On the morning of February 17, 2026, an 85-year-old economist addressed his country for the last time as its leader. Muhammad Yunus, the man who had spent decades fighting poverty through microcredit and who was summoned from Paris at a moment of national crisis, spoke with the quiet gravity of someone handing back a burden he never asked for. "The interim government is stepping down," he said. "But let the practice of democracy, freedom of speech, and fundamental rights that has begun not be halted." With that, the most unusual chapter in Bangladesh's political history came to a close.

The nation he left behind was, by most measures, more fractured than the one he inherited. The economy had slowed to a 36-year low. Hundreds had been killed in mob violence. Religious minorities faced an escalating wave of persecution. And yet, something had also been built: a constitutional reform charter approved by nearly 73 percent of voters in a national referendum, the first credible election in over a decade, and a judicial reckoning with the abuses of the Hasina era that, however imperfect, broke a long pattern of impunity. Yunus's legacy is not a simple balance sheet of successes and failures. It is the story of a transitional government caught between revolutionary expectations and institutional reality — between the dream of a "new Bangladesh" and the stubborn persistence of the old one.

To understand what the Yunus government actually achieved and where it fell short requires going beneath the headlines of mob violence and political crisis, and into the structural contradictions that made this experiment so difficult, and so consequential, from the very beginning.

I. The Inheritance

How a quota protest became a revolution — and why a microfinance pioneer became head of state

The story begins not with Yunus but with a seemingly narrow grievance. In June 2024, Bangladesh's Supreme Court invalidated a 2018 government decision abolishing a quota system that reserved a third of civil service jobs for descendants of independence war veterans. For millions of young Bangladeshis — in a country where youth unemployment exceeded 30 percent — this was not an abstract legal question. It was a gatekeeper to the only stable livelihood many of them could imagine.

What started as a student protest against quotas rapidly metastasized into a nationwide revolt against 15 years of creeping authoritarianism. Sheikh Hasina's government responded with staggering brutality: live ammunition, drones, helicopters, and a telecommunications blackout. By the time Hasina fled to India on August 5, the UN would later estimate that approximately 1,400 people had been killed — the worst episode of political violence in Bangladesh since the 1971 Liberation War.

In this power vacuum, the Students Against Discrimination movement — the Gen Z organizers who had catalyzed the uprising — made an extraordinary demand: they wanted the Nobel Prize-winning economist, then 84, to lead the country. It was a choice born of desperation and strategic logic. Yunus was the one figure who commanded both domestic moral authority and international credibility. He had been a target of Hasina's regime, facing what he called trumped-up charges. And he was, critically, not a politician — a virtue in a country where decades of political turbulence had left institutions fragile and public trust eroded.

Yunus was sworn in on August 8 by President Mohammed Shahabuddin. The cabinet he assembled was eclectic: academics, civil society veterans, a former UN official, and two student leaders from the uprising itself. It was, constitutionally, an anomaly — an extra-constitutional government legitimized only by the appellate court's invocation of the "doctrine of necessity." But the mandate from the streets was unambiguous: reform everything, punish the old regime, and then hold elections. The question was always whether those three goals could coexist.

II. The Blueprints

Eleven commissions, 84 proposals, and the most ambitious reform agenda in Bangladesh's history

Yunus moved with surprising speed on the reform front. On September 11, 2024 — barely a month after taking office — he announced the formation of six reform commissions targeting the constitution, the electoral system, the judiciary, the police, the anti-corruption apparatus, and public administration. Five more commissions followed, covering health, women's affairs, labor rights, mass media, and local government. A former IMF economist, Ahsan H. Mansur, was installed as central bank governor to tackle a banking crisis that had metastasized under Hasina's patronage networks.

The commission structure was deliberately technocratic. The Constitutional Reform Commission, led by Illinois State University political scientist Ali Riaz, was tasked with what amounted to reimagining the Bangladeshi state. Their report, submitted in January 2025, was radical in scope: replacing the unitary, prime-minister-dominated system with one featuring a bicameral parliament, term limits, an empowered presidency, stronger judicial independence, and expanded fundamental rights. Secularism, socialism, and nationalism — the foundational principles enshrined by the 1972 constitution — were recommended for removal, replaced by a commitment to "pluralism" in a "multi-nation, multi-religion, multi-language" state.

These recommendations were then funneled through a National Consensus Commission, chaired by Yunus himself, which spent months negotiating with political parties. The result — the July National Charter, signed by 25 parties in October 2025 — consolidated the reform proposals into a single document that would be put to the people in a referendum alongside the general election. It was a remarkable feat of political engineering for an unelected government with no parliamentary mandate.

