Support for Professor Yunus during the years he has been persecuted by his own government has been strong in G-7 countries. In fact, last week he was in Rome with other leaders and Nobel laureates at the World Meeting on Human Fraternity organized by Pope Francis. On several occasions, he was asked to effectively serve as the spokesperson for all the assembled Nobel Peace Prize laureates—clearly a very high honor. He hosted a roundtable on peace as part of the meeting.
Now, Indian and Indian-American business leaders are going public with important acts of solidarity, which is crucial given India’s influence on the Bangladesh government. For example, famed venture capitalist Vinod Khosla wrote a strongly worded opinion article in The Wire last week titled “The Bangladesh Government’s Attacks on Muhammad Yunus Are an Attack on Human Rights.” Both Khosla and The Wire’s editor, Siddharth Varadarajan, tweeted about the article to their hundreds of thousands of followers.
To take another example, Narayana Murthy, the co-founder of the Indian technology firm Infosys, whose influence and operations span the globe, has recently published a video in support of Professor Yunus.
The contrast couldn’t be more stark: Outside Bangladesh, other political and civil society leaders tap Professor Yunus to be their spokesperson on critical issues facing humanity. Inside Bangladesh, his own government pursues (in the words of U.S. Senator Dick Durbin) “personal vendettas” against him, harassing him with cases that Amnesty International and other human rights groups deplore and that Bangladeshi elder statesman Rehman Sobhan said, in an influential recent article, “would not make it to first base in any well functioning legal system.”
Pressure on the Bangladeshi government to relent in its campaign against Professor Yunus continues to build, with no end in sight.