Former Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajid, who resigned and fled the country in August 2024 amid violent protests, confirmed on Wednesday that she has been living in India since her abdication – and she “would love to go home,” if “law and order genuinely prevailed.”
Hasina’s government was toppled by mass protests against an ethnic quota law for government jobs. After she resigned, she claimed she was forced out of office by the U.S. government because she would not relinquish control of Saint Martin Island, a small but strategically located island which is also claimed by neighboring Myanmar.
“I could have remained in power if I had left St. Martin’s and the Bay of Bengal to America,” Hasina claimed in August 2024.
Hasina left Bangladesh because she said there were threats against her life and was widely understood to have sought refuge in India, although she only recently confirmed she has been living there.
In October, Bangladeshi prosecutors announced they were seeking the death penalty against Hasina because she allegedly ordered the police to use lethal force against student protesters last year.
“Sheikh Hasina is the mastermind of all the crimes. She is a heartless criminal. She deserves the maximum punishment. For the murder of 1,400 people, she ought to have been hanged 1,400 times,” fumed Muhammad Tajul Islam, chief prosecutor of the Bangladesh International Crimes Tribunal.
Islam said Hasina wanted to “cling to power permanently, for herself and her family,” so she “turned into a hardened criminal and shows no remorse for the brutality she has committed.” Several other officials from her government are also facing charges of brutality and corruption.
The U.N. Human Rights Committee published a report in February 2025 that found there were “reasonable grounds” to believe Hasina and her top officials, along with “violent elements associated with the former ruling party,” committed “serious and systemic human rights violations” during the August 2024 protests.
The next election in Bangladesh is scheduled for February, but the Election Commission banned Hasina’s Awami League party from participating in a May 2025 ruling. The government of interim president Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, invoked the Anti-Terrorism Act to outlaw the Awami League.
The ban on the Awami League was so strict that even posting support for the party online could carry criminal penalties. The party said the Yunus government “stoked division within society, strangled democratic norms, fueled ongoing pogrom against dissenters and strangled inclusivity” by banning the party in violation of “democratic norms.”
On Wednesday, Hasina warned that the millions of voters in her party would boycott the February election to protest the “unjust” and “self-defeating” ban.
“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.
The Awami League remains one of the two largest parties in Bangladesh, the other being the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). The BNP will almost certainly romp through the February election if the Awami League is not allowed on the ballot.
Yunus is not a member of the BNP; he is an economist whose Nobel Peace Prize was awarded for his work in pioneering small loans to help lift Bangladesh out of poverty. He has been under increasing pressure from the BNP and the politically influential Bangladeshi military, and has in turn stated that he cannot reform the corrupt and fractious politics of his country unless he is given more power.
Yunus threatened to resign his interim presidency when the military tried to force an election in December 2025. Yunus was originally aiming for elections in June 2026, but compromised to February 2026. Hasina insisted on Wednesday that no government could be legitimate if her party is not allowed to participate in the election.
“It’s really not about me or my family. For Bangladesh to achieve the future we all want, there must be a return to constitutional rule and political stability. No single person or family defines our country’s future,” she said.
“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, building on earlier statements that she would not return to Bangladesh as long as the Awami League was outlawed. She dismissed the criminal charges against her as a “politically motivated charade.”
Hasina said she would not participate in any effort to evade the ban, such as asking Awami League voters to strategically vote for third parties or proxy candidates.
“We are not asking Awami League voters to support other parties. We still hope common sense will prevail and we will be allowed to contest the election ourselves,” she said.
Hasina’s interview with Reuters on Wednesday was her first media interview since she resigned, although she has posted messages to her followers on social media.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and five civil society groups said in an October 19 joint letter to the Yunus government that meaningful reforms to protect free speech and freedom of the press have been made, but there is still work to be done.
Among other recommendations, CPJ and its colleagues asked for the repeal of several restrictive laws, including the Cyber Security Ordinance of 2025, the Special Powers Act, the Secrets Act, and the Anti-Terrorism Act — the latter being the very law invoked to ban the Awami League and bring capital charges against Hasina.
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