Since a student-led uprising last month forced Bangladesh’s authoritarian leader to flee, it has been a topic at New Delhi dinner parties: where is Sheikh Hasina?
As protesters were marching on her Dhaka residence on August 5, Hasina resigned and flew to an air force base near Ghaziabad, India, on a Bangladeshi military aircraft. Narendra Modi’s government has since confirmed she is in India, but is declining to say more. That has not stopped tongues from wagging.
With various degrees of credibility, members of India’s chattering classes have privately claimed that the deposed strongwoman is in an Indian government safe house; staying with her daughter Saima Wazed, who took a Delhi-based regional job with the World Health Organisation in February; or has even been glimpsed strolling with her entourage around one of the capital’s poshest parks, Lodhi Garden, reports Financial Times.
The Modi government, Hasina’s top foreign backer when her Awami League party ran Bangladesh, is maintaining a decorous silence on the topic. Delhi’s local and foreign press have mostly stopped pretending they will get Hasina’s first post-overthrow interview.
There are a few reasons for this. Muhammad Yunus’s acting government, which took power after Hasina was toppled, has accused her of responsibility for hundreds of killings during the past summer’s unrest. India and Bangladesh have an extradition treaty — signed by Hasina’s own government in 2013 — which could in theory be used against her should the new regime seek her arrest.
“According to the extradition agreement with India, we may demand her extradition to Bangladesh,” Asif Nazrul, minister of law, justice and parliamentary affairs in Yunus’s interim cabinet, tells the Financial Times. “For now, we expect India not to allow her to instigate instability in Bangladesh, which she is trying to do by spreading lies and misinformation.”
Following recent press reports relaying controversial remarks attributed to Hasina, Yunus himself said (in words that in turn ruffled some in the Indian establishment): “If India wants to keep her until the time Bangladesh wants her back, the condition would be that she has to keep quiet.”
India has a history of offering refuge to fleeing regional leaders. The Dalai Lama settled in India after fleeing the Chinese takeover of Tibet in 1959. Though he has handed over political affairs to a civilian exile administration (also based in India), the Tibetan spiritual leader recently received a US Congressional delegation, a move that riled Beijing and which analysts say would not have taken place without the Modi government’s assent.
Afghan leader Mohammad Najibullah’s family fled to India in 1992, where his wife Fatana Najib and children still reportedly spend much of their time. (They keep a low profile; Najibullah himself was kept from fleeing and, after years sheltering in a UN compound, was killed and strung from a traffic light pole by the Taliban as they swept into Kabul in 1996).
Hasina herself, along with her sister Sheikh Rehana, took refuge in India for several years after 1975, when their father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and most of their family were murdered in Dhaka in a coup. “There has been a host of precedents of leaders coming to India from the neighbourhood,” says Shivshankar Menon, a former foreign secretary and national security adviser under Manmohan Singh’s government. “We have always allowed them to stay, and in most cases they respect our wishes that they stay clear of political activity.”
Hasina is widely supported across the Indian political spectrum, where she is seen as a bulwark against Islamist extremism, and remembered with respect for her late father’s pivotal role in Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence, in which Indira Gandhi’s government supported the winning side, at huge human cost.
The theory that Hasina’s ousting and Yunus’s installation as acting prime minister was a “colour revolution” or a regime change backed by the US, which supported Pakistan in 1971, has broad currency in India, and not just in pro-Modi circles.
The sensitivities of Hasina’s sojourn in India, say analysts, also mean a cloak of discretion is likely to surround her whereabouts for now — and by New Delhi’s design.
“These are the problems of intimacy, and things are delicate when it comes to our neighbours,” says Menon. “It’s not like we’re dealing with countries on the other side of the world.”
