India must stand firm in its refusal to hand over a leader who has been a steadfast ally, particularly when such demands come from factions with anti-India sentiment
India must not pay the slightest heed to the demand by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s secretary-general, Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, to extradite Sheikh Hasina to his country. From reports in Indian newspapers, he seems to have cited two grounds, both utterly laughable, for his demand. The first is that she should stand trial for the murder and other charges levelled against her. The question is: will she receive a fair trial under the conditions now prevailing in Bangladesh? The matter is important. Even if the charges levelled against her are true, and she has done terrible things, she has an inalienable right to a fair trial.
This, she will not get with large mobs literally baying for her blood, statues of her father, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the architect of the country’s emergence from East Pakistan to sovereign Bangladesh, are being pulled down, the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum of 32 Dhanmondi, Dhaka, his erstwhile residence, ransacked and burnt, and the Liberation War Museum at Suhrawardy Udyan Dhaka, razed to the ground.
Clearly, a section of people is trying to take advantage of the situation created by the Anti-Discrimination Students’ Movement (ADSM), to target the symbols of Bangladesh’s liberation struggle. Undoing the country’s independence and its re-unification with Pakistan is, of course, out of the question. But cultivating closer ties with Pakistan, pursuing a stridently hostile policy towards India, which such elements have never ceased hating for playing a decisive role in Bangladesh’s independence by routing Pakistan in the 1971 war, and replacing Bangladesh’s secular, democratic polity by one practicing fundamentalist Islam, has been a part of the agenda of the country’s fundamentalist Islamist groups.