India can weather its Bangladesh headache

One of India’s geopolitical nightmare scenarios became a reality on August 5. On that day, a student-led, military-backed coup succeeded against neighbouring Bangladesh’s India-friendly Awami League government, led by Prime Minister (PM) Sheikh Hasina. Following the transition, Hasina fled to India, where she now resides, and New Delhi has since become increasingly concerned about the policies of the interim government, led by Nobel Prize laureate and octogenarian Mohammad Yunus. While Indian worries are reasonable, the challenges certainly are not insurmountable, especially if New Delhi plays its cards right.

From India’s perspective, the revolution in Bangladesh creates a number of headaches. For a start, throughout most of its history, Bangladesh—a nation New Delhi helped birth in 1971 when it supported the Bengali people against Pakistani genocide there—had been cooperative and loyal to India, and now, that relationship is tense and even adversarial. Hasina’s Awami League government, which had ruled for 15 consecutive years, had been particularly accommodating of New Delhi’s wishes. During this self-proclaimed golden chapter, the two sides cooperated on the full range of issues, including trade and regional connectivity, border security, and counterterrorism.

Today, it is far less certain whether such cordial and productive ties will continue. Dhaka, for example, appears to have changed its border policy. Under Hasina, the Bangladeshi border guard was allegedly told to “turn their backs” on violations, but the interim government’s home minister recently said “that will not happen anymore.” Following the coup, Bangladeshi border troops prevented Indian forces from building a barbed wire fence. To take another example, the Hasina government cracked down on Islamist groups and jailed Islamic terrorist organisations. The interim government is instead welcoming the main Islamist opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), to once again play a role in domestic politics. The government lifted the Awami League’s previous ban Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist group inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood and with close ties to Islamists in Pakistan. It also released Jashimuddin Rahmani, the chief of Ansarullah Bangla Team, which is essentially the al-Qaeda of South Asia, raising fears in New Delhi of renewed terrorist attacks.

All of this leads to another growing Indian concern over the status of Hindus and other ethnic minorities living in Bangladesh, a majority Muslim country. Indian social media has recently been awash in videos allegedly showing physical attacks on Hindus, and some believe a genocide is already underway in the country. Such fears prompted PM Narendra Modi last month to reach out to Yunus, and subsequently President Joe Biden, to call for the protection of Hindus.

Further inflaming the situation is the rising anti-India sentiment throughout Bangladesh. Although the interim government has not officially requested Hasina’s extradition from India to Bangladesh, the request seems imminent. The BNP has already said she should be handed over in “a legal way” because “the people of this country have given the decision for her trial. Let her face that trial.” Many Bangladeshis have also blamed the recent flooding on India. To be sure, Bangladesh is a low-lying and flood-prone nation, especially during the monsoon season. But this has not stopped the dubious narrative from spreading that New Delhi intentionally released flood waters at Dumpur Dam to exact retribution against Dhaka for its unwelcome political transition. Flooding has marooned millions and resulted in mass evacuations and several casualties.

And finally, India is increasingly uneasy about the prospect of China benefitting geostrategically from the new government in Dhaka. Bangladesh is already the second largest importer of Chinese weapons, and if Dhaka now sees New Delhi as a rival, then Beijing could further bolster its security and defense posture there. For decades, China has built strategic ties with Pakistan in part to keep India contained in South Asia, but Beijing never had Bangladesh to enlist on India’s eastern flank as well. Now, it may.

Beijing has sought to develop numerous Bangladeshi ports, including Chittagong, Mongla, and Sonadia ports, to achieve a maritime presence in the Bay of Bengal. Enhanced access to any or all of these ports could substantially add to Beijing’s “string of pearls” strategy to hem in India in the Indian Ocean if linked up with ports like Gwadar (Pakistan), Hambantota (Sri Lanka), and Kyukpyu (Myanmar).

New Delhi also probably worries that its current infrastructure and investment projects could be shifted to Beijing, and Dhaka may give China the right of first refusal on future opportunities. To be sure, when Hasina was in power, she accepted several Chinese bids for development, but India was always her strongly preferred partner. A good example was when Hasina’s government chose India over China to finance the reservoir of the Teesta water project. The trouble for India is that new Chinese projects in Bangladesh could create new vulnerabilities, especially on port access in the Bay of Bengal.

