Hasina must ‘keep quiet,’ Bangladesh interim govt chief Yunus tells India

Ousted Bangladesh leader Sheikh Hasina must “keep quiet” while in India, and New Delhi was told to ensure that the ex-PM stays silent until she was brought to Dhaka to stand trial, Muhammad Yunus, her temporary successor, told India’s state news agency.

The interim government chief also described bilateral relations as being in a bad place, amid New Delhi’s communal spin to attacks on some minority Hindus after Hasina fled, combined with its notion that only she could ensure a stable Bangladesh, said a Thursday Press Trust of India report.

Yunus, a 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner for pioneering microcredit, who was chosen head of the transitional government days after Hasina’s Aug. 5 resignation and flight to India, did not specify when she had publicly spoken since she departed. 

However, the only time was in an Aug. 13 social media post via her son’s X account, when she demanded justice for those killed during the anti-government protests, which she called “terrorist aggression.”

Hasina’s statements while staying in India are being interpreted as hostility towards Bangladesh, Yunus said, although he wasn’t clear who was being seen as hostile – India or Hasina.

“If India wants to keep her until the time [the] Bangladesh [government] wants her back, the condition would be that she has to keep quiet,” Yunus told PTI in an interview from his official residence in Dhaka.

“Yes, she has to be brought back or else the people of Bangladesh won’t be at peace. The kind of atrocities she has committed, she has to be tried in front of everyone here,” he added, indicating Dhaka would demand that India extradite Hasina.

Critics have said Hasina crushed dissent, allegedly caused enforced disappearances and bent state institutions to her will. 

India’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has since 2014, when it came to power, been Hasina's steadfast supporter and champion. Before  the BJP,  India's Congress government also favored a Hasina administration.

But the Awami League leader had developed a special camaraderie with Indian counterpart, the BJP's Narendra Modi.

PTI asked Yunus whether the Indian government had been informed about how the Bangladesh administration interpreted Hasina issuing statements while in India.

Yunus replied that the message was verbally – and strongly – conveyed to New Delhi.

“We have said quite firmly that she should keep quiet. This is an unfriendly gesture towards us; she has been given shelter there and she is campaigning from there,” Yunus said.

“It is not that she has gone there [in the] normal course [of events]. She has fled following a people’s uprising and public anger.”

Hasina resigned and bolted for India following student protests that turned deadly amid violence by supporters of the ex-PM’s party and unprovoked police attacks.

The protest then became a nationwide mass movement calling for Hasina’s resignation.

The two neighbors have been at odds since Hasina decamped to India, observers have noted.

Yunus acknowledged as much in his interview to PTI.

“We need to work together to improve this relationship, which is now at a low,” he said.

He pointed to at least two recent developments that led to the current rift.

One was New Delhi’s unwavering support for Hasina, based on the idea that she was the only Bangladeshi leader who was willing to crack down on religious extremism and separatist insurgents in India near the border with Bangladesh.

The way forward for Bangladesh and India is for New Delhi to move away from such a “narrative,” Yunus said.

“The narrative is that everybody is Islamist, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) is Islamist, and everyone else is Islamist and will make this country into Afghanistan. And Bangladesh is in safe hands with Sheikh Hasina at the helm only,” he said, referring to the main opposition party during Hasina’s 15-year rule since 2009.

“India is captivated by this narrative. India has to come out of this narrative.”

Many observers believe that when an election is held in Bangladesh, the opposition BNP will emerge victorious.

Its leader, a frail Khaleda Zia, who was released from prison following Hasina’s departure, is viewed in India as pro-Pakistan.

Her 2001 to 2006 term as PM was “marked by rhetorical anti-India statements,” said an opinion piece published in 2006 on the website of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, which calls itself an independent New Delhi-based think- tank.

“Controversial issues like illegal immigration, border skirmishes and the issue of militant camps in Bangladesh would remain thorny issues,” the article said, referring to the problems India had with Bangladesh during Khaleda's administration.

For Bangladesh, the report said, “the rise of the religious [Hindu] right,” in India would hamper bilateral ties.

In 2009, an article titled “Bangladesh: A Sanctuary for Terrorists Operating Against India,” published on the website of the New Delhi-based Centre for Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS) think tank, described Khaleda’s alleged anti-India stance.

“Fundamentalist and jihadi elements were the notable allies of Begum Zia’s national and international policy to weaken the opposition Awami League and its allies and to keep India destabilized respectively,” said the article on the website of the purportedly independent think tank.

It added that Bangladesh’s Jamaat-e-Islami group supported insurgent groups in northeast India.

“It should be noted that efforts towards joint anti-terrorist or security operations between India and Bangladesh started soon after Sheikh Hasina came to power,” which she did in 2009.

The threat of Islamic extremism rising if a BNP-Jamaat alliance come to power, “is an invention of the Awami League and its supporters,” said Jon Danilowicz, a retired U.S. diplomat, who served three assignments in Bangladesh.

“That’s not to say there hasn’t been extremism, but it is not accurate to say that everyone who may be conservative is by definition a terrorist or extremist,” he told BenarNews on Aug. 6.

“By and large, there has been a tradition of coherence and cohesion among religions that I saw in my career there. The narrative of the Awami League that it was the only thing standing in the way of Bangladesh becoming the next Afghanistan was not a reflection of reality.”

Under Hasina’s second watch as PM, Islamic militants targeted secular writers and bloggers in a series of machete killings. In July 2016, extremists aligned with the transnational Islamic State group massacred 29 people at a café in Dhaka’s diplomatic quarter.

The café attack jolted the Hasina government, which played down the threat of foreign terror groups and, for years, repeatedly denied the presence of IS in Bangladesh.

Instead, it blamed Neo-JMB, a faction of a home-grown extremist group, for the slaughter at the Holey Artisan bakery café.

‘Attacks are political, not communal’

The second recent development that has displeased Yunus and others in Bangladesh is the issue of attacks on the country's Hindu minority and the “exaggerated” manner in which New Delhi projected some of the violence in the immediate aftermath of Hasina fleeing to India.

Hindus comprise around 8% of Bangladesh’s population.

Yunus told PTI that the attacks were not communal. Other non-Hindu supporters of the Awami League were also attacked, he said.

“I have said this to [Indian Prime Minister] Modi also that this is exaggerated. This issue has several dimensions,” Yunus said.

“When the country went through an upheaval following the atrocities by Hasina and the Awami League, those who were with them also faced attacks. Now, while beating up Awami League cadres, they had beaten up Hindus as there is a perception that Hindus in Bangladesh [are] Awami League supporters.”

Soon after Hasina ran away, incidents of vandalism and physical attacks on people were reported across the country, including against Hindus and Muslims.

However, in neighboring India, fake news about widespread violence against Bangladesh’s Hindu minority spread like a contagion.

Alleged incidents of such attacks posted on social media were debunked by fact checkers at international news agencies such as BBC News and Agence France-Presse,

Meanwhile, news sources such as Al Jazeera quoted reputed observers as noting that the Indian media had played a big part in spreading alarmist reports.

Additionally, Yunus said the incidents occurred only for a couple of days after Hasina fled for India.

“These attacks [were] political in nature and not communal,” Yunus told PTI.

“And India is propagating these incidents in a big way.”