NEW DELHI, India – Sima Akhter, 24, was at soccer practice when her friend interrupted to share the news that Bangladesh’s fugitive former prime minister Sheikh Hasina had been sentenced to death.
For the Dhaka University student, it felt like a vindication moment.
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Last year, several of Akhter’s friends were killed in a crackdown on protesters by Hasina’s security forces before she finally resigned and fled Bangladesh. The International Crimes Tribunal in Dhaka tried the 78-year-old leader for crimes against humanity, but after a months-long trial found Hasina guilty of ordering a deadly crackdown on last year’s uprising and sentenced Hasina to death.
“Hasina, a fascist, thought she could not lose and could rule forever,” Akhter said from Dhaka. “Her death sentence is a step toward justice for our martyrs.”
But Achter added that sentencing itself is not enough.
“We want to see her hanged here in Dhaka!” she said.
It won’t happen easily.
Hasina, who fled Dhaka in August 2024 after protesters attacked her home, remains far from the gallows, living in exile in New Delhi.
Hasina’s presence in India, despite repeated requests for extradition from Bangladesh, has been a major source of friction between the two South Asian neighbors for the past 15 months. Now that Hasina has been formally found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death, these tensions are expected to rise to new heights. While India is keen to forge a partnership with a post-Hasina Dhaka, several geopolitical analysts said they could not imagine a scenario in which New Delhi extradited the former prime minister to Bangladesh to face the death penalty.
“How can New Delhi let her die?” said Ranjan Chakravarty, former Indian High Commissioner to Dhaka Pinak.
“Extremely unkind act”
Hasina, Bangladesh’s longest-serving prime minister, is the eldest daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who led Bangladesh’s war of independence from Pakistan in 1971.
She first became prime minister in 1996. He lost the 2001 election and was out of power until re-elected in 2009. She remained prime minister for the next 15 years, winning elections in which opposition parties were often boycotted or barred from running amid widespread hard-liners. Thousands of people were forcibly disappeared. Many people were killed extrajudicially. Incidents of torture were frequent, and her opponents were imprisoned without trial.
Meanwhile, her government touted its economic performance to justify her rule. Bangladesh, once described as a “basket case” economy by former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, has experienced rapid gross domestic product (GDP) growth in recent years, surpassing India’s per capita income.
But in July 2024, a student movement that initially began over government job quotas for descendants of those who fought in Pakistan’s 1971 war of independence escalated into nationwide demands for Hasina to call for a brutal crackdown by security forces.
According to United Nations estimates, nearly 1,400 people were killed in clashes between student demonstrators and armed police in Dhaka.
Hasina, a longtime ally of India, went into exile in New Delhi on August 5, 2024, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus took over as interim leader. Yunus’ government has since moved to forge closer ties with Pakistan amid tensions with India over Dhaka’s insistence on New Delhi’s ouster of Hasina.
On Tuesday, the Dhaka Ministry of Foreign Affairs further raised the pitch for the match against New Delhi. Citing the extradition agreement with India, the ministry said it was New Delhi’s “mandatory responsibility” to ensure Hasina’s return to Bangladesh. It added that India’s continued provision of shelter to Hasina was “a very unfriendly act and a disregard for justice”.
However, Indian political analysts told Al Jazeera that there are exceptions to the extradition treaty if the crime is “political in nature.”
“India understands this.” [Hasina’s case] It is a political vendetta of Bangladesh’s dominant political forces,” said Sanjay Bhardwaj, a professor of South Asian studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
Bhardwaj told Al Jazeera that New Delhi’s view is that Bangladesh is currently ruled by “anti-India forces”. Yunus is a frequent critic of India, and leaders of the protest movement that ousted Hasina have often accused New Delhi of supporting the former prime minister.
Against this backdrop, Hasina’s extradition “signifies legitimation” to forces opposed to India, Bhardwaj added.
“The Indian equation needs to change.”
India “takes note of the judgment” against Hasina and New Delhi and “will always work constructively with all stakeholders,” a foreign ministry statement said.
India “remains committed to the best interests of the people of Bangladesh, including peace, democracy, inclusion and stability in Bangladesh,” it said.
