In Dhaka, a massive foreign policy challenge for Delhi

The situation in Bangladesh is a massive setback to Indian foreign policy. The dramatic events underline both Sheikh Hasina’s obduracy and authoritarianism in Dhaka, and New Delhi’s unwillingness over the years to help reorient Bangladesh’s politics towards perhaps a more stable, even if less pliable, direction through democratic channels.

First the caveats

It is indeed true that Hasina’s Awami League brought the much-needed political stability to Bangladesh after a period of tumult when she returned to power in 2008 and eventually consolidated. It is true that her rival, Begum Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), led a thoroughly corrupt and violent force that had encouraged Islamists in power and continued to work with it while in opposition.

It is true that Hasina took a public position in favour of deepening ties with India, never an easy proposition in a neighbourhood where nationalism is defined as standing in opposition to India amid the insecurities that come with being dependent on a larger neighbour. It is true that Hasina followed up this public position with specific actions, especially on countering terrorism by cracking down on groups hostile to India and deepening connectivity. And it is true that BNP retained its ultra nationalist character, continued to adopt a publicly hostile position against India, and was allied to external and internal forces that were not friendly to Delhi.

As one top Indian official told this writer last year, “If Hasina fell, it means BNP was back. If BNP was back, it meant Jamaat was back. If Jamaat was back, it meant ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) was back. If ISI was back, it meant China’s security presence was even more intense. And if Dhaka had a government that was internally reliant on Islamists and externally reliant on Pakistan, it meant that our Northeast was even more fragile. It is a no-brainer that we would support Awami.”

But here was the problem

Hasina’s domestic legitimacy in the past decade was slipping, and disillusionment kept growing. She centralised power and stifled both internal channels of feedback and external channels of dissent in civil society and media. She crippled institutions that help mediate disputes that occur in polity. She dealt with any expression of discontent against the regime — an inevitable feature of any democracy, but definitely of South Asian democracies dealing with high levels of deprivation — with repression. Her ability to deliver public goods slipped and economic troubles increased. And, most critically, she and her party appeared to have an unfair advantage in three consecutive elections in which the Awami swept to power.

India knew this. But since it was comfortable with Awami, and didn’t want to risk BNP returning, it legitimised Hasina’s new authoritarian turn, both in the final few years of the Manmohan Singh-led United Progressive Alliance government and then under the Narendra Modi-led government in the last decade. It worked as long as it worked, but there was never a plan for the day after when it would not work — and it couldn’t work forever. New Delhi will now have to scramble to respond to the swift changes in its neighbouring country — one that can extract a massive cost due to their shared porous border.

The larger takeaway here is that democracies produce outcomes that may not be palatable to many — but democratic politics also ensures that discontent is expressed peacefully; citizens get a chance to vent their anxieties through intermediary institutions in civil society; governments change and elites circulate, but within an overall framework constitutional stability.

India was playing a high-risk game when it backed Hasina. It was a strategy that ran the risk of alienating Bangladeshi citizens increasingly furious with Hasina, and by extension, with India that was seen as enabling her. It also ran the risk of alienating other Bangladeshi political forces. And it ran the risk of buying peace in the short term but instability in the long term because the channels for peaceful transfer of power had closed. In a nutshell, it ran the risk of leaving India’s eastern frontier volatile.

There were moments over the last few years when India could have changed course. There were analysts, including scholar Avinash Paliwal in these pages, who regularly warned South Block that Hasina’s run was unsustainable. There were friendly Western officials, including in Washington DC, who alerted India that there was a severe crisis of legitimacy that Hasina confronted, only to be told that they didn’t understand Bangladesh. There were private signals by BNP that it was willing to engage with India and address Delhi’s security concerns, but they were rebuffed by the Indian officialdom that was worried about what Hasina would think if they engaged with her rivals.

One cannot but think of another mass movement in the neighbourhood close to 20 years ago. In Nepal, when an autocratic monarch took power, India displayed remarkably creative diplomacy and peacemaking skills in bringing together democratic parties and Maoists together and supporting a popular agitation to restore democracy in 2005-06. It required thinking out of the box, getting out of one’s comfort zone, sacrificing the quick returns by backing an autocracy over the long term returns of having democracy. In the process, Delhi won the goodwill of Nepali citizens as well as the Nepali political class.

The setback in Bangladesh comes at a particularly difficult time in the neighbourhood. India’s Act East policy is not working in the immediate vicinity for, just next to Bangladesh, Myanmar remains caught in a vortex of military authoritarianism, ethnic insurgencies and democratic resistance. Down south, Maldives recently saw the election of a regime that is explicitly hostile to Indian interests and keen to deepen ties with China. Up north, Nepal has just witnessed the return of a leader who is more amenable to Beijing’s interests than that of Delhi. To the west, despite its own economic troubles, Pakistan appears to be making a renewed bid to cause trouble in Kashmir. And all of this when three are no signs of a resolution to what is now is four-year long border standoff with China.

It is time for Indian diplomacy to get back to working quietly to rebuild bridges and influence in the neighbourhood. And yes, doing so with greater commitment to democratic values, with flexible diplomacy, with an openness to diverse points of view, and with a more calibrated approach that does not back just one leader and one party in another country. Bangladesh 2024 offers a cautionary lesson and throws up a big challenge for India’s neighbourhood policy.