DHAKA (The Thursday Times) — Bangladesh’s ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina has no legal route to a new passport or a return home, a senior leader of the governing Bangladesh Nationalist Party said on Saturday, days after she asked for travel documents from exile in India.
Ruhul Kabir Rizvi, the BNP’s acting secretary general and political adviser to the prime minister, said that as “a fugitive convicted of crimes against humanity”, Hasina was barred under the Bangladesh Passport Order of 1973, a law enacted when her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, led the country.
“She cannot return to the country. She must serve every sentence handed down against her,” Rizvi told a rally in Dhaka after a procession by the BNP’s youth wing, Jubo Dal, from the National Press Club to Shahbagh.
A request from exile
Hasina, who fled to India in August 2024 after a student-led uprising ended her 15-year rule, has applied for a new passport and national identity card so that she can come back. She has said she plans to return in December and surrender before a court, and her letter asked for the applications to be processed “expeditiously” on the basis of her Bangladeshi citizenship.
Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed said last week that the foreign and law ministries were examining whether there was any legal basis for the applications. Rizvi had already called the request “a shameless act” on Monday.
A war crimes tribunal in Dhaka sentenced Hasina to death in absentia in November 2025 over the crackdown on the 2024 protests, in which as many as 1,400 people may have been killed, according to UN estimates. The government says it has finished the legal work for her extradition and that the decision now rests with India, which has not handed her over.
‘Barricades in the streets’
Rizvi also accused leaders of Hasina’s Awami League, which is banned from political activity, of living in comfort abroad while “grassroots activists are being given bombs” to set off around the country. He said “nationalist and democratic forces” would “build barricades in the streets” to resist what he called a return of fascism.
The same evening, BNP and Jubo Dal offices at three markets in Tungipara, Hasina’s ancestral home in Gopalganj district, were vandalised and set on fire, local BNP leaders said, blaming Awami League activists. The local police chief said processions had taken place after dusk but that police had received no complaints of attacks or arson.
A return by Hasina would test a government that has spent the year trying to steady the country and its economy, with garment factory owners now threatening to shut their units over stalled wage talks.
