On August 5, Sheikh Hasina fled Dhaka and landed at Ghaziabad’s Hindon airbase after her ouster as prime minister of Bangladesh. Dramatic as it was, she was not the first high-profile political leader from India’s neighbourhood to seek safe haven. In 1959, India suffered consequences with China over the arrival of the Dalai Lama, fraying an already fragile bilateral relationship and contributing to tensions ahead of the 1962 war.

Hasina’s presence does not pose such dire challenges, but she’s unique in a way that India’s other guests in exile are not. Other than the special history that India and Bangladesh share, the former prime minister is the only exile in India who was completely in charge of her domain until the moment she fled. For this reason, she’s the only one that the home country wants back, and urgently, opening up potential legal complications to her stay in India.

Even with India’s history of providing refuge, extradition is a new angle that Delhi has never faced before with its other guests.

Delhi and Dhaka want different things

Complicating the Hasina matter is the arrest this week of Chinmoy Krishna Das, a Hindu priest in Bangladesh, on charges of sedition. India strongly expressed its concern over his arrest and the denial of bail to him, an indication that Delhi and Dhaka are now at that stage of talking past each other in the downward spiral of bilateral relations.

Delhi, where the rank communalism of its own leadership does not do India proud, wants to keep the focus on the vulnerability of the Hindu minority in Bangladesh. Dhaka’s attention is on Hasina, who is wanted back to stand trial on charges of murder and corruption. 

A spokesperson of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party described the former prime minister as “the most wanted person in Bangladesh” for the alleged killings of students in police firings during the uprising against her, for enforced disappearances under her watch as prime minister, and for alleged corruption. According to Bangladesh’s health ministry, over 1,000 people were killed during the uprising this year. A students’ body has compiled a list of over 1,500 deaths and more than 30,000 injured. 

Meanwhile, a special tribunal – set up by Hasina a decade ago to try collaborators with the Pakistan army in the 1971 war on charges of genocide and other war crimes – has now been turned against its creator. The so-called International Crimes Tribunal, which convicted several Jamat-e-Islami leaders, leading to the execution of four of them, has now been repurposed to try Hasina for the deaths of hundreds of protesters shot dead by security forces during the uprising. The tribunal asked the international police organisation Interpol to issue a red notice for her arrest.

The tribunal also filed more than 60 complaints against Hasina, members of her Awami League party, and security officials, accusing them of forced disappearances, murder and even genocide. In September, it issued arrest warrants for Hasina and several others, and asked the Yunus-headed interim dispensation to produce them before the tribunal by mid-November. That date has passed. 

Earlier this month, Bangladesh Chief Advisor Muhammad Yunus said his government would seek her extradition under the India-Bangladesh extradition treaty. Yunus told The Hindu in an interview that if India refuses to extradite Hasina, it would be a violation of the treaty “that will not make a very happy relationship between us”. It would not be forgiven by any future government either, he said.

The consequences of ‘safe haven’ to Dalai Lama

Extradition is a new worry for India.

In 1959, the Dalai Lama was independent India’s first VIP political refugee. When he landed in Chuthangmu, in what was then the North East Frontier Agency, on March 31 that year, India’s relationship with China was already fraying. 

Peking reacted angrily, screaming and shouting that Delhi had “expansionist” designs. It also railed against “Tibetan rebels” for having their “faces turned towards India and their backs to their motherland”. It was alleged that the Dalai Lama was a prisoner of these “rebels” who, in collusion with India, were coercing him into making statements about “independent” Tibet. 

But China, though angered at the high international visibility that India had provided to the Dalai Lama, made no demands that Delhi send him back. Instead, Delhi’s problems were of a different order. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had already recognised Tibet as part of China through the 1954 Panchsheel Agreement. In a one-on-one with the Dalai Lama, who was then only 24 years old, he conveyed that India’s “capacity to help is very limited and the moment we try to extend it, it would stop even that capacity”.

Almost like a father speaking to a young son, Nehru put it plainly: “Physically it is not possible to fight on behalf of Tibet. Even such a suggestion will harm them [the Tibetans] and their cause. Sympathy at present for Tibet cannot be converted into help by any country. DL should be under no illusion and, therefore, should fashion his policy with reference to actuality.”

In even starker language, he said: '“Let us face facts...The whole world cannot bring freedom to Tibet unless the whole fabric of the Chinese state is destroyed. USA, UK and others or anybody else cannot do this at present. DL should realise that in the present context Tibet’s independence would mean the complete break-up of the Chinese state and it is not possible to envisage it as likely to happen. To defeat China is not easy. Only a world war, an atomic war can perhaps be the precursor of such possibility. Can one start a world war? Can India start a world war? Let us talk of the present and not of the future and be more realistic.” 

Nehru then asked the Dalai Lama how the Tibetans could resist China's overwhelming military superiority. “One should, therefore, not close the doors of settlement; otherwise, it becomes a fight to the death”. India would not recognise a Tibetan government in exile, the Dalai Lama was told.

Yet Chairman Mao was convinced India was “doing bad things in Tibet” and decided he would give it “enough rope to hang itself”.