But the process also revealed deep fissures. While the major political parties, including the BNP, engaged with the Charter process, some parties raised concerns about specific mechanisms such as proportional representation in the proposed upper house. The Awami League, Bangladesh's other historic party, was not at the table at all. Having been banned in May 2025 and its leader sentenced to death in November, the party that had governed for 15 years and commanded the loyalty of tens of millions was simply excised from the conversation. The absence of a major political constituency from the reform process remained a source of tension.

III. The Economy of Fragments

GDP at a 36-year low, 3 million pushed into poverty, and the specter of a garment industry in crisis

If the reform commissions represented the Yunus government's idealism, the economy represented its constraints. What Yunus inherited was not merely a country in political transition but one whose economic foundations had been systematically hollowed out. The "Bangladesh miracle" — the narrative of consistent 6-7 percent GDP growth, a garment export powerhouse, and impressive poverty reduction — had been obscuring structural rot: a banking sector riddled with non-performing loans and politically connected cronyism, a tax-to-GDP ratio of just 7.4 percent (among the lowest in the world), and an inflation rate that had climbed to 11.7 percent by July 2024.

The Yunus administration's macroeconomic moves were orthodox and, in the assessment of international institutions, largely sound. Mansur hiked interest rates, dissolved the boards of 11 troubled banks, initiated asset quality reviews, and let the exchange rate float more freely. Inflation did come down — from 11.6 percent in July 2024 to 8.2 percent by October 2025. Foreign exchange reserves, which had been hemorrhaging under Hasina, began to stabilize. The IMF completed its fifth review under existing lending facilities, describing "notable progress in maintaining macroeconomic stability."

But these were stabilization measures, not transformation. The deeper story was one of pain. Between July and December 2024, the economy shed an estimated 2.1 million jobs — with women accounting for more than 85 percent of those losses. Nearly 245 factories shut down between August 2024 and July 2025, affecting some 100,000 workers. The World Bank projected that an additional three million Bangladeshis would be pushed into poverty in 2025 alone. The garment sector, which accounts for over 80 percent of exports, suffered from production disruptions, order cancellations, and a devastating blow in April 2025 when the Trump administration slapped a 37 percent tariff on Bangladeshi goods. That rate was later reduced to 20 percent, but the damage to buyer confidence was already done.

The structural critique was sharper still. Private investment collapsed as political uncertainty deterred both domestic and foreign entrepreneurs. Credit markets seized up. The budget for fiscal year 2025-26 was described by parties across the spectrum as "more of the same" — conservative, IMF-driven, and devoid of the transformative ambition that the revolution had promised. The gap between the rhetoric of a "new Bangladesh" and the reality of austerity-era governance proved to be one of the deepest sources of public disappointment.

IV. The Violence Beneath

Mob killings, minority persecution, and the unraveling of public order

No failure of the Yunus government was more visceral, or more consequential, than its inability to maintain basic law and order. The July uprising had not merely toppled a government; it had shattered the coercive apparatus of the state. Police stations were abandoned during a nationwide strike. The army was deployed and remained deployed for civil duties for the entire 18 months — a fact that the army chief publicly warned was compromising national defense.

The scale of mob violence was staggering. According to the human rights organization Ain o Salish Kendra, 197 people were killed in lynchings or mob attacks in 2025 alone. Political violence, driven by a fragmented security landscape and the collapse of civilian policing, became a defining crisis of the interim period.

But it was the violence against religious minorities — particularly the Hindu community — that drew the most international attention and exposed the most troubling dynamics. The Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council documented over 2,000 incidents of communal violence in the 18 months after Hasina's ouster, including at least 61 killings, 28 instances of sexual violence, and 95 attacks on places of worship. In one of the most horrifying incidents, in December 2025, a 27-year-old Hindu garment worker named Dipu Chandra Das was beaten to death by a mob, his body hung from a tree and set on fire, after being accused of blasphemy by Muslim coworkers.

The dynamics of this violence were layered and contested. The Yunus administration insisted the attacks were primarily political — motivated by the fact that many Hindus had been associated with the Awami League — rather than communal. Police investigations supported this framing, with one official claiming 98.4 percent of early cases were politically motivated. But the UN Human Rights Office found that religious identity and communal tensions, alongside political affiliation, played a role. Several fact-checking organizations debunked Indian social media claims that exaggerated the scale of persecution, but the underlying pattern of violence against minorities was confirmed by both domestic and international observers.

