N Sathiya Moorthy If the Bangladesh government approaches New Delhi for extraditing Hasina and her sister, that too after following the due processes as known to common law and also the provisions of the extradition treaty, then New Delhi might well be put in a fixDid the mass protests and consequent regime-change in neighbouring Bangladesh impact domestic politics here in India? For the first time possibly under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 10-plus years of the BJP-NDA regime, the Opposition acted ‘responsibly’ and the government was ‘responsive’. There is no need to dissect as to who was in the wrong in the past. By taking the Opposition into confidence, both inside and outside Parliament, with the multi-party I.N.D.I. alliance standing by the government on matters Bangladesh, a new era of bi-polar politics has begun in the country.Traditionally, the nation’s polity has stood as one when it comes to matters of national security and allied foreign policy concerns. Referring to Indira Gandhi’s leadership of the ‘Bangladesh War’ (1971) in Parliament, then Jan Sangh leader (later BJP) Atal Bihari Vajpayee used the metaphor ‘Durga on the Lion’. The Opposition of the day hailed the nation’s achievement on ‘Pokhran-I & II’ (1974, 1998) nuclear tests. As the Kargil War (1999) wound on, the then Congress Opposition pledged whole-hearted support to the national cause and stood by. They reserved criticism on alleged ‘intelligence failure’, ‘delayed action’ and a corruption-ridden ‘coffin-gate’ for post-war exchanges in Parliament and outside. Better still, the ruling Congress and the Opposition BJP stood as one in getting the India-US civilian nuclear deal passed in both Houses.Betting too muchIn the weeks, months and years to come, strategic thinkers and academics, in the two countries and also the rest of the world, would surely be debating if New Delhi, independent of political leaderships, bent too much on Hasina’s side to the near-exclusion of other political players in that country. Truth be acknowledged, India did not interfere in the internal affairs of Bangladesh, there was possibly a failed system and faked elections. New Delhi was left with no choice but to deal with the government and Prime Minister that the people of Bangladesh elected, and repeatedly so.Remember how after Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s assassination, sections of the Bangladeshi strategic community blamed him for bending too much on the Indian neighbour. If they regretted the creation of Bangladesh and India’s interventionist role in it, they did not say so. If they now begin complaining, louder than ever, that Sheikh Hasina was too accommodative to India’s wishes, political, economic and strategic, again they are mistaken.India had no role in the autocracy that runs in Bangladeshi minds. What father Mujibur Rahman was accused of doing, Hasina lived to repeat. In between, the various military-led regimes and that by her arch-rival and BNP president, Begum Khaleda Zia, were no different. To be fair to Hasina, she turned around the country’s economy and also wiped out terrorism, both in near-simultaneous swift moves. It was evident that the security forces stood by her leadership when it battled terrorism in the country, and also during the ‘mutiny’ by the Bangladesh Border Guard (BDR), way back in 2009.This time round, however, there seemed to have been inherent limitations to the self-regulated role of the armed forces in putting down the ‘people’s power’. According to news reports, younger officers questioned the top brass over the wisdom and propriety of doing so, at the behest of the Hasina regime. They were reflecting the mood of the nation and that was not a good sign. That mood was not about economic recovery (which was already floundering, post-Covid) or terrorism, but was about democratic values.Maybe, it all owed to the war and violence that a whole generation of Bangladeshis were parties to and witnessed, too. The fact remains, Bangladesh is possibly the only country in South Asia, where political clashes were rampant and their turning into big-time violence was not unusual and casual. Elsewhere in the region and in most other nations, where there are street-clashes of the kind, the State, represented by the police and other security forces, would be on the one side and violent protestors and mobsters, on the other.It was not always so in Bangladesh, where political clashes were invariably between the cadres of two political parties, invariably between Hasina’s Awami League on the one side, and Khaleda’s BNP with or without the Jamaat-e-Islami, which was/is a patently an anti-India, radical Islamist force. Between the two phases of the nation-wide student-youth violence that ousted the Hasina regime, you had the government banning the Jamaat for a second time, on 1 August, blaming it for the unprecedented street-violence that refused to die down.It is more than likely that the Jamaat, BNP and all frustrated political forces were behind the street protests and mob violence, yes. But it also shows how disconnected the Hasina regime had become after barring the Jamaat from contesting elections in 2013 (after her father had once banned the party in 1973) and putting political rival Khaleda behind bars, almost permanently. Whoever took the decision, almost the first one after Hasina left the country was to free Khaleda from prison. It is not unlikely that Hasina’s rivals would want to give it back to her, now in the same coin.Not right…This brings in India, where Hasina has taken shelter for now. It is a difficult yet