On august 5, 2024 protesting and venting their anger against Sheikh Hasina Wazed, the Prime Minister of Bangladesh and her Awami League government’s years of despotism, injustices and brutalities, an angry mob of hundreds and thousands marched towards her official residence, the Gonobhabon demanding her resignation.
Sensing an imminent bloodbath, the military commanders asked Hasina to resign. After some dithering, she resigned and fled to India, ending a decade-and-a-half-long despotic rule, spectacularly unceremoniously!
What triggered Hasina’s fall?
Bangladesh experienced significant economic growth and drastic poverty reduction during Hasina’s decades-long rule. However, she and her government became “increasingly autocratic” that “stifled dissent, favoured the elite and widened inequalities.”
According to Al Jazeera, “Hasina’s stubborn refusal to compromise, overreliance on state violence, and deep patronage ties to a privileged clientele class had long disconnected her from the Bangladeshi public….” which seems to have also blunted her capacity to gauge the “willpower of a nation’s disillusioned youth.”
Hasina who looked rock solid till August 5 but fell like a House of Cards, has driven home several compelling lessons in governance and development.
More importantly, her fall may have also conveyed yet another important message which is that predatory geopolitics has short shelf life and its negative impact on client nations such as Bangladesh as well as the patron is devastating and enduring.
India’s long hand and rise of an autocrat
India’s not-so-invisible long hands were extended to Bangladesh during the 2008 general elections, through late Pranab Mukharjee, the then Foreign Minister of India.
Mr. Mukherjee played a not-so-subtle a role to ensure that Hasina and her party, the Awami League won the election with overwhelming majority and remain a permanent protégé of India.
The 2008 elections were held under the supervision of a military-backed Caretaker government. It is alleged that with India’s backing the elections that facilitated Hasina’s ascent to power, were “free but not fair.”
Awami League did not have to look back since. After assuming power in 2009, Awami League used its two/third majority in the Parliament to scrap the non-political neutral election-time caretaker government (CTG) system that till then had delivered three free and fair elections except that the 2008 election, which as mentioned before was “free but not fair”.
It thus does not come as a big surprise that with the scrapping of the CTG system in 2009, Awami League never “lost” an “election” and remained in power and ruled Bangladesh with combined strategy of selective patronage and brute force, till early August this year when, fed up with her autocratic and corrupt government, a people movement surged and kicked Hasina out.
Modi era and Hasina’s rise as an autocrat
India’s backing of Hasina and its interference in the internal affairs of Bangladesh gained momentum and deepened during the Modi era.
The Modi/Hasina Patron/Client relationship was underpinned by two intertwining strategies – keep Hasina in power and back her unconditionally and in return, extract from her maximum concessions with the result that Hasina with India’s security backing evolved into a dangerous despot and in return, she conceded to and India extracted from Hasina enormous favours that included among other things, plump contract for Modi’s mate Adani, free use of Bangladeshi ports, railway and roads such that by now, Bangladesh looks more like a vassal state of India than an independent sovereign nation.
As years went by, India’s backing of Hasina, more particularly its security backing made her “increasingly authoritarian, arresting and targeting opposition members, and cracking down on dissent and free speech.”
The Modi/Hasina Patron/Client relationship that sustained and fortified an autocrat and in return extracted massive concessions and privileges from Bangladesh irked average Bangladeshis though fear of arbitrary arrest, disappearance and even extrajudicial murder stopped them from protesting openly – discontents seethed below.
End came in August this year when student protest-turned-mass movement toppled Hasina and her decades long autocratic rule.
Indians are in Denial
Sadly, most Indians, fail to see the connection between Hasina’s rise as a despot and her fall because of, and the role the India/Modi/Hasina Patron/Client relationship played in it.
On the other contrary, some Indians believe that external conspiracy is behind Hasina’s fall and argue that “Her [Hasina’s] decision to award the Teesta project to India angered China, …[and] Biden went after her” and others attribute Hasina’s fall to “intelligence failure.”
India’s spy agency, RAW blames “Pakistani spy agency, ISI and its Chinese patron in the Bangladesh unrest that forced Sheikh Hasina to abruptly step down as PM and flee to New Delhi.”
