By T N Ashok
Exiled Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s virtual press appearance from New Delhi has plunged India-Bangladesh relations into their sharpest crisis in months, with Dhaka accusing New Delhi of allowing its soil to be used to attack Bangladesh’s sovereignty, and India insisting it had no hand in organising the event at all.
The flashpoint was a live media interaction held in the Indian capital on August 5 — the second anniversary of the day Sheikh Hasina, then Bangladesh’s prime minister, fled Dhaka as a student-led uprising closed in on her government.
Speaking to journalists by video link for the first time since her ouster, the 78-year-old former premier used the occasion to reject the findings of Bangladesh’s tribal justice process, accuse the interim government of Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus of plotting against her, and declare that she intends to return home in December — “whatever fate awaits me,” in her words, including arrest, imprisonment or worse.
Bangladesh’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it was “outraged” that a woman it calls an absconding convicted mass murderer had been permitted to hold forth on Indian soil against the Bangladeshi state and its people, timed cruelly, in its telling, to coincide with the anniversary the nation marks as its “July Revolution.”
The ministry called the episode an affront to Bangladesh’s sovereignty, said it had conveyed its objections to New Delhi before the event took place, and expressed regret that the programme went ahead regardless. It warned, pointedly, that repeated incidents of this kind could undo the fragile progress both governments have made toward resetting a relationship battered since Hasina’s fall.
This was not a one-off complaint. Bangladesh’s foreign ministry had already summoned India’s deputy high commissioner in Dhaka in November 2025 over an earlier round of interviews Hasina gave to Indian and international outlets, formally asking that her access to the media be shut down.
Dhaka went further still in the days after the August 5 broadcast, lodging a fresh protest with New Delhi’s acting envoy over Hasina’s remarks — delivered, again, from Indian territory — condemning the demolition of her father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s historic Dhanmondi residence by a mob, which she said had turned Bangladesh into “a land of militants and terrorists.”
On the substance of the August 5 broadcast itself, New Delhi has drawn a careful line. Government sources described the media interaction as a privately organised event with no official Indian sponsorship or endorsement, distancing the state from any suggestion that it had facilitated a political platform for Hasina. That formula — noting events, declining responsibility, urging calm — has become India’s standard posture through two years of Bangladeshi demands that it hand over its most consequential political exile.
How Hasina came to Delhi; The current standoff has its roots in the chaotic afternoon of August 5, 2024, when Hasina, facing a collapsing security situation after nearly two months of student-led protests that left close to 1,400 people dead by United Nations estimates, resigned and fled Dhaka by helicopter.
She flew into India and was received by Indian authorities near Delhi, beginning what has stretched into two years of what New Delhi has characterised as a temporary, humanitarian stay rather than a formal grant of asylum. India has never publicly clarified her exact legal status, a studied ambiguity that has allowed it to avoid a decision on the extradition request Dhaka has pressed under the 2013 India-Bangladesh Extradition Treaty — a request the Yunus-led interim government, and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party government that succeeded it after February 2026 elections, say has gone unanswered for two years.
The legal stakes for Hasina rose sharply on November 17, 2025, when Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal, trying her in absentia, convicted her of crimes against humanity over the 2024 crackdown and sentenced her to death, alongside her former home minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal. A third co-accused, former police chiefChowdhury Abdullah Al-Mamun, turned state witness and received a five-year term.
Hasina has dismissed the verdict as the product of a “rigged tribunal” answering to an unelected government, while human rights organisations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have separately criticised the trial’s fair-trial standards even as they acknowledge the gravity of the underlying allegations. India’s own response to the verdict was carefully calibrated — New Delhi said it had “noted” the judgment and remained committed to the interests of the Bangladeshi people, but stopped short of addressing the extradition question altogether.
That silence is precisely what now animates Dhaka’s fury. With Hasina publicly vowing to return in December regardless of consequences, and Bangladesh’s foreign ministry renewing its extradition demand with every fresh broadcast from Delhi, the two capitals are locked in a cycle that shows no sign of easing: Hasina speaks, Dhaka protests, Delhi demurs, and the underlying question of her legal status and eventual fate remains exactly where it has stood since August 2024 — unresolved, and increasingly costly to a relationship both governments say they still want to repair. (IPA Service)
