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The Indian ExpressAugust 7, 2026

India-Bangladesh ties should be Hasina-proof

Wednesday’s press conference, during which exiled former Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina saidshe cannot “stay away” while her “beloved countrymen are suffering”, comes less than six months after the Bangladesh Nationalist Party-led government took office. Even though the Awami League was barred from contesting, PM Tarique Rahman’s administration is seen to have restored a measure of legitimacy to the political system. Hasina, who was sentenced to death by Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal, remains a deeply unpopular figure in her country for several reasons, including her government’s heavy-handed response to the 2024 student protests. Against this backdrop, comes her announcement of a political comeback while being in exile in India. Her timing is fraught, a mob hurled petrol bombs at the residence of former Bangladesh cricket captain and party member Shakib Al Hasan after he joined Hasina virtually. It also comes when New Delhi is working to rebuild ties with Dhaka after one-and-a-half years of strained relations with the Muhammad Yunus-led interim government. India was right to offer Hasina refuge, especially given the concerns over the blatant unfairness of the legal proceedings against her in Bangladesh. But while a sanctuary offers her a home away from home, turning it into a political platform is problematic. The personal struggle of the former PM — who once anchored the close relationship between neighbours bound together by geography, security, culture — is filled with challenges. Yet, she must surely know that her political aspirations cannot bruise New Delhi’s relationship with the democratically elected Rahman government. Rahman’s election, followed by high-level exchanges between the two governments, has opened the door to a pragmatic reset. This is even as difficult issues – from illegal border crossings to the future of the Ganga Water Treaty – remain unresolved. Dhaka’s sharp reaction to Wednesday’s event, in spite of New Delhi making it clear that it was not involved, is thin-skinned and hardly helps the two countries. Indian investment, technical cooperation and infrastructure financing have contributed to Bangladesh’s growth story. India has stakes in Bangladesh’s power and connectivity sectors. New Delhi is also wary of Dhaka’s possible drift into Beijing’s orbit. The two countries share a 4,000-kilometre border, making cooperation indispensable to tackling trafficking, illegal infiltration and cross-border extremism, particularly given the sensitivity of India’s northeast region. Both governments need to insulate bilateral ties from short-term compulsions. While Hasina remains a welcome and protected guest, the bilateral relationship is too important to be held hostage by any one individual or interest.

Key GK Takeaways for CLAT
  • 1India has no dedicated domestic refugee or asylum law, so decisions to host individuals like Sheikh Hasina rest on executive discretion under the Foreigners Act, 1946, since India is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol. This gives the Union government, acting through the Ministry of External Affairs and Ministry of Home Affairs, wide latitude to grant or restrict a guest's political activities on Indian soil. Such executive flexibility is precisely what the editorial urges India to use carefully, ensuring bilateral ties are not held hostage to one individual's choices.
  • 2India-Bangladesh relations moved through a turbulent phase after Sheikh Hasina's ouster in August 2024 and the formation of the Muhammad Yunus-led interim government, followed by elections that brought Tarique Rahman's Bangladesh Nationalist Party to power. Bangladesh's strategic location, sharing a four-thousand-kilometre border with India and controlling access routes to India's northeastern states, makes stability there central to India's neighbourhood-first policy, particularly given China's growing investment footprint in Bangladeshi ports and infrastructure. Unresolved issues such as the Ganga Water Treaty's future and cross-border migration continue to test the relationship even as both governments seek a pragmatic reset.
  • 3Sheikh Hasina's death sentence was handed down by Bangladesh's International Crimes Tribunal, a domestic tribunal originally established in 1973 to prosecute Liberation War atrocities but since used in cases connected to the 2024 crackdown on protesters. India's decision not to extradite her draws on the India-Bangladesh Extradition Treaty of 2013, which contains exceptions for political offences and concerns about fair trial standards. This tension between treaty obligations and India's assessment of due process fairness illustrates a recurring theme in extradition law tested in CLAT legal reasoning passages.
  • 4India has significant economic stakes in Bangladesh, having extended multiple lines of credit worth several billion dollars over the past decade for infrastructure, power, and connectivity projects, including cross-border electricity supply agreements. Bilateral trade between the two countries has historically been valued at several billion dollars annually, making Bangladesh one of India's largest trade partners in South Asia. Given this economic interdependence, alongside the shared four-thousand-kilometre border affecting security cooperation, the editorial's call to insulate ties from any single political figure reflects the high economic and strategic cost of instability.

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