No. The Nobel laureate, champion of poverty reduction, and one of the most prominent names in the world is still alive. But, Sheikh Hasina, the ultimate dictator Bangladesh has ever seen, has achieved her mission of wreaking havoc, tantamount to death, on the Octogenarian man.
After ensuring another term through yet another farcical election, the Hasina-led Awami regime did not take much long to start harassing the prominent figure. They took him to the courts with fringe cases and in the end encroached all his offices and the institutes in Dhaka forcefully.
It is well known that Hasina has always been eager to get a Nobel prize but the West did not really show any interest in awarding one to the controversial leader. As a result, the wrath on Yunus was not only political but also personal.
Yunus on the other hand, did not leave his country and all the institutes he built over the years to fight against poverty reduction. He mostly remained reticent despite all his big international network and never really bothered about the political activities.
He was saved by the pressure of his Western powerful friends time and again but now the power of the Hasina regime became insurmountable, and at the same time West’s interest and influence waned in this part of the world.
Hasina got confidence as the West failed to thwart her farcical election and resurrect democracy in Bangladesh. The prolonged war in Ukraine and the heinous attack of Israel on Palestine made the West also morally, politically and financially weak and occupied elsewhere in the world. Also, they are so busy dealing with those situations, the interest in Bangladesh is shelved for the time being, it seems.
The Awami regime is now walking over the tightrope of diplomacy and keeping the West at arm's length with the aid of India and China-led alliance. As a result, it gained the confidence to take audacious action against Yunus.
Unfortunately for Bangladesh, it is not only the demise of a great man but also the fall of institutions. In the future when we talk about the impact of this regime, the most prominent one will be the destruction of institutions, the building block of any democracy.
The regime has decimated them all using power and most frustratingly by tweaking and manoeuvring law as its wand.
The Boxer: The author is one of the indefatigable working-class Bangladeshis who have been trying to change the fate of the nation but were betrayed by the ruling elites and autocrats. The name is inspired by a character in George Orwell's 1945 novel Animal Farm.