Although it was clear what sort of government Hasina ran in Bangladesh, nobody imagined that it would collapse so quickly or so dramatically. Like the last Shah of Iran, she had acquired a reputation for stability and development; her allies at home and abroad had invested heavily in her continued rule, chief among them the Government of India. So her fall, hurried flight and subsequent replacement by an interim government of her opponents constitute a major setback for the foreign policy of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government and its backers.
Avinash Paliwal’s voluminous India’s Near East: A New History could not have arrived at a better time. Based on declassified government documents and interviews with key figures in Bangladesh, India and Myanmar, it makes the case that New Delhi has historically taken an active interest in the existence of stable, well-disposed governments on its eastern flank. In practice, this has usually meant a Burmese junta Delhi could do business with and a secular Bangladeshi government hostile to Pakistan. It has also largely kept markets open to Indian trade and ensured central control from New Delhi over the bewildering diversity of India’s Northeastern states with the aim of enhancing India’s security, material prosperity and strategic position in relation to China. The victims of this policy have included the nationalist aspirations of the Nagas, Mizos and Assamese, the health of democracy in Bangladesh, and the welfare of the Rohingya in Myanmar.
2024 has not been kind to that policy. The collapse of autocratic control has been no less dramatic in Myanmar than in Bangladesh, although it has proceeded over several years now and the junta still holds Yangon and other pockets in a many-fronted war. Today, India’s Near East reads like a testament to failure.
That failure is especially evident in the aftermath of the student-led revolution in Bangladesh. India became associated with Hasina’s repressive government over its 15 years of uninterrupted rule, and resentment of India has erupted in Bangladesh on the streets, on social media, and in the offices of the interim government. The head of the interim government, the Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, has called India’s support for Hasina “hurtful” and demanded that she be extradited to Bangladesh from Delhi. His government has begun to object in the strongest terms to killings of Bangladeshis by Indian border forces, a common occurrence which until now received little official notice. Indian and Bangladeshi military officials have exchanged combative statements. In August, unusually bad flooding in eastern Bangladesh saw India widely blamed for its upstream control of Bangladeshi waterways. Meanwhile, the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which, with the demise of Hasina’s Awami League has become the country’s largest traditional party – had a highly symbolic meeting with the Pakistani High Commission in Dhaka.
Yet, although pro- and anti-Indian sentiment have been potent political forces throughout Bangladesh’s history, there are strong rational reasons on both sides for cultivating friendly relations. The two countries share a 4000-kilometre border and deep ties of trade, geography and culture; they must maintain at least a working relationship. This makes it all the more perplexing that India chose to invest solely in Hasina, whose unrestrained capture of the Bangladeshi state ultimately proved unsustainable. Paliwal does not interrogate the assumptions behind that investment; nevertheless, he provides much valuable detail on how it paid dividends, and for whom.
INDIA’S MEANS OF exerting control over neighbouring governments gradually become clear over the book’s 400-odd pages, shining light on why, for instance, Bangladesh agreed to a power-supply deal with the Adani Group on terms that were plainly extortionate. We should bear in mind the Adani Group’s close relationship with Modi and the BJP, India’s power over Bangladesh as the dominant regional power in Southasia, as well as New Delhi’s particular hold over Hasina.
The fallen prime minister’s current stay in Delhi is not her first. She had lived there in exile after 1975, when her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who had led the country to independence before declaring it a single-party state, was murdered by a group of mid-ranking army officers in the first of Bangladesh’s many military coups. This was a foundational trauma for Hasina – and for Bangladeshi politics – causing her to distrust the army for its perceived independence and closeness to Pakistan. By contrast, her party, the Awami League, founded by her father, has always had a close relationship with India.
This faultline became apparent in 2009. Paliwal quotes Touhid Hossain, then the top civil servant in the Bangladesh foreign ministry and now an “advisor” in the new interim government, as saying “India almost intervened militarily” in response to a bloody mutiny by a Bangladeshi military unit, and India threatened to drop paratroopers into Dhaka “within one hour”. Unfortunately, Paliwal does not tell us much about this mutiny: what motivated it, what form it took, or how it was seen in Bangladesh. But whether or not there was a genuine risk of a military takeover, it is clear that the Indian military threat was designed to strengthen Hasina’s position in relation to the military. Just the previous month, Hasina had taken office as prime minister after more than two years of a military-backed caretaker government.
