Horror sometimes has a curious way of triggering hope through shared experience and emotion. Bangladesh and India might just find they are at that point of inflection. And, as ever, it can take death to prove life matters.
The crash of an Air India aircraft in Ahmedabad this past June brought widespread expression of commiseration from Bangladesh and the region -- even puncturing to an extent the trolling by mindless or mercenary hate-bots which have become a feature since July-August 2024. Besides the death of 241 passengers and crew, the death and injury to several dozen students and faculty at a medical college onto which the aircraft collapsed added to the shock and horror. Bangladesh’s government expressed condolences and offered support.
The crash of a Bangladesh Air Force aircraft onto a school in northern Dhaka on July 21 that killed the pilot, over 30 schoolchildren and teachers, and injured nearly 200 more is a tragedy that also brought humanity to the forefront at a time of everyday inhumanity of politics. The expressions of grief and support in India have broken through the troll-barriers. The government of India was open in its statement of solidarity. Burn-specialists -- doctors and nurses -- were sent by India to undertake what remedial action they can in Bangladesh’s time of need.
This is what good neighbours do.
Nothing will erase the memory of the barbarism around the political dislocation in Bangladesh last year, and India’s transparent complicity by extension. But surely it is time to move on by building on recent humane gestures. At stake are the livelihoods and security of several hundred million in Bangladesh, and the Indian states of West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura, and Mizoram, that border Bangladesh -- and indeed, the livelihoods and security in India’s entire northeastern region and much of eastern South Asia.
It is time to visit some must-dos; and address some key realities and myths that embroider the India-Bangladesh border of 4,096km -- among the world’s longest, and longer than India’s border with Pakistan, and Mexico’s border with United States. Just saying.
Let us for now dispense with obvious aspects like reviving the sort of bilateral visa regime that thrived until mid-2024 and led to the clocking of Bangladeshi visitors and tourists to India as the second biggest group after those from the United States. Such a revival, while a no-brainer, will require demonstrable guarantees for the security of consular and diplomatic staff in both countries. That continues to be a work in progress, to the benefit of commerce, general tourism, medical tourism, and education -- although numerous Bangladeshi travellers are now drawn away to China, Singapore, and Thailand as needs and opportunities abhor a vacuum.
Let us discuss transshipment and third-country exports; connectivity; India’s current obsession with bypassing Bangladesh to nurture and secure Northeast India; and Bangladeshi and Indian trolls continuously threatening the other country with imminent severing of strategic chokepoints.
One. India has indeed invested in grants and aid to boost Bangladesh’s roads, railways, and water networks to enhance transshipment facilities. This is a direct outcome of the bilateral bonhomie of the Hasina years. While the deposed prime minister and her kin roost in exile in India’s national capital region, the fact remains that Bangladesh earned revenue -- and will continue to earn revenue -- from all transhipped freight. Moreover, Bangladeshi trucks, trains, small ships, and barges move Indian freight from eastern India to northeastern India.
While such facilities and freight rates are certainly open to negotiation and quid pro quo -- a part of any transnational arrangement -- the fact also remains that upgraded facilities and assets created are now undeniably Bangladesh’s. Bangladeshi importers, exporters, and citizens use and will continue to use the same infrastructure for their own benefit.
Two. All of Bangladesh’s overland trade with Nepal and Bhutan also uses these now-Bangladeshi assets -- besides, on account of geography and cartography, it uses Indian territory for the transit of goods. Everybody gets to play neighbour-neighbour, trade and connectivity receive a boost, and India earns brownie points for this sub-regional enabling.
Three. Both India and Bangladesh -- and their media trolls and bots -- have played up the choke points that torment the two countries. The post-Hasina months have been rife with speculation and threats of how easily Bangladesh -- with China’s overt and covert support -- can snip the 22-odd kilometer wide Siliguri Corridor, the so-called Chicken’s Neck. China’s proximity to the region and its enhanced cozying up to Bangladesh has made public discussion of the scenario flip from Deaf-Con 5, as it were, to Deaf-Con 3 or thereabouts, mimicking the American threat perception scale from a low of five to a high of one.
