EVER since prime minister Sheikh Hasina precipitously fell from power on August 5, 2024, the dynamics between India and Bangladesh have been worryingly discordant. But it is not a brand-new phenomenon. Partially, an inheritance from the past, the two-pronged narrative is still ‘handcuffed to history!’ My August 8, 1998, weekly Holiday piece on Indo-Bangladesh interactions of the time still carries a relevance to the New Delhi-Dhaka stand-off in the post-Hasina strategic backdrop. Subject to who ruled the corridors of power in Dhaka and New Delhi, Indo-Bangladesh relations have spun around five volatile markers: (a) the stretchy ‘gratitude’ for the Indian contribution to the country’s violent separation from Pakistan in 1971, (b) the AL regime’s demonstrated compliance to New Delhi, (c) steady pro-Indian postures of the liberal intellectuals and their allies, (d) India-friendly stance of the cultural organisations and the performers, and (e) the bulk of the Hindu and other religious minorities’ confidence in Indian weight for their safety and security. Over multiple intervals and with Dhaka’s amenability, an Indian supremacy easily wafted over Bangladesh.
The much-trumpeted 1971 feats became a dwindling capital for the Indian ascendency to continue in 2024. Now India worries that the Islamic groups, the perceived anti-India outfits in Bangladesh, gained upper hand during the tumultuous July-August civil unrest. Bharatiya Janata Party leaders habitually smell Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, Islami Chhatra Shibir and other Islamic groups conspiring with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence to undermine their country. During Hasina’s long tenure, Dhaka yielded to the big neighbour’s geo-political manoeuvring that discounted Bangladeshi national interests. When Hasina plunged from authority and fled the country, prime Minister modi rattled as Bangladeshi ‘gratitude’ for India began to peel off. No more a hush-hush that Modi’s collaboration made Hasina’s rule an authoritarian one-party replacement for democracy in Bangladesh. Bangladeshis now yearn for a ‘mutually respected and supported’ bilateral rapport, not Delhi’s dominance. Hasina’s sudden fall was, indeed, a stunning diplomatic loss for prime minister Modi.
Tajuddin Ahmed-led exiled government’s contentious pacts with India and later Sheikh Mujibur Rahman-signed 25-year Indo-Bangladesh friendship treaty in 1972, facilitated New Delhi’s supremacy in Bangladesh. The 1975 bloody coup, however, manifested a not-so-warm spell between the two neighbours until Hasina restored the Awami League to power in 1997 and, then again, she settled for a long haul in authority from 2009. She hated the Islamic parties as they sustained the Bangladesh Nationalist Party-led government in the beginning of the 1990s when India pandered Hasina as she weaponised her campaign against Khaleda’s BNP-Jamaat coalition rule. Ousting Khaleda Zia from power became the casus belli of AL politics — no matter what it would take. But Hasina’s long tyrannical rule commenced after the 2008 election had steered by a military-sponsored caretaker cabinet with a not-so-secret Indian concurrence.
Four incipient features of post-Hasina Bangladesh, however, worry Modi’s government: (a) a distinct possibility of a Bangladesh-Pakistan-China alliance that would lift off the tectonic shifts in the South Asian security theatre, (b) ideological and political realignments along with the Islamic parties, a thorny prospect for Indian regional supremacy, (c) an escalating distrust towards New Delhi, and (d) a counter-narrative of what happened in 1971 and who got what since then and the constructed history handed out, so far, by the Awami League, its validators and India. In my old Holiday wedge, the dread that India could one day intervene in Bangladesh’s domestic politics was not an exaggeration. Delhi’s non-military leverage divided Bangladeshi internal affairs and polarised people, not only on pro-Indian and anti-Indian lines, but also along religious and communal tracks. And, Delhi’s bare endorsement of three rigged elections is the burning political issue in post-Hasina Bangladesh. Hasina’s worst political legacy is the Indianisation of Bangladesh’s politics. It has grown into Delhi’s strategic fixation and a noose around Modi’s diplomatic neck.
