On December 9 in Dhaka, will the foreign secretaries of India and Bangladesh walk back their two countries from the brink of engineered bilateral chaos?
Can they? Yes, in scant hours, done with practical intent and outcomes in a dozen and more areas from trade to connectivity to border relations to demonstrated dignity of purpose, all sealed with a firm handshake, an engaging statement, and a warm photo-op.
Will they? Do their masters wish them to -- all their masters?
That is they grey area. The brinkmanship-is-a-slippery-slope area. It was never fetching, but now it is downright ugly with the risk of chaos spreading from local to regional. The kindest thing that can be said about the ongoing meltdown in India-Bangladesh relations is that it is an undiplomatic stew. And much of the blame for it deservedly lies with India.
There are several strands in the wind.
It is an irony of handsome proportion that India, which frequently uses the trope of an undeniably big hand in the liberation of Bangladesh from Pakistan as a sulky neighbourhood bully might whenever it gets smacked on its foreign policy face, is today quite legitimately concerned about Bangladesh’s unfiltered post-August 5 diplomatic outreach to Pakistan.
It could be -- as a strand of analysis might go – that, with Pakistan, Bangladesh has decided to move past a genocide in 1971, mirroring what several European countries did with Germany, or Vietnam with United States, or the entire sub-continent with United Kingdom. That would be moving a step closer to a knit South Asian future, the publicly-stated manna of Bangladesh’s Chief Advisor to the Interim Government, Muhammad Yunus. And it could be a first step in taking South Asia beyond the disruptive India-Pakistan curse of animus to gradually bringing Pakistan into the regional fold from pariah to participant.
Or it could be, as another analytical strand might postulate, that Bangladesh has gone whole hog hard-line Islamist, damn any state-led spin or thin liberal prophylactic. Here is a proposition: It is not on account of the Bangladeshi Islamists’ new-found love for Pakistan; it is an old love for some, even a faded love, but it is a love. This is manifest in the recent pardoning of conservative politicians to supposedly influencing policies of the interim government to welcoming Pakistan with open arms. When seen through India’s hyper-alert policy lens, it is an invitation to literally, openly, bring anti-India intent and arms; reprising a time between the 1980s and the early 2000s when, to Indian policy hawks, Bangladesh was effectively a part of a troubling pre-1971-like west-to-east pincer. As ever, with an active overlay of China.
This could bring South Asian tensions to a head.
While strands of these futures will become evident in the next year or so, it is an indication of just how far India has come in the game of brinkmanship that it is fast losing its strident pitch of being a messenger of peace and stability in the region. It is today engaged in hardscrabble diplomacy wherever it can, mending a gaping rent in relations with the Maldives; see-sawing with Sri Lanka; in Myanmar scrambling to regain tactical benefit in an Act East Policy shot to hell; and being repeatedly unnerved by Nepal’s gumption to punch way above its weight -- albeit with a patient China in its corner ever ready with the methamphetamine-like Belt and Road Initiative and the demeanour of a Chesire cat. All it needs to do is wait for India to trip. And trip.
India’s regional policy has always come with a certain amount of flex, but its Bangladesh blowout -- or washout -- has been spectacular. This column flagged the warning signs for a year-and-a-half before August 5, for India and the end of HE (or the Hasina Era), and the beginning of AHE (After the Hasina Era). This column has also flagged the reasons for the meltdown, and for long suggested ways out of the bilateral morass (See ‘Subcontinental Drift’ archives in Dhaka Tribune).
But perhaps nothing is as damaging for India’s foreign policy outreach as its domestic politics, which is predicated on massive doses of ethno-religious threat perception and engineered insecurities mated to misinformation and disinformation. It has been the go-to modus for decades and has remained especially amped-up for the past decade. The approach was publicly declared by leading politicians and their establishment advisors as being an acceptable practice of “total politics.” These politicians are in government. Several such advisors were appointed to guide governments in key northeast Indian states.
Much of the blame for it deservedly lies with India
This approach, as is now well-established, has been altogether brought to bear on Bangladesh with full intensity.
