven't heard one since. But the army league in Gopal Gattans are very clearly reorganizing. We grouping as you say, the military. So, but that is limited to Gopal Gattans. Will it spread out to rest of the country? We hope it doesn't. But the next thing, the ones they will be able to get the loin order and the economy up to an acceptable level, I wouldn't say thriving, but acceptable level of performance. They have to look at long-term reforms in the government system, the government election system. Should we have two houses of parliament? Our neighbors Sri Lanka has two houses of parliament. India has a two house of parliament for a very, very long time. I'd say from the very beginning, I think. Why can't we have two houses of parliament? You have more, you know, checks and balances. Why can't we increase the number of members of parliament? We had 3971. When we had a population of 75 million, now we have a population of 170 million, and still we have 300 members of parliament. So, you know, all this should be proportional representation so that no party gets a brute majority from an election. So, in a built-in checks and balances. Those reforms, I think, need to be brought in before the next election. So, if the interim government is looking at that, planning for, I don't know if they are right now, but the planning for that, they have to be given time. At least maybe a couple of years. You know what they can do all that. - Got it. Well, on that note, I think we can wrap up this conversation. Again, thank you so much for sharing your point of view and your insights, you know, sitting, observing things from the outside. I just hope that democracy thrives in Bangladesh, that the aspirations of his young people in particular are met. And again, I think I fully agree with you that this was something that was building up to what the events were a few days ago. And I hope that stability is restored very quickly. And again, Bangladesh has set quite a good example in South Asia in terms of economic growth and moving women forward and being more progressive. And one of the-- - Oh yes, our women empowerment record is really good. - Correct. - It's one of the best in South Asia. - Yeah. And so one hopes that trajectory resumes sooner rather than later. So with that, thank you for your time and appreciate you joining us today. - My pleasure, my pleasure. Nice talking to you. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)