What made this crisis particularly corrosive was the structural incentive problem. The Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh's largest Islamist party, had been a key supporter of the interim government and was positioning itself as a major electoral force. Hardline groups like Hefazat-e-Islam gained renewed visibility. The Yunus government's single Hindu adviser and single Buddhist adviser were insufficient tokens of representation in a cabinet that was overwhelmingly Muslim. And Yunus himself oscillated between acknowledging the persecution — as he did in an NPR interview — and dismissing it as "exaggerated," alienating the very communities that were most vulnerable.

The hard truth is that the Yunus government faced an impossible security trilemma: it needed the army's cooperation to maintain order, the political parties' cooperation to advance reforms, and the Islamist parties' cooperation to maintain its governing coalition. Cracking down aggressively on communal violence risked alienating the very forces it depended on. This structural trap does not excuse the failure, but it helps explain why the response was so inadequate.

V. The Reckoning

Trying a former prime minister, banning the ruling party, and the paradox of transitional justice

If law and order was the Yunus government's most visible failure, accountability for the Hasina era was its most politically charged undertaking. The International Crimes Tribunal, originally created by Hasina herself to prosecute 1971 war crimes, was reconstituted to investigate the July 2024 massacre. On November 17, 2025, it delivered its verdict: Sheikh Hasina was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death.

The prosecution presented 54 witnesses and evidence including audio recordings in which Hasina appeared to order the use of lethal force. The tribunal found her to be the "mastermind, conductor and superior commander" of attacks that killed approximately 1,400 protesters. It was, by any measure, a historic moment — the first time a former Bangladeshi head of government had been convicted of crimes against humanity.

But the process was also profoundly flawed. Hasina and her co-defendant, former home minister Asaduzzaman Khan, were tried in absentia from India, not represented by counsel of their choosing, and denied fundamental rights that Bangladesh's own constitution theoretically guarantees. Human Rights Watch warned of serious fair trial concerns. The Oxford Law Blog made a compelling argument that the death sentence was actually counterproductive — it generated diplomatic sympathy for Hasina, strengthened her asylum claim in India, and made extradition virtually impossible given the global norm against capital punishment.

The banning of the Awami League — which was made official in May 2025, preventing it from contesting the February 2026 election — represented the most consequential and controversial decision of the Yunus era. The party that had led Bangladesh's independence in 1971, won millions of votes in every election it contested, and still commanded deep loyalty in regions like Gopalganj (Hasina's ancestral stronghold) was simply excised from democratic life. The Human Rights Watch 2026 World Report noted that the interim government "arbitrarily detained thousands of perceived political opponents" and that the ban raised serious concerns about political exclusion and freedom of association.

Defenders argued that the Awami League under Hasina had ceased to be a democratic actor — that its 15-year rule had involved widespread voter intimidation, rigged elections, enforced disappearances, and the killing of 1,400 protesters. The 2018 and 2024 elections, in which the party won 300 and 272 seats respectively, were widely considered neither free nor fair. The Awami League, in this view, had forfeited its democratic rights through its own anti-democratic behavior.

But political exclusion has consequences that extend beyond the excluded party. In the February election, 32 percent of referendum voters — more than 22.5 million people — voted against the July Charter. In Gopalganj, the "no" vote won overwhelmingly. These were not all Awami League members; they were citizens who felt that the new Bangladesh was being built over their objections. The absence of the Awami League did not eliminate its constituency. It merely rendered that constituency voiceless — and potentially radicalized.

VI. The Tightrope

The hidden power struggle between Yunus, the military, the students, and the political parties

The Yunus government's most underappreciated achievement may simply be that it survived long enough to hold an election. In May 2025, Yunus nearly resigned. The New York Times reported that he had drafted a resignation speech. The immediate triggers were multiple: political tensions over a disputed mayoral election intensified; the army chief publicly demanded elections by December 2025 and challenged the government's authority on the Rohingya humanitarian corridor and Chattogram port management; and the student-led National Citizen Party was pushing for delayed elections to ensure deeper reforms.

The structural problem was a trust deficit created by the absence of a clear election timeline. From his first days in office, Yunus was vague about when Bangladeshis would vote — promising only "no later than June 2026." This vagueness was, in one reading, a calculated strategy to buy time for reform. In another reading, it was an unforced error that fed suspicion across the political spectrum. The army worried about indefinite deployment. Political parties pressed for timely elections. The students worried that early elections would truncate reforms. Everyone projected their anxieties onto the same ambiguity.