Without exception, establishment-fed media and pet media of the government and the ruling hard-right superstructure in India have been flagrantly incorrect or over-the-top, or both, in excoriating Bangladesh. A post-August 5 presentation by the television channel Republic Bangla suggesting all of Chittagong Division was plum for India’s taking as it would solve access issues for northeastern India to reach the Bay of Bengal, is now a record of media infamy. A report in October by the media outlet Swarajya, besides blithely spewing misinformation, suggested that as deterrence, all “infiltrators” from Bangladesh to India, both Bangladeshi and Rohingya, “must be subjected to harsh measures even before they are imprisoned.” Social media fans of an ideology, paid trolls, and bots amplify such messaging, which is almost always used to mask policy-and-practice failures with diversionary tactics. India’s establishment has it down to an art form.
Such vitriol has found new energy with the arrest of a controversial ISKCON monk from Chattogram in Dhaka, and the ensuing violence, which has taken on religious tones. Chinmoy Krishna Das was subsequently described as persona non grata by officials of ISKCON Bangladesh and by some in ISKCON Great Britain but has found support from ISKCON officials in Kolkata. Saving Das and, by extension, saving Hindus in Bangladesh --even Hindus over other minorities -- has found great political and media traction in India.
With a near-constant, overwhelming media barrage, it is natural albeit incorrect for Bangladeshis to view all Indian media as being uniformly unethical, undignified, and slanderous. Indeed, I have watched with consternation a doyen of Bangladeshi media bemoaning the lack of fact-checking by India media (my clarification: Establishment-fed Indian media) when they comment on Bangladesh. His naïvetté is staggering. More so, it is either posturesome, as it were, or displays ignorance of both how India’s domestic politics has shaped up over the past decade, and how utterly suborned many in Indian media are to such politics, trading in professionalism for upholding the Hypocritic Oath. This of course now stands exposed.
Here it must be said that Bangladeshi media and social media monitors, and some hair-trigger emotionalists of the interim government, have shown scant inclination to criticize, let alone officially complain about, venomous and misinformation- and disinformation-led social media handles run by public figures from Bangladesh’s alt-right, and handles that comment on defence-related matters. These routinely spew lies and hate against anything Indian. This columnist has tracked this lie- and hate-mongering sub-species specifically since July 2024, when protests against the Hasina government flamed on.
Dog-whistling in both India and Bangladesh work to the age-old pattern of making domestic political capital at any cost, almost always to the detriment of bilateral relations
Several such accounts -- and even accounts of verified liberals, so to say, an increasingly ghettoized group in Bangladesh -- ran photoshopped and AI-generated images of floods and flood-victims in Bangladesh this past August, squarely blaming the catastrophe on a revenge-minded India miffed at the ejection of Sheikh Hasina.
Several such accounts have, for several months, also run openly hard-line Islamist posts claiming religious supremacy in Bangladesh to the exclusion of other faiths, even urging aggressive manoeuvring along the border with India. The accounts continue to have a free run of provocation and wilful misinformation and prove yet again that hate and churlishness are country-agnostic.
Dog-whistling in both India and Bangladesh -- indeed, across the world -- work to the age-old pattern of making domestic political capital at any cost, almost always to the detriment of bilateral and neighbourhood relations. Only now, this is superimposed by the very real spectre of a tense sub-region jostled by all manner of future-unfriendly scenarios of ethnic turmoil, religious turmoil, vast pressures of climate crisis-infused migration, socio-economic dislocation, dislocation of entire geographies, and, in a worst-case scenario, possibly the altering of boundaries.
If this is the intended outcome in the bloated and belligerent minds of South Asia that are increasingly, and lamentably, legion: then, please, go forth and implode the region, and destroy hundreds of millions of futures to serve the narrowest of interests framed in the cosmology of ethno-religious superiority.
If, on the other hand, the intended outcome is regional and sub-regional equity of a sort, if the outcome of mutually assured destruction is the very deterrence that amplifies mutual benefit to be the way to mutually assured security, the dog-whistling must stop.
It must -- if diplomacy is to have even the chance of a resolute snowflake in hell.
Sudeep Chakravarti works in the policy-and-practice space in South Asia and the Indian Ocean Region.
