On Thursday, BBC Bangla ran a long report by its Delhi correspondent, Shubhajyoti Ghosh, on what India is supposedly thinking about Sheikh Hasina going home.
The headline version is simple enough. India is ready to let her go, on two conditions. The Bangladesh Army has to come and collect her, by military aircraft or at a land border. And Dhaka has to guarantee her an appeal against the death sentence and a brand new trial.
I have gone through the report line by line a few times. It is a nothing burger. Not a single official in it is named. There is not one line of response from the Bangladesh government, the army, or the tribunal's prosecutors, though all three are being told what they must do.
And at every point where the report can be checked against the public record, it falls over. Let me take it claim by claim.
The aircraft is the loosest line in the whole piece, so start there. The argument from Ghosh's sources goes like this. Hasina landed at Hindon on August 5, 2024 in a Bangladesh Air Force aircraft, so it is the Bangladesh Army's job to come and take her back. India, we are told, is even ready with the logistics.
Think about what August 5 2024 was. She was the deposed prime minister when that C-130J took off, and India's own high commissioner in Dhaka, Dinesh Trivedi, has said Delhi received her on that footing. By the afternoon, the army chief was telling the country she had resigned, and an interim government would take over. It was a day without a government.
November 2026 is a different country. Hasina is a fugitive with a death sentence from the International Crimes Tribunal. The UN human rights office puts the deaths of July and August 2024 at as many as 1,400, and that is before anyone counts the disappearances and killings of the fifteen years before.
Ghosh has perhaps not noticed that Bangladesh voted in February. The BNP took 209 seats, a two-thirds majority, and Tarique Rahman is prime minister. The army moves on his government's orders. It does not take flight requests from South Block.
A convict is not the army's business in the first place. She would be received by police and prison authorities on the strength of a court's warrant. State Minister Humaiun Kobir has already said where she goes if India hands her over: to prison, under guard. He has also asked, with some sarcasm, whether she is coming to visit her in-laws in Rangpur that she should need a passport for the trip.
So an empty military aircraft is supposed to fly to Delhi and give this fugitive royal treatment on the way home? That reads like Napoleon rising from his grave to lead the Mukti Bahini in 1971.
There is a trick buried in it too. The same report says India will never put her on a Bangladeshi plane as a prisoner, and that sending her back the way the state minister described, in handcuffs, is beyond imagination. A Bangladeshi military plane with the army as her escort is perfectly fine. So it seems Delhi's objection was never to the plane. It is to the handcuffs.
Indian military intelligence officials, for their part, deny there is any possibility of a Bangladeshi military aircraft being allowed to land in India to take Hasina back. "In the eyes of the law she is a criminal, and we don't involve ourselves in such controversial matters," a senior military official said.
The idea did not even start with the BBC. The same day, former Indian high commissioner Veena Sikri was telling ANI that the army "can send another military aircraft to take her back". If the government in Dhaka won't talk about it, she said, the army is the institution to deal with.
A retired diplomat proposes going around an elected government to its generals, and BBC Bangla prints the same thought as the considered view of unnamed officials!
To show that the two armies are close enough to manage all this between themselves, Ghosh writes that India's previous army chief, General Manoj Pande, and his predecessors have said publicly that they speak to General Waker-Uz-Zaman every week, from before July 2024 until today.
General Manoj Pande retired from active military service on June 30, 2024. General Wakeruzzaman took over the office of Chief of Army Staff, Bangladesh on June 23, 2024. The two Generals overlapped as chiefs for exactly one week. The man who said he was in regular touch with General Waker was General Upendra Dwivedi, and it was Dwivedi who handed over to General Dhiraj Seth this June.
This is not a small slip. Ghosh's The whole army-to-army theory hangs on it. If the BBC's Delhi correspondent cannot get India's own army chiefs in the right order, how much weight are we meant to put on his unnamed top military source?
That source's big clue is that High Commissioner Trivedi met the Indian Army chief in Delhi in the first week of October. Why would a high commissioner call on the army chief, the source asks, unless something special was going on? The Indian Army answered that on the day. It posted that the meeting was about bilateral cooperation and defence ties.
Diplomatic sources told the BBC that same week that Trivedi had flown in to brief Modi on Tarique Rahman's possible visit to India. It was also reported then that he is a political appointee who goes straight to the prime minister whenever he is in Delhi. A month later the same trip has turned into a Hasina mission. Which version are we supposed to believe?
A promise no government can make
The second condition is a guaranteed appeal and a fresh trial. Here the report runs into the statute book.
