On August 5, 2026, two years to the day since she fled Dhaka by helicopter, Sheikh Hasina is set to address a virtual press conference in New Delhi, hosted by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of South Asia. She will not appear on camera – organisers say the government has not cleared her for a video appearance, so it will be audio only. That single detail tells you where South Block actually stands: New Delhi isn’t debating whether Hasina gets to speak from Indian soil. It is managing exactly how loud.For Indian readers, this should not be read as a footnote to a neighbour’s internal turmoil. It goes to the heart of India’s own northeastern security calculus, its rivalry with China in the Bay of Bengal, and the credibility of the “Neighbourhood First” doctrine that successive governments in Delhi have championed. Dhaka wants Hasina back. Delhi keeps saying the request is “under examination.” That is not bureaucratic caution but a choice — one worth understanding on its merits and not just its optics.This isn’t her first broadcast — and it isn’t harmlessIn January 2026, Hasina addressed a packed FCC gathering in New Delhi by audio link, calling Bangladesh’s then-interim leader Muhammad Yunus a “murderous fascist” and declaring the country would “never” see a free election under him, to a reported online audience of over 100,000. Dhaka lodged a formal protest with the Ministry of External Affairs over the speech.It was not an isolated outburst. Earlier, after a mob demolished her father’s historic Dhanmondi residence in Dhaka, Hasina delivered a virtual address from Indian soil accusing Bangladesh’s interim leadership of plotting to kill her and her sister — remarks Dhaka says helped ignite fresh violence, prompting it to summon India’s acting High Commissioner in protest. In each instance, the platform was Indian, the audience was Bangladeshi, and the object was Bangladesh’s own government. That is worth sitting with: a head of state convicted of crimes against humanity by her own country’s tribunal is being permitted to run an active political campaign against the government that succeeded her, broadcasting from a neighbouring capital. In November 2025, Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal held Hasina responsible for ordering drones, helicopters and lethal weapons used against unarmed demonstrators in the July 2024 uprising, and sentenced her to death in absentia. Recordings verified by Al Jazeera’s investigative unit captured her telling an ally she had ordered forces to “shoot wherever they find them.” A peer-reviewed study of 253 deaths from that crackdown, published in Dialogues in Health in January 2026, found close to 47% of victims were shot in the chest and 29% in the head — a pattern the study’s authors say sits uneasily with any claim of routine crowd control.That is the woman India continues to host, continues to let speak and, three formal requests later, continues to decline to send home.Why this actually serves Indian interestsSet aside the discomfort of the record for a moment, and the logic of New Delhi’s position becomes easier to see: Hasina delivered what no successor government has. For 15 years, her government moved against anti-India insurgent groups sheltering in Bangladeshi territory and settled border disputes that had lingered for decades — cooperation Assam’s own chief minister once credited with helping pacify India’s northeast. That is not a small thing to write off, whatever verdict a Bangladeshi tribunal has since delivered on her domestic record.Dhaka has been tilting toward Beijing after the Hasina govenment was overthrown – and the tilt is accelerating. In March 2025, Yunus travelled to Beijing and secured $2.1 billion in Chinese loans, investment and grants, including funds to modernise Mongla Port and deepen Chinese involvement in the Teesta River project — a river India and Bangladesh have failed to agree on sharing for over a decade, and whose barrage sits uncomfortably close to India’s Siliguri Corridor, the narrow “Chicken’s Neck” linking the mainland to the northeast. In January 2026, Dhaka’s air force signed a framework with a Chinese state firm to build a drone manufacturing plant on Bangladeshi soil — a deal Indian analysts read as a pointed signal. And after Bangladesh’s February 2026 election, newly installed prime minister Tarique Rahman went to Beijing himself, signing 13 more agreements with China. Against that backdrop, keeping Hasina and the Awami League’s residual base in reserve costs India nothing and closes off no future options — even as its traditional influence in Dhaka visibly erodes.She gives India leverage it would otherwise lack. Hasina now functions as India’s pressure point against Dhaka, since her interviews and broadcasts from Indian soil keep Bangladeshi politics unsettled and the Awami League’s base mobilised. Hosting her lets India extract quiet concessions from Bangladesh while keeping the relationship tilted in Delhi’s favour. Read this way, the disorder her broadcasts stir up inside Bangladesh isn’t collateral damage New Delhi merely shrugs off — it is functional, because a Bangladesh preoccupied with Awami League agitation has less room to consolidate its new friendship with Beijing.India has run this playbook before, without ever needing to say so out loud. As International Crisis Group’s Thomas Kean put it plainly, “India is clearly not going to want to extradite her back to Bangladesh.” India has hosted the Dalai Lama since 1959 without ever formally calling him a lever against China — yet Beijing has treated his presence here as a permanent thorn regardless. An asset, in diplomacy, doesn’t have to be actively used to do its job. Sometimes just holding it is the strategy.The ‘legal matter’ that never resolvesDhaka has asked three times now — a note verbale in December 2024, a formal extradition request after the November 2025 verdict, and a repeat during Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman’s April 2026 visit. Each time, the Ministry of External Affairs has offered a version of the same line. Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal told reporters on July 17, 2026 that the request remains “under examination” and will be weighed against “the legalities and the judicial process of extradition” — phrasing that has not moved in eight months. One extradition-focused outlet put it more bluntly: “a polite no with no expiry date.”There are sound, self-interested reasons for that studied vagueness. The 2013 India-Bangladesh extradition treaty carries a political-offence exception, giving Delhi legal room to argue the tribunal’s case is politically coloured — an off-ramp it can invoke indefinitely without ever issuing a formal refusal. Handing her over would be a costless propaganda win for Dhaka and a reputational one for Delhi to swallow: surrendering a 78-year-old woman under a death sentence, who was for over a decade South Asia’s most reliably India-friendly head of government, would read across the region as India abandoning an ally the moment she stopped being useful in office. That is not a signal any government of any party has an incentive to send.What readers should weigh for themselvesThe “strategic asset” read is an inference, not a fact. The MEA has never used that language – its line is that Bangladesh is an important neighbour and extradition is a legal matter. Hasina herself told Reuters she plans to return voluntarily around December 2026 to face trial, which cuts against the idea that Delhi means to hold her indefinitely.The theory carries real costs if true and visible: it hardens anti-India sentiment in Bangladesh, strains ties with the Rahman government, and makes India look coercive rather than principled just as it competes with Beijing for regional goodwill — not obviously the stronger hand to play.Hasina is a convicted war-crimes defendant under death sentence, she keeps broadcasting from Indian soil with Delhi’s evident cooperation, and India has turned back three extradition requests in 20 months. Is this deliberate strategy or just reluctance to hand over an old ally? The evidence leans toward strategy — but doesn’t prove it, and readers deserve that distinction. Officially, India’s position hasn’t moved.Kaniz Fatema is the Head of Content at Centrist Nation TV.