For large sections of India’s polity, Nehru had blundered by not pushing the Tibet card against China. However, as journalist Ananth Krishnan pointed out in his book India’s China Challenge, Chinese suspicions about Indian intentions in Tibet were as important as India’s forward policy of 1961 in China’s decision to attack India.

The Dalai Lama has lived in India ever since his arrival more than six decades ago, making Mcleodganj in Himachal Pradesh’s Dharamshala district his permanent abode in exile. More than one lakh Tibetans now live in settlements across India. By the time India began normalising ties with China in the late 1970s, the Dalai Lama’s own views on independence changed. In 2005, he declared that Tibet was part of China and sought autonomy, not independence – a view he has restated several times since then. 

As for India-China bilateral relations, India’s safe haven to the Dalai Lama has not figured much, except when Beijing objects to some of his activities, which it views as “splittist”, such as his visits to Arunachal, all of which China claims as south Tibet. 

Fleeing the LTTE and Sri Lanka

India’s other high-profile exile, who’s lived here since 1990, is Annamalai Varatharaja Perumal.

Perumal was the chief minister of Sri Lanka’s North-East Provincial Council, a tragically short-lived experiment at India’s behest. Through the 1987 Indo-Sri Lanka Accord and the 13th Amendment, it aimed at devolution of power to the Tamil areas of Sri Lanka. But it was jointly sabotaged by President Ranasinghe Premadasa and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Premadasa refused to transfer even the smallest power to the northeast government, instead making a deal with the LTTE, arming them to fight the Indian Peace Keeping Force. 

Perumal’s situation worsened when the new VP Singh government decided to withdraw the IPKF from Sri Lanka. The last Indian troops were scheduled to leave by March 31, 1990. Perumal saw his protective umbrella vanishing. So, on March 1, he made a last-ditch attempt to assert himself. He moved a resolution converting his provincial council into a constituent state assembly that would draft a constitution of the “Eelam Democratic Republic”. He said this would take effect from March 1, 1991 if Colombo had not agreed to his demands by then. 

It was a de facto “unilateral declaration of independence”.

Delhi was horrified, but did not abandon Perumal to his fate. Within hours, Perumal, his wife and three daughters were bundled into an Indian Research & Analysis Wing plane and flown to Mauritius. More than 200 cadres of the Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front were evacuated to India in Indian Air Force planes.

In June 1990, Perumal arrived in Mumbai, only to discover that the LTTE had wiped out the top leadership of the EPRLF, gunning them down in their rented apartment in Chennai. Perumal was moved to Lakshadweep for his safety. In August, he and his family were taken to Madhya Pradesh, to a tightly guarded and barricaded hunting lodge in Chanderi belonging to the Scindia family. 

In May 1991, after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, Perumal and his family moved to a government bungalow in Ajmer’s Civil Lines area. They lived there for a dozen years. There were no demands from Sri Lanka for his return. In the mid-1990s, he spent some months in Kathmandu dodging assassins sent by Prabhakaran. Towards the end of the decade, he went back to Sri Lanka to test the waters when then President Chandrika Kumaratunga seemed determined to bring about a political resolution to the Tamil question. But the 2002 ceasefire, which empowered the LTTE, alarmed him and he withdrew to India once again.

Perumal moved to Tamil Nadu. In 2008, a year before the LTTE was routed militarily, the state police uncovered, just in the nick of time, a plot to kill him and his family. He presently lives in Coimbatore.

What does the post-Hasina era hold?

Sheikh Hasina has been exiled in Delhi before. On August 15, 1975, her father Sheikh Mujibur Rehman and members of her family were assassinated in Dhaka. Hasina, her husband, two children and sister were the only family members to escape as they were abroad. She led a low-profile life, working part-time at All India Radio, with a small circle of friends that notably included Pranab Mukherjee and his family. 

In 1981, at the persuasion of her late father’s friends, she returned to Dhaka and plunged into politics taking over as the leader of the Awami League, her father’s political vehicle. 

This time, the 77-year-old, who is reported to have moved into Lutyens Delhi from her transit accommodation at Hindon airbase, is unlikely to go back for another shot at power. And India is unlikely to yield to pressure from Dhaka and abandon her.

Unlike the Dalai Lama, who could hardly take on the Chinese military in Tibet, or Perumal, who stood little chance of surviving the LTTE in north-east Sri Lanka, Hasina is a different category of exile. In full control as prime minister for 15 years, she did for Delhi what no other leader could have done. She secured India’s borders from Islamists and north-eastern military groups, and made the Hindu minority feel safe. 

And it’s her proximity to Delhi, and to the Modi government for two of her three terms, that appears to have been one of the reasons for her downfall. Keeping her here is as important to India as having her back in Bangladesh is for her opponents.In the post-Hasina era, India’s relations with Bangladesh will, in the near term, depend on whether Dhaka can move past the demand for the return of Hasina, and if Delhi can look at ties beyond the alleged persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh. Neither of these issues can serve to bring relations back to even keel. Perhaps that is no longer the goal for either country. 

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