New Delhi, India – Shima Akhter, 24, was in the middle of football practice when her friend stopped the session to break some news for her: Sheikh Hasina, the fugitive former prime minister of Bangladesh, had been sentenced to death.
To the University of Dhaka student, it felt like a moment of vindication.
Several of Akhter’s friends were killed in a crackdown on protesters by Hasina’s security forces last year before Hasina finally quit office and fled Bangladesh. The International Crimes Tribunal in Dhaka, which tried the 78-year-old leader for crimes against humanity, sentenced Hasina to death after a months-long trial that found her guilty of ordering a deadly crackdown on the uprising last year.
“The fascist Hasina thought she could not be defeated, that she could rule forever,” Akhter said from Dhaka. “A death sentence for her is a step towards justice for our martyrs.”
But, Akhter added, the sentencing itself wasn’t enough.
“We want to see her hanged here in Dhaka!” she said.
That won’t happen easily.
Hasina, who fled Dhaka as protesters stormed her home in August 2024, remains far from the gallows for now, living in exile in New Delhi.
Hasina’s presence in India despite repeated requests from Bangladesh to hand her over has been a key source of friction between the South Asian neighbours over the past 15 months. Now, with Hasina formally convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death, those tensions are expected to rise to new heights. Even though India is eager to build a partnership with a post-Hasina Dhaka, several geopolitical analysts said they cannot envision a scenario in which New Delhi turns the former prime minister over to Bangladesh to face the death penalty.
“How can New Delhi push her towards her death?” former Indian High Commissioner to Dhaka Pinak Ranjan Chakravarty said.
‘Highly unfriendly act’
Hasina, Bangladesh’s longest serving prime minister, is the eldest daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who led the war for independence from Pakistan in 1971.
She first became prime minister in 1996. Defeated in the 2001 election, she was out of power until she won again in 2009. She remained in office for 15 years after that, winning elections that opposition parties often boycotted or were banned from contesting in amid a broader hardline turn. Thousands of people were forcibly disappeared. Many were killed extrajudicially. Torture cases became common, and her opponents were jailed without trials.
Meanwhile, her government touted its economic record to justify her rule. Bangladesh, which former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had once called a “basket case” economy, has in recent years witnessed rapid gross domestic product growth and has outpaced India’s per capita income.
But in July 2024, a student protest that initially began over government job quotas for descendants of those who fought in the 1971 war of independence from Pakistan escalated into a nationwide call for Hasina to go after a brutal crackdown by security forces.
Student protesters clashed with armed police in Dhaka, and nearly 1,400 people were killed, according to estimates by the United Nations.
Hasina, a longtime ally of India, fled to New Delhi on August 5, 2024, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus took over as interim leader. Yunus’s government has since moved to build closer ties with Pakistan amid tensions with India, including over Dhaka’s insistence that New Delhi expel Hasina.
On Tuesday, Dhaka’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs raised the pitch against New Delhi further. The ministry cited an extradition agreement with India and said it was an “obligatory responsibility” for New Delhi to ensure Hasina’s return to Bangladesh. It added that it “would be a highly unfriendly act and a disregard for justice” for India to continue to provide Hasina refuge.
Political analysts in India, however, pointed out to Al Jazeera that an exception exists in the extradition treaty in cases in which the offence is “of a political character”.
