The move by the Interim Government in Bangladesh, led by Dr. Muhammad Yunus, to reject the Indian proposal for bandwidth transit to the Seven Sisters in the northeastern regions of India has marked a paradigm shift in the realm of digital geopolitics in South Asia. This particular move was not an isolated case in the regime’s telecommunication policy. This was not just an issue of cable technology. This was a statement in the realm of digital politics.


It basically seeks to depict a new understanding of the workings of power. In the modern era, the ability to control the routing of information holds the same weight as the ability to dominate water routes, energy routes, or strategic bottlenecks. The Interim Government decided to prioritize financial stability, leverage, and national security over short-term gains in efficiencies, which would largely benefit India, since the very purpose of the new deal was to strengthen the structural dependency of the supply chain on its Indian side.

This step has raised the standing of the government led by Yunus in the eyes of the international and domestic communities. For the first time in a long, long time, Bangladesh looked India in the eye, not as a potential antagonist, but as a confidant. Through its assertion that it wants to deal as an equal, as a country that will not willingly submit but will maintain its dignity, the government touched the hearts of the overwhelming majority of the people, who are tired of unequal partnerships. Dr. Yunus will be remembered in the collective memory of Bangladesh as an unprecedentedly courageous leader one who, with quiet resolve and moral clarity, stood eye to eye with Indian hegemony and affirmed Bangladesh’s dignity, sovereignty, and right to act in its own national interest.

In the twenty-first century, data channels have become as important as shipping lanes and oil pipelines. Whoever controls the channels has the power to influence markets, security systems, and, sometimes, even political discourse. By resisting the use of its geography as a cheap digital bypass for another country’s internal rearrangement, Bangladesh demonstrated the defense of a principle increasingly rare in lopsided associations: geography is not charity—it is power.


The Proposal Revisited: Technical Sophistication, Strategic Imbalance

There was no denying the technical complexity of the plan proposed by Summit Communications and Fiber at Home in collaboration with Bharti Airtel. The northeastern regions of India, including Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura, Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland, and Arunachal Pradesh, have conventionally been plagued by poor and costly telecommunication connectivity because of their geographical roughness, sparseness, and sheer distance from the major cable landing points of the country’s main submarine cables in its west and south coastlines.
This is because the traffic from the international carriers would be routed through Bangladesh. By connecting Bangladesh’s submarine cable landing points in Cox’s Bazar and Kuakata via the Indian terrestrial cable landing point at Akhaura, Indian telecom companies would avoid routing thousands of kilometers of internal traffic. This would reduce latency and improve the reliability of cloud, e-commerce, telemedicine, and GoDown Communications services.
However, infrastructure is never agnostic. That same efficiency that would incentivize the integration of the Indian Northeast would also reposition Bangladesh as a “quiet” infrastructure provider theoretical carriers of the burden but not of the control over the traffic they originally carried. Infrastructure was merely a veneer that camouflaged network inequality.


The Hidden Economics: Why the Deal Was Structurally Revenue-Negative
As the proposed agreement progressed from the engineering design level to the economic analysis level, one of the most important flaws could hardly be overlooked. “The architecture of the agreement did not provide a positive revenue stream for the Bangladeshi government. In the international community, bandwidth transit is a paid, not a free, service. Nations that house transit points levy tolls and manage connectivity through the support of national gateways.”
However, in this particular case, this schema was effectively rendered powerless in the face of said benefits of sovereignty. As stated by Aminul Hakim of the International Internet Gateway Association of Bangladesh (IIGAB), this was designed to ensure that there was no direct transaction through which the government of Bangladesh would profit from bandwidth sales or a transparent fee for transit.

This would, over time, normalize a problematic precedent: Bangladesh’s digital infrastructure would be utilized heavily without paying a sovereignty fee. Establishing these kinds of norms is hard to reverse. A perceived lost opportunity is, in fact, a crisis averted in the long term.


Digital Hegemony as Strategy, Not Side Effect
The proposal should also be understood in the context of India's regional strategy as a whole. Over the last decade, the Indian government has invested heavily in integrating the Seven Sisters and the rest of the country in the realms of roads, railways, energy, and security networks. Connectivity is the final and most important step in the integration process. Having India externalize this information technology integration through Bangladeshi territory without having the reciprocal strategic bargain would fulfill the above-cited goals. India’s internal unity would have strengthened, as its northeastern economy would have optimized itself along routes through Bangladesh. Anyway, India’s dependency would then work against Bangladesh’s political goodwill. Such dependency is two-faced; however, the disadvantaged side faces more adverse effects. Usually, modern hegemony is not exercised explicitly. It is ensconced in norms and defaults that, by stealth, shape what passes for the norm. The Bangladeshi defiance halts this process before it hardens.


