IMohammad Yunus, widely respected Nobel laureate and chief adviser to Bangladesh’s unelected caretaker government, takes aim at British minister, says Tulip Siddiqui profited from ‘simple robbery’ in his home country It was unusual for him to call her out and accuse her of having done so. To apologize. But once that happened, things moved quickly. Accusations swirled against the embattled finance minister, who withdrew from an official delegation to China, came forward with Rory Magnus, the government’s adviser on ministerial standards, and finally resigned as finance minister this week. post. (Mr. Siddique “completely refutes” the corruption allegations.)
This month, the Financial Times reported that Siddique was given a two-bedroom apartment in central London by a development company with close ties to the aunt of Bangladesh’s recently ousted longtime leader Sheikh Hasina. It was reported that. Mr Siddique claimed to have received the property from his parents and told Mr Magnus that he had recently learned that it was a gift from a Bangladeshi businessman. Until 2018, she lived in a Hampstead apartment given to her sister by another businessman with ties to Hasina’s government. She currently lives in a rented property owned by a businessman linked to the British wing of Hasina’s political party, the Awami League. Siddique was first elected to parliament in 2015, and after his first victory he told supporters he singled out British Bangladeshi members of the Awami League as staunch supporters.
Meanwhile, a photo taken in 2013 shows her with her aunt, Russian leader Vladimir Putin, at the signing of a deal to build a $12bn (£9.8bn) nuclear power plant in Bangladesh. There was also a photo of him. Magnus accepted her explanation that she was a tourist on a social visit, but Siddique is now facing a corruption investigation in Bangladesh over the deal.
Mr Magnus did not conclude that Mr Siddiq had broken any rules regarding his London home, nor did he question the legitimacy of the transaction. But she also said she “could have lived longer” given the limited information and reputational risks posed by her family’s ties to Bangladesh. He also suggested the prime minister would want to consider his responsibilities. Her position was now untenable and she had little choice but to step aside.
The situation would have been different if Hasina was still in power. But she fled in disgrace last August as protests against her increasingly unpopular rule grew. Students marched through the streets of Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka, demanding an end to generous quotas that give government jobs to freedom fighters and their descendants. It was a nepotistic exercise, a perpetual privilege that conferred a role on political supporters. Hasina ordered police to use force, killing about 1,000 students and other demonstrators, many of them unarmed, and sometimes shot at point-blank range. Instead of listening to the students, Hasina called them “razakars”. This is a highly derogatory term used to refer to Bangladeshis who supported the Pakistani army during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War.
Bangladesh’s freedom struggle was bloody. The country was once part of Pakistan, carved out of India to form the eastern wing of the nation in 1947 at the end of British colonial rule. Urdu has become the national language of Pakistan, the subcontinent’s Muslim stronghold, with its Punjabi-dominated west and Bengali-speaking east more than 1,000 miles from the secular Hindu-dominated republic of India. East Pakistanis wanted Bengali to be their national language, but West Pakistan resisted. Anxiety increased in the 1960s. In the 1970 elections, Hasina’s father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his Awami League party swept the polls and won enough seats to rule all of Pakistan. West Pakistani leaders, including the generals, were alarmed.
In March 1971, the Pakistani military launched Operation Searchlight, killing thousands of East Pakistanis and imprisoning their leaders (including Mujib, as he was commonly known). In the nine-month war that followed, hundreds of thousands of Bengali-speaking civilians in eastern Pakistan were killed and many women raped. Ten million refugees left for India. Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi initially provided training as well as moral and diplomatic support to Bangladesh’s guerrilla forces. However, when Pakistan attacked India in December of the same year, India retaliated and liberated Bangladesh within two weeks. Most refugees returned to Bangladesh. Mujib, who was released from prison, won an overwhelming majority in Bangladesh’s first elections.
But Mujib’s popularity eroded after 1974, when law and order deteriorated and many parts of Bangladesh suffered from famine. To reassert control, he created a one-party state and ruled by decree. In August 1975, junior military officers staged a coup and assassinated Mujib and most of his family. Hasina and her sister Rehana (Siddique’s mother) fled as they were abroad.
Hasina returned from exile in 1981 and led a vigorous campaign to restore democracy in Bangladesh. She won the 1996 election and became leader of the coalition government. She returned to power in 2008, Bangladesh’s last truly free and fair elections, and gradually became more authoritarian. Since then, the Awami League has won three consecutive elections, but the main opposition party sat out two of them and boycotted the third after realizing the scale of intimidation and rigging shortly after voting began.
Under Hasina’s rule, disappearances and extrajudicial executions have increased, there has been a crackdown on the media and the internet, and the arrests of dissidents, human rights activists and journalists. Although Hasina was instrumental in restoring Mujib’s reputation, her rule infuriated many and, after her ouster, Mujib’s historic mansion was attacked and set on fire, statues toppled and statues toppled. His name was erased from the inheritance. An attempt was made to rewrite history.
Hasina is largely responsible for defaming Mujib. While she presented herself to the rest of the world as taking a firm stand against rising religious fundamentalism, she found a formidable ally in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Mr Siddique has been an active supporter of human rights causes in many parts of the world, including Syria and Gaza, but has remained strangely silent on the rapidly deteriorating human rights situation in Bangladesh, calling himself the He claims to be a member of the Diet.
In the end, it was her relationship with Bangladesh that ruined Siddique’s career. Corruption was widespread under Hasina. Ahsan Mansoor, the head of Bangladesh’s central bank and a former International Monetary Fund official, said as much as Tk2 trillion (£13.5 billion) was smuggled out of the country by companies close to the Awami League, including through forced bank mergers and inflated import bills. He said that Other suspicious activity. Bangladesh’s Financial Intelligence Bureau has reportedly asked local banks to provide transaction details of all accounts related to Siddique and his family.
Political opponents have always taken advantage of regime change in Bangladesh to seek and settle revenge against their predecessors through endless lawsuits and investigations, but the accusations against Hasina (and the questions against Siddique) are not politically motivated. do not have. Whatever the motives of the politicians making the accusations, the fact remains that the World Bank canceled a $1.2 billion loan to build a bridge over the Padma River, citing credible allegations of corruption. UN human rights experts also strongly criticized Bangladesh for forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings to silence human rights defenders under Hasina.
Politics is a ruthless business. Siddiq is now part of two worlds that play according to different rules. Now her family’s legacy is tarnished in Bangladesh and Britain, and she can find no solace in either place.
