The political leadership in India’s northeastern states, across the party divide, have condemned Yunus’s attempt to leverage the geographical isolation of the region in a bid for Chinese investments in Bangladesh. Yunus reportedly told the Chinese leadership, “Seven states of India, eastern part of India, called seven sisters of India, they are a landlocked region of India. They have no way to reach out to the ocean. We are the only guardian of the ocean for all this region.” Going on the same vein, he invited China to invest in the Teesta River Comprehensive Management and Restoration Project (TRCMRP). Such a move will enable China to have a foothold in Bangladesh close to the sensitive “chicken’s neck” connecting the Northeast to the rest of India.

Historically, China has been a haunting spectre in India’s Northeast. Its army overran Indian posts in the 1962 war and entered Assam. It has aided armed insurgencies in Nagaland and Assam and continues to claim Indian territory in Arunachal Pradesh. Yunus’s audacious pitch to Beijing that the region could be an “extension of the Chinese economy”, can at best be dismissed as evidence of illiteracy about the region’s complex history and demographic worries. If it was meant as a ploy to play China against India, the repercussions are ominous for Delhi-Dhaka ties.

Finally, Yunus’s exaggerated claim as “guardian of the ocean” exposes his ignorance of geography. The Bay of Bengal is India’s backyard, and Delhi expects the seven-nation Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (Bimstec) to emerge as a regional economic zone. It is unfortunate that Dhaka, which hosts the Bimstec headquarters, should ignore the regional bloc and lean on Beijing to bolster its crumbling economy. It isn’t just history that mandates that Delhi and Dhaka, despite differences, respect mutual sensitivities and work together for prosperity in the region. It is also geography.