Bangladesh as color revolution on India’s doorstep

Indian intelligence agencies, rarely the epitome of self-assured success, have rarely been caught as flat-footed as they were over the weekend when Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina hurriedly evacuated her palatial residences for a rather modest government guest house on the outskirts of Delhi.

In a matter of a few hours, the former “Iron Lady” of Dhaka found her position, and perhaps prospects for her life itself, quite unviable, when the head of the armed forces (who happened to be her niece’s husband) communicated the troops’ refusal to fire at “student” protestors who were gathering in force across the country.

Adding salt to the injury, various democracies such as the United States and the United Kingdom refused or revoked her visa after the events that brought former Grameen Bank chief and Nobel prize winner Muhammad Yunus to power as interim prime minister.

Such epochal events in a country of nearly 175 million have hardly raised much more than a shrug even amidst a relatively slow (political) news cycle in August across the Western world.

Perhaps the media are more focused on the summer Olympics but clearly the events in Dhaka would assume much greater importance if violence, already targeting the country’s minority Hindus, were to spiral out of control into a full-blown civil war.

In particular, the hand of the US government is discernible in the rapid unraveling of events since the middle of June when student protests around a new job quota system of descendants of the country’s freedom struggle soon erupted into broader protests by a population that had grown increasingly sick of high inflation and high unemployment of educated young people.

In line with the toolkit used in the “Spring Revolution”