India is still the Awami League’s patron, which complicates Dhaka’s diplomacy and the country’s domestic politics. The left-over Awami Leaguers and their allies in the bureaucracy and business are still amongst New Delhi’s best assets in Bangladesh. Modi’s BJP-inspired Hindutva doctrines portentously rose in Bangladesh during Hasina’s long authoritarian rule, according to domestic and international reports. Those forces threaten Bangladesh’s internal security while India has sheltered Hasina and the asylum-seeking AL bigwigs gathered in India. On August 5, 2024, Hasina abandoned her Awami League and its accomplices on the run. Appallingly, she left behind a trail of hundreds of dead and wounded students, civilians and police personnel dead during the violent civil unrest for which the interim government of Bangladesh has issued a warrant for the arrest of Hasina for trial. The dawn of independent Bangladesh in 1971 was a strategic victory for New Delhi, but the August 5 Hasina’s collapse launched India’s worst diplomatic disaster since China humiliated it in the 1960s.
Awkward questions such as why the surrender ceremony of December 16, 1971, when the Pakistani generals openly laid down their arms to their Indian counterparts, did not have any formal presence of the Bangladeshi freedom fighters or the exiled government, are raising their heads again — more stridently than before. Another searching issue is the seven-point agreement that the Bangladesh’s exiled government initialled with New Delhi, which became the Indian weapon of intervention into Bangladesh. The 1972 friendship treaty with India also confronted fresh criticism in 2024 although the accord had long expired. Thanks to social media, the skeletons from veiled history can as well talk now. Newspapers reported that the new school textbooks were jettisoning the ‘imposed history’ foisted by the dynastic rulers to perpetuate their grip. Top leaders of the huge July-August 2024 protests want to know more about the enigmatic deals and memorandums of understanding between the Hasina government and its Indian counterparts. Such debates blaze the old fault lines between the two neighbours, which, of course, adversely fall on India-Bangladesh relationships.
The Students Against Discrimination team that led the July-August uprising has recently asked for a ‘proclamation of the July revolution’ that wants to scrap the 1972 constitution, which they perceived as the ‘roots’ of authoritarianism, Indian domination, dynastic autocracy, rampant corruption and a plethora of ignominies that Bangladesh has encountered since its birth. Mainstream parties, however, fear that such radical steps would destabilise the country.
Bangladesh now staggers between ‘its past and future’ — the post-Hasina political alchemy shakes domestic as well as the strategic imperatives. New Delhi’s consents for Hasina’s hated, pernicious and unacceptable rule would have a protracted spin over Indo-Bangladesh interactions. Dr Yunus’s interim regime now shoulders an exhausted and angry nation that wants an early election and a return to a political regime which might prioritise the bilateral interests of the two neighbours and break their current stalemate.
But a looming foretelling may, on the contrary, further exasperate the faltering Dhaka-New Delhi ties now. It is the narrow ‘chicken neck’ strip of the River Feni that slices Bangladesh from India. And then, the waterway, its bridges, and roads provide vital links between the western half of the country and its southeastern territories. On the east, the River Feni’s adjoining regions stretch to the troubled CHT, the Chittagong port, the insurgency-plagued (Indian) north-east and the rebel Arakan Army-controlled Myanmar’s western perimeters that might even appear as the new state in the region. India’s connectivity trajectory points at the Chittagong port as the shortest sea routes to its landlocked north-east. The recent India-built Maitri Bridge over the River Feni, the fresh infrastructure and the escalating water disputes have amplified the zone’s geo-political sensitivities. We are also aware that the troubled cross-border terrain attracts other regional and international stakeholders — state and non-state, too. If this sensitive swath unravels and spirals out of control, post-Hasina Bangladesh will face a different strategic future.
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M Rashiduzzaman, a retired academic in the United States, occasionally writes on Bangladesh history, politics and identity. His latest book is Parties and Politics in East Pakistan 1947-71: The Political Inheritances of Bangladesh, Peter Lang, 2024.
