Since the fall of the Sheikh Hasia regime on August 5, which was triggered by a student-led mass uprising, Bangladesh’s relationship with India has been becoming increasingly tense and uncertain.
The deterioration of the relationship between the two neighbours that has reached such a boiling point in recent times that on December 2, an Indian Hindu extremist mob forced their way into the Bangladesh diplomatic post in Agartala, in the Indian state of Tripura, now ruled by Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu supremacist party, the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) and vandalised it.
A Blow to India
Sudden deterioration in the India/Bangladesh relations has a rather sordid backdrop.
India under the Hindu supremacist Prime Minister Narendra Modi effectively staked its relationship with Bangladesh on Hasina’s despotic and kleptocratic regime which was predicated upon India being granted disproportionate concessions by Hasina in exchange of India’s support to ensure her grip on power. Therefore, Hasina’s ouster is a major opportunistic diplomatic blow to India. This was also the foreign policy position of the opposition party Indian National Congress about Bangladesh. Its two leaders Rahul Gandhi and his mother Sonia Gandhi, both members of the Nehru dynasty maintain very close personal ties with Hasina. India’s relationship with Bangladesh essentially became a relationship with one individual and one party., Therefore Hasina’s ouster is major material and diplomatic blow not just to Modi but to India as well.
Hasina’s 15-year rule was marked by complete subservience to India. She was entirely depended on India in conducting three rigged elections between 2014 and 2024. In this venture both the BJP and the Congress were full partners. Her regime survived because of this bipartisan support.
Unequal Exchange Relationships
During her decade and a half despotic rule, Sheikh Hasina had become India’s closest ally and an effective enforcer of India’s security goals to enable India to fulfil its dream of becoming the regional hegemon.
Hasina not only addressed India’s security concerns, but also agreed to allow India rail and road transit (euphemistically called as regional connectivity) through Bangladesh as well as maritime trade through Bangladesh using Chittagong and Mangla ports at free of cost. But Bangladesh’s concerns on Teesta River Water Sharing, one of Bangladesh’s crucial agricultural needs was left unaddressed by India. At the same time Bangladesh did not receive India’s permission to export goods to Bhutan and Nepal through India’s land transit hubs depriving Bangladesh of its export earnings.
Hasina’s close personal ties with both the BJP and the Congress in New Delhi helped Bangladesh become India’s closest and most loyal regional ally. Under Narendra Modi the relationship reached new heights described as “Sonali Adhya” or golden chapter turning Bangladesh into a vassal state of India. Now on August 5, with the overthrow of the Hasina regime by a student led mass uprising has turned that golden chapter into a geopolitical nightmare for India.
Rumours are spreading faster than facts in Bangladesh now. Since Hasina fled the country all political parties and the media in India have joined hands in carrying out virulent anti-Bangladesh propaganda.
The Indian media have started to foment sectarian violence in Bangladesh to destabilise the post-Hasina political climate in the country. Also, agent provocateurs belonging to the Awami League (AL) are also actively helping India in this effort by creating sectarian tension to destabilise the interim government.
Hindus who constitute about 10 percent Bangladesh population are seen to be supporters of the AL. The targeted attacks on AL supporters, especially those who were involved in serious human rights violations and serious corruptions also included Hindu AL activists of the similar kind. So, attacks on Hindu households were driven by political identity, not religious identity.
In fact, like many Muslim senior civil servants and police officers, many Hindus holding similar positions closely associated with the Hasina regime are now absconding or have fled to India like many Muslim and Hindu AL politicians because they were involved in serious human right violations and massive corruptions.
The Hindu Card
It is to be noted that Indian external Affairs minister S. Jaishankar and the opposition leader Rahul Gandhi also added their voice in expressing their concerns on the plight of Hindus in Bangladesh within a couple of day s of the overthrow of Hasina.
Also, Indian Hindu supremacist Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his Indian Independence Day (August 15) address held out an implicit threat to Bangladesh on the issue of safety of Hindus in Bangladesh. This is yet another clear expression of the Indian political establishment’s displeasure with the overthrow of India’s client regime of Hasina and its persistent attempts in destabilising the current interim government in Bangladesh.
The latest trigger to supply more ammunition to keep the “Hindu repression issue” alive by the ruling Hindu supremacist BJP was the arrest of a Hindu priest in Bangladesh two weeks ago in the port city of Chittagong on charges of sedition. This has set off with the active support of the ruling BJP, a frenzy of anti-Bangladesh public demonstrations by Hindu organisations and politicians in India.
It is obvious that the Modi government will continue to use the “Hindu card” to destabilize the interim government in Bangladesh. On December 2, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee also joined the fray and asked the Indian federal government to request the UN to deploy UN peacekeepers to protect Hindus in Bangladesh.
The Secretary of the Ministry of External Affairs of India visited Bangladesh on December 9 and had one-to-one meetings with his Bangladeshi counterpart and discussed the troubled Bangladesh-India relations. However, the Indian Foreign Secretary did not give any indication that India was giving up the use of the “Hindu card”, instead he emphasised it and said that the plight of Hindus in Bangladesh was an issue of concern for India, impacting the bilateral relations with Bangladesh. According to a media report in Bangladesh the Secretary of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs appeared to be in a rather aggressive mood in setting the parameters for interaction with Bangladesh during his meeting with his Bangladeshi counterpart. This was also reflected in his refusal to have a joint press conference at the conclusion of the joint meeting in Dhaka, an expected protocol for a visiting diplomat.
