In this peak season of subcontinental dramas since July, a small but significant act played out last week in Kathmandu in the ongoing multi-act play that has recalibrate-or-lose as its central theme.
Energy sector officials and senior executives of state-run companies of Nepal, India, and Bangladesh signed off on a power purchase-and-supply agreement between Nepal and Bangladesh that would deliver electricity via transmission lines in India.
At one level, it is a test run for a modest peak of 40MW of Made in Nepal electricity to be transmitted to Bangladesh for five months, between mid-June and mid-November. It will feed off Nepal’s Monsoon-boosted hydroelectricity generation to supply Bangladesh’s growing need for energy.
Seen through another lens, it is much more, because it will be yet another example of third-country exports among two of India’s significant northern and eastern neighbours. Alongside a show of sub-regional goodwill, it will also set a template for Bhutan to export electricity to Bangladesh via India. While both landlocked Nepal and Bhutan trade with Bangladesh and, inevitably, use Indian territory to do so, transporting power is seen as work very much in progress of boosted bilateral, trilateral, and regional trading and investment pipelines of the near future. Indeed, even a pipeline of mutual respect and shared prosperity.
The signing also dignifies the carrying capacity of diplomatic relations after the Bangladesh-India bilateral imploded with the ouster of Sheikh Hasina in early August. It shows that repairing of the short-circuit has begun; and India’s frequently churlish, presumptuous behaviour that has been the practice of the neighbourhood since at least 2015, might, even if expediently, be abating.
There’s been a flurry of Indian diplomatic activity in the region, triggered primarily by the meltdown in Bangladesh, and realization that the absence of India’s autocracy-enabled ally in Sheikh Hasina and her government was only the apex in a series of foreign policy and practice flubs from Nepal to the Maldives to Myanmar. Alongside hugely misreading the ground in Myanmar and Bangladesh, India’s increasingly overarching regional arrogance has frequently undercut goodwill. It has taken a coalescing of crisis points for the message to now hit home. The bottom line, as this column has often noted: While even a cursory look at the map and all manner of indices and statistics shows the overwhelming geographical and economic heft of India as the fulcrum if not the centrepiece of South Asia, India doesn’t have to be loutishabout it.
And there is an irony here. For several decades, Pakistan and India’s mutual acrimony has effectively stymied the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) which requires unanimity in policy decisions. While Pakistan has looked primarily to China and, to a lesser extent, the US, to trip India up from a security perspective, India’s gambit has been to steadily implement a bypass-Pakistan approach for both regional security and economic outreach.
Alongside stated intentions to boost Pakistan-minus relations, India has for several decades backed regional and sub-regional moves like the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC); and the Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, and Nepal initiative (BBIN). While the latter seeks to boost the movement of goods and services, and people, between these four neighbours of Eastern South Asia, BIMSTEC also draws in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Thailand.
With India’s growing regional muscle and both rhetorical and policy aggression, most of its neighbours have been eyeing India’s goodwill-hunting with distress, disquiet, and, quite often, distaste. And, consequently, China has massively gained in both policy-and-practice and optics. This China-India seesaw in Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and Bangladesh has been particularly troubling for India since 2015. And that brings us to India’s tipping point with Bangladesh in August.
There has been a bit of a bilateral flurry since.
India’s foreign minister S Jaishankar visited the Maldives over August 9-11. The visit clawed back goodwill, with India underwriting crucial Maldivian debt in the danger of default, and winning public plaudits from that archipelagic nation’s president, Mohamed Muizzu, who had leveraged anti-India sentiments to win presidential elections in 2023; his party also won parliamentary elections in a landslide in April this year. Now Muizzu has dialled down anti-India rhetoric. He is in India on a state visit, searching for goodwill alongside a surge in Indian tourists and secure sources of food and healthcare.
India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri, who was appointed to the job in mid-July after a stint as deputy national security advisor, visited Nepal in August.
Jaishankar also made a quick trip to Colombo last week. Jaishankar was the first top official of any country to visit Sri Lanka after landmark elections rejected established political families and dynasts to hand the country’s presidency to the left-leaning Anura Kumara Dissanayake in late September. Besides Dissanayake, Jaishankar met the country’s top leadership and, significantly, both the immediate-past president and opposition leaders.
Call it the Bangladesh Effect: India has evidently learned a harsh lesson after ignoring nearly everything and everyone outside the Hasina and Awami League echo chamber in its all-in strategy that backfired -- and has taken India down an optics chute where the sun shines weakly.
Indeed, the lesson has now extended to Myanmar as well. After a disaster all-in play with the Tatmadaw -- the army -- and military junta especially in the past decade, to the near-total exclusion of other power centres in that fractious country, India is now reaching out. There is talk of the foreign ministry-funded think-tank, Indian Council for World Affairs, to soon host several representatives of rebel enterprises -- or ethnic armed groups, as they are referred in Myanmar’s context. At any rate, “non-junta” folk that will also include members of the opposition, the in-exile National Unity Government.
This will help shore up a post-conflict future as even the Tatmadaw-junta have late last month floated a trial ceasefire balloon to draw its near-overwhelming foes across Myanmar to talk détente. At the very least, it will be insurance for India’s geo-economic interests in coastal Rakhine State and neighbouring Chin State -- with which India shares a border as with the Sagaing Division immediately to the north of Chin. India will have taken a long overdue leaf from China’s playbook in Myanmar: That practical and wilier master of outreach and optics has, for decades, spoken to every regime and ethnic armed group to protect Chinese interests, from metals and hydrocarbon pipelines to everything in between.
This brings us back to the not-insignificant signing ceremony in Kathmandu.
India has done absolutely the right thing by following through with the three-way agreement to tranship power from Nepal to Bangladesh -- which has demonstrated that policy and national interest extends beyond the pivot of a single failsafe mechanism -- instead of trying to trip it up to score silly points with neighbours as had become the go-to game.
How South Asian “bilaterals” and “multilaterals” evolve will depend on how the key fulcrum, India, behaves on a range of issues from walking the talk of BBIN and river water sharing, to equitable border management and being there for its neighbours in their times of need -- always. If India can get its act together, it is inevitable that South Asia -- with or without Pakistan -- will, too.
Sudeep Chakravarti works in the policy-and-practice space in South Asia and the Indian Ocean Region.
