Eighty-four-year-old Dr. Muhammad Yunus, a seasoned technocrat, micro-lending pioneer, and octogenarian Nobel Peace Prize winner to head the interim government’s chief adviser – in effect prime minister of Bangladesh, world’s eighth-most populous country, after toppling the country’s autocratic leader and his personal nemesis Sheikh Hasina, who had fled to India to escape mobs marching on her house.

Yunu clad in traditional Kurt and vest had flow in from Paris, where he launched a social entrepreneurship venture with the mayor and had square named after him in Dhaka.

 The institutions of the old regime -police, judiciary, government were melting away.

Students are directing traffic in Dhaka, Yunus had appealed for calm and the protection of the minorities after days of violence, looting and arson, attacks on Hindu homes. Hasina’s government had pursued a legal vendetta against him and his operations, slandering him as a “bloodsucker” of the poor.  In January, a labour court sentenced him to six months in prison- a possible trumped up case – one that has been dropped after Hasina’s overthrow.

Yunus compared this week’s events to “second liberation”, ( Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan in 1971.

Dr Yunus has the support of Tasneem Zaman Labeeb, a 22 year-old student protester from Dhaka university’s business school who said, “ Students are supporting him because we never really had a wise or intelligent policymaker as our government head”.

Yunus born in 1940 in Chittagong, as the third of 14 children, five of whom died young, is the author of “Banker to the poor”, in which he credited his mother Sofia Khan, whose concern for the poor “helped me discover my destiny”, after winning a Fullbright scholarship and settling into teaching in Tennessee, he left the need to go back to Bangladesh after the 1971 war. When famine struck Bangladesh in 1974, he began studying ways to help farmers fixating on access to credit after noting that people’s fate was being decided by pennies a day.

He built Grameen Bank giving micro-loan of $27 to 42 people, prioritising lending to women. By 2003, Grameen was working with 36, 000 villages which won him the Nobel Prize in 2006.

In 2007, formed his own party, and in 2010, Hasina’s government demanded an investigation after a Norwegian government probe found no wrongdoing, but the following year he was ousted from Grameen’s board on grounds of his age (70).