Nothing could be further from truth. While it is true that in recent times, Hasina did annoy both China (apparently for not giving contract of construction of a seaport) and Mr. Biden (according to Hasina, for not giving the Americans a military base in Bangladesh) there is no evidence to suggest that either had anything to do with the mass upsurge that brought the autocrat down.
Therefore, it is fair to say that India’s perspectives on Hasina’s fall that these were works of big power revenge and foreign conspiracy are not only myopic but delusional and more importantly, unhelpful to appreciate the underlying issues objectively and rationally that warrant reflection and mending the ways of doing business with neighbours.
Recently, the Nobel Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus, the current head of the Interim government in Bangladesh has echoed similar concerns at an Indian television interview where he said that one of the main reasons why people in Bangladesh were angry with Hasina and by extension, with her patron, India was because “India focused on Hasina, not on building friendship with the people of Bangladesh!”
Indeed, ignoring the role the Modi/Hasina patron/client mutually self-seeking relationship played in promoting autocracy in and extracted massive concessions from Bangladesh that fomented mass anger and contributed to Hasina’s sudden and spectacular fall is not just unfortunate but a sad case of cognitive dissonance.
India and South Asia
India has pursued similar intrusive and predatory foreign policy in Nepal, Maldives and in Sri Lanka and bred similar anti-India sentiments in these countries and suffered similar rebukes. For example, recently, the civil society members of these countries have released a joint statement saying Delhi’s meddling in the internal affairs of their countries has contributed to “unending political instability in our countries” and bolstered “autocratic regimes.”
Bangladesh is its latest victim of Delhi’s intrusive policy that has encouraged rise of autocracy, destroyed democracy, compromised the country’s sovereignty and schemed Bangladesh of its vital resources.
Departure from ‘Panchsheel’
So, what influences India’s intrusive South Asia policy? For quite some time and especially since Modi’s ascent to power, India’s relations with South Asia have been fraught, mainly because these relationships were seen through the prism of control, security and intelligence and not through the framework of cooperation.
Mr. Modi, an ultra-Hindu nationalist supremacist leader who prefers to see himself and India as the rising big guy in the region relies more on control than cooperation, coercion than accommodation, and enforcement than empathy. Accordingly, he has given his spy agency, RAW precedence over the foreign relations experts in guiding and determining India’s foreign policy, especially in South Asia.
Unfortunately, the spy mindset in foreign policy has taken a narrow view and deviated from India’s original and much-revered Panchsheel principle, propounded by India’s founding fathers that stressed peaceful coexistence as the core tenet of its engagement with its neighbours.
Thanks to Modi’s Supremacist Hindutva ideology that espouses a big brother role, more like a Moholla Mastan (area muscle man) role for India in the region, the Panchsheel has since been thrown in the dustbin and replaced by sly, suspicion, intimidation and machinations with consequences that are inherently counterproductive for the region, and for India.
Reinvent Panchseel/the SAARC Vision
Modi’s spy-run Moholla Mastan (MM) policy has backfired, causing devastating harm to the region and India itself.
The policy has bolstered autocrats and fostered pilferers in the region, fomented mass anger, destabilised societies and harmed the region at political, economic, and institutional levels.
The MM policy has hurt India as well – it has dented India’s stature and depleted India’s trustworthiness among South Asians. Furthermore, induced by India’s MM policy the political and economic destabilisations suffered by the region pose spillover effects on India in the form of business downturn, refugee outflow etc.
The time is ripe for India to give diplomacy a chance. India must shun the practice of coercion and chicanery in its neighbourhood engagements strategy and instead, revert to its founding fathers’ Panchsheel principle and make peaceful coexistence and cooperation its core policy tenets in the region.
Indeed, instead of sabotaging India must help promote a democratically flourishing, politically stable and economically vibrant South Asia, a vision that the now moribund, SAARC once espoused for the region where people could “live in dignity and realize their full potentials.”
Again, in a globalised world, not conflict but cooperation and healthy competition is the way forward.