- Three Bangladeshi leaders with prior death sentences were acquitted and won parliamentary seats
- Lutfozzaman Babar and Abdus Salam Pintu belong to Tarique Rahman’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party
- ATM Azharul Islam from Jamaat-e-Islami was acquitted despite serious 1971 war crime charges
Three Bangladeshi leaders have suddenly found themselves to be very lucky. Two of them are from Tarique Rahman's Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which won the first national election since the fall of former prime minister Sheikh Hasina, and one from the Jamaat-e-Islami, which lost.
All three had been living with serious charges including the ultimate one - the death penalty - before Muhammad Yunus returned from the US, following Hasina's departure for India to live in exile. Yunus then cleared their names of all charges.
The two BNP leaders, Lutfozzaman Babar and Abdus Salam Pintu, and ATM Azharul Islam from the Jamaat-e-Islami are now headed to the new parliament of the small nation that had been in a tense situation in its ties with neighbouring India.
In December 2024, a Bangladesh high court acquitted Tarique Rahman, Lutfozzaman Babar and others convicted in two cases linked to a grenade attack on August 21, 2004 that targeted Sheikh Hasina. While she escaped narrowly, 24 people were killed.
Lutfozzaman Babar won the election to his nearest rival by 1.6 lakh votes.
His party colleague, Abdus Salam Pintu, is more problematic from India's perspective. A year after Babar was acquitted in the grenade attack case, Abdus Salam Pintu also got relief when the charges against him were cleared.
But that's not all. Pintu had been accused of backing Pakistan's terror group Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (Huji) that was behind attacks in India, including the blasts on a court premises in Uttar Pradesh's Varanasi in 2006, Ajmer Sharif Dargah in 2007, and Delhi in 2011.
Pintu won by at least two lakh votes.
The third lucky leader, ATM Azharul Islam, is a longtime Jamaat leader. He has been trying his luck in politics since 1998, even serving as the organisation's secretary general till 2012.
And what were the charges against Islam?
He was allegedly responsible for the deaths of over 1,200 people in the 1971 Liberation War. He is also an accused in 13 rape cases. For all these crimes, he was given the death sentence in 2014, only to be forgiven and acquitted of all charges by the US-returned Nobel laureate.
All the three leaders who had a death sentence to their names will, in just a few days following the oath ceremony of Tarique Rahman, enter the sacred hall of democracy - Bangladesh's parliament.
From New Delhi's strategic perspective, the election outcome marks a clear break from the interim administration led by Muhammad Yunus, a phase Indian officials privately describe as deeply disruptive.
The focus now shifts to Tarique Rahman, whom Indian officials describe as someone they are "cautiously optimistic" about. While acknowledging past differences with BNP governments, New Delhi believes Rahman may take a more pragmatic diplomatic and political approach, driven by economic realities and regional stability considerations.
