A star-spangled tail that wagged the Bangladeshi terrier is the speculation du jour in Dhaka, capitals across the region, and anywhere that Bangladesh counts as a factor in trade, territoriality, and benign influence.
But the enduring image for the foreseeable future will remain that of Sheikh Hasina decamping from her Dhaka residence in the early afternoon of August 5, and news that arrived, scant hours later, of the former prime minister of Bangladesh arriving at Hindon Air Force base near Delhi in a Bangladesh Air Force transport.
She was received by India’s National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, the emphatic face of India’s often-heavy hand across South Asia.
It was QED for hyphenation watchers: India had delivered an election for the Awami League as a part of its regional security blueprint, and had now provided a friend and ally a sanctuary.
It’s not that simple.
Let’s leave hyperbole to shrill Indian news anchors and media influencers who have untiringly rained the hellfire of disinformation and a warped understanding of Bangladesh on both unsuspecting and suspecting viewers with the same facility as members of the just-ejected Bangladeshi government and its media lapdogs did. (Alas, while in Bangladesh nobody was fooled, hoodwinking remains an integral tool of Indian misgovernance.)
Let’s also discount the resurgent tendency of several foreign policy talking heads in Bangladesh to ravenously and omnivorously spread-eagle themselves at Dhaka’s embassy row junket-and-funding buffets. These buffets will of course continue, as many scramble to provide signals to -- and receive signals from -- one regional or global influencer or another even as the interim government attempts to spread its curative wings. So, the force-multiplier Fagins, irrespective of whether their banners carry stars or stripes of any kind, will always have their policy foot soldiers outside government -- and certainly in the “interim.”
And let’s look beyond binaries. Because hyphenations, even India-Bangladesh, isn’t a zero-sum game.
There’s no doubt that India has come off the worst in what many are calling Bangladesh’s Monsoon Revolution. Doval receiving Hasina is just the sour icing on a stale cake.
As I have written earlier in this column, India has appalling optics in Bangladesh. There are reasons for it.
Optics were made measurably worse after the tenures of high-visibility, affable, tirelessly networked high commissioners like Harsh Vardhan Shringla, who went on to become India’s foreign secretary, and Vikram Doraiswami, who left in September 2022 as India’s envoy to the UK. (An aside: Shringla remains a go-to troubleshooter for the foreign ministry; Dhaka should soon expect goodwill ambassadors.)
The year Doraiswami left Dhaka was also the year that India greatly stepped up its G2G, or government-to-government, play to the detriment of its P2P, or people-to-people, play.
India has appalling optics in Bangladesh. There are reasons for it
There are numerous examples, but here’s one. A force-multiplier exhibition, so to say, was held in Dhaka in May 2023. The India Foundation, a think-tank transparently close to that country's current establishment, arrived in Dhaka to hold a major regional conference. India’s foreign ministry was the prime sponsor. Bangladesh’s foreign ministry was a major sponsor.
Top officials at India Foundation have deep links with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological core of India's Hindu nationalist ultra-right. A founder and high official of India Foundation is the son of that country’s national security advisor. The conference drew leaders and fixers from India’s resident and overseas “saffron” establishment alongside government officials -- politicians, career diplomats, and technocrats -- in droves.
The intention, as I wrote at the time, was crystal. Continue to establish bulwarks against China; and secure India’s eastern borders by securing Bangladesh against every manner of implosion and explosion in a range from political to demographic. (Bangladesh is among nine countries in the Indian Ocean Region that the Indian establishment has identified as a focus.)
That is not in itself unusual for India, or overly awkward for Bangladesh. A country tends to work with another country irrespective of who is in power, for the purpose of national interest. Bangladesh has done so assiduously and effectively with India, the same as it has with China and a couple of dozen countries across the world crucial for its economic and geo-political wellbeing. Indeed, there have been China-led gatherings in Dhaka and in any other capital of a country in which Beijing retains an abiding interest.
An upswing in Bangladesh-India relations, from people contacts to trade and transshipment, began during the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government from 2004 onwards. It deepened and expanded in the decade since 2014, when the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government took office. But the G2G aspect began to be amped up from 2019, after Prime Minister Narendra Modi was re-elected to run a second-term NDA government.
And its post-2022 handling was arrogant in the extreme. Indian think-tank heads began to breeze in and out of the top offices of Bangladesh. Indian businesses, blessed by India’s establishment, appeared to run monopolies -- from disingenuous pricing scams for raw materials, to finished products. The gathering impression in Bangladesh -- and one lamentably ignored by India’s policy-makers and glossed over by ivory tower government-to-government bonhomie -- was of a creeping Indian zamindari. Mutually respectful cooperation was seen to give way to a relationship of controller-state and client-state.
