Sheikh Hasina on Time’s list of 100 most influential people of 2018

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has featured on the Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people in the world in 2018.

Senior Correspondentbdnews24.com
Published : 19 April 2018, 06:18 PM
Updated : 19 April 2018, 08:45 PM

She has been put on the list due to her “humanitarian role under difficult circumstances in sheltering more than a million forcibly displaced Rohingyas who fled violence in their homeland in Myanmar”.

TIME’s annual list of the world’s most influential people is a designation of individuals whose time, in its view, is now.

The TIME 100 is not a measure of power, though many on the list wield it. Nor is it a collection of milestones accumulated.

The 2018 TIME 100 recognises leaders ranging from Donald Trump to Kim Jong Un. Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe have also made it to the list.

Writing on Hasina, South Asia director for Human Rights Watch Meenakshi Ganguly said, “Bearing the legacy of her father, who led Bangladesh’s liberation war, Hasina has never been afraid of a fight.”

“So when several hundred thousand ethnic Rohingya refugees started streaming into Bangladesh last August to escape atrocities by the Myanmar army, she accepted the humanitarian challenge.

“An impoverished country, Bangladesh had not welcomed massive influxes of refugees in the past, but she could hardly turn back the traumatised victims of ethnic cleansing,” Ganguly wrote about her in the Time.

But she had some criticism for Hasina "who is stumbling badly on human rights".

“Her government has presided over extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances, including those of political opponents, and does not tolerate criticism or dissent.

“For one who railed against unfairness when out of office, Sheikh Hasina needs to curb this tendency toward authoritarianism and be an example to Myanmar and others to show that democracy embraces disagreement and diversity.”

Ganguly said she first met Hasina in the 1990s, when she was “fiercely campaigning to end military rule in Bangladesh. Our last meeting was in 2008, when she was campaigning against another military regime. The following year she became Prime Minister after a landslide election victory.”

Business magazine Forbes in 2015 put her on a list of 100 most powerful women in the world.

In 2016, another business magazine Fortune ranked Hasina the 10th among 50 leaders who "are transforming the world and inspiring others to do the same”.