AA Edit | Tough Choices For Hasina

It is a perilous journey that Bangladesh’s former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina will be undertaking if she chooses to follow up on her desire to return to Bangladesh by the end of the year. She accepts the reality that she may be jailed on her arrival and may even be executed if the death sentence against her is carried out.

India has been a haven for the Bangladeshi leader in the two years since she had to flee home at short notice. Coming here was her choice, which was backed by India considering how good the ties were during her time in office. Leaving to go home would be her choice too, but one loaded with the threat hanging over her freedom and her life itself.

The reaction of the Bangladesh government of Tarique Rahman to her holding a virtual press meet from her protected residence in New Delhi was a dead giveaway about how the former PM is regarded now. “Bangladesh is outraged that the absconding convicted genocider [sic] Sheikh Hasina was allowed to engage in live interaction with the media in New Delhi,” was the caustic message from Dhaka.

Sheikh Hasina was a democratically elected Prime Minister whose political career was forged after cataclysmic events in which her father Sheikh Mujibur Rehman was eliminated along with many members of his family. She continued her reign later by holding elections from which she excluded the main rival — Bangladesh Nationalist Party.

Condemned as an autocrat, she became the focus of a student movement which avowedly began as a protest against seats reserved for the kin of martyrs. Who sponsored it or manipulated the events quickly thereafter to oust her and put in an adviser in Md Yunus who oversaw a disastrous interregnum before Khaleda Zia’s party returned to power with her son at the helm will remain a mystery.

Given the toxic political rivalries among major parties in the subcontinent and a dreadful history of assassinations or state-sponsored executions of Presidents and Prime Ministers, it is with trepidation that Sheikh Hasina’s intending return to her homeland should be viewed. As a friend of India, we will wish her well if she does decide to go home because of compulsions only she can know of.