By Bloomberg News
Copyright financialpost
Vaswani: So I think Bangladesh is a really good case study for this, right? You have an interim leader, Muhammad Yunus, widely respected Nobel Peace Prize laureate. And he’s talked about publicly the engagement and involvement of young people in politics. He is courting them. He is engaging with them and trying to get them to think about political parties and, you know, governance structures. And I think that’s really sensible and I think that’s wise. And you have elections coming up. They’re expected next year at some point. A lot rests on that on how they go. And for Bangladesh to turn into sort of functioning democracy with these young people in charge, at least some of them. And I think it can’t just be young people. You need to also sort of have multi-generational consensus. And so co-opting different groups, but bringing them together, with young people at the heart of that, in terms of a sort of viable political party, I think that would be a very good move in Bangladesh, and I’m watching that quite closely to see if it can be the template for other places around the region. You know, I’m an eternal optimist. I believe in the power of young people. They are the ones who have consistently brought change, not just in Asia, but around the world. And it’s their energy and their dynamism that can change political structures and the way that countries are run, but if that energy is not channeled into something hopeful and optimistic, then it is wasted and worse, it can backfire and actually end up achieving the opposite of what these young people want.
