In the election, the Awami League and its leader, Sheikh Hasina, swept back into power after the biggest opposition party – the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP)– boycotted the vote following a crackdown in which hundreds of its members were arrested. Hasina’s Awami League government enjoys substantial support from the Indian regime. This was evident when India, which assumed the G20 presidency for 2023, invited Bangladesh to the summit. This was the first time Bangladesh received a G20 invite and was the only Southasian country included. In the run-up to the election, New Delhi backed Hasina’s government by opposing international criticism of its tactics and by lobbying for continuity of government in Bangladesh with the United States for security and economic reasons. The Indian prime minister Narendra Modi also offered enthusiastic congratulations to Hasina after her re-election.
Only months earlier, Mohamed Muizzu had won a presidential election in the Maldives to become the country’s new head of state after campaigning on a largely nationalist and anti-India platform. Bhattacharya’s appeal to boycott Indian products has grown into an India Out campaign similar to the one in the Maldives, and now the BNP wants in.
The BNP was initially on the fence about the campaign. However, in a show of solidarity in late March, the senior BNP leader Ruhul Kabir Rizvi threw his Indian-made shawl to the ground at a press conference. In response, the Awami League said that “the people” will boycott those who boycott India. Taking a jab at her opponents, Hasina has challenged leaders of the BNP to burn their wives’ Indian saris if they are true to their claimed cause. All in all, the campaign’s success so far has been largely rhetorical. In practice, many Bangladeshis are still buying Indian products.
The BNP has struggled in recent times to find a cause that can rouse its rank and file against the ruling party. Bangladesh’s opposition has tired in its struggle against the Awami League, not least due to massive persecution through prosecution. One of the BNP’s key themes is nationalism, and in an atmosphere of massive anti-India sentiment in Bangladesh, the party’s obvious play was to support the India Out campaign. Support for the boycott of Indian products may bolster its public support and mobilise people against a regime the BNP can easily characterise as pro-India.
The BNP’s ideology has long been that of conservative populism, with ties to Islamism. Meanwhile, Hasina has captured much of the far-right electorate earlier loyal to the BNP through her appeasement of Islamic conservatives. Her government has given land grants to the Hefazat-e-Islam, a group of radical Islamists, recognising the degree issued by its network of Qawmi madrassas as equal to a master’s degree in Bangladesh’s general higher education scheme. Such moves have solidified Hasina and the Awami League’s position in the ever-broadening centre of the political spectrum. An anti-India stance could be the ideological boost that the BNP needs to reorient itself against the ruling party.
The BNP has used anti-India sentiment before to maintain its popularity with the Bangladeshi people. In 1978, the BNP’s founder, Ziaur Rahman, attempted to move out of India’s orbit and establish diplomatic relations with Pakistan, from which Bangladesh won independence in 1971. In the 1990s, under the leadership of Khaleda Zia, the BNP characterised the Bangladesh-India Friendship Treaty of 1972 as a “treaty of slavery”. It threatened to cancel this treaty as well as the 1996 Ganges water sharing treaty between the two countries if it came back to power.
Given this history, the BNP can be characterised as traditionally anti-India. However, it has faltered in its commitment to an anti-India strategy several times, giving way to rising dissatisfaction among its core supporters. The BNP has tried to be friendly with India as a means to secure a way back into a position of power in Bangladesh. The party has been out of power for 15 years now, going back to Hasina’s victory in Bangladesh’s 2008 election. Before the 2018 election, top BNP leaders went to India and, according to some news reports, met leaders of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the hardline Hindutva parent organisation of India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). BNP leaders also tried to meet Ram Madhav, a top RSS and BJP executive, in Bangkok, but the meeting did not take place. Ultimately, the BJP government chose to side with the Awami League, just as it did in the recent election.
The BNP has seemed inconsistent at times in its commitment to its core ideology of nationalism. The India Out campaign emerging from the online sphere has given it an opportunity to renew its commitment to this part of its identity. However, the party still seems to be second-guessing its stance. While Rizvi has expressed solidarity with the movement, other leaders have sought to distance themselves from it.
To add to its struggles, the BNP has been suffering a long crisis of leadership. While its chairperson, Khaleda Zia, languishes under house arrest while serving a 17-year sentence for corruption while in office, its acting chairman, Zia’s son Tarique Rahman, is in exile in the United Kingdom. What remains of the party’s core leadership in Bangladesh often seems divided. Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, the party’s secretary general, is mostly out of the frontline due to health concerns. Rizvi, the BNP’s senior joint secretary general, has stepped up as the face of the party, and his solidarity with India Out has been seen as the BNP’s stamp of approval for the movement. However, other leaders like Gayeshwar Chandra Roy have said that this is not the party’s position.
While many Indian and international media outlets have called the India Out campaign futile given Bangladesh’s interdependence with India in terms of geopolitics, economy and security, ground realities in Bangladesh often bely conclusions from afar. One apparent truth in Bangladesh is that people are fed up with the ruling regime, especially due to rising unemployment and cost of living, and they need someone to blame. India serves as the perfect scapegoat, not only for the right-of-centre nationalist audience but also for groups on the left of the Awami League and its allies.
Indian influence over Bangladesh’s politics, especially with its unabashed support for the increasingly autocratic Awami League, is one factor here. Another is the role of Indian forces in killings along the India-Bangladesh border, with a yearly average of some 30 deaths and India’s manipulation of rivers by withholding waters upstream of Bangladesh. Citizens from a wide cross-section of political ideologies are united in their dislike of India. The only real friends that India has in Bangladesh are the ruling regime and its cronies.
Before and after the January election, the BNP has continued to call for a return to the system of having a caretaker government in charge for elections – something Bangladesh adhered to until it was done away with by Hasina’s government in 2011. This BNP demand remains relevant, but the party also needs some new issues to stay in the public discourse. In addition to the political turbulence and the democratic backsliding in the country under the Awami League, Bangladesh is facing serious economic woes – high inflation and unemployment, as well as rising costs of living due to the government’s misrule. The BNP’s apparent hope with the India Out campaign is to depict the Awami League government as a puppet of India, and to portray this as a factor in its misgovernance.
The BNP may only be riding on the coattails of a YouTuber who started the India Out conversation in Bangladesh, but it has a shot at holding the Awami League accountable before the people if it commits to the cause. The party is taking a risky gamble by going against India, the regional hegemon and emerging superpower, but it is a move that just might pay off – and the BNP in its current state has little to lose.