Under section 21 of the tribunal law an appeal has to be filed within 30 days of the verdict, and nothing is admissible after that. Hasina was sentenced on November 17 last year. Her 30 days ran out in December while she sat in Delhi. On September 7, the chief prosecutor, Md Aminul Islam, said she and the others who did not appeal in time have lost the opportunity.
Some lawyers argue the Appellate Division could still excuse the delay if she surrenders and explains herself. Fine. That is for the court to decide when she is standing in front of it. No minister can promise Delhi in advance what the Appellate Division will do, and the Act makes no special provision for someone convicted in absentia who turns up later.
Ghosh tells us India is being very careful not to be seen interfering in Bangladesh's judicial system. What else do you call demanding a retrial as the price of handing over a convict? Imagine Dhaka telling Delhi how the Indian Supreme Court ought to rule on one of India's fugitives.
Ghosh's "simple answer" to whether India was behind Hasina's announcement is that she did not make it without Delhi's quiet approval, and that the two sides agreed first. He gives no source for it, not even an unnamed one.
Hasina herself told Reuters in July that she had consulted no foreign government about going back, and she denied any secret discussions. Either she lied to Reuters or somebody is spinning the BBC. Ghosh does not seem to have noticed that both cannot be true.
He also writes that the Indian government holds regular debriefings for the foreign guests it shelters, and that Hasina was told Delhi's mind at these sessions. Well, that is one absurd claim to print without a source. She has been living in a guarded safe house in Lutyens' Delhi for more than two years. Of course her hosts talk to her. If having the morning papers delivered to the door counts as a security briefing, that is a different discussion.
Then there are the secret talks. Delhi, we are told, has been negotiating quietly with Dhaka for months to clear her way home. Yet further down the same report, officials from the home and foreign ministries can only tell Ghosh what Dhaka's real intention seems to them to be. People who have been in talks for months do not need to guess.
And if a deal were being worked out between two governments, why did a London law firm have to email the Bangladesh High Commission in Delhi this month about her passport and NID? The mission says the letter came with nothing to show that she had even engaged the firm.
On the record, nobody mentions an aircraft. India's foreign ministry spokesman Randhir Jaiswal said on November 10 that extradition is a legal matter and that "for travel of people, you need a travel document". Humaiun Kobir said Bangladesh "does not give passports to terrorists" and that her only way home is the extradition treaty.
The spokesman's line is that it is all a matter of law. Ghosh's sources tell him something else. India, they say, is using the loopholes in the extradition treaty to sit on Dhaka's request, because handing her over would send the wrong message to Delhi's friends in Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
So which is it, law or loyalty? BBC prints both and does not ask.
The report makes one more admission in passing. Delhi tried again and again to move her to a third country, and nobody would have her. India is hearing from abroad that it is sheltering a convicted criminal. That is the BBC's own account of how the world sees the woman for whom Bangladesh is expected to send an air force plane.
The report says policymakers in Delhi agree the Awami League cannot be revived unless Hasina goes home, and that India wants the party back in Bangladesh's politics. That much we knew. It is also very far from ground reality.
The party's activities have been banned since May 2025. It could not contest the election, and the elected government has left its fate to the courts. By Hasina's own account to Reuters, almost all her leaders and workers face cases and many are in hiding. When she first announced the December return, Scroll found very few people in Bangladesh who believed it, and read it as an exercise in lifting her activists' morale.
Wanting something in the South Block does not make it happen in Dhaka.
The real story is in the final paragraphs, and Ghosh printed it himself.
India, he writes, knew from day one that getting her back on these terms would be hard. Most observers in Delhi think a December return is unlikely. So why let her announce it? Because Delhi has nothing to lose.
A South Block official spells it out. India can then say that Hasina wanted to go and Bangladesh made excuses. The report adds that the announcement has fired up Awami League workers, which Delhi counts as a plus. And if she is still on Indian soil on December 31, Delhi will have a fresh argument for keeping her.
There it is. Conditions Dhaka cannot meet, set by people who will not be named, so that Delhi can blame Dhaka while Hasina's camp, living on a thread, gets another month of hope.
Unnamed sources are part of our trade, and I use them too. But here every claim comes from people without names. The one detail anyone can check- the generals- is wrong. The legal condition is impossible on the face of the statute. And the report's own ending admits the whole exercise is for show. The reader is entitled to ask what he has been handed.
BBC Bangla had the real story in its hands, but it chose to fly it away with aircraft, logistics and gimmicky secret talks, and buried the confession at the bottom. Sadly, this has all the hallmarks of a piece built to mislead.
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