作者： admin

Nearly two years after being ousted from power by a mass popular uprising, former Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has publicly pledged to return to her home country by December, even as she faces a confirmed death sentence for crimes against humanity handed down by a Dhaka tribunal last year. The 78-year-old leader, who fled to India at the height of the 2024 anti-government protests that ended her 15-year tenure, denies all charges against her, framing the conviction as a politically motivated campaign to destroy her and her Awami League party.

Hasina delivered her remarks via audio link to a packed gathering of journalists at Delhi’s Foreign Correspondents’ Club on Tuesday, marking her first formal public address to media since her government collapsed. “I know that they may put me in jail or they may kill me, anything may happen, but still I have to go back,” she told attendees, declining to share specific details of her travel route or exact re-entry date to avoid preemptive disruption. During the address, she claimed without providing evidence that opposition and civil society organizations hijacked a 2024 student-led protest over government job quotas to orchestrate a violent coup against her administration.

The conviction against Hasina rests on robust evidence collected by multiple independent bodies. United Nations investigators confirmed they found clear documentation that Hasina and her inner circle authorized systematic lethal force to cling to power during the uprising. A phone call recording verified by BBC’s investigative unit BBC Eye captured Hasina directly approving a deadly crackdown on demonstrators, which prosecutors used as core evidence to secure her in absentia conviction. The UN estimates that as many as 1,400 people were killed during the weeks of unrest, most by live gunfire from state security forces loyal to Hasina.

Since Hasina fled to India, her long-ruling Awami League has fractured amid a widespread crackdown by the new government. The party was banned from political activity shortly after Hasina’s departure and was barred from contesting the country’s February 2026 general election, which brought the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) to power with its leader Tarique Rahman installed as prime minister.

The current Bangladeshi government has already reacted with fury to Hasina’s Delhi press event, accusing India of violating diplomatic norms by allowing her to hold a public political address. “Our people have firmly resolved that our nation will never again go back to the dark days of fascism and that Bangladesh will never be a client state,” the Bangladeshi foreign ministry said in an official statement following the address. Dhaka has formally requested India extradite Hasina to face her sentence, a request New Delhi says it is currently reviewing. Hasina’s continued residency in Delhi has already put significant strain on bilateral relations between the two neighboring South Asian nations.

Political analysts warn that a potential return by Hasina would carry massive personal and national risks. “It’s a huge risk for her personally. If she does go back to Bangladesh, she will immediately be arrested,” said David Bergman, a Dhaka-based independent political analyst. He added that mass protests led by BNP supporters, student activists from the National Citizens Party, Islamist groups and other opposition factions would almost certainly immediately break out demanding the government carry out her death sentence.

At the same time, the stakes of remaining in exile are equally high for the fractured Awami League. Exiled former Awami League cabinet minister Mohammad Ali Arafat told the BBC that without Hasina’s return, the party will be completely destroyed. “If Ms Hasina doesn’t go back, the violence will continue and they will exterminate the Awami League,” Arafat said. Already, internal discontent has grown within the party, with rank-and-file members and mid-level leaders criticizing top officials for fleeing the country and leaving grassroots supporters vulnerable to targeted violence by the new government. Awami League claims hundreds of its supporters have been killed in post-uprising mob violence and dozens more have died in custody, claims that current Dhaka officials have repeatedly denied.

Bergman notes that Hasina’s vow to return reflects a clear political calculation: any future role for her in Bangladeshi politics depends on her facing the consequences of the conviction rather than remaining in exile. For the country, any move by Hasina to return is almost certain to trigger fresh political unrest and deepen existing divides two years after the uprising that ended her rule.

When social media platform X announced this week it would mount a legal challenge against a Turkish government order to block a campaign account supporting imprisoned Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu’s 2025 presidential bid, the claim was met with immediate skepticism from digital rights and free expression advocates.

The campaign account, launched to boost Imamoglu’s candidacy in Turkey’s upcoming national election, was first taken offline for users within Turkey in late March 2025, after authorities submitted a formal block request to the platform. In a public post to its own platform Wednesday, X explained that it had complied with the block order the previous week, arguing that Turkish legislation left the company no choice: failure to act would have triggered aggressive bandwidth throttling of X’s entire service across the country by Turkey’s Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK).

“Although Turkey’s laws force us to comply with the order, we are challenging the order in court and, in the spirit of full transparency, are sharing the court order,” the company stated, alongside a public copy of the official government directive. This is not the first time X has moved to block Imamoglu-linked content: the mayor’s personal main X account, which boasted close to 10 million followers before it was restricted, was blocked in May 2024 under an identical government order, which X also says it is contesting through the Turkish court system. Other major global social platforms have complied with similar Turkish government requests: both Meta and YouTube have already restricted access to Imamoglu-associated accounts and content at authorities’ demand.

Yaman Akdeniz, founder of Turkish free expression nonprofit IFOD, told Middle East Eye that he doubts X, owned by Elon Musk who has repeatedly labeled himself a “free speech absolutist,” has any real intention of meaningfully opposing the Turkish government’s censorship demands. “It is true to say that every now and again they appeal against decisions and lodge a few applications with the Constitutional Court — however, this is very selective and X chooses not to provide further details about the judicial challenges,” Akdeniz explained.

Data from X’s own transparency reports backs up critics’ claims that the platform regularly complies with Turkish content removal requests. Between July and December 2024, X received 11,107 separate content and account removal requests from Turkish authorities, and enforced action on 86 percent of those demands. An earlier review of X’s disclosure data by The Washington Post found that the platform’s compliance rate with legal content removal requests globally rose 20 percentage points between 2021 and the first half of 2024, hitting 71 percent. For Turkish government requests specifically, X complied with 68 percent of the 9,364 demands it received in the first half of 2024 alone. Akdeniz added that X is not an outlier in this practice: “I must say Meta and the others are no different as they have all become the long arm of the Turkish law enforcement mechanism.”

