New Delhi: The United Kingdom is playing hardball and pushing back on appeals for political asylum by deposed Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina, ThePrint has learnt.
Sources in the security establishment said that Hasina currently remains at the Hindon air base in Ghaziabad and is likely to spend a few more days, contrary to the earlier plan of a technical stopover.
Sources said the Bangladeshi military’s C-130J aircraft, which had brought Hasina to India, had taken off from the air base and was on its way back to the country.
The original plan, according to sources, was for the plane to make a technical stopover for refuelling, which would have been a couple of hours.
She was then supposed to either take the flight to a friendly Middle-Eastern country from where she was to move to London on her own or take a chartered aircraft from Delhi to London.
As reported by ThePrint, within minutes of realising that the situation had gone out of hand, the Awami League chief reached out to New Delhi Monday seeking safe passage into Indian airspace, a request that was immediately accepted.
However, it is now learnt that the UK is refusing to accede to her asylum request. Because of the change in plans, National Security Adviser (NSA) Ajit Doval, along with Additional NSA Rajinder Khanna and Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri, drove down to Ghaziabad to meet with Hasina.
Incidentally, the UK issued a statement calling for a United Nations (UN)-led investigation into the violence and protests in Bangladesh that prompted Hasina to flee the country.
Nearly 300 have been killed in the weeks-long deadly clashes to protest a controversial quota rule that reserves 30 percent of government jobs for the kin of those who fought in Bangladesh’s independence war in 1971 under the leadership of Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman.
The US, which many see as having played a role in the developments, has called for “accountability” for alleged human rights violations during the protests
(Edited by Tikli Basu)
Also read: UK calls for UN probe into Bangladesh violence, mum on Hasina asylum. US seeks ‘accountability’