Welcome to Foreign Policy’s South Asia Brief.
The highlights this week: Interim Bangladeshi leader Muhammad Yunus grapples with increasing Rohingya refugee arrivals, Sri Lanka gears up for its presidential election this month, and renewed political tensions erupt in Pakistan.
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This week, Muhammad Yunus, the head of Bangladesh’s interim government, called for the expedited resettlement of Rohingya refugees to third countries. Bangladesh hosts nearly 1 million Rohingya today, many of whom fled military violence in Myanmar in 2017; many reside in massive refugee camps in the city of Cox’s Bazar.
Intensifying conflict in Myanmar has likely prompted Yunus’s urgency: Around 8,000 Rohingya refugees have crossed the border into Bangladesh in recent months, according to Bangladeshi officials.
The Rohingya issue is one of many daunting policy challenges for Yunus and the interim government, which is also grappling with restoring law and order following the forced resignation of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina last month, stabilizing a sputtering economy, and initiating large-scale institutional reforms. But Bangladesh has a fighting chance at addressing the refugee crisis, in large part because of Yunus himself.
Yunus, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist and microfinance pioneer, enjoys close ties with Western governments and the international donor community. His prominence and reputation overseas lend him the credibility to make effective pitches for increased humanitarian aid for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh—the first and most immediate step needed to tackle the crisis.
The international community has provided generous assistance, including $2.4 billion from Washington since 2017. But ensuring continued aid is essential: Competing humanitarian crises in Gaza, Ukraine, and elsewhere risk distracting from the plight of the Rohingya, even as thousands more refugees enter Bangladesh. The Hasina government had made an $852 million appeal for assistance this year, but the United Nations warns it has been underfunded.
The second and more difficult step is the resettlement process. Given the rapidly worsening conflict in Myanmar, Bangladesh’s interim government wisely appears unwilling to continue the Hasina administration’s policy of seeking to repatriate some Rohingya back to Myanmar, including involuntarily.
Negotiating third-party resettlements won’t be easy; to this point, few countries have stepped up to host Rohingya refugees. (India, Malaysia, and Thailand host a combined 345,000 people.) But here Yunus could be an asset in leveraging his star power and connections to the donor community to get Western governments to consider hosting refugees.
Yunus has an opportunity this month: He is expected to attend the annual U.N. General Assembly meetings in New York, which will give him a prominent platform to make an appeal to the world, both through his speech and on the sidelines. It may be difficult: The sheer scale of the Rohingya challenge, competing donor priorities, and the uneasiness of many governments about taking on refugees could cause him to fall short.
However, the stakes are high for the Rohingya refugee community, as well as for Bangladesh. Rohingya refugees face major hardships, living in overcrowded camps and depending almost entirely on humanitarian aid. Beginning in 2020, Dhaka relocated thousands of refugees to a deserted and flood-prone island. Because Bangladesh doesn’t provide Rohingya refugees with a path to citizenship, many are deprived of basic services, including access to education.
In recent years, many desperate Rohingya refugees have boarded flimsy boats from Bangladesh and sought to escape to Southeast Asia by sea—but some have died en route, and others have faced violent resistance on arrival. Meanwhile, Bangladeshi officials and international experts worry about the long-term costs for Bangladesh of hosting so many refugees, from worsening economic stress to radicalization risks.
Ultimately, the Rohingya have a potential powerful champion in Yunus, if he is up for the task of advocating on their behalf on the global stage. It is a challenge for which he’s eminently qualified.
Sri Lanka nears critical election. Sri Lanka is gearing up for a presidential election on Sept. 21. The Sri Lankan presidency is a powerful post, not a ceremonial one. The race is essentially between three leaders: current President Ranil Wickremesinghe; Sajith Premadasa, a former Wickremesinghe ally who formed his own party; and Anura Kumara Dissanayake, whose anti-corruption messages resonate with young Sri Lankans.
Namal Rajapaksa—a member of the family dynasty that dominated Sri Lankan politics for years until his uncle, former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, resigned in 2022 following mass protests—is also a presidential candidate.
The election will be a referendum on two main issues: Wickremesinghe’s handling of the economy, which has rebounded since a debt default in 2022 but remains fragile, and broader views of Sri Lankan politics. Many Sri Lankans want to move away from the family-driven politics of the Rajapaksas—a sentiment that disadvantages Wickremesinghe, who is close to the family and served out the remainder of Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s term.
Political tensions in Pakistan. Last Sunday, thousands of supporters of imprisoned former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan held a rally outside Islamabad to demand his release. It was the largest demonstration that Khan’s party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), has held since his imprisonment more than a year ago.
