New Delhi: A Nobel laureate, banker and vocal critic of former Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina — who called him a “bloodsucker of the poor” and slapped over 190 legal cases on him — Muhammad Yunus’s life is set to see a complete turnaround.
From being cornered and battered by the Hasina-led administration, Yunus will now go on to head the interim government in Bangladesh after her ouster.
The 84-year-old was perceived by “Dhaka’s governing elite” as an “American stooge” and cables detailing his meetings with American diplomats to “bemoan the sorry state of Bangladeshi politics” were leaked by Wikileaks, according to a Time magazine report from June. “There’s a sense that whenever the U.S. imposes a cost on Hasina, Yunus serves as a convenient whipping boy,” the report had said.
Yunus is best known for founding the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1983, which provides small loans to the poor without collateral. In 2006, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, especially using microcredit to help impoverished people. He earned the title, ‘Banker of the Poor’, which also happens to be the title of his autobiography published in 1999.
He ran afoul of Hasina when he announced his intentions to form a political party in 2007.
The Hasina-led government began reviewing the Grameen Bank’s activities and subsequently removed Yunus as the bank’s managing director for the alleged violation of government retirement rules.
Yunus has, in the past, referred to Hasina as a “dictator”, and has described her latest ouster as a “second liberation” for Bangladesh. “Bangladesh is liberated… We are a free country now,” he told ThePrint in an exclusive interview, minutes after Hasina fled Bangladesh Monday.
During Hasina’s rule, the Nobel laureate was put on trial twice — in 2010 and 2013. He faced a number of corruption allegations. Over the years, he has been charged by the Awami League government in over 190 cases.
This January, Yunus and three of his colleagues from Grameen Telecom, one of his many companies, were accused of violating labour laws for their workers. They were sentenced to six months in jail, but were given bail by a labour court, allowing them time to appeal in a higher court. At the time, Amnesty International had said that the conviction of Yunus was “emblematic of the beleaguered state of human rights” in Bangladesh.
Yunus has won many national and international honours. Apart from the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, he received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2010.
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Family of jewellers
Yunus was born in June 1940 during British colonial rule in the village of Bathua, located close to the present-day port city of Chittagong. He was raised in a Bengali Muslim family and had nine siblings.
His paternal side was in the jewellery trade. As a child, he attended Lamabazar Primary School in Chittagong. He and his family lived in a small two-storey house on Boxirhat Road in the heart of the old business district of Chittagong.
“The ground floor served as my father’s jewellery shop in the front and workshop behind. Our world was always full of noise, gasoline fumes and the screams of passing street vendors, jugglers, beggars and just plain madmen,” Yunus had recalled in his autobiography.
He credits his mother, Sofia Khatun, for inspiring him to help the poor. “She always had money put away for any poor relations who visited us from distant villages. It was she, through her concern for the poor and the disadvantaged, who helped me discover my destiny,” he had written.
In 1960, Yunus completed his bachelor’s degree in economics from Dhaka University and then his master’s in 1961. Shortly afterwards, he began teaching economics at Chittagong College and was a lecturer until 1965. During this time, he set up a packaging and printing business given that all packaging materials had to be brought from western Pakistan at the time.
He travelled to the US in 1965 after receiving a Fulbright scholarship to study economics at Vanderbilt University. Here, he met Vera Forostenko, who he married and had one child with — Monica Yunus, who is an opera singer. The two later divorced.
Yunus received his PhD from Vanderbilt University in 1969, and then taught as an assistant professor at Middle Tennessee State University.
At the time of the Bangladesh Liberation War, Yunus headed the economics department at Chittagong University. He ran the ‘Bangladesh Information Center’ during the war, along with other Bangladeshis in the US, to raise support for the country’s independence. He later married Afrozi Yunus, a professor of physics at Jahangirnagar University. They have a daughter together, Deena.
This July, speaking to Bloomberg, Yunus had claimed that he was under constant surveillance by the Hasina government, and that he and Deena were on a watch list at the airport.
Apart from Grameen Bank, Yunus set up other subsidiaries, like Grameenphone, the largest telephone service in Bangladesh. The inauguration of the company had taken place at Hasina’s office on 26 March, 1997. Hasina had made the first call to the rural outskirts of Dhaka city that day. Since then, the company has been leading Bangladesh’s telecom sector and serves over 85 million customers.
Tryst with politics & claims of embezzlement
In February 2007, Yunus had proposed to launch a political party, tentatively called Nagorik Shakti (Citizens’ Power). But he eventually chose not to go ahead, citing lack of eligible candidates.
This decision followed a meeting with the head of the interim government at the time, Fakhruddin Ahmed, who is also an economist and the former governor of the Bangladesh central bank. At the time, top politicians, like former prime ministers Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina, were imprisoned on corruption charges and a state of emergency was enforced in Bangladesh.
The first accusation of embezzlement against Yunus came in 2010.
Danish documentary filmmaker Tom Heinemann accused Yunus and the Grameen Bank of allegedly diverting millions of dollars of aid money given by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD). The title of the documentary was “Caught in Microcredit”.
The Hasina government subsequently began investigations into Yunus’s activities and removed him as the bank’s managing director for alleged violation of retirement rules. He was past the 60-year mark at the time. The Bangladesh Supreme Court in April 2011 backed his dismissal.
Back then, Hasina had accused Grameen Bank of only attracting large sums of aid from western countries with no visible change on ground. “This is nothing but sucking money out of the people after giving them loans. There has been no improvement in the lifestyle of the poor so far. They were just used as pawns to get more aid,” Hasina had said at a media conference in December 2010.
Yunus went on to face several court cases.
In 2015, he was accused of non-payment of taxes amounting to $1.51 million. This June, he was indicted by a court on charges of embezzling $2.2 million from the workers’ welfare fund of his telecom company.
(Edited by Mannat Chugh)
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