Bangladesh’s former prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, who left office on Monday and fled to India following violent protests in the Asian country since July 1, remains in New Delhi, shrouded in secrecy and with more unknowns than certainties regarding her future.
“We have no news about their plans,” said Randhir Jaiswal, spokesman for the Ministry of External Affairs of the Indian government, at a press conference on Thursday.
In recent days, the Indian and Bangladeshi press have speculated that Hasina might seek asylum in the United Kingdom, where her sister and niece, a member of the Labour government of Keir Starmer, live, or in the United States, where Sajeeb Wazed, one of the former president’s sons, lives.
However, in an interview with Indian television channel NDTV on Wednesday, Wazed clarified that her mother had not yet applied for asylum in either country and said reports that authorities in those states had rejected her applications were not true.
A third option that could arise in this case is that Hasina would remain longer in the Indian capital, where she already lived in exile between 1975 and 1981, when she had to undertake her first flight from Bangladesh after the assassination of her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and most of her family.
The Indian government has not yet made any clear statement on this matter, saying only that it will give the former prime minister “time” to decide her future.
Faced with initially peaceful student protests that broke out in the Asian country on July 1, the once all-powerful Hasina was forced to resign from her post, which she had held uninterruptedly since 2009, and decided to leave Bangladesh.
The brutal repression with which her government suppressed the protests, in which more than 400 people died, according to reports prepared by EFE, precipitated the departure from power of Hasina and her party, the Awami League.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus will take office this afternoon as head of the new interim government that will take charge of Bangladesh after four days of power vacuum in the country, one of the poorest in the world.
New Delhi / EFE
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2024-08-10 08:45:40
