RT-Engels: 17-08-2024,
Sheikh Hasina’s ouster is unlikely to change the strong bilateral economic ties built over the past 15 years, but anti-India sentiment runs strong, and its rivals will try to cash in
By Gowhar Geelani, a Kashmiri writer and journalist. He is the author of Kashmir: Rage and Reason
Televised images of angry protesters in Bangladesh’s capital city Dhaka hacking away at statues of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, a towering personality in the nation’s political history, have become emblematic; they reflect the gravity of the nation’s latest crisis.
Perhaps in order to erase memories of the past, the country’s interim government, headed by renowned Nobel laureate Dr. Muhammad Yunus, eliminated a national holiday on 15 August that marks the assassination of the country’s perceived liberator Bangabandhu (friend of the Bengal) Mujibur Rehman.
Forty-nine years after her father’s killing in 1975, former prime minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina is facing a major crisis in her career. On August 5, 2024, she boarded a military aircraft to flee Dhaka, buckling under immense pressure from protesters.
The Telegraph, one of India’s most widely respected English newspapers, summed up Hasina’s political catastrophe with the headline: “Hasina falls. Lands in India.”
In its editorial ‘A New Dawn Rises on Bangladesh’, a prominent Bangladesh-based English newspaper, The Daily Star, described Hasina’s ouster as a day ”when people truly rose to power,