NEW DELHI: Three days before the cancellation, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of South Asia had circulated the agenda: ten speakers from six countries, a panel that included a Czech parliamentarian, a German diplomat, a Rohingya rights activist, and a Belgian-backed humanitarian organisation, gathering in New Delhi on August 29 to discuss democracy, press freedom, and South Asian governance. Delhi Police denied the event permission, citing security concerns. The FCC sent its members a brief notice: the seminar was cancelled.
Within hours of that notice, reports began circulating in Bangladeshi and South Asian media that framed the cancelled event as an Awami League programme, a claim the party is now pushing back against with unusual firmness.
The Bangladesh Awami League, the country’s oldest and once dominant political party, issued a formal statement this week disputing the characterisation. The party said the seminar was “neither organised, sponsored, authorised, nor directed” by the Awami League, and condemned what it described as “baseless and misleading reporting.”
The statement draws a precise line. The FCC of South Asia is a journalistic body that hosts public events open to a range of attendees. Any individuals with Awami League affiliations who planned to attend the seminar would have done so in a personal or professional capacity, the party said. That participation, the statement argues, “cannot reasonably turn an independent international seminar into a party event.”
The composition of the panel assembled for the cancelled seminar illustrated how far removed it was from any partisan gathering. Among those scheduled to speak were Czech politician Ondrej Dostal, German diplomat Peter Fahrenholtz, Bangladeshi American scientist Nuran Nabi, Bangladeshi legal scholar Salim Mahmud, Nepalese child rights activist Sundar Ghimire, Rohingya rights activist Rabi Alam, FCC-IAPC chairman Venkat Narayan, former diplomat Veena Sikri, United Diplomatic Council president Asif Iqbal, and Golam Zilani, general secretary of the Hand in Hand Foundation, the Belgium-based NGO co-hosting the event. The subject, by all available descriptions, was South Asian governance and press freedom.
Delhi Police’s cited reason for the cancellation, security concerns, has not been elaborated upon publicly. What is clear is that the denial came at a politically loaded moment. The Bangladesh Awami League has been formally banned from political activity under Bangladesh’s interim government, led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, who came to power following the fall of Sheikh Hasina’s administration in August 2024. An anti-terrorism amendment passed by Bangladesh’s parliament in 2026 gave legal force to that ban, criminalising Awami League activity, public meetings, publications, and any publicity in support of the party.
Yunus, who founded Grameen Bank in 1983 and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, has long been credited with pioneering microfinance as a tool for poverty alleviation. The model extends small loans to the rural poor at interest rates that critics have described as exploitative, drawing sharp scrutiny in a 2010 Norwegian documentary that alleged Grameen Bank had redirected approximately $100 million in aid funds without donor knowledge. Yunus denied the allegations and Norwegian authorities later cleared him.
His return to Bangladeshi public life after Hasina’s fall was not without personal legal exposure: a Bangladeshi labour court convicted him in January 2024 on labour law violations at Grameen Telecom, a case his government characterised as Hasina’s political persecution. Hasina had publicly described him as a “bloodsucker of the poor” for the interest rates his microfinance institutions charged. A February 2026 Al Jazeera retrospective found Bangladeshis sharply divided on whether his record represents liberation or a different kind of debt.
Bangladesh’s interim administration has since been pressing India on the question of Awami League activity on Indian soil. The country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has publicly warned that such activities “risk long-term friendship and multifarious engagements” between Bangladesh and India. India’s Ministry of External Affairs, for its part, has maintained it is “not aware of any anti-Bangladesh activities by Awami League in India,” a response that carefully avoids taking a side.
Whether Dhaka’s diplomatic pressure played any role in Delhi Police’s decision remains unanswered. The police have not indicated they received any formal request from Bangladesh’s government. That silence is precisely what made the media’s leap to characterise the FCC event as an Awami League function so consequential: inference rushed in where disclosure had not.
The mischaracterisation carries real stakes, but so does the broader political reality it reflects. The Awami League, founded in 1949 and the party that led Bangladesh’s liberation struggle, has won nine national elections since independence. Its exclusion from politics is not a provisional suspension; it is a formal ban enforced under anti-terrorism law. Bangladesh’s Election Commission has confirmed that under current rules, Awami League candidates cannot appear on the ballot. As Eastern Herald has reported, the question of which parties fill that electoral space remains fiercely contested.
A survey by the International Republican Institute, the Washington-based democracy think tank, estimated the party’s support base at approximately 11 percent. Applied to Bangladesh’s roughly 119 million registered voters, that figure represents approximately 13 million people whose political preference has no legal outlet in the country’s electoral system. Under the 2026 amendment, those voters cannot donate to the party, attend its meetings, or publicly associate with its activities. They may vote in future elections, but not for the party they support.
International legal frameworks on political participation draw a distinction between restricting a party’s conduct and eliminating voters’ ability to express an affiliation altogether. The UN Human Rights Committee, interpreting Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Bangladesh is a signatory, has held that restrictions on political organisations must be proportionate and necessary in a democratic society. Bangladesh’s government has argued the Awami League poses a security threat sufficient to meet that threshold; rights groups and the party’s own lawyers have contested whether the standard has been satisfied. As Eastern Herald has reported, the silencing of the Awami League carries costs well beyond Bangladesh’s own borders.
Sheikh Hasina, the party’s president and Bangladesh’s former prime minister, has remained in India since August 2024, where arrest warrants issued by Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal have not produced extradition. At an August 5 FCC South Asia event in Delhi, she addressed media by video link, announcing her intention to return to Bangladesh in December 2026. “Whatever fate awaits me, I will return to my people,” she said. That earlier FCC event, at the same journalistic organisation, was not an Awami League production either.
The question left open by the Awami League’s statement, and by Delhi Police’s terse denial, is what security concern, if any, was genuine. A ten-person international panel including European politicians and diplomats, convened by the region’s oldest foreign correspondents’ club, is not a plausible staging ground for the kind of activity that typically warrants police intervention. The party itself makes no allegations. Its statement simply asks that reporting distinguish between independent events and party-sponsored ones, a request that, in a different political climate, would not need to be made at all.
Related Posts
