After a dramatic escape on a helicopter from her Dhaka palace amid a student-led protest last year, former Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina has been living a reclusive life in Delhi since August 2024.
Since her ouster, an interim government led by Nobel peace laureate Muhammad Yunus has been governing the country and has pledged to hold national elections in February 2027, while she leads an nondescript life in India’s capital New Delhi.
The protest and the subsequent invasion of the protesters on her Dhaka palace was a rather brutal reminder of the 1975 military coup that claimed the lives of her father and three brothers while she was abroad with her sister.
Hasina’s life in Delhi
Hasina’s life in exile is peaceful, though she yearns to go back. “I would of course love to go home, so long as the government there was legitimate, the constitution was being upheld, and law and order genuinely prevailed,” she said in an interview.
A few months ago, a Reuters reporter saw Hasina taking a quiet stroll through Delhi’s historic Lodhi Garden, accompanied by two individuals who appeared to be her personal security detail. She acknowledged passersby with a nod as some recognized her.
Last year, reports said that Hasina was living in a safe house in New Delhi’s Lutyens Bungalow Zone, a high security area that houses several former and serving Members of Parliament and senior officials. The accommodation was arranged by the Indian government.
The Print had reported that Hasina usually took walks in the nearby Lodhi garden with a security guard in plain clothes accompanying her.
Hasina reportedly fled into India’s Hindon airbase on August 5, 2024 on a Bangladesh Air Force aircraft with few people close to her.
She stayed at the base for two days where she met National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and senior military officials and was moved to a safer place with adequate security measures.
Election boycott
Millions of supporters of Bangladesh’s Awami League will boycott next year’s national election as protest against Hasina’s ban on taking part in the polls. Despite her stay overseas and ongoing trial in absentia, Hasina in her interviews insisted that she remained committed to “restoring democracy” in the country.
“Only free, fair, and inclusive elections can heal the country,” she told the Independent newspaper of the UK while in other interviews she said the next government must have electoral legitimacy.
“Millions of people support the Awami League, so as things stand, they will not vote. You cannot disenfranchise millions of people if you want a political system that works,” she said, rejecting any government formed without her party’s participation in the voting.
Meanwhile, Bangladesh’s interim government chief Muhammad Yunus on Wednesday said he feared forces “from home and abroad” to thwart planned general elections over debarring deposed prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League from contesting.
“Many forces from inside and outside the country will work to spoil the election. Many powerful forces, not minor ones, will attempt to thwart it. Sudden attacks may come,” Yunus’s press secretary Shafiqul Alam quoted him as saying at a high-level meeting on election preparedness.
Chief Adviser Yunus, he said, told the meeting that the election will be “challenging” as “various types of propaganda will be carried out in a planned manner from inside and outside the country”.