Both Hasina and the government of India long benefited from this relationship. Within months of coming to power for the first time, in 1996, she signed a 30-year water-sharing treaty with India that had eluded her predecessors. Bangladesh is a country of rivers, and they are mostly controlled upstream by India – a historical point of friction in the two countries’ relationship. The 1996 agreement has not been free of controversy: many Bangladeshis consider its terms unfair. And, with relations between New Delhi and the new dispensation in Dhaka already strained, it comes up for renegotiation next year.
In 1997, Hasina signed an historic peace treaty with an indigenous militant group, the Shanti Bahini, that operated out of the Chittagong Hill Tracts – a densely wooded territory in south-east Bangladesh, bordering India and Myanmar. It is home to 12 different ethnicities, some related to each other, but all of them distinct from the plainland Bengalis who make up 98 percent of Bangladesh’s population. With the independence of Bangladesh, the inhabitants of this territory found themselves an anomaly in the new Bengali-nationalist state. Their desire to safeguard their rights, customs and property was rejected by the nation’s new leaders, and their disaffection morphed into a twenty-year guerrilla insurgency. In response, the Bangladeshi army ruled the territory like a colony, in alliance with Bengali Muslim settlers from the plains.
India’s Near East tells us how India nurtured the Shanti Bahini in camps along its porous, jungly border with the Chittagong Hill Tracts, and among the refugees displaced from the area by Bangladeshi military action. Indian support for Dhaka and pressure on the militant group would therefore have been essential in helping the Hasina government conclude hostilities. In time, however, Bangladesh failed to fully implement the 1997 accords, and discontent still simmers in the Hill Tracts, where communal violence continues amid a heavy military presence.
Paliwal does not discuss more recent, and presumably continuing, Indian involvement in the Chittagong Hill Tracts – perhaps because his sources do not mention it. He does, however, mention that separatist movements in India’s Northeast have historically received support from Bangladeshi territory. India has viewed this potential covert interference as a deliberate policy of Bangladeshi governments hostile to India and friendly to Pakistan, with the intention of de-stabilising the Indian northeast and tying up Indian military resources. The staging ground for much of this proxy support was likewise the Chittagong Hill Tracts, and Paliwal argues that one of New Delhi’s main motivations in seeking friendly governments in Dhaka has been to prevent this sort of destabilising intervention.
A stark example of the sort of activity India has sought to prevent came in 2004, when Bangladesh was ruled by Hasina and the Awami League’s bitter rival, the BNP. A shipment of several million dollars’ worth of arms and ammunition was uncovered in Chittagong, Bangladesh’s biggest port, and allegedly linked to a wealthy BNP politician known for his ties to Pakistan. The shipment was thought to be destined for the Hill Tracts, to be smuggled across the border for use by the United Liberation Front of Assam, which was known to be funded by Pakistani intelligence.
India understandably wished to prevent this sort of covert, crossborder interference; Paliwal’s book shows how, in alliance with rational business interests and irrational communal interests, that desire became identified solely with ensuring Hasina’s control over Bangladeshi state and society. The reasoning was that the opposition BNP was anti-India and pro-Pakistani, and would therefore act against Indian interests. Unfortunately, neither Indian policymakers nor Paliwal have asked whether this was in fact a self-fulfilling prophecy: there was no point cultivating Bangladeshi public opinion when Hasina was so staunchly pro-Indian and the Bangladeshi public so disempowered. Moreover, it is not clear whether interference in India’s Northeast was a deliberate policy of the BNP, or simply the result of incompetent governance. That distinction matters if we wish to understand the challenges facing Bangladesh now that Hasina has fallen, and how they might affect the region. An obsession with conspiracies and covert threats can obscure the fact that structural weaknesses in state and society signal a far bigger threat to India’s “Near East” than deliberate state-sanctioned interference.
Paliwal has focused on Indian motivations and interests, with copious original research and material. But the scope of India’s Near East does not extend to those at the receiving end of New Delhi’s chosen policy. As a result, the reader may feel unsure what to make of the conspicuous recent failures of India’s eastern policy. Simply put, we are not allowed to see that the Indian government has missed the wood for the trees; that its narrow pursuit of self-interest was unsustainable all along; that, in the end, the benefits were illusory.
