Khawaza Main Uddin
Before this development, in more than one and a half decades, New Delhi had offered a foreign policy puzzle by relying only on one party, practically a single Zaminder (landlord)-like chief executive officer in Dhaka, for serving Indian interests.
The Indian authorities have then provided shelter to Sheikh Hasina, as Bangladesh’s former prime minister, also the Awami League’s president, who has been widely called a fascist ruler.
Remember, she fled the country to escape public wrath and still found refuge in India, unlike failure of many other dictators to secure asylum in their respective guardian angel’s home.
Thus, New Delhi has given yet another proof for its patronisation of Bangladesh’s longest serving prime minister who managed to cling on to power by holding three rigged elections – in 2014, 2018 and 2024 – until the student-mass uprising in July-August 2024 finally compelled her to quit.
India also seems to not care either if her ‘special care’ for the ousted Bangladeshi dictator would violate diplomatic norms and invite embarrassment for her as Hasina has been accused of mass murder and widespread corruption.
The Indian authorities were rather so stunned by the ‘loss of paradise’ that Delhi is yet to express its willingness to refix the relations with Dhaka in a completely new context. And the reality is: The regime-centric bonhomie in bilateral relations is a thing of the bygone era.
Now assuming that Hasina’s Awami League is unlikely to stage a political comeback in a likely democratic setup soon, Indian diplomats and ‘strategic partners’ are cleverly looking for a new friend in, for example, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), the key contender for power, which was a major victim of Hasina’s tyranny though.
India’s South Block has not yet made any statement signaling that India wants to make a shift in its policy towards Bangladesh and that it seeks long-term friendship with the people of Bangladesh.
Instead, Delhi is showing certain ego, or in other words an angry loser’s ‘big brotherly’ approach to maintaining relations with Dhaka, somewhat similar to how India is perceived in most other South Asian capitals.
The way Delhiwalas deal with countries like Bangladesh suggests that the Indian policymakers are barely focused on the long-term interests of their people and national image.
Otherwise, why does India ignore the sentiment of the Bangladesh people who turned the Hasina administration into a house of cards, to restore a number of fundamental rights including the right to choose their representatives in the manner the Indians elect their leaders?
India’s dominant and insensitive attitude towards the Bangladesh people have been reflected in some of the Indian media’s propaganda highlighting imagined communal attacks inside Bangladesh and anti-Bangladesh sentiment among a section of the Indians.
The recent attacks on Bangladesh missions in India are the outcomes of provocations from and rhetoric used by different quarters inside India.
Within a month of the Bangladesh revolution, Rajnath Singh, India’s defence minister, reportedly asked the Indian Armed Forces to be prepared for war in order to preserve peace. He equated the conflicts between Israel and Hamas and Russia and Ukraine, with the current state of affairs in Bangladesh. His misplacing of the name of ‘Bangladesh’ alongside two war zones showed how the hegemonic Indian minds were shell-shocked by the revolutionary changes in the neighbouring country.
Of late, the chief minister of India’s West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, called for sending the UN peacekeeping forces to Bangladesh to ‘ensure safety of the minorities’.
She, too, is wrong on two counts: one, the minorities are safer in today’s Bangladesh than they were during the Hasina regime, as factchecking (not rumours) confirms; and two, the world’s largest army of peacekeepers is here in Bangladesh, a country which promotes peace at home and abroad. Mamata Banerjee, Trinamool Congress supremo, might have joined the competition with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party to appease their domestic political constituencies, now vocal against Bangladesh.
However, Indian High Commissioner in Dhaka Pranay Verma alone has emphasised friendly relation with Bangladesh, in diplomatically sugarcoated language.
Is there any decision in his capital that India is going to make a policy departure from the past marked by India’s one-sided gains on the negotiation table and Hasina’s unilateral sacrifice for her friend for her ‘greater cause’ of staying in power?
Undeniably, there is a revolutionary bitterness among many Bangladeshis about how repressive acts perpetrated by the fascist Hasina regime, which publicly boasted of its backing from Delhi, led to prolonged national sufferings.
When Hasina constantly denied the Bangladesh people the right to vote by rigging all elections, the Indian leaders had all the praises of her as ‘torchlight of democracy’!
Before the 2014 farcical ballot, India’s external affairs secretary Sujatha Singh had nakedly interfered into the electoral process by asking former dictator Gen Ershad to join Hasina’s one-sided election game.
It is, therefore, incumbent upon India to try to heal the injuries caused to the Bangladesh people by making a clear shift with fresh outlook of pursuit of foreign policy involving two sovereign nations.
As an overture to confidence-building, New Delhi could have appreciated the Bangladesh people’s democratic rights and aspirations, assuring Dhaka today that major pending issues would be resolved through official talks and civic engagements, giving special attention to Bangladesh’s interests.
A few major issues that India should address for pacifying the Bangladeshis’ grievances include extradition of absconding criminals inclusive of Sheikh Hasina, suspicious deals with the Hasina regime hampering Bangladesh’s interest, unilateral withdrawal of waters of common rivers, barriers to Bangladesh’s exports, killing of Bangladeshi nationals along the border, smuggling of illicit items into Bangladesh, cross-border money laundering, intrusion of Indian fishermen into Bangladesh’s territorial waters and exclusive economic zone, denial of land transit to Nepal and Bhutan to and from Bangladesh through Indian territory for trade and tourism and ruining the spirit of SAARC which could have contributed to developing a better off and harmonious South Asian community.
For resetting the relations with Dhaka, Delhi may think of substituting the Awami League with, say, the BNP, if the party is voted to power in the near future. Such assumption won’t bring any meaningful change; neither would such an approach work in improving the Indo-Bangladesh relations in the coming days.
India would indeed need to maintain its relations with a democratic Bangladesh (republic) owned by its people, not the Sheikh family or a few persons among the ruling elites.
The ongoing revolution in Bangladesh has exposed that the younger generations that has brought down the Hasina regime do not have a very fond memory of India in terms of ‘win-win’ deals, other than India’s overt and covert endorsement of Hasina’s repressive acts.
So, it is important that the Indian policymakers go back to the drawing board to reassess, understand and anticipate Bangladesh, especially its demography and prospects, in the next 50 years or so. New Delhi can try to read what has been written between the lines in Bangladesh’s revolution of the new century: A policy change is the call of the hour.
prothom alo