Political Weaponisation of the Bangladesh Hindus
Many argue that for Modi the issue of Hindu rights in Bangladesh is about firing up Hindutva sprit to garner political support for his regime at home. To add to the Modi Government’s narrative on the Hindu plight in Bangladesh is also backed by Hindutva crafted Islamophobic rhetorics which are far more dangerous than the US crafted Islamophobia. India’ s Islamophobic narrative is that the post-Hasina Bangladesh is a hotbed of Islamist terrorists and extremists who are inimical to India and Hindus in Bangladesh and this seems to be the bipartisan position of India.
Hindutva crafted Islamophobia has also been turned into a foreign policy tool deployed against Bangladesh as reflected in India’s depiction of Bangladesh as a hot bed of Islamic terrorists around the world, especially in the West.
For Example, Rahul Gandhi, the opposition leader in India while speaking at the National Press Club in Washington D.C., last September expressed his concerns over extremism (read Islamist terrorism and extremism) in Bangladesh like that of the BJP. Rahul Gandhi used this platform knowing full well that the US corporate media would be receptive to such an Islamophobic narrative, justifying somewhat Hasina government’s horrendous crimes against humanity that often targeted her opponents.
Bangladesh’s Compromised Media
In fact, during Hasina’s 15-year rule, a very large part of Bangladeshi media was completely compromised on core journalistic values and turned into not only a propaganda machine for the Hasina regime but also became a vehicle for spreading Islamophobia. The intensity of Islamophobia unleashed in Bangladesh by the compromised media was phenomenal resulting in targeted killings, abductions, forced disappearances and imprisonment of thousands of Bangladeshi Muslims who opposed the Indian client regime in Bangladesh.
Given India’s own ill treatment of the Muslim minority and other minorities including the Dalits, India is the last country to pontificate on the minority plight in Bangladesh or anywhere else around the world. Professor Thomas Blom Hansen of Stanford University while discussing the rise of anger, brutality and violence in Indian public life described the Modi government as “a regime of low intensity terror”.
Hindutva India’s Hegemonic Obsessions
Hasina’s close relationship with India was detrimental to Bangladesh’s interest and heavily tilted in favour of India which is reflective of India’s hegemonic aspirations in the South Asia region.
Modi’s support for the Hasina regime is seen as to create an Indian puppet regime in Bangladesh to achieve that hegemonic objective. India was also singularly responsible for the destruction of democracy, democratic institutions and civil society in Bangladesh to enable Hasina to stay in power.
India’s coercive foreign policy towards its neighbours did not start with the Modi government. It stretches back all the way to Jawaharlal Nehru. But now the Hindu supremacist party BJP’s Hindutva offers a much more aggressive vision of India than what was envisioned by Nehru in his book The Discovery of India which is described as a combination of history and propaganda by British author and historian Patrick French.
India’s drive to recreate the Mythical India is the root cause of its aggressive behaviour towards its smaller neighbours.
India that was partitioned in 1947 was the British colonial India or more precisely India that we see today was a colonial construct, nothing ever preceded like this unified construct, even not under the Mughals. Consequently, India as a successor state to the British colonial India still grappling itself with identifying itself with the Mythical India. Even Nehru could not distinguish between the two – the reality and the myth.
Unfortunately, maintenance of mythical India comes at a cost. Indeed, the dream of mythical India perpetuates India’s poverty, squalor and underdevelopment because it needs a very big armed force to maintain the unity of post-colonial India which remains fractured in many parts of the country and a big army is also needed to intimidate its smaller neighbours
Historically what we now know as India has been a highly politically fragmented geographic entity and has always been composed of various nationalities like Bengalis, Oriyas, Punjabis etc. The British put various nations and nationalities together in the sub-continent for the first time including territories grabbed from China in the very beginning of 20th century in the dying days of the Ching dynasty like South Tibet now called Arunachal Pradesh (Zangnan is China’s official name for Arunachal Pradesh which China never recognised as an Indian territory). The border dispute between China and India remains unresolved.
While nation is a cultural construct, state is a political construct. A state must accommodate national interests to maintain a cohesive state. For Nehru to insist India is a nation, he was primarily claiming that based on Hindu religious identity as the proxy for Indian national identity given that Hindus constitute the vast majority. Nehru thus transformed a political construct into a cultural construct with implicit political ideology of Hindu majoritarianism and that made him to refuse to recognise the unique national identity of Kashmiris.
Now the fragility of Nehru’s “nation India” is clearly manifested in the ascendency of Hindu supremacists to power because he could not put an everlasting glue to his “nation India” instead creating a “state India”. Now Hindu supremacists are trying very hard to put an alternative glue called “Hindutva” to keep Nehru’s India together but unknowingly they are deconstructing Nehru’s “Indian Nation State” paving the way for what we now call as India has historically always been, a highly politically fragmented geographic entity.
India is a country where 84 percent of population are Hindu and just 14 percent are Muslim. Modi and his Hindu supremacist party BJP must have achieved an astonishing feat of success in creating a fear of threat coming from its minority, the Indian Muslims.
This is deeply worrying not only for the people around the civilized world where preservation of minority rights is sacred duty of all states but to many Indians who are opposed to bigotry.