This has led to counter-threats by Indian ultranationalists and trolls to point out two of Bangladesh’s territorial vulnerabilities. One is the 80km or so wide “neck” in northern Bangladesh that India could, as Assam’s combative and openly divisive chief minister pointed out in May, snip Rangpur Division from the country. The other is the 30km or so wide “neck” to the south, a line from the tip of India’s Tripura to the Bay of Bengal, the severing of which could take away the entire eastern and southern aspects of Chittagong Division.
The outcome of such eventualities would unleash a sub-regional hell of such intensity that the India-Pakistan rivalry might seem like kindergarten playtime. This would not just be the hell of war, but the hell of demographic displacement that will inevitably redraw all eastern South Asia.
Besides, the often-touted Indian insurance to bypass Bangladesh and use the Kaladan Multimodal Project to link eastern India by sea to Sittwe in Myanmar’s Rakhine province and then travel upriver and by road to link Mizoram, will remain a dud until Myanmar’s raging internal wars die down. Or the Arakan Army and Chin rebels, through whose de facto territorial control this link must pass, do foolproof deals with India; or they are defeated, and Myanmar’s government returns the deal to status quo ante.
The short point: This mutual needling is an avoidable madness. Clearly the path is to step back from the precipice and work on several positives -- and not just the cases of goodwill mangoes that Bangladesh’s interim head of government shipped earlier in July to India’s prime minister, and to the chief ministers of West Bengal and Tripura.
And so, to Four. Despite water volumes and controls being greatly controversial, the flows of the Teesta and the Ganga from India into Bangladesh have not stopped. The bilateral treaty for sharing waters of the Ganga is up for renewal in 2026, and it is imperative that the matter is settled with equity not just for good neighbourliness, but also to temper people-to-people volatility. Equity with the Teesta too, of course, and other bilaterally sensitive rivers.
Five. Although public furore in Bangladesh about overpricing led to the renegotiation of rates, and subsequent negotiations for payment because of Bangladesh’s forex crunch, the Adani Power project of 1600MW in Godda in India’s Jharkhand continues to supply power. This bespoke project, which some Bangladeshi bureaucrats call “our power plant” is not the only example of energy supply. Bangladesh continues to purchase power from other Indian sources.
In an action of diplomatic and regional significance, in October 2024, after Bangladesh-India relations tanked in the wake of Hasina’s flight, 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.
That seasonal experiment, for 40MW of Made in Nepal electricity to be transmitted to Bangladesh for five months, between mid-June and mid-November, feeding off Nepal’s Monsoon-boosted hydroelectricity generation to supply Bangladesh’s growing need for energy, is live.
There are several such ongoing initiatives and links that are all too often buried in rhetoric and vitriol -- not unlike India’s robust trade links with China which persist alongside robust animosity along the India-China border: A talk-talk-fight-fight mode. There are also several major and minor niggles that require sorting out, from great tension along the India-Bangladesh border on account of illegal crossings -- and the equally illegal “pushback” of alleged illegal migrants by India ignoring establish channels of bilateral discussion; to the ban of trading in certain goods by India; or withdrawal of some border transit locations for goods and people.
But all these can be overcome with sincere bilateral intent that needs to place people and peace ahead of paper tigers.
That brings us to the cautionary aspect -- one with great disruptive potential, one that can freeze the thawing of sorts after India and Bangladesh’s recent aviation-led tragedies.
General elections to the state assemblies of West Bengal and Assam are due in March-April 2026. Given the ratcheting up of communalist rhetoric and propaganda to gain West Bengal and retain Assam -- a state where Muslims have even been blamed for food inflation, among other ills -- the border and Bangladesh will inevitably become election fodder.
For its part the interim government of Bangladesh has promised elections in early 2026, to account for Ramadan as well as public impatience. Sheikh Hasina and her sheltering by India -- and the real and imagined sins of India against Bangladesh -- will inevitably become election fodder.
In the past, both countries have passed off such posturing as election drama, insisting that bilateral ties go deeper than expedient misinformation- and disinformation-mongering. Alas, the charged emotions since July-August 2024, still raw, will not need much of a spark.
More reason then, to stop playing silly buggers with the lives and aspirations of hundreds of millions of people of the two neighbours. It is time to cease and desist.
Sudeep Chakravarti works in the policy-and-practice space in South Asia and the Indian Ocean Region.
