Slamming India for backing former Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina, chief adviser Muhammad Yunus said on Wednesday that Dhaka’s ties with New Delhi are strained also because India didn’t like last year’s student protests that led to her ouster. “They (India) are hosting Hasina who created all these problems and killed young people,” Yunus said during his visit to New York to attend UNGA. He also alleged, “lots of fake news is emanating from the other side (India)”. The interim govt in Dhaka has accused Hasina of committing “crimes against humanity” to quell the uprising against her govt during July-Aug last year. It has requested India to extradite her, but there has been no response from the latter.In a separate meeting with Finland President Alexander Stubb, Yunus said trials of “Hasina and her cronies are a top priority of his govt”.Yunus calls reports of rising Islamic fundamentalism in B’desh ‘fake news’ While pushing for the revival of Saarc, Yunus laid emphasis on regional cooperation on the economic front, but said there are “problems with India right now because they did not like what the students have done in Bangladesh. And that creates a lot of tension between the two nations,” he said at a conversation hosted by Asia Society and Asia Society Policy Institute. The chief adviser also appeared to blame India for Saarc summits not happening since 2014, but stopped short of mentioning names. “We wanted to bring this together so that young people can get in touch with each other – all region, not just one country, all the countries – they can visit each other, make friends with each other, study in universities, colleges, wherever they are, they go do business in each other’s countries. That was the whole idea,” Yunus said. “Our history gives us the opportunity to make that happen, but somehow it didn’t fit into the politics of one country, so we had to stop that. So, we feel very sorry for that. We want to make sure that we open it up and bring people together,” he said. Yunus dismissed accounts of rise in Islamic fundamentalism in Bangladesh as “fake news”.
