Dhaka, Bangladesh – Two years after she was ousted and forced to flee to India following a student-led uprising, former Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has made her strongest commitment yet to return, saying she is prepared to face arrest, imprisonment or even death, but cannot remain away from her supporters.
“I know I may be detained, I may be sent to prison,” Hasina, ۷۸, said in an audio address to journalists from New Delhi on Wednesday. “They may try to enforce verdicts issued in fabricated cases. But fear cannot decide my duty to the people.”
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Hasina’s address at an event hosted by New Delhi’s Foreign Correspondents’ Club of South Asia marked the second anniversary of the end of her ۱۵-year rule, which saw widespread allegations of killings and arrests of political opponents, human rights violations and rigged elections.
In November, Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal – a notorious court Hasina herself founded to try her rivals – found her guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced her to death for ordering the killing of more than ۱,۴۰۰ people during the ۲۰۲۴ uprising.
Bangladesh has repeatedly asked India for Hasina’s extradition, but New Delhi, a close Hasina ally, says the request is under examination.
As Hasina spoke, protesters in capital Dhaka burned her effigy, while Prime Minister Tarique Rahman’s government expressed “outrage” over New Delhi allowing the event, warning it could further strain diplomatic ties.
In Magura town, about ۱۷۰km (۱۰۵ miles) southwest of Dhaka, the ancestral house of former Bangladesh cricket captain Shakib Al Hasan was attacked by a mob angry over Hasina’s address.
Shakib, a former parliamentarian from Hasina’s Awami League party, has remained outside Bangladesh since the uprising. He has been accused of murder, embezzlement, fraud and money laundering by the authorities.
Hours before Hasina’s address, which Shakib also joined, Prime Minister Rahman inaugurated a memorial museum dedicated to the ۲۰۲۴ uprising at Hasina’s official residence. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus, who headed the interim administration after Hasina’s ouster, also attended the ceremony.
‘No political future’
Against such a backdrop of a rival government, widespread anger and a death sentence looming over her head, Hasina delivered a defiant address, rejecting the widely accepted accounts of the July ۲۰۲۴ uprising, arguing instead that it was not a popular movement but a coordinated campaign to topple her government.
“They may put me in jail, or they may kill me. Anything may happen. But still I have to go back,” she said in response to a question asked by a journalist covering the New Delhi event.
The former prime minister repeatedly framed her planned return as an effort to “restore democracy and promote national reconciliation”, arguing that Bangladesh needed “healing rather than confrontation”.
Among the members of Hasina’s now-banned Awami League party, her announcement has rekindled hopes of a political comeback.
Al Jazeera reached out to five Awami League leaders. Three declined to comment. One senior leader, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: “The leader will definitely return, and we will all come out of our hiding places.”
Another party activist, Shajidul Islam Shobuj, who has been hiding since the uprising, told Al Jazeera: “We are eagerly awaiting her return and are already working to reorganise the party.”
But leaders of the ۲۰۲۴ uprising say reconciliation cannot come before accountability.
“Sheikh Hasina can return to Bangladesh at any time if she has the ability to do so,” Akhter Hossain, a former student leader and now a legislator from the National Citizen Party (NCP), told Al Jazeera. “She will have to face Bangladesh’s judicial process.”
Akhter said the Awami League had “no political future” unless it was held accountable for the “crimes committed during its time in power”.
Many others who protested during the uprising have also received Hasina’s announcement with scepticism.
“She previously said she would not flee the country, yet she did. We do not believe she will return simply because she says she will,” said Atikul Gazi, a ۲۳-year-old who survived being shot at point-blank range by the security forces on August ۵, ۲۰۲۴, but lost his left arm.
Whether Hasina returns voluntarily or not, he said the government should ensure she faced the judicial process.
‘Difficult to see how’
Experts say Hasina’s “high-risk political gamble” could determine the future of the Awami League while also testing the durability of the political order that emerged after her fall.
“She does intend to actually return to Bangladesh,” journalist and political analyst David Bergman told Al Jazeera.
“Returning to Bangladesh gives her a chance of remaining politically relevant, of creating significant challenges and difficulties for the country’s new government, and possibly changing the current political dynamic to the advantage of the Awami League,” he said.
But Bergman also argued that the Awami League continues to misread the political mood.
“Until it recognises its own responsibility for the party’s current demise, and acknowledges that Bangladesh is not the dystopian, failed country it seeks to portray, it is difficult to see how the Awami League can carve out a new role for itself in Bangladesh.”
If she returns to Bangladesh, it would not be Hasina’s first return from exile.
After the assassination of her father, Bangladesh’s founding leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and most of her family members in ۱۹۷۵, Hasina spent years in exile before returning to Bangladesh in ۱۹۸۱ to lead the Awami League, which was then in opposition.
She was repeatedly arrested during the military rule in Dhaka before she stormed to power in ۱۹۹۶, governing the country for most of the next three decades.
This time, however, the political landscape is markedly different as Hasina no longer faces just political opposition.
Mubashar Hasan, a political observer and adjunct researcher at Western Sydney University’s Humanitarian and Development Research Initiative, says Hasina’s political challenges extend beyond the courtroom.
“Basically, Sheikh Hasina’s vow to return is a political strategy aimed at motivating and inspiring Awami League activists, many of whom have become demoralised since she left the country,” he said.
Hasan said many party activists felt abandoned when Hasina fled Bangladesh in a military helicopter on August ۵, ۲۰۲۴, reportedly without warning senior party leaders.
But he also wondered if Hasina’s gambit would work.
“In my view, this announcement is intended to boost the morale of party supporters,” he said. “Personally, I do not think that strategy will succeed.”
‘Nothing more than empty rhetoric’
Meanwhile, Hasina’s speech has also triggered new diplomatic tensions between New Delhi and Dhaka.
“Bangladesh is outraged,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. “Convicted mass murderer Hasina and her mafia enterprise will never have a place in the polity of Bangladesh.”
The ministry said India allowing Hasina to use its territory to attack the Bangladeshi state was “an affront to the sovereignty of Bangladesh” and “a grievous insult to the martyrs of the July Revolution”.
It also criticised New Delhi for failing to respond to Dhaka’s request to extradite Hasina under the ۲۰۱۳ bilateral extradition treaty.
Before Hasina’s address, India’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Randhir Jaiswal said the Indian “government has no involvement whatsoever in it, neither does [the government] endorse any views that may be expressed”.
Back in Dhaka, the parents of ۱۷-year-old Shahriar Khan Anas, one of the ۱,۴۰۰ people killed during the ۲۰۲۴ uprising, had just returned from the inauguration of the memorial museum at Hasina’s former residence.
Asked about Hasina’s plans to return, they only said: “We have no words today.”
But others who took part in the uprising were more direct.
“It’s nothing more than empty rhetoric,” said Risul Islam Rifat, a final-year journalism student at North South University, one of the epicentres of the ۲۰۲۴ protests.
“Despite their political differences, today’s political parties are united on one issue: Sheikh Hasina. More importantly, those of us who joined the July movement, together with ordinary Bangladeshis, will not allow her brand of politics to return.”
