The interviews given by the ousted Bangladeshi Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, to the Indian media have been criticised by a leading Bangladeshi news website, which said her remarks “flaunt an utter lack of contrition”.
An opinion piece that appeared in Daily Star Bangladesh slammed the former Prime Minister, who is in exile in India, stating that her interviews proved that she was “unencumbered by even a touch of introspection or self-doubt.” “There is not a hint of remorse, not a sliver of guilt,” the article states, quoting the exclusive piece carried by THE WEEK, which saw Hasina speak about how Bangladesh is a powder keg waiting to explode.
Lashing at Hasina’s statement that Bangladesh is led by an administration with no constitutional basis, no experience of governance, and no electoral mandate, the Daily Star piece said she was deploring “the ineptitude of the very institutions her regime had meticulously destroyed.”
“She flails against the interim government for not having the people's mandate, which she had manufactured to stay in power for years through rigged elections. She berates the BNP for trying to manipulate the caretaker government system, which her regime had abolished. Her deluded sense of being wronged pervades the entire article,” the Daily Star piece said.
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It also said that Hasina’s only acknowledgement of error in her administration was when she accepted that “mistakes were very clearly made in the way some members of the security forces responded to the rapid upsurge of violence."
The Daily Star also rubbished Hasina’s claims that she personally took steps to ensure that no firearms were used. The former Prime Minister also stated that she did not authorise security forces to fire on crowds, and all the evidence against her was doctored or taken out of context.
To this, the Daily Star said its own probe revealed that Hasina personally authorised the use of lethal weapons, citing an alleged phone recording from July 18, 2024, where Hasina purpotedly tells her nephew, former Dhaka South Mayor Sheikh Fazle Noor Taposh, that she has given instructions to use lethal weapons. “Wherever they find them [protesters], they will shoot directly," the Daily Star’s claims about the phone conversation said.
The article said Hasina’s interviews with the international media were somewhat balanced, but the ones for Indian outlets were “far more incendiary”. It also accused Hasina of not mentioning anything about “weeks of untold violence preceding her flight”.
The Daily Star added that her interviews were an attempt to portray the Yunus-led government as a usurper but without “any acknowledgement of how the Awami League regime had fuelled discontent among the protesters as well as the general populace.”
The article added that the interviews were aimed at influencing the ensuing election, and those will not “even begin to restore the Awami League’s image”.