The book’s analysis is sometimes perplexing, as in its treatment of the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. Paliwal argues that “India’s response to the Rohingya crisis demonstrates how communalism shapes geopolitics,” but he fails to do justice to that observation. He interviews Aung Tun Thet, the chief coordinator of the sinister-sounding “Union Enterprise for Humanitarian Assistance, Resettlement and Development in Rakhine”, who tells him “with candour and ‘mischief’” that “if India could get rid of three million citizens in Assam then don’t come and talk to us about citizenship of 700,000.” This is a reference to the notorious National Register of Citizens, a BJP-championed exercise to disenfranchise supposed outsiders in Assam – many of them Muslims. Aung Tun Thet continues, “It gave us a cover, that look if the world’s largest democracy can do it then …”
We never discover more about Aung Tun Thet’s involvement in the Myanmar government’s ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims. It is unclear who considers his attitude “mischievous”, and we are not told what happened to 700,000 Rohingyas: how they have spent the last seven years languishing in a vast complex of refugee camps, rife with criminality, disease and despair, on the sandy south-easternmost tip of Bangladesh. Chiefly, it is unclear how this benefitted India’s foreign or domestic interests; Hasina, on the other hand, got much political mileage out of it, calling herself, without obvious irony, the mother of “humanity” for her government’s treatment of the Rohingya, who are not allowed to leave the camps, receive an education, or work in Bangladesh.
One wishes that Paliwal would extend his observations to their conclusion; the communal factor in India’s “Near East” policy is left largely unexplored. How does the BJP’s anti-Muslim politics feed into India’s stance on the Rohingya, and hence into its relationship with Myanmar? How does the Modi government’s support for Hasina’s Awami League square with the latter’s supposedly secular nationalist ideology? India seems to consider secularism a virtue in Muslims, and in this Hasina may have seemed a logical champion in Bangladesh. The Awami League has been thought to protect Bangladesh’s non-Muslim minorities, primarily Hindus, although through its general thuggery and cynical politics it ended up victimising them too. Conversely, how much does anti-India sentiment in Bangladesh arise from and feed into communal distrust of Hindus? Paliwal notes that Modi’s visit to Dhaka in 2021 caused violent protests targeting Hindus, but he does not probe the relation between Indian foreign policy and communalism abroad.
In the wake of Hasina’s fall, there have been over a thousand attacks on Hindu properties and temples in Bangladesh. Most Bangladeshis have been horrified by this, and the country’s political parties, including the right-wing Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami, have condemned the attacks. Jamaatis even made sure to be seen publicly protecting Hindu temples – signalling either brotherly love or a dislike of anarchy. Some have pointed out that among the Hindus who have faced attacks are individuals linked to the Awami League; they have still condemned the attacks, but have tended to emphasise the victims’ political affiliation over their religious background. Domestically and geopolitically, this is a dangerous game; where minorities are concerned, individual guilt tends to bleed into collective suspicion.
TO UNDERSTAND the undercurrent of violence beneath the beguiling surface of Bangladesh, we must turn to Joseph Allchin’s Many Rivers, One Sea: Bangladesh and the Challenge of Islamist Militancy (2019). The author was a freelance journalist in Dhaka during the formative years of Hasina’s dictatorship in the 2010s. This period coincided with a sometimes violent stirring-up of Bangladeshi society: prominent figures were hanged for crimes committed during the 1971 Liberation War, solidifying Bangladeshi nationalism and Hasina’s hold over the state; two non-competitive elections completed the Awami League’s project of state capture; and secular civil society clashed with the forces of radical Islam.
Allchin takes the title of his book from a prosecutor who averred that legitimate Islamist political parties and Islamist terrorists were like rivers flowing into the same “sea” of hardline Islamism. He goes on to provide a taxonomy of that sea, taking as his starting point the Holey Artisan Bakery attack in 2016, when Islamic State-inspired militants from upper-middle class backgrounds killed over 20 people, including 17 foreigners, in an up-market Dhaka restaurant. Allchin seeks to answer the simple question, “Why?”
