In just 12 days, eight major Indian outlets published near-identical “exclusive” Q&As with fugitive ex–Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina, signalling an orchestrated PR campaign ahead of her November 17 death sentence.
The interviews let Hasina push her narrative unchecked, while journalists failed to ask obvious questions about her escape to India, political patrons, asylum plans, and the secrecy around her 16-month stay.
Bangladesh protested India’s facilitation of the media outreach, while critics decried the interviews as obsequious—an episode exposing troubling cracks in media independence and accountability.
Something very strange happened in the mainstream Indian media just before Sheikh Hasina, the former Bangladeshi prime minister holed up in India since last year, was sentenced to death by the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) in Dhaka on November 17, 2025 exactly as expected for her direct role in the massacre of 1400 protestors which ultimately led to her downfall.
Prior to the sentencing, in a brief span of 12 days from November 7 to November 17 – as if on cue – five leading English national dailies – The Indian Express, The Hindustan Times, The Times of India, The Hindu, and The New Indian Express; premier Bengali daily Anand Bazar Patrika, NDTV Online, and Press Trust of India published fairly long interviews with Hasina in Question and Answer (Q&A) format. Each one of them claimed that the interview was “exclusive”, although the questions and answers in the various outlets were indistinguishable from one another – all the pieces were cut from the same cloth!Each publication duly explained that Hasina had sent written replies to their questions. One publication wrote that Hasina had communicated from “her secret shelter in New Delhi”, but most others simply said that she had spoken from an “undisclosed location”.
To underline their own importance and impress readers, each one of them claimed individually that Hasina’s emailed responses to its written queries were her “first” media engagement after she fled Bangladesh.
Staggeringly, The Hindu, The Hindustan Times, and The New Indian Express carried the Hasina interview on the same day – November 7. The Indian Express and Anand Bazar Patrika published her interview on November 13, a day after the Press Trust of India, while NDTV Online and The Times of India ran theirs on November 17, giving the disgraced dictator eight big exposures in 12 days in the jewels of the free press in the world’s largest democracy. No doubt, the collective coverage by the Indian media of the 78-year-old ex-premier hiding in India since August 5, 2024 to escape the wrath of her own countrymen, just before she was given the death sentence in absentia, was attention grabbing and stood out for its range and reach. It was, of course, orchestrated and must have cost a bomb.
I am not insinuating that the journalists who conducted the interview or the publications which carried them were paid bribes. The public relations-lobbyist firm which meticulously planned the whole campaign and pulled off the media spectacle to build a certain narrative before Hasina was awarded the capital punishment, surely charged someone a big fat sum for its professional services. Who that someone is, is pretty obvious but that too hardly bothers me.
My quarrel with the spate of Hasina interviews lies elsewhere. I am not at all against giving Hasina a platform to say her piece – which she did as well as she could in her present circumstances.In the interviews, unsurprisingly enough, she washed her hands of the genocide and smugly blamed the security forces for gunning down agitating youths in July-August 2024; tore into the head of the interim administration, Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, for grabbing power with the help of external forces; declared that the parliamentary elections next year will be a complete farce as her Awami League has been banned from participating; solemnly announced that Hindus have been orphaned in her absence; alerted India and the United States-led West to the resurgence of ‘Islamic extremism’ in Bangladesh due to the re-emergence of Jamaat-e-Islami – and profusely thanked New Delhi for not only providing her a safe haven but standing rock-solid beside her.
So far so good! But the interviews are a big blot on journalism for not asking Hasina the obvious questions that were crying out to be asked – questions that make the difference between journalism and an advertorial or PR job. The questions which the Indian media, inexplicably enough, did not ask Hasina despite getting a golden opportunity to do so, are:
1. Who in India showed you the green light to cross over on August 5 last year? Did you send an SOS to New Delhi, or someone in India told you to come over? Or was there a contingency plan in place anyway, that you were welcome in India if the situation spun out of control in your country?
2. Have Narendra Modi, S. Jaishankar and Ajit Doval met you? What are the assurances they have given you?
3. On August 6, 2024 Jaishankar informed Parliament that at “very short notice, you requested approval to come for the moment to India”. Which means that you were initially permitted to stay here only temporarily. How has “for the moment” stretched to nearly 16 long months? Are you awaiting permission from other countries to shift there from India? Is it true that you had approached the United Kingdom for asylum but the response was not positive?
4. What advice did New Delhi exactly give you to defuse the rapidly worsening situation in Bangladesh, considering that Jaishankar informed the Consultative Committee on External Affairs on March 22, 2025 that India was aware of an anti-Sheikh Hasina wave building up in Bangladesh but was not in a position to do much except advising her? Did your assessment of the ground realities differ from India’s in that crucial period?
5. Did you leave behind a pet cat or dog in Ganabhaban as you were reportedly given only half an hour by the army to pack and board a helicopter? Did your pets join you later, or are they still stuck there?
6. How is your current exile in India compared to your earlier one following Mujibur Rahman’s assassination in 1975? What’s your average day like and how are you coping with Delhi’s pollution at your age, considering your asthmatic tendencies?
All these are legitimate questions even a cub reporter would have asked considering Hasina’s dramatic flight to India, the mystery surrounding her stay and whereabouts in our country and her wholly uncertain future. But the seasoned journalists doing the external affairs beat for decades somehow didn’t, despite knowing fully well that the fugitive ex-PM is today a major pawn on the South Asian geostrategic chessboard, demanding close, professional scrutiny by the media. On November 12, Bangladesh sat up and reacted to the sudden surge of interviews.
It summoned Indian Deputy High Commissioner in Dhaka, Pawan Badhe, to protest what it described as New Delhi’s facilitation of Hasina’s engagement with the Indian media despite her being a fugitive from justice. There was also a backlash from former journalist Shafiqul Alam, the spokesperson for interim government chief Mohammad Yunus, who characterised Hasina’s interviewers as “Indian bootlicking” journalists, triggering angry demands by the Press Club of India for an apology from Alam.
Fabrice Le Lous, a celebrated Nicaraguan newsman, is a great exponent of the Q&A with important personalities as a key tool of journalism with the interviewer asking the questions that a curious and conscientious reader would to get to the bottom of things. When a Q&A is done well, it can become a memorable piece of public consultation and a document for future historians. But the Hasina interviews are so embarrassingly inadequate and obsequious that they are best forgotten as an aberration and buried.
