In the hours before Sheikh Hasina fled Gonobhaban, her official residence in Dhaka, on 5 August, Bangladeshi security forces killed scores of protesters who had joined a huge march to the capital demanding an end to her autocratic rule. Around the same time, it has since been reported, Hasina had pressured the army chief to enforce a curfew using deadly force, which would have meant the military joining the bloodbath. The army chief refused.
The prime minister’s desperate hold on power finally slipped when security chiefs warned that the advancing protesters would reach Gonobhaban within an hour and they doubted their ability to contain the crowd. Speculation that India, her strongest international ally, would intervene in her favour proved unfounded, and Hasina was left at the mercy of the military, which ultimately facilitated her escape across the border. She wound up at a safe house in Delhi, trying but failing to gain asylum in the United Kingdom. All told, the weeks of protests against her government, which started on university campuses and escalated in reaction to brutal state repression, left at least five hundred dead, including more than thirty children.
The hasty exit deprived Hasina of the chance to address her supporters and her country, as she had planned on doing that day. A week or so later, reports emerged of her describing the speech to her associates and blaming the United States for orchestrating her fall, apparently because she refused to surrender control over St Martin’s Island in the Bay of Bengal. Hasina’s son denied all of this, but it could not have helped her already rocky relationship with Washington DC, which months ago had criticised the sham election that gave Hasina a fourth consecutive term in power.
Friendless in the United States, rebuffed by the United Kingdom – and, reportedly, also Europe and the United Arab Emirates – Hasina is finding few places to turn to. China and Russia, earlier her vocal supporters, also appear too distant or too reluctant to help. For now at least, the deposed despot remains moored in Delhi, her presence there a daily reminder to the people of Bangladesh of New Delhi’s role in enabling her reign. Unsurprisingly, the Bangladeshi public’s ire against India is only growing.