The vibrant, heterogeneous landscape of Bangladeshi Islam is dotted with Sufi shrines and Bengali influences. But in a devoutly Muslim country, there have always been people who desire what they see as an Islamic state system. They have tended to coalesce around the conservative, reactionary Jamaat-e-Islami, and the vast network of unregulated madrassas up and down the country. Though the Jamaat is committed to the democratic process, it occupies the same space, physically and ideologically, as more radical Islamist outfits.
It was in these madrassas that an essentially home-grown Islamist militancy arose in Bangladesh around the turn of the century. It was either neglected or manipulated by the BNP government of the day, which resulted in a series of bomb attacks on “secular” targets, some of whom were also opponents of the BNP. Eventually, after this morphed into a series of murders of “atheist” bloggers, the new Awami League government appeased the supporters of these attacks, while condemning the victims for their supposed offences.
However, they were overtaken by global trends in radicalisation. In the 2010s, jihadis no longer emerged just from madrassas; they seemingly materialised from thin air, radicalised online. The 2016 Holey Artisan Bakery attack was claimed by a regional affiliate of the Islamic State. Allchin provides much rich contextual detail on the attackers: they may have been inspired by figures in West Asia, but they were aided by pre-existing Bangladeshi networks of radical Islam, the “sea” of his title. No “mainstream” Bangladeshi Islamist ordered this attack, but the Jamaat figures prominently in the sorts of networks that might also include potential militants. The book makes a strong case for that proposition, but any conclusions as to the relation between mainstream Islamism and Islamist terrorism ideally require more evidence.
After 2016, the spectre of terrorist violence in Bangladesh receded. Hasina’s government was lauded for its restoration of security, but that security came at a cost. In the absence of due process, gross violations were committed in the name of counter-terrorism, eventually leading to US sanctions on some of Bangladesh’s security forces. Unfortunately, the scope of Allchin’s book does not extend to illuminate the aftermath of the 2016 attack; has violent Islamism truly been eliminated, or merely its outward symptoms? He attributes the violence to the global phenomenon of youth discontent, combined with the fertile ground of Bangladeshi political Islam. Hasina put an end to the violence; youth discontent put an end to her; what then of political Islam?
Hasina had tried to defang the Jamaat as a political and social force. She succeeded only in eliminating it politically, and then only temporarily. It is resurgent once more and must be tolerated if Bangladesh is to be a democracy. Moreover, the country’s conservative Islamic hinterland remains largely intact, ensuring a constituency for the Jamaat in future elections. Clearly, 15 years of an India-backed, supposedly secular government could not really suppress Bangladeshi Islamism. However, if the Jamaat’s past popularity is anything to go by, it is unlikely to achieve anything more than a handful of parliamentary seats in free elections. In fact, it has been suggested that the Jamaat owed some of its past popularity to its reputation for moral probity amid an otherwise corrupt political class. If the interim government under Yunus is able to implement effective reforms, support for the Jamaat and other Islamist parties may well diminish in the future. If, however, the vacuum left by Hasina’s dictatorship remains unfilled, we may see more attacks on minorities, Sufi shrines, and “secular” symbols.
Meanwhile, Indian commentators have been worrying loudly about the role of Islamists in the fall of Hasina’s regime; “Islamic revolution” and “military coup” are just two of the labels thrown around baselessly by mainstream voices across the border. This has outraged Bangladeshis, who take a nationalist pride in their assertions of popular sovereignty. They lived through the student uprising, Hasina’s bloody crackdown, and their own unexpected victory. And they understand that popular movements are coalitions of unlikely bedfellows; burqas and saris were seen side by side on the streets in the July protests. But they also know that theirs was a fragile victory, and is liable to be fractured, subverted or subsumed. If it is to be a lasting success, it will need the help of the international community.
Consequently, India’s eastern policy will need a reset. Paliwal’s book is thus both timely and out of date; it takes us inside an Indian worldview which came to see Hasina’s dictatorship as the only acceptable option, just as the revolution in Bangladesh has made a mockery of its underlying assumptions. The government of India will need to be pragmatic enough to realise this. At the same time, Allchin’s book is a reminder of what is at stake; there are many potential threats to Bangladesh’s future stability and Islamist violence is just one. All result from the failure of sustainable governance.
source : himalmag