However, relations between New Delhi and Dhaka today are frosty. The prosperous economic, security, and political alliances that existed under Hasina have now turned into bonds marked by mistrust.
Former Indian High Commissioner Chakravarti said he did not expect this situation to change soon.
“Under this government [in Dhaka]“Relations will remain tense because India continues to say they will not give us back Hasina,” Chakravarti told Al Jazeera.
But he said Bangladesh’s elections scheduled for February could open a new path. Hasina’s Awami League has been banned from campaigning, and India will find it easier to work with an elected government, even though most other major political forces, including the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, have criticized New Delhi.
“This cannot continue. India needs an elected government in Dhaka,” Chakravarti said of the tense relations between the neighbours. “India should wait but not interfere with other arrangements, such as goodwill trade.”
Sreerada Dutta, a professor of South Asian studies at India’s Jindal Global University, said that while India is in a bind over Hasina, it is not ignoring the popular resentment against her in Bangladesh.
In an ideal scenario, New Delhi would like to see the Awami League return to power in Bangladesh at some point in the future, she said. “she [Hasina] He is always the best forward for India,” Dutta told Al Jazeera.
But the reality is that India needs to accept that Bangladesh is unlikely to give Hasina another chance, she said. Instead, India needs to build relationships with other political forces in Dhaka, Dutta said.
“India has never had good relations with any other stakeholder. But now that has to change,” Dutta said.
“We are currently at a very fragile stage in our bilateral relations,” she added. “But we have to be able to move beyond this particular agenda. [of Hasina’s extradition]”
Even though India and Bangladesh are no longer allies, they still need to “have civility with each other,” Dutta said.
Benefits of attachment to Hasina
Bangladesh and India have close cultural ties and share a 4,000 km (2,485 mile) border. India is Bangladesh’s second largest trading partner after China. Indeed, despite the tensions, trade between India and Bangladesh has increased in recent months.
But while India has long maintained that its ties are with Bangladesh and not with any political party or leader in Dhaka, the closest one was with the Awami League.
After a bloody war of independence in 1971, Hasina’s father came to power in East Pakistan (renamed Bangladesh) with Indian support. For India, the breakup of Pakistan solved a major strategic and security nightmare by making its eastern neighbor a friend.
Hasina’s personal ties to India go back almost as long.
She first called New Delhi home 50 years ago, when most of her family, including Rahman, were assassinated in a 1975 military coup. Only Hasina and her sister Rehana survived because they were in Germany.
Then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi offered asylum to Rahman’s orphaned daughters. Hasina and her husband MA Wazed lived in different residences in New Delhi. children; and Rehana, and even appeared on All India Radio’s Bangla broadcast Moonlit.
After six years in exile, Hasina returned to Bangladesh to lead her father’s party and was first elected prime minister in 1996, beginning her second long term in 2009.
Under her rule, relations with India flourished even as she faced domestic criticism over brokering deals with Indian companies that were seen as unfair to Dhaka.
When she was exiled and felt the need to flee, there was little question as to where she would take refuge. India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval greeted her as she landed on the outskirts of New Delhi.
“We did not invite Hasina this time,” said Chakravarti, who briefly negotiated with Hasina’s government in 2009 when she was high commissioner. “Government officials naturally accepted her because she was the incumbent prime minister and India allowed her to stay. What other option was there?”
“Can she return to Bangladesh now that she has been sentenced to death?” he further asked, adding, “She was a person who was friendly to India. India has to take a moral stand.”
Michael Kugelman, a South Asia analyst based in Washington, D.C., said Hasina’s presence in India “remains a thorny issue in bilateral relations” but allowed “India to stay true to its pledge to remain loyal to its allies.”
But in theory, Kugelman argued, New Delhi could also have long-term political benefits.
Unlike other analysts, Kugelman said Hasina’s political achievements and the future of Awami League cannot be completely written off.
Hasina heads an old dynastic party, and Kugelman said South Asia’s political history shows that dynastic parties “fall into difficult times for quite a while, but they never really wither away and die.”
“Dynastic parties are hanging out” in South Asia, he said, adding: “If we can be patient and see significant political change, there could be another opportunity for a comeback.”
