Bangladesh: The Deceptive Undertones of Dr. Yunus’s ‘July Declaration’

An old adage reminds us, “Look before you leap.”

But Dr. Muhammad Yunus, in his dangerous arrogance and geopolitical servility, has leapt headfirst into treachery. On the rain-soaked afternoon of 5 August 2025, at approximately 5:00 PM, I bore witness—closely, solemnly—to a spectacle of betrayal at Manik Mia Avenue in Dhaka. Cloaked in calculated deception and shrouded in theatrical bravado, Dr. Yunus delivered what he brazenly dubbed the ‘July Declaration’—a perverse manifesto of sedition disguised as a political roadmap.

The setting was no accident. The symbolism of August—the month of both our national mourning and our Liberation's legacy—was deliberately chosen to provoke and pervert. There he stood: Dr. Yunus, surrounded by a gallery of infamy—Jamaat-e-Islami war criminals’ progeny, communal bigots, agents of disinformation, and their misbegotten political offspring. They had the gall to cloak themselves in the sacred green and red of our National Flag—emblazoning it on their foreheads, waving it with counterfeit fervor—while their ideological allegiance lay not with Bangladesh but with the dark, genocidal specter of Pakistan.

These are not patriots. They are impostors. They are the political undead, crawling out of the tombs of 1971 with blood on their conscience and venom in their breath. Dr. Yunus has offered them a new lease on political life. And that is a crime not only against the state, but against the very soul of our hard-won independence in 1971.

Let it be clear: the 'July Declaration' is not a political statement. It is a blueprint for national subversion. It seeks to undo the sacrifices of our three million martyrs, to erase the tears of our violated women, and to spit upon the dreams of a sovereign Bangladesh. It is a coup of words—a semantic insurrection. And sedition by any other name remains sedition.

Dr. Yunus’s coalition—if one can call this carnival of contrarians a coalition—is a toxic concoction of signed zeros. Just as in certain computing systems where positive zero and negative zero exist with nominal difference but no real value, so too do the components of this political amalgam cancel each other out in worth, yet pose computational dangers to the integrity of the system they seek to infiltrate.

Zero plus zero plus zero still equals zero. And that is precisely what Yunus’s political alignment represents for Bangladesh: a null set of ideas, a vacuum of vision, a black hole of despair masquerading as reform. There is no governance model here, no economic blueprint, no social agenda—only the dangerous ambition of a man propped up by foreign hands and domestic parasites.

Let us not be naïve. This is not an isolated declaration. It is the crescendo of a long, covert orchestration—one financed through crores drained from the public exchequer, funneled through shadowy networks, and deployed to mobilize rent-a-crowd protesters from across the country. It is a campaign choreographed with foreign complicity, tailored to Western tastes, particularly, America and designed to transform Bangladesh into a client state—a pliable pawn in the grand chessboard of U.S. geopolitical interests.

Dr. Yunus’s rhetoric, with its jumbled idioms and faux-liberation slogans, is nothing short of linguistic treason. He speaks in the vernacular of deceit, using words not to inspire but to confuse, to bewilder, and to manipulate. He toys with the national psyche as one might play ducks and drakes—with reckless abandon and utter contempt for consequence.

And yet, even as he stands drenched in rain and self-importance, he cannot wash off the stench of betrayal. His associates—many of them Jamaati holdovers, known communalists, and opportunists masquerading as reformists—are the very antithesis of the spirit of 1971. They speak of democracy but conspire with autocrats. They claim to champion justice while shielding war criminals. They wave our flag, yet long for the shadow of Lahore and the tutelage of Langley.

To all who still dream of a secular, progressive, sovereign Bangladesh, Dr. Yunus’s 'July Declaration' should serve as a blaring siren. It is a call to arms—not in violence, but in vigilance. The Yunus camp seeks not to reform the state, but to capture it. Not to uphold democracy, but to camouflage tyranny in democratic costume. Their endgame is not national progress but national paralysis.

This declaration is also an insult to every freedom fighter, every family that sacrificed, every citizen who believes in the promise of ‘Sonar Bangla.’ It seeks to reset the clock, to rewrite our history, to blur the line between oppressor and oppressed. It is, in short, an attempted act of historical vandalism.

But let them be warned. The people of Bangladesh are neither fools nor forgetful. We remember 1971. We remember who stood with us, and who stood against us. We know the taste of betrayal, but we also know how to resist it. The forces that Dr. Yunus now emboldens—the very enemies of our Liberation—were defeated.

Written by: Anwar A. Khan

Author's Bio: The writer was a frontline freedom fighter in 1971, is now a senior citizen of Bangladesh, writes about politics, political and human-centred figures, current and international affairs.

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