Despite all this, there are good reasons to believe that India will successfully navigate this latest storm. India maintains deep and longstanding historical, cultural, and linguistic links to Bangladesh, and the two nations are neighbours who have shared mostly positive relations prior to the transition in government. Indeed, both Yunus and the BNP have expressed a desire for cordial and productive ties with India. To achieve this end state, Yunus gave a recent interview in which he called upon India to keep Hasina silent and that eventually she would have to be “brough back, or the people of Bangladesh won’t be at peace.” Yunus further argued India has to reject hyping the Islamist takeover threat in Bangladesh. Yunus subsequently said Bangladesh wants to engage with India and other neighbours “on the basis of fairness and equality.” These are things that should be fairly easy for New Delhi to put into practice.

Another thing going for India is that it tends to successfully engage all types of governments and opposition figures, even in environments hostile toward New Delhi. Following the United States (US) military withdrawal in August 2021 from Afghanistan, for example, New Delhi kept its embassy in Kabul open and has quietly negotiated with the Taliban on issues of common interest. India has not, as perhaps would have been the expectation, cut off all interactions with the Islamic group. In its partnership with neighbouring Maldives, which in 2023 elected a China-friendly president in Mohamed Muizzu, India has steered the course of maintaining stability and predictability. For instance, the two nations may ink a new free trade agreement soon. Muizzu led the so-called India-Out campaign to reduce New Delhi’s influence and presence in his country, and yet, India remains the key fixture in Maldivian foreign policy. The same has been true with Dhaka as recent reports indicate that Indian officials are already engaging with Bangladeshi counterparts on a widening range of issues.

Of course, China is also good at engaging governments and opposition leaders of all stripes. It has already shown this intent in Bangladesh. Since the coup, the Chinese ambassador in Dhaka, Yao Wen, has been making the rounds with Yunus and other interim government officials, the BNP, and even the chief of Jamaat-e-Islami. Earlier this month, Beijing pledged duty-free access for all Bangladeshi products per its least developed nation status. Although New Delhi may not have as much influence as Beijing does with the new set of players in Bangladesh, India’s non-aligned policy of engaging all will benefit it, making the key question whether India can win the competition rather than whether it can compete at all.

On development projects in Bangladesh, it is further to India’s advantage that China must focus its Belt & Road Initiative globally, whereas New Delhi’s Neighborhood First policy ensures concentrated efforts in South Asia. This could enable New Delhi to put forward more resources to help Bangladesh relative to Beijing, and to target projects of particular geostrategic concern. That said, China’s economic output continues to dwarf India’s, and so this advantage may be relatively limited. The fact that it exists, however, is significant.

India can also to some extent fall back on Yunus’ good relationship with the US. Through its burgeoning strategic partnership with Washington, New Delhi could privately request that the US serve as a diplomatic bridge between India and Bangladesh, especially if bilateral relations dramatically worsen. A senior US government delegation just visited Dhaka and pledged $202 million in aid to the interim government. And as noted earlier, Modi already raised the issue of protecting Hindus in the country, suggesting that New Delhi believes Washington has some influence over Dhaka’s behaviour. But pervasive Indian conspiracy theories arguing that the US (as well as China and Pakistan) inspired the coup may create frictions that would prevent or hinder such bilateral cooperation.

Although India faces serious challenges in post-revolutionary Bangladesh, New Delhi can feel confident that it has the tools necessary to restore bilateral relations. If Modi meets Yunus on the sidelines of the United Nations proceedings in New York, as has been floated as a possibility, then this would be a good opportunity to refresh bilateral relations. A first step in the right direction would be to proactively, without a request from Dhaka, extradite Hasina to Bangladesh to face justice there. In doing so, India could set the tone that it plans to act in good faith. Another obvious step is to tamp down the public rhetoric that Bangladesh is the new Islamist Pakistan or Afghanistan. New Delhi can still seek the protection of Hindus without such critical and unfounded language. India should also ramp up, not wind down, its assistance to Bangladeshi infrastructure projects in the face of Chinese competition. Most importantly, India should take a deep breath and play the long game by realising that it is still early days in Bangladesh, and while there will likely be new challenges to come, new opportunities will inevitably arise as well.

This article is authored by Derek Grossman, senior defense analyst, RAND and professor, University of Southern California.