Bangladesh Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman on Friday said that during his visit to New Delhi, he had reiterated Dhaka’s demand that India extradite deposed Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, The Hindu reported.

The previous caretaker government led by Muhammad Yunus had, in November, made the request under the India-Bangladesh extradition treaty.

Khalilur Rahman’s visit marked the first high-level bilateral engagement hosted by India since the Hasina government was ousted.

Hasina fled to India in August 2024 after several weeks of widespread student-led protests against her Awami League government. She had been in power for 16 years.

Yunus, a Nobel laureate economist, subsequently took over as the head of Bangladesh’s interim government.

After parliamentary elections in February, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party formed the new government in the country. Tarique Rahman, the chairperson of the party, was sworn in as prime minister.

Earlier this week, Khalilur Rahman held talks with National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar during his visit to New Delhi, before travelling to Mauritius to attend the 9th Indian Ocean Conference.

Jaishankar reiterated to his Bangladeshi counterpart that India will “engage constructively” with the new government in Dhaka and work to strengthen bilateral ties. The visit by Rahman marked the first high-level bilateral engagement hosted by India since the Hasina government was ousted.

Speaking to The Hindu in Mauritius on Friday, the Bangladeshi foreign minister said Dhaka had “already asked for [Hasina’s] return under our extradition treaty”. “We reiterated that.”

Rahman added that he was “reasonably optimistic” about bilateral relations after his meetings in Delhi.

“The leaders of our two countries, my PM [Prime Minister] Tarique Rahman and Indian PM Narendra Modi had not only exchanged letters, they also spoke, and both want to advance the relationship,” the newspaper quoted him as saying. “It is a relationship of consequence to both countries and we talked about how to carry it forward.”

He added: “I hope that we will do this in the next few weeks”.

Ties between New Delhi and Dhaka had been strained after Hasina had fled to India.

Bangladesh has repeatedly demanded that India extradite Hasina after a tribunal in that country sentenced her to death for alleged crimes against humanity. Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal held Hasina guilty of having ordered a deadly crackdown on the protests against her government.

In December, Jaishankar had said that it was for Hasina to decide whether she wanted to return to Bangladesh.