When the deposed Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fled Dhaka by military helicopter on August 5, there was little doubt about where she was heading for. While her fall marking the end of her despotic rule for 15 years was greeted with great jubilation across Bangladesh, it was seen as a pure disaster in the corridors of power in New Delhi. In fact, her landing in India created a diplomatic crisis for the Modi government.
Despite India’s efforts to relocate Hasina outside India, it now appears that Hasina has no other taker in the world. The problem is also getting further compounded as Bangladesh is preparing legal documentations to ask India to extradite her to Bangladesh to stand trial for murder among numerous other serious criminal charges and human rights violations.
India being historically and geographically a close neighbour of Bangladesh sharing 4094 kilometres of land border on three sides of the country always remains an important factor in the making of Bangladesh’s foreign policy. The same is true for India as well. Bangladesh-India ties also go far beyond historical and geographical factors covering areas such as trade, transit, water, border control, security and geo-political issues.
Now Hasina’s ouster is a major diplomatic blow to India. The country under the Hindu supremacist Prime Minister Narendra Modi has effectively staked its relationship with Bangladesh on Hasina’s despotic regime. This was also the foreign policy position of the opposition party Indian National Congress about Bangladesh. Its two leaders Rahul Gandhi and his mother Sonia Gandhi, both members of the Nehru dynasty maintain very close personal ties with Hasina. India’s relationship with Bangladesh essentially became a relationship with one individual and one party.
This bipartisan foreign policy stand of India on Bangladesh was premised on Islamophobic rhetoric that Bangladesh is the hotbed of Islamist terrorists and extremists, and that only Hasina could keep them under control to make India safe. Last week, Rahul Gandhi while speaking at the National Press Club in Washington D.C., expressed his concerns over extremism (read Islamist terrorism and extremism) in Bangladesh like the BJP.
India is a country where 84 per cent of population are Hindu and just 14 per cent are Muslim. Modi and his Hindu supremacist party BJP must have achieved an astonishing feat of success in creating a fear of threat coming from Indian Muslims, i.e., Islamophobia within India. This is deeply worrying not only for the people around the world but also for the vast majority of Indians who are opposed to bigotry.
Islamophobia has been turned into a foreign policy tool deployed against Muslims in Bangladesh. Hasina became a very willing tool of India to implement that policy in Bangladesh and that also helped to maintain her grip on power to perpetuate her despotic rule. The intensity of Islamophobia unleashed in Bangladesh by the Hasina regime backed by India was phenomenal resulting in targeted killings, abductions, forced disappearances and imprisonment of thousands of Bangladeshis.
She was entirely dependent on India in conducting three rigged elections between 2014 and 2024. In this venture both the BJP and the Congress were partners. Her regime survived because of this bipartisan support. Hasina’s close personal ties with both the BJP and the Congress in New Delhi helped Bangladesh become India’s closest and most loyal regional ally or more precisely a client state.
Hasina did not, even her Indian acolyte like “secular liberal” and a defender of democracy around the world Shashi Tharoor of the opposition Congress Party (who is also considered a scholar having a great sense of history) did not realise that exercise of naked power has an expiry date. Hasina and dictators before her like Reza Pahlavi, Marcos, Duvalier, Ceausescu, Mengistu, Pinochet, Ben Ali et al eventually found out they all had a limited shelf life.
During Hasina’s despotic rule she had become India’s closest ally and an effective enforcer of India’s security goals to enable India to fulfil its dream of becoming the regional hegemon. She not only addressed India’s security concerns, but also agreed to allow India rail transit through Bangladesh. But Bangladesh’s concerns on Teesta river water sharing were left unaddressed by India.
About a couple of weeks ago (August 29) in an interview with Karan Thapar for The Wire, historian, author and political commentator Ramachandra Guha said that in recent times Modi government has stopped calling India a Vishwaguru (global leader) and started to refer to the country as a Vishwamitra (global friend).
Guha then said, the people in the neighbouring countries like Bangladesh, Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka viewed India not as Vishwamitra but a big bully. He also said each of these countries has experienced numerous instances of political interventions as well as rhetorical boastfulness by India. India’s relationship with the Hasina regime over the last 15 years is a telling example of that.
Guha points out that India’s big bully attitude towards its neighbours did not start with the Modi government. It stretches back all the way to Jawaharlal Nehru.
India’s geographic size also plays a role in developing a dismissive attitude towards its smaller neighbours. The Business Standard, an Indian English-language daily newspaper recently opined that “With the possible exception of Bhutan, India is relatively friendless in South Asia at the moment. Does it matter? Perhaps not, given our size”.
But now the Hindu supremacist party BJP’s Hindutva offers a much more aggressive vision of India, so much so that Stanford University Anthropologist Thomas Blom Hansen described the Hindu supremacist Modi government as a “Regime of Low Intensity Terror”.
India is now the 5th largest economy in the world accounting for 9.9 per cent of global GDP with a per capita income of US$2,731. India has the ambition to become Vishawaguru indicating to assume a more assertive role in the global arena. It has the 4th largest armed forces in the world with the estimated strength of around 1.4 million active service personnel. It has an arsenal of atomic bombs. Yet nearly 60 per cent of India’s 1.4 billion people live on US$3.10 a day the World Bank’s median poverty line. 21 per cent or more than 250 million people survive on less than US$2.00 a day. Poverty forces millions of Indians to live in sewer-like hovels, eat very meagre amount of food, cope without running water, defecate in the open, and endure a squalor that haunts them from birth to death.
Modi government’s obsession with the anti-Muslim Hindutva policy seems to be detracting the regime’s attention away from where it is due – tackling acute poverty in India.
To understand why India is a big bully despite experiencing acute poverty and squalor, one needs to have a historical perspective. Historically what we now know as India has been a highly politically fragmented geographic entity. India that was partitioned in 1947 was the British colonial India or more precisely India that we see today was a colonial construct, nothing ever preceded like this unified construct, even not under the Mughals. Consequently, India as a successor state to the British colonial India is still grappling with identifying with the mythical India. India’s drive to recreate the mythical India is the root cause of its bullying behaviour towards its smaller neighbours. This also perpetuates India’s poverty, squalor and underdevelopment because it needs a very big armed force to maintain the unity of post-colonial India which remains fractured in many parts of the country and to intimidate its smaller neighbours. Such bullying behaviour is further reflected in the Indian defence minister’s recent implicit threat to take military actions against Bangladesh.
In an interview with PTI discussing the future of India-Bangladesh relations, Bangladesh’s Chief Adviser Professor Mohammad Yunus expressed a desire for good ties with India and said, “The way forward is for India to come out of the narrative. The narrative is that everybody is Islamist, BNP is Islamist, and everyone else is Islamist and will make this country into Afghanistan. And Bangladesh is in safe hands of Sheikh Hasina”. He further added, “India is captivated by this narrative. India needs to come out of this narrative. Bangladesh, like any other nation, is just another neighbour”. Hasina’s close relationship with India was detrimental to Bangladesh’s interest and heavily tilted in favour of India. Such a lopsided relationship is also reflective of the prominence of coercive elements in pursuing India’s hegemonic aspirations in the South Asia region.
Last Sunday (September 8) Professor Yunus at a student-gathering again emphasised the need for good relations with India based on equity and fairness. Now the onus is on India. It is the time for Bangladesh to wait and see how India responds to the suggestions.
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