“When kleptocrats flee, they don’t vanish. They simply relocate — and keep operating.”
There is something almost classically colonial about the spectacle. A regime collapses. Its beneficiaries scatter. And within weeks, the very men and women who looted a nation’s treasury are sipping tea in Kolkata drawing rooms, enrolling their children in expensive schools, and — if the reports are accurate — conducting business as usual through gold smuggling networks and hawala channels. History, in South Asia, rarely surprises.
August 2024 changed Bangladesh. The fall of Sheikh Hasina’s government — brought down by a student-led uprising that her administration tried and failed to crush — was swift, violent, and long overdue. But the reckoning that followed was incomplete. Because while Hasina herself fled to India, she was not alone. In her wake came a procession: ministers, parliamentarians, party operatives, fixers, and loyalists — at least three thousand, by credible estimates — who slipped across the border illegally and established themselves with breathtaking ease in West Bengal, Delhi, and beyond.
Let us be precise about what this means. These are not political refugees in any meaningful sense of that term. A refugee flees persecution. These individuals fled accountability. There is a difference, and it matters enormously.
The subcontinent has seen this before. After the fall of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, after every military coup that reshuffled Pakistan’s deck, the ousted class retreated abroad and waited. Some returned. Some never did. But the pattern is consistent: power in South Asia rarely strips its beneficiaries of their wealth, because the wealth was extracted precisely in anticipation of such moments. The smart thief builds the exit before he needs it.
What distinguishes the Awami League exodus, however, is its audacity. These are not men who quietly disappeared. Reports from Kolkata suggest that former ministers purchased or rented properties in upscale neighborhoods, opened businesses, and — astonishingly — obtained Bharatiya Aadhaar cards and even Indian passports, reportedly with the active assistance of powerful figures within the Trinamool Congress. One former MP, AKM Bahauddin Bahar — a man accused of seizing a Hindu temple in Comilla and converting it into an Awami League party office — allegedly obtained an Indian passport and fled to Germany, where he is now seeking political asylum.
Read that sentence again. A man accused of anti-Hindu violence in Bangladesh used India’s documentation infrastructure to claim victimhood in Europe. The irony would be comic if it weren’t so damaging.
The corruption allegations are not abstract. They have names and networks attached. Several Awami League figures are now accused of joining transnational smuggling operations — gold, narcotics, human trafficking. At least four are allegedly linked to Aziz Mohammad Bhai, a Bangkok-based businessman with reported ties to Dawood Ibrahim’s organized crime network. The murder of Awami League MP Anwarul Azim Anar in Kolkata in May 2024 — before the government’s fall — was itself connected, investigators believe, to gold smuggling disputes. This was not politics. This was organized crime wearing a party badge.
And now those networks have metastasized. Indian intelligence sources, according to credible reporting, have flagged that some of these individuals maintain contact with Pakistan’s ISI. The implications for Indian national security should be obvious, even if they remain politically inconvenient for those in West Bengal who benefited from the arrangement.
There is a phrase economists use: “state capture.” It refers to the process by which a private interest so thoroughly infiltrates government that the state exists to serve not citizens but the capturers themselves. Bangladesh under the later Hasina years exhibited every symptom. Public contracts were awarded based on party loyalty. Dissent was criminalized through the Digital Security Act. The banking sector was hollowed out by politically connected defaulters. By 2024, Bangladesh’s external debt had climbed to nearly $100 billion — a figure that represents not development but extraction dressed as development.
Those who extracted the most are now living, by all accounts, rather comfortably. Kolkata’s luxury apartment market has reportedly felt the influx. German asylum offices have received their applications. Third-country migration — using Indian passports to enter the United States, Britain, and Germany on tourist visas, then overstaying — has reportedly begun to embarrass Indian diplomatic missions abroad.
Bharat’s reputation is not an abstraction. It is a diplomatic asset, carefully built across decades. To have it compromised by Bangladeshi kleptocrats who obtained Indian travel documents through political patronage is an injury that compounds itself every time one of them overstays a visa in Frankfurt or London.
One might argue for compassion. One might note that political transitions are messy, that not every Awami League figure is guilty of the worst allegations. Fair enough. But the appropriate venue for determining guilt and innocence is a court of law — in Bangladesh. Not a Kolkata safehouse. Not a German asylum application. Not a Bangkok criminal network.
The logic of accountability is not complicated. Nations build extradition frameworks precisely for moments like this. Bangladesh has requested the return of several figures. India, for reasons that blend politics with inertia, has been reluctant. This reluctance is itself a policy choice — and it carries costs.
Bangladesh’s incumbent government, whatever its imperfections, deserves a legitimate chance to prosecute those who corrupted its institutions. India, which has long positioned itself as South Asia’s responsible power, cannot credibly play that role while simultaneously providing sanctuary (witting or unwitting) to the very figures whose corruption destabilized the neighborhood.
The historian Ramachandra Guha once observed that South Asia’s deepest problem is not poverty but impunity — the persistent belief among the powerful that consequences are for other people. The Awami League’s fugitive class has internalized this belief completely. They took. They fled. They are waiting.
The question is whether India will finally decide that some guests, however politically useful their networks once were, have overstayed their welcome — and that returning them is not a concession to Bangladesh’s new government but a statement about what rules the subcontinent intends to live by. History is watching. It usually is.