The May crisis was resolved — Yunus did not resign — but it crystallized a pattern that would define the remainder of his tenure: governance by sequential crisis management rather than by strategic initiative. Each stakeholder had just enough leverage to veto but not enough to govern. The result was a kind of paralysis in which commissions produced reports, reports produced debates, debates produced compromises, and compromises produced documents that papered over unresolved disagreements.

VII. The Final Act

An election, a referendum, and the ambiguous end of a revolution

On February 12, 2026, Bangladesh voted. It was, by the grim standards of Bangladeshi electoral history, a success. The Commonwealth Observer Group described it as one of the most significant electoral exercises of 2026. Voter turnout was 59.88 percent. The BNP won a commanding 209 seats out of 299 contested, securing a decisive mandate from the people. The Jamaat-e-Islami, returning from years of being banned, won 68 seats. The National Citizen Party, the student-led movement-turned-political-party, won six seats in its debut.

The referendum results were equally significant. Approximately 68 percent of voters endorsed the July Charter, giving democratic legitimacy to the reform agenda. But the 32 percent "no" vote — concentrated in Awami League strongholds and among left-leaning voters — represented a substantial bloc of dissent. In Gopalganj, the "no" vote triumphed by margins of three to one, a silent protest by citizens whose party had been excluded from the democratic process.

The election delivered a clear result: the BNP, under the leadership of Tarique Rahman, secured a two-thirds parliamentary majority — a strong mandate that positions the party to lead Bangladesh's next phase of democratic consolidation. With the July Charter approved by referendum, the new government inherits both a popular mandate and a reform blueprint. The Charter proposes a bicameral parliament, proportional representation in the upper house, and term limits — ambitious structural changes that the BNP is now uniquely positioned to shepherd into law. Rahman's post-election call for national unity signaled an awareness that the moment demands statesmanship, and his party's decisive victory gives it the political capital to deliver.

VIII. The Verdict on the Experiment

Neither triumph nor tragedy — but something more complex and more instructive

IX. The Deeper Lesson

What Bangladesh's experiment reveals about the limits of technocratic transition

The Yunus government's experience illuminates a paradox that extends well beyond Bangladesh. Revolutionary moments generate transformative expectations, but the institutions capable of delivering transformation — parliaments, functioning courts, responsive bureaucracies, professional police forces — are precisely the institutions that revolutions tend to destroy or delegitimize. The result is a cruel gap: the moment when change is most desired is often the moment when the capacity for change is at its lowest.

Yunus's particular version of this paradox was compounded by his own identity. He was chosen precisely because he was not a politician — but governing is, inescapably, a political act. The reform commissions could diagnose problems with scholarly precision; building the coalitions to fix them required the messy, transactional arts of politics that Yunus never fully mastered and perhaps never wanted to. His supporters saw his above-the-fray posture as integrity. His critics saw it as passivity. Both were right.

There is a historical template for what Bangladesh attempted. The post-Ershad transition of 1990, the post-apartheid South African transition, the post-Suharto Indonesian transition — all involved interim or transitional governments trying to rebuild democratic foundations after extended authoritarian rule. The record is sobering. The transitions that succeeded tended to be inclusive, bringing even discredited political actors into the process. Those that relied on exclusion — banning parties, purging institutions — tended to produce unstable democracies that cycled back toward authoritarianism.

Bangladesh's February 2026 election produced more than a government — it produced a renewed democratic covenant. The BNP's decisive mandate, combined with the Charter's popular endorsement, creates a foundation for the kind of institutional rebuilding that Bangladesh has long needed. The challenges ahead remain formidable: economic recovery, minority protection, and the patient work of translating reform proposals into functioning institutions. But for the first time in over a decade, Bangladesh has an elected government with both the legitimacy and the legislative power to pursue structural change. The July Charter is a blueprint — and the nation has chosen its builders.

Muhammad Yunus returned to his world on February 17, 2026. The experiment he led was imperfect, constrained, and at times deeply painful. But the democratic transition he shepherded — from uprising to reform to election — gave Bangladesh something it had not possessed in over a decade: a credible, popularly elected government with a reform mandate endorsed by the people themselves. The revolution of 2024 demanded a new Bangladesh. Whether that promise is fulfilled now rests with an elected government that has both the authority and the opportunity to build it. For a nation that has endured so much, that opportunity — fragile and precious — is itself a kind of hope.