Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has resigned and reportedly left for an “undisclosed location”.
A senior official in the Border Security Force (BSF) said that all senior border guarding officials and commandants had rushed to the border and had been maintaining tight vigilance along the frontiers. “Our troops are on high alert along the border with Bangladesh. We have almost sealed the border.”
Five Indian states including West Bengal, Tripura, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Assam — share a total of 4,096-km border with Bangladesh. On earlier occasions many political leaders of different political parties, including Awami League, took shelter in Tripura and West Bengal.
Officials of Bangladesh Assistant High Commissions in Guwahati and Agartala have submitted that they have no information about Hasina’s helicopter landing in Guwahati or Agartala.
On Monday, a section of the crowd in Dhaka vandalised a statue of former Bangladesh President and the country’s Independence leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the father of Sheikh Hasina. Bangladesh Army Chief General Waker-Uz-Zaman announced that Sheikh Hasina has resigned as the Prime Minister, and an interim government will be formed soon to run the country. Over 100 people were killed and more than 1,000 injured in the clashes that took place between police and protesters on Sunday. Recently hundreds of students studying in Bangladesh have come back to India through the borders of Meghalaya and Agartala.
The students had been protesting a 30 per cent reservation in government jobs for relatives of freedom fighters who wrested independence for Bangladesh from Pakistan in a bloody civil war in 1971 in which, according to Dhaka officials, 3 million people were killed in the genocide by Pakistani troops and their supporters.