Pakistani authorities responded with a flurry of arrests on Monday, detaining other party leaders, including PTI’s current chairman (who was released on Tuesday). In a dramatic development, law enforcement officials entered Pakistan’s Parliament, cut the power, and arrested at least 11 PTI lawmakers. On Wednesday, National Assembly Speaker Sardar Ayaz Sadiq suspended five security officials posted to the Parliament House.
According to police statements, arrests were made on charges related to protesting beyond the allotted end time for the Sunday rally, not using preapproved roads for the demonstration, and throwing stones at police. But what likely shook up the government were incendiary comments made by protest leaders, including reportedly threatening to use force to free Khan if he is not released in the next few weeks.
These events will only deepen the ongoing confrontation between PTI and Pakistan’s leadership. PTI sees the government and military as unrelentingly repressive, while Pakistani officials view PTI as a dangerous entity that needs to be sidelined.
Fresh unrest in Manipur. On Tuesday, officials in the Indian state of Manipur imposed curfews in some areas and shut down the internet after the latest phase of ethnic violence that has flared for more than a year. This month, members of the Meitei ethnic majority clashed with minority Kukis—reportedly over a Meitei demand for special status that would allow them to purchase land in areas where Kukis and other minority groups live.
Armed groups used heavy weaponry, including drones and rockets, in the fighting. The curfew and internet shutdowns were announced after students staged protests against the violence, which prompted police to respond with tear gas. The students have demanded that top security officials in the state be fired for not ending the violence.
The violence in Manipur has become one of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s biggest internal security crises. Neither security crackdowns nor talks that New Delhi has conducted with Meiteis and Kukis have ended the violence, which Indian officials have previously blamed in part on worsening unrest in neighboring Myanmar.
In recent days, senior Indian officials have made strong statements about India’s relationship with Pakistan. On Aug. 30, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar said the “era of uninterrupted dialogue with Pakistan is over.” Last Sunday, Defense Minister Rajnath Singh stated that India is prepared to begin dialogue with Pakistan only if it stops supporting terrorism in Indian-administered Kashmir.
But both statements simply reiterated existing policy. India hasn’t held any type of formal dialogue with Pakistan in many years—whether interrupted or uninterrupted—and it has long insisted on Pakistan stopping terrorism as a precondition for talks.
One might conclude that Jaishankar and Singh were telegraphing New Delhi’s response to Islamabad’s invitation to Modi to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit hosted by Pakistan in October. India has publicly acknowledged receiving the invitation, but it has not indicated if it will accept it or not.
The officials’ comments suggest that India is in no mood to engage with Pakistan, even on a multilateral level. That wouldn’t be a surprise: Modi’s diminished mandate after disappointing results in this year’s elections highlights the importance of his core political base—which doesn’t support engagement with Pakistan.
But tough talk doesn’t rule out a different type of outcome. Last year, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif accepted Modi’s offer to the annual SCO summit that India hosted, though he participated virtually. (Then-Pakistani Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari attended another SCO summit in India earlier in 2023.)
On Tuesday, Pakistani media reported that India’s trade minister will virtually attend a Pakistan-hosted SCO meeting this week. This suggests the possibility that Modi, like Sharif, could also tune in to the SCO leaders’ summit next month. Still, he would likely lose little by skipping it.
In the Express Tribune, professor Moonis Ahmar examines the prospects for improving Pakistan-Bangladesh ties after years of false starts. “Pakistan’s efforts failing to yield results means either the Yunus-led caretaker government does not want to take the risk of positively responding to the overtures from Islamabad … or it wants some time to come up with a policy framework for fully normalising relations with Islamabad,” he writes.
In the Daily Star, professor Mustahid Husain highlights the disparity between government spending on academic research and surveillance during Bangladesh’s Hasina era. It “lays bare a government that evidently favoured control over creativity, and surveillance over innovation,” he writes. “The long-term consequences of this misguided prioritisation could be severe.”
In Kuensel, journalist Yangchen C. Rinzin laments recent surveys showing a lack of awareness in Bhutan about entrepreneurship. “Given such limited awareness about entrepreneurship, it would be impractical to expect young people to pursue entrepreneurship as a career option,” she writes. “The awareness is crucial because higher entrepreneurial awareness is linked to a greater intention to start a business.”
Michael Kugelman is the director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington.
The post Can Muhammad Yunus Support Rohingya Refugees? appeared first on Foreign Policy.