Turkey is far from the only government where X has complied with demands to censor accounts belonging to dissident voices and government critics, a pattern that undermines the platform’s public commitment to free speech. Just this week, The Guardian revealed that X has blocked a collection of prominent Saudi Arabian critics of the Saudi monarchy, including prominent human rights advocate Yahya Assiri and activist Abdullah Alaoudh, whose father is imprisoned cleric Salman al-Ouda. The restrictions came after Snapchat, Meta and Instagram already implemented similar blocks following Saudi government claims that the accounts violated local content regulations. Notably, X had previously issued a public statement claiming it would refuse to follow the other platforms’ lead, saying it “strongly believes in defending and respecting the voice of our users.”

Saudi Arabia’s government has poured billions of dollars in investment into xAI, recently renamed SpaceXAI, the parent company that operates both the X social platform and its AI chatbot Grok, creating a clear conflict of interest that critics say drives the platform’s willingness to comply with Saudi censorship demands. Middle East Eye reached out to X for additional comment on the Turkish court challenge and compliance patterns, but had not received a response as of publication.

The wave of youth-driven mass protests that has roiled India in recent months has inflicted serious damage on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration, according to prominent education reform advocate Sonam Wangchuk, whose 26-day hunger strike became the catalyst for the growing grassroots movement.

In an interview with the BBC, the 59-year-old activist explained that a profound shift in public mood has swept the country following the demonstrations, which ultimately forced the resignation of India’s Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on July 25. Wangchuk, a veteran engineer and education specialist, noted that young Indians have emerged from the protest wave with newfound confidence: they now understand they are capable of driving meaningful change when they organize, and are no longer willing to accept unfair systemic outcomes passively.

The movement that has shaken national politics took its unusual name from a widely criticized comment by India’s Chief Justice, who infamously compared groups of unemployed young jobseekers to “cockroaches” during a public court hearing. What began as public outrage over a widespread exam paper leak quickly escalated into one of the largest displays of public dissent against Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, which has held national power since 2014.

Wangchuk led the protest movement from the front, staging his hunger strike through record-breaking high temperatures in New Delhi between June and July, consuming only salt and water for 26 days. By the end of the fast, he had lost 11 kilograms, six of which he has since regained. For the final six days of his protest, he was forcibly detained by authorities and moved to a hospital, which Wangchuk describes as having functioned “more like a prison” to restrict his activism.

One day after Wangchuk ended his hunger strike, Pradhan stepped down from his cabinet post. In the aftermath of the protests, the Modi administration has announced a series of policy concessions: it has established fast-track courts to prosecute individuals linked to the exam paper leaks, appointed a prominent tech billionaire to lead a national examination system reform effort, and pledged to provide financial compensation to the families of students who died by suicide in the wake of the leak scandal.

But Wangchuk argues that India’s crisis runs far deeper than a broken examination system. For a quarter of a century, graduate unemployment has hovered between 35% and 40%, a systemic failure rooted in an outdated education model that does not align with the needs of the modern job market. Current national exams, he explains, rely heavily on multiple-choice questions designed to efficiently grade millions of test-takers, with no consideration for whether they actually measure practical skills or deep conceptual understanding. This assessment model, in turn, distorts how schools teach students, prioritizing rote memorization over applied learning.

To address the country’s persistent unemployment crisis, Wangchuk says fundamental education reform is non-negotiable. If assessments shifted to prioritize hands-on experience and aptitude for real-world work, he argues, schools would adapt their curricula and teaching methods to match. He also calls for long-term strategic planning that anticipates India’s economic and social needs 15 years from now, to ensure that young people are prepared for future jobs and that growing industries do not face widespread labor shortages. “Changing the way children are taught might help ensure they are not left unemployed and sectors that need people are not left underemployed,” he says.

The Indian government has pushed back against criticism of its economic management, arguing that claims of a widespread unemployment crisis are overstated and that the country’s core macroeconomic fundamentals remain strong. Despite the government’s policy changes after the protests, reports indicate that many activists involved in the “Cockroach” movement still face ongoing retaliation, including pending criminal court cases, routine police harassment, and coordinated abuse on social media. These repercussions continue even after India’s Supreme Court ordered authorities not to take coercive action against protesters with no prior criminal record.

Even so, Wangchuk says the movement has already made tangible progress, and a shift toward change is already underway. He argues that the Modi government has been severely damaged by the public backlash over its slow response to the protests, which in turn gave young activists space to build unity and confidence in their collective power. Wangchuk points to the BJP’s recent poor performance in three key by-elections, where the party lost two seats — including a Bihar constituency it had held for more than 30 years — as evidence that the political fallout is already being felt at the ballot box.

Wangchuk, who is now back in his hometown of Leh in the Himalayan region of Ladakh 12 days after ending his hunger strike, maintains he remains open to the government changing course. “I always believe in people realising their mistakes and amending their ways. So I would give them that chance,” he says. If the administration refuses to address the demands of the movement, however, Wangchuk warns that protests could expand beyond the issue of education reform to challenge broader government policies.

A long-time activist who previously led hunger strikes to demand greater self-rule for Ladakh and oppose development projects in ecologically sensitive Himalayan regions, Wangchuk says he remains committed to Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violent resistance. Even when his past campaigns did not immediately achieve their stated goals, he argues that self-inflicted sacrifice through hunger strike changes the government’s calculus in a way that violent confrontation never can: “inflicting pain on ourselves makes the government feel differently, compared to us using sticks and stones.”

When asked if he plans to run for public office to advance his reform goals, Wangchuk says he has no interest in holding office, preferring to support and empower the next generation of young leaders to run for office themselves.