POBNEWS24, desk report, Dhaka Apr 4, 2025 : Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi held his first bilateral meeting with Professor Muhammad Yunus, the chief advisor to the interim government in Bangladesh after the fall of Sheikh Hasina’s regime in August.
The meeting was held at 12:30 pm local time on the sidelines of the BIMSTEC summit at the Shangri-La Hotel in Bangkok.
This meeting between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Professor Yunus, the chief advisor, came after eight months of the Bangladesh interim government.
The Bangladesh side said that Professor Yunus raised the issue of the extradition of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina during the meeting.
After the meeting on Friday, the Chief Advisor’s Press Secretary Shafiqul Alam told reporters, “The meeting discussed issues of mutual interest between the two countries. The Chief Advisor talked about Sheikh Hasina’s extradition in the meeting, and various incendiary (aggressive) comments she (Sheikh Hasina) is making while sitting in India.
“”In addition, border killings, renewal of the Ganges Treaty and water sharing of the Teesta River were also discussed in the meeting,” said Mr. Alam.
For the past few days, there has been discussion in the Bangladeshi and Indian media about the meeting of the top leaders of the two neighboring countries.
On the sidelines of the BIMSTEC summit, officials in Dhaka had expressed interest in sending a letter from Bangladesh to hold a bilateral meeting between the two top leaders. Although news of this was published in the Bangladeshi media, Indian officials did not confirm the matter.
As a result, there was a kind of uncertainty about the meeting until the last moment.
The meeting was held on the sidelines of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Regional Cooperation (BIMSTEC) summit in Bangkok, Thailand on Friday.
During the meeting with Narendra Modi, Bangladesh’s Principal Advisor Professor Yunus presented him with a commemorative photo from a decade ago.
Deputy Press Secretary to the Principal Advisor Abul Kalam Azad Majumdar told BSS that on January 3, 2015, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi presented Nobel laureate Professor Yunus with a gold medal at the 102nd Indian Science Congress in Mumbai. The same photo was presented to Modi by the current Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Professor Yunus, ten years later.
