Bangladesh chief adviser Muhammad Yunus on Thursday castigated India for hosting ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and accused New Delhi of stalling Saarc and generating a fake narrative against Dhaka.

While there was no official response from India, former foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal tore into Yunus’s remarks, saying there was “a lot of self-serving distortions in this airy-fairy preachy talk”.

Yunus’s comments came in an interview moderated by Kyung-wha Kang, Asia Society president and former South Korea foreign minister, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

“We have problems with India right now because they didn’t like what the students have done. And, they are hosting Hasina who is the former Prime Minister who created all this problem and killed the young people. And that creates lot of tension between India and Bangladesh,” Yunus said.

In an oblique allusion to India, Yunus added: “There’s lot of fake news coming from the other side making all kinds of propaganda that this is a very bad thing, this is (an) Islamist movement, these are the Taliban… they even say I am a Taliban too.”

Yunus was particularly vocal on Saarc, calling it a group of “very close family members” and underscoring that the idea of the regional grouping had been born in Bangladesh.

He likened Saarc to the European Union and advocated its revival.

“That was the kind of image in which the Saarc was built but somehow one of our neighbours didn’t like that framework. So it became almost a dead organisation,” Yunus said.

Expanding on the idea behind Saarc, he said: “Bangladesh is the one who promoted this idea capital by capital in all the South Asian countries. Now you are telling that you are enemy of each other. We wanted to bring us together so that young people can get in touch with each other….

“All the people in Saarc countries can visit each other, make friends with each other… study in universities… do business in each others’ countries, that was the whole idea. Our history gives us the opportunity to make that happen, but somehow it didn’t fit into the politics of one country, so we had to stop that.…”

Sibal stepped in to challenge Yunus on X. “SAARC has withered away because of Pakistan’s Kashmir bugbear, unwillingness to trade with India, deny it transit facilities and sponsor terrorism against India,” he posted.

“The economic and political basis of a regional organisation like SAARC was rejected by Pakistan. And by successive Bangladesh governments too which harboured anti-Indian insurgents on its soil, denied transit rights to India’s northeast about which Yunus is doing smooth-talking.”

Sibal added: “Free movement is fine but what about failure to control terrorists from Pakistan and illegal migration from Bangladesh? Yunus is misleading the interviewer about sub-regional cooperation. BBIN (Bhutan, Bangladesh, Nepal, India) was precisely that. Sheikh Hasina allowed these transit facilities.”