Kangaroo Justice

Bangladesh’s unelected regime has converted the law into a blunt instrument to eliminate the pro-India Sheikh Hasina.

Bangladesh’s interim rulers have finally delivered the spectacle they seemed to crave: a death sentence for Sheikh Hasina, handed down by a tribunal whose credibility is as hollow as the government that convened it. The former Prime Minister, who is in India at present, was tried in absentia by the International Crimes Tribunal - an institution once created to prosecute the genocidal violence of 1971, now repurposed to brand as “international crimes” the actions of an elected leader confronting violent mobs on her own soil. The re-engineering of this court says less about Hasina’s conduct than about the ambitions of the unelected clique now running the country.

Bangladesh today does not have a legitimate government. It has an interim administration with no constitutional footing, led by Muhammad Yunus, a man parachuted into office with the blessing of foreign patrons, notably in Washington. This regime has now pushed through a trial designed to erase Hasina, her party and the political legacy of Bangladesh’s liberation.

The charges against her strain coherence. The violence in question which included street rioting, arson, and mob assaults in the final days before Hasina’s ouster was domestic. There were no external actors, no cross-border operations, no semblance of the international dimension for which the tribunal was conceived. The court’s original purpose was to prosecute the atrocities committed by the Pakistan army and its collaborators in 1971. To place Hasina’s actions in the same category is to trivialise the genocide that created Bangladesh.

The mobs that overran Dhaka in those chaotic weeks targeted more than Hasina. They burned symbols of the country’s founding, vandalised tributes to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and assaulted courts, forcing judges to resign under threat. Against this backdrop, the tribunal’s composition and its sudden appetite for severity inspire little confidence. A bench formed in an atmosphere of intimidation cannot claim to represent impartial justice.

The larger aim appears to be to crush the Awami League before next year’s elections. The party, which commands deep social roots and historic legitimacy, is inconvenient for a junta trying to consolidate power without a popular mandate. De-legitimising Hasina through a capital sentence is an attempt to delegitimise the movement she leads. Any election held without the Awami League would disenfranchise millions.

This political purge coincides with Dhaka’s sharp turn away from India and towards Pakistan. Yunus and his circle have unfurled a foreign policy that flatters Islamabad and indulges Jamaat-e-Islami, the party that sided with the Pakistani army during the liberation struggle and has long nurtured hostility towards India. Jamaat’s sudden policy influence helps explain why anti-India sentiment has surged. Yunus, too, has played to this gallery.

If Hasina were truly the war criminal the tribunal now claims, it is hard to fathom why Bangladesh’s army chief would have personally flown her out of Dhaka to prevent mob violence against her. His actions would themselves demand scrutiny. Yet the interim leadership pretends not to notice this contradiction. Instead, Yunus boasts on global stages that the uprising against Hasina was “meticulously designed,” even introducing the supposed architect of the “student movement” that toppled her.

The government’s diplomatic posture is equally brazen. Knowing full well that India will not extradite a political rival facing a death sentence, Dhaka has sought to raise the temperature. Officials now claim that extradition is a “mandatory duty” under the bilateral treaty, threatening that India’s refusal to hand her over would constitute an “act of enmity” against Bangladesh.

The extradition treaty explicitly allows India to refuse requests of a political character, or those made in bad faith. Both conditions apply in abundance. Nor will Indian courts ignore that a death sentence makes extradition all but impossible. Economic offenders and terrorists from Western countries often evade deportation for years; Dhaka’s expectation that New Delhi will promptly surrender an ex-prime minister condemned by a tainted tribunal is wilfully unrealistic.

India’s response has been restrained thus far. India has avoided endorsing the verdict - not least because it reeks of political vengeance but its cautiously worded statement leaves room for firmer positions ahead.

Bangladesh’s interim rulers may believe they can stabilise the country by eliminating the Awami League. More likely, they have planted the seeds of a legitimacy crisis from which the country will struggle to recover.