The Role of Regulatory Reversal in the Claim of Sovereignty of Institutional Power
The role of the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission in this case requires particular comment. The commission was at first receptive to considering this proposal but later decided not to merely reject it but to rescind its initial support altogether. This was more institutional learning than red tape.
This reversal can be seen as an increasing recognition in Bangladesh’s regulatory circles that telecom infrastructure intersects with national security, cyber resilience, and foreign policy. In today’s world where cyber espionage, data interception, and information warfare are prevalent, an unchecked transit route can put an entire nation at stake for more than just lost income.

 


The Transparency Gap: Why Process is as Important as Outcome
However, the manner in which the proposal emerged is also equally worrying. It did not emerge from a full bilateral framework agreement reached at the political level on how such projects relate to the future ICT plan for Bangladesh. Rather, the initiative passed through the bureaucratic processes as a mere technical facilitation request.
For a nation that, in the course of its history, has had experiences such as unequal treaties and arrangements imposed by other nations, a lack of transparency in procedures is not a trivial issue. Online corridors call for trust, collaboration, and reciprocity.


Opportunity Cost and the "Eastward Vision" that the People of Bangladesh Maintain
Bangladesh thus protected, through the rejection of the proposal, what sometimes receives too little consideration in policy discussions: strategic optionality. Bangladesh’s location puts the country, in effect, at the crossroads of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Southwestern frontier of China.
Bangladesh could, through the right investment and strategic vision, offer internet bandwidth to the east to the Myanmar market, connect to the ASEAN electronic economy, or simply serve as the “honest broker” between different regions. It might therefore have reduced its future options if the Bangladesh government had committed itself prematurely to fulfilling the Indian side's internal connectivity needs. If a regional hub is to be effective, however, it must be impartial, multi-directional, and independent.


Re-evaluating the Hub Argument: Ambition without Control Is Dependency
But the point made by Moinul Haque Siddique, Chairman of Fiber at Home, about a ‘lost chance for a cheap internet hub in Southeast Asia for Bangladesh’ does reflect a real concern. It is true that a ‘huge demand for bandwidth’ is being ‘met by a similar but much costlier requirement for global capacity’ by Bangladesh.
However, hubs are founded with the principle of control, not concession. Global corporations would invest in regions with clearly defined regulatory oversight, the power to dictate prices in the host government's hands, and infrastructure that serves the host nation’s needs first. A hub established through asymmetric terms would not increase sovereignty; it would decrease sovereignty. Bangladesh decided to postpone the construction of its hub without undermining the foundations of a real hub.


A Pattern, Not an Isolated Decision
This is part of an overall shift in Bangladesh’s international calculus. From energy transit agreements to water resource sharing and trade facilitation arrangements, the Bangladesh government is increasingly finding fault with the terms of trade that provide greater benefits to Indian interests and limit the independence of the Bangladesh state. The move regarding bandwidth is therefore in sync with what is shaping up as Bangladesh’s new agenda for international engagement—coordination and balanced, asymmetric arrangements that limit Bangladesh’s independence do not feature in that plan.


Conclusion: Sovereignty Is the Core Infrastructure of the Digital Age
Bangladesh’s denial of India’s bandwidth-transit request is more than a result of a regulatory process; it is a momentous act of political courage. It marks the first time since independence that a Bangladeshi government has taken a strong, decisive stance of ‘no’ to a project that would have furthered Indian dominance over Bangladesh. The Interim Government of Bangladesh, led by Muhammad Yunus, has made a statement about sovereignty and the information age: sovereignty is not symbolic; sovereignty is infrastructure.


This is because this move confirms a fundamental reality of twenty-first-century geopolitics: that data cables no longer merely facilitate data transmission but facilitate transmission through power, ability to wield influence, and reliance. In opting to prioritize sovereignty above ease of access, for instance, this country has exhibited a degree of maturity in decision-making typical of larger states that have seemed either unwilling or incapable within this region.
This was not an anti-India move or an aggressive act. This was a pro-Bangladesh policy based on realism, on dignity, and on national self-respect. In effect, Bangladesh chose control over convenience and asserted its role not as a passive digital corridor but as a mindful, self-directed force within the digital transformation of South Asia.


Most notably, however, this stance has now proven to be a vital precedent in the South Asian subcontinent as a whole. This is because it has proven that smaller nations do not have to be forced into a confrontation in order to overcome the issue of structural asymmetry; that the ideals of cooperation and the principles of subordination do not necessarily have to be intertwined; and that even hegemony, even the kind which has been normalized through the processes of time, has the ability to be overturned by sound governance. In the digital age, Bangladesh has proven that sovereignty is not an ideal that has to be negotiated; that the greatest infrastructure that a country can construct is the infrastructure of the courageous individual who fights towards