How an assassination is pushing Bangladesh to the brink

Until about two years ago, Bangladesh, famously dubbed a “basket case” by the late Henry Kissinger, had been hailed as a growth and development story. Its economy recorded a brisk pace, overtaking its former twin Pakistan to emerge as South Asia’s second largest behind India’s. Its social indicators were widely admired. Extremism was in check, and ties with its India, its most important neighbour which envelops it on three sides, were largely stable.

That’s all been upended. Today, the South Asian nation is in its biggest crisis since Independence in 1971, when the former East Pakistan broke away to emerge as the new nation of Bangladesh.

Elections called for Feb 12

by the caretaker administration of Nobel Laureate Mohamed Yunus were meant to lend a measure of political stability after two years of turmoil and the end of the despotic, violence-filled rule of three-term prime minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed, daughter of the nation’s founding father.