Bangladesh urges India to keep Sheikh Hasina ‘quiet’ in ‘best interest’ of bilateral ties

DHAKA: For the sake of bilateral relations, India should influence Bangladesh’s ex-PM Sheikh Hasina to “keep quiet,” Dhaka’s top diplomat said, as the ousted prime minister continued to give instructions from her exile in New Delhi.

After 15 straight years in power, Hasina resigned and fled to neighboring India on Aug. 5, forced out by weeks of student-led rallies and a nationwide uprising in the wake of a police crackdown on demonstrators that left hundreds of people dead.

In the following days, the parliament was dissolved, and a new temporary administration was appointed, with Nobel Prize-winning economist Muhammad Yunus at the helm.

With the new government in office, Hasina kept making political remarks from India and official calls to her party supporters. She also demanded a “thorough investigation” into the protests-related violence to “bring to justice those responsible for these heinous killings and acts of sabotage” and claimed that the US was behind her ouster.

“As long as she is in India … it is not in the best interest of relations that she continues to sermonize from there. Since she is being given shelter there, we would prefer that she keeps quiet and her hosts tell her that she keeps quiet,” Bangladesh’s Foreign Affairs Adviser Touhid Hossain told Arab News in an interview at his office in Dhaka this week.

A former foreign secretary and ambassador, Hossain was appointed last month as chief of the interim government’s foreign affairs.

While Hasina enjoyed close strategic and economic ties with India during her 15-year rule, Hossain said that the new government in Dhaka also wanted “a good relationship” with New Delhi.

Amid calls for Hasina’s extradition from India to face trial at home for the violence preceding her downfall, he added that time will show if such a request will be made.

“It’s a much wider issue,” he said. “But for the moment, I think that it is in her best interest — and also the interests of her hosts and us — that she keeps quiet.”

Hasina, 76, was one of the world’s longest-ruling female leaders and played a pivotal role in the politics of Bangladesh, a nation of about 170 million people that declared its independence in 1971.

She is the daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country’s charismatic founding leader, who was killed in 1975 in a military coup when Hasina was 28. She served as prime minister from 1996 to 2001 and regained power in 2009.

Under her leadership, Bangladesh became one of the fastest-growing economies in the region, with World Bank estimates showing that more than 25 million people in the country have been lifted out of poverty in the last two decades.

But critics say she has grown increasingly autocratic and called her a threat to the country’s democracy, with many saying that the sudden collapse of Hasina’s government had reflected a broader discontent against her rule.

The student-led demonstrations that began peacefully in July were against a quota system for government jobs, which was widely criticized for favoring those with connections to the ruling party.

The rallies then turned violent as security forces clashed with protesters, leading to the killing of hundreds of people and triggering a civil disobedience movement that forced Hasina’s resignation.

Bangladesh’s interim government has agreed to a probe into the events by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. According to the OHCHR’s preliminary analysis of the unrest and state violations in addressing it, immediately available data indicates that more than 600 people were killed, but “the reported death toll is likely an underestimate.”

The violations include cases of “extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests and detention, enforced disappearances, torture and ill-treatment.”