Online Desk  :   As protesters were marching on her official residence in Dhaka on August 5, Sheikh Hasina was ousted from the post of prime minister and fled to an air force base near Ghaziabad near Delhi of India, on a military aircraft. Narendra Modi’s government has since confirmed she is in India, but is declining to say more. That has not stopped tongues from wagging, says The Financial Times in a report on Thursday.  With various degrees of credibility, it says that members of India’s chattering classes have privately claimed that the deposed strongwoman is in an Indian government safe house; staying with her daughter Saima Wazed, who took a Delhi-based regional job with the World Health Organisation in February; or has even been glimpsed strolling with her entourage around one of the capital’s poshest parks, Lodhi Garden.

The Modi government, Hasina’s top foreign backer when her Awami League ran Bangladesh, is maintaining a decorous silence on the topic. Delhi’s local and foreign press have mostly stopped pretending they will get Hasina’s first post-overthrow interview. There are a few reasons for this. Muhammad Yunus’s acting government, which took power after Hasina was toppled, has accused her of responsibility for hundreds of killings during the past summer’s unrest. India and Bangladesh have an extradition treaty — signed by Hasina’s own government in 2013 — which could in theory be used against her should the new regime seek her arrest.

“According to the extradition agreement with India, we may demand her extradition to Bangladesh,” Asif Nazrul, minister of law, justice and parliamentary affairs in Yunus’s interim cabinet, tells the Financial Times. “For now, we expect India not to allow her to instigate instability in Bangladesh, which she is trying to do by spreading lies and misinformation.” Following recent press reports relaying controversial remarks attributed to Hasina, Yunus himself said: “If India wants to keep her until the time Bangladesh wants her back, the condition would be that she has to keep quiet.”  Hasina herself, along with her sister Sheikh Rehana, took refuge in India for several years after 1975, when their father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and most of their family were murdered in Dhaka in a coup. “There has been a host of precedents of leaders coming to India from the neighbourhood,” says Shivshankar Menon, a former foreign secretary and national security adviser under Manmohan Singh’s government. “We have always allowed them to stay, and in most cases they respect our wishes that they stay clear of political activity.”
The theory that Hasina’s ousting and Yunus’s installation as acting prime minister was a “colour revolution” or a regime change backed by the US, has broad currency in India, and not just in pro-Modi circles.