unavoidable scenario that New Delhi had to end up hosting her at a critical juncture in that nation’s history. Needless to say that the deposed leader and her advisors too would be alive to the fact that she cannot continue to stay on in India for more than required. Reports claimed that she was thinking in terms of migrating to the UK, but after obtaining ‘political asylum’; however, soon it turned out that it was not going to happen. No Prime Minister in 10 Downing Street could especially afford to have an Islamic ‘fugitive’ from another country asylum in the UK when the country was facing ‘anti-Muslim’ riots all across.But India has had another related problem on hand, or something that may be brewing. Travelling from Dubai to take over as the head of the interim government, 84-year-old Nobel laureate Mohummud Yunus said that it was ‘not right’ for Hasina to stay on in India. He told an Indian interviewer how if the violence and crisis continued, it could well spill over into India’s border states and also Myanmar.If Yunus was cautioning New Delhi about a situation like one that prevailed in 1971, wherein a humanitarian crisis of unprecedented kind since Partition and Independence caused India’s diplomatic and military intervention, he did not say it – at least, not yet. But his observation is loaded in multiple ways, whether or not he realised them all.A senior leader of Khaleda’s BNP leader, Gayeshwar Roy, lost no time in cautioning India over ‘strained relations’ over New Delhi’s ‘support’ for Hasina, meaning hosting her in the interim. Though it is more about the present and try to attribute motives where none exist, they often tend to forget how India under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had officially hosted Khaleda Zia, then still only an Opposition leader, for a week or so – and she returned the compliment by cancelling an appointment with the visitor when he travelled to Dhaka not very long after, by tactically calling for a nation-wide bandh, of course against the Hasina regime, during the period.However, Mahbub Uddin Khokon, president of the Bangladesh Supreme Court Bar Association, was blunt in his social media post for India to “arrest and send back” Hasina and her sister, and send them back to that country. Now that a civilian regime of some title and character has taken charge in Dhaka, the question arises as to New Delhi’s reaction if and when approached for extraditing Hasina, to stand trial in local courts for alleged acts of commissions, under the law.Yunus too has since talked to Prime Minister Modi and promised the continuance of good neighbourly relations – but that does not mean that his regime would look the other way on Hasina and massive allegations of her high-handedness and also corruption when in power. Already, demands for India arresting Hasina and sending her back to face trial nearer home have begun reverberating across Bangladesh. Some rivals have used the specific term ‘extradition’.The two nations, it may be recalled, signed an Extradition Treaty in 2013, which was amended in 2016, between the governments of Prime Ministers Hasina and Narendra Modi. It is anybody’s guess if opponents in Bangladesh who are demanding Hasina’s arrest and extradition knew of the existence of this agreement, but definitely, government officials in Dhaka, directed to handle criminal cases against her would know all about it. Hence, if the Bangladesh government approaches New Delhi in the coming weeks and months for extraditing Hasina and her sister, that too after following the due processes as known to common law and also the provisions of the extradition treaty, then New Delhi might well be put in a fix.Loaded messageEven without it all, Bangladesh is faced with real problems of everyday kind, which goes beyond democracy, rule of law and the impending crisis, which the Hasina regime could only put off for another day, but not wipe out completely. When faced with a crisis, you now have a leader in Yunus, who, at 84, has no politico-administrative experience. The alternate leader in Khaleda is ageing at 78 and is also ailing with multiple health issues. Hasina herself is 76.In the transition, if that is what it is, Yunus is the chief advisor. There are 14 advisors, none of whom is a minister under the Constitution, which thankfully has not been ‘suspended’ or ‘abrogated’, as used to be the case in such circumstances. When Hasina left, the army gave word that fresh parliamentary polls would be held at the earliest, to annul the results of the controversial one in January. On release from house-arrest, Khaleda wanted early elections, as early as three months.However, Yunus has since declared that holding elections was not his first priority, but restoring order alone is. It is anybody’s guess how many more months or years it is meant to take. Already, there are indications that the army is going to stay ‘behind the scenes’ but run the show all the same, if only to confer continued legitimacy of some kind on the propped up administration that is not elected. This can have consequences for the nation first and neighbours, next — and the attack on Hindus and other minorities in the country was/is only one of them. Yunus talked to Prime Minister Modi and promised to end anti-Hindu violence across the country, after the latter mentioned it in public. For India, that might be a measure, but not the only one!https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/what-if-dhaka-now-seeks-hasinas-extradition-under-existing-bilateral-agreement-13806816.html(The writer is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)
