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Since a student-led rebellion final month pressured Bangladesh’s authoritarian chief to flee, it has been a subject at New Delhi dinner events: the place is Sheikh Hasina?
As protesters had been marching on her Dhaka residence on August 5, Hasina resigned and flew to an air power base close to Ghaziabad, India, on a Bangladeshi army plane. Narendra Modi’s authorities has since confirmed she is in India, however is declining to say extra. That has not stopped tongues from wagging.
With numerous levels of credibility, members of India’s chattering lessons have privately claimed that the deposed strongwoman is in an Indian authorities secure home; staying together with her daughter Saima Wazed, who took a Delhi-based regional job with the World Well being Organisation in February, or has even been glimpsed strolling together with her entourage round one of many capital’s poshest parks, Lodhi Backyard.
The Modi authorities, Hasina’s high international backer when her Awami League get together ran Bangladesh, is sustaining a decorous silence on the subject. Delhi’s native and international press have principally stopped pretending they’ll get Hasina’s first post-overthrow interview.
There are a couple of causes for this. Muhammad Yunus’s appearing authorities, which took energy after Hasina was toppled, has accused her of duty for a whole bunch of killings throughout the previous summer season’s unrest. India and Bangladesh have an extradition treaty — signed by Hasina’s personal authorities in 2013 — which may in concept be used towards her ought to the brand new regime search her arrest.
“In accordance with the extradition settlement with India, we might demand her extradition to Bangladesh,” Asif Nazrul, minister of legislation, justice and parliamentary affairs in Yunus’s interim cupboard, tells the Monetary Instances. “For now, we count on India to not permit her to instigate instability in Bangladesh, which she is attempting to do by spreading lies and misinformation.”
Following latest press stories relaying controversial remarks attributed to Hasina, Yunus himself stated (in phrases that in flip ruffled some within the Indian institution): “If India needs to maintain her till the time Bangladesh needs her again, the situation can be that she has to maintain quiet.”
India has a historical past of providing refuge to fleeing regional leaders. The Dalai Lama settled in India after fleeing the Chinese language takeover of Tibet in 1959. Although he has handed over political affairs to a civilian exile administration (additionally primarily based in India), the Tibetan religious chief not too long ago acquired a US Congressional demonstration, a transfer that riled Beijing and which analysts say wouldn’t have taken place with out the Modi authorities’s assent.
Afghan chief Mohammad Najibullah’s household fled to India in 1992, the place his spouse Fatana Najib and kids nonetheless reportedly spend a lot of their time. (They hold a low profile; Najibullah himself was stored from fleeing and, after years sheltering in a UN compound, was killed and strung from a site visitors mild pole by the Taliban as they swept into Kabul in 1996).
Hasina herself, alongside together with her sister Sheikh Rehana, took refuge in India for a number of years after 1975, when their father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and most of their household had been murdered in Dhaka in a coup. “There was a number of precedents of leaders coming to India from the neighbourhood,” says Shivshankar Menon, a former international secretary and nationwide safety adviser below Manmohan Singh’s authorities. “We have now at all times allowed them to remain, and normally they respect our needs that they keep away from political exercise.”
Hasina is broadly supported throughout the Indian political spectrum, the place she is seen as a bulwark towards Islamist extremism, and remembered with respect for her late father’s pivotal position in Bangladesh’s 1971 conflict of independence, by which Indira Gandhi’s authorities supported the profitable facet, at enormous human price.
The speculation that Hasina’s ousting and Yunus’s set up as appearing prime minister was a “color revolution” or a regime change backed by the US, which supported Pakistan in 1971, has broad foreign money in India, and never simply in pro-Modi circles.
The sensitivities of Hasina’s sojourn in India, say analysts, additionally imply a cloak of discretion is more likely to encompass her whereabouts for now — and by New Delhi’s design.
“These are the issues of intimacy, and issues are delicate with regards to our neighbours,” says Menon. “It’s not like we’re coping with nations on the opposite facet of the world.”
john.reed@ft.com