India did little to dispel this notion. And Bangladesh’s now-deposed leaders fed off that platter for their own survival. This negative image, this P2P trust deficit, took deep root despite a thriving functional relation particularly in trade and transshipment, connectivity, and tourism -- Bangladeshi tourists now count among the top three visiting nationalities to India. India’s hand was perceived in the riotously controversial Bangladesh elections of early 2024 that brought the Awami League and Sheikh Hasina to power for the fourth consecutive term.
When the anti-quota protests flamed on in early July; when Sheikh Hasina made her obtuse “razakar” remark on July 14 that incensed and united students across the country; when agencies of her government subsequently attacked, beat up, maimed, and killed students, passersby, and even children; when her government was seen to manipulate the judiciary, block access to the internet, and engage in the grossest disinformation, the impression of India shielding the leaders of an immensely corrupt, cronyism-led, hubris-laden, absolutist government was only reinforced.
There is now a desperate scramble in India to repair its relationship with Bangladesh
There is now a desperate scramble in India to repair its relationship with Bangladesh -- indeed, repair its relationship with Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Maldives too. But this repairing, this outreach, will need to be handsomely demonstrated.
Besides visible respect and visible lessening of arrogance and reining in the establishment’s dog-whistlers, India will likely need to offer Bangladesh major concessions in trade, offer grants and aid to boost socio-economic programs. Alongside, it needs to dispel fears of connectivity and trans-shipment, ensure equity in the imminent talks to share waters of the Ganga/Padma, fast-track a solution to the vexing issue of the sharing of Teesta River waters, cooperate for flood control and establish equitable riparian mechanisms.
The relationship would benefit from overhauling and easing the visa regime for a great many categories of Bangladeshi citizens, and by removing restrictions of specific points of entry and exit to and from India for overland travel.
And, certainly, India would benefit by ensuring the Border Security Force back off from hair-trigger responses along the vast, 4,096km border the two countries share.
As far as Bangladesh is concerned, it will likely find great benefit in wearing bifocals to prevent short-sightedness and churlish responses to both real and perceived Indian misdemeanours.
As I pointed out at a seminar in Dhaka this past March, at which I was on panel alongside Md Touhid Hossain, Bangladesh’s former foreign secretary and currently, a key advisor to the interim government: While India has indeed pumped in money to boost Bangladesh’s roads, railways and water networks to boost its transshipment facilities, the assets created in the process are now undeniably Bangladesh’s. Bangladesh earns revenue from all transshipped freight. And Bangladeshi importers, exporters and citizens use and will continue to use the same infrastructure for their own benefit.
Ambassador Hossain, an eminently practical and level-headed career diplomat, surely also sees that Bangladesh’s ambitious outreach for an overland trade boost with Nepal and Bhutan, and the country’s plans to import electricity from Nepal and Bhutan, must necessarily use Indian territory for its own transshipment needs. Alongside, several Indian ports and airports now offer Bangladesh easier access to several key regional and global markets.
Equally, those currently in the thrall of impetus from the west in the interim, as it were, as Bangladesh reenergizes itself administratively, judicially, politically, socially, and economically, must surely realize that binaries do not, and cannot, work.
An impelling US, EU, or even Japan, for instance, doesn’t mean an end to Bangladesh’s relationships with India or China or Russia, but a recalibration. India is a part of the Quad along with the US, Australia, and Japan. Would a bilateral niggle then overshadow an Indo-Pacific play that seeks to counter China and Russia?
Or, take another impelling mantra that took shape in the spring of 2023: The push to integrate India and Bangladesh into a productive supply chain. It was transparently encouraged by the US and Japan. It was also a key plank during India’s G20 presidency. Will cumulative and comprehensive transnational, multi-nation economic benefits now take a backseat to rhetoric even as such logic came about precisely because of the impressive growth of Bangladesh’s economy, and the urgency of boosting its manufacturing base and diversifying its exports away from readymade garments? Unlikely.
Bangladesh took Bangladesh for granted and has paid an enormous price. Surely India, China, the US and others of their ilk should be careful of following in those unsalutary footsteps.
It’s a time of renewal. It’s also a time for realism.
Sudeep Chakravarti is Director, Centre for South Asian Studies at University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh.
