Bangladesh’s upcoming national election, its first since Sheikh Hasina was dramatically removed from power last year, has set off a reflex in India’s strategic commentariat that will feel familiar to observers of Indian politics.

The word used to describe Bangladesh’s electoral situation is “precious.” Bangladesh must protect this “hard-won” democracy, we are told. If it doesn’t, Bangladesh itself might fall. South Asia could destabilize. The subtext, if we allow ourselves to read between the lines: Bangladesh’s democracy is important not because democracy is valuable in and of itself, but because it conforms to India’s strategic preferences.

We’ve heard this before. What we haven’t before is Bangladesh speaking back.

Has India Stood Up for Democracy in Bangladesh?

Indian political discourse about its eastern neighbor has long privileged predictability over everything else. Dhaka was friendly? That was enough. This held true for the Congress party, and has only calcified under the BJP.

For years, India courted, invested in, and rhetorically supported Sheikh Hasina’s government. Questions about the fairness of Bangladesh’s elections, the closing of civic space, and systematic political disenfranchisement were mere footnotes. Because Bangladesh was quietly allowing Indian security, transit, and connectivity priorities to be met, that was enough for New Delhi.

What India refused to acknowledge was the degree to which resentment against Hasina was building not just against Bangladesh’s increasingly authoritarian order, but against India’s tacit support for it.

Bangladesh’s Ideological Reckoning Isn’t India’s Either

Indian analysts like to talk about Bangladesh in black-and-white terms. You are either with us or against us in 1971, goes the thinking. You are either for “liberation” or “anti-liberation.” You are either secular or Islamist.

Bangladeshis do care about secularism. Bangladesh was founded on a potent mix of linguistic-cultural nationalism that superseded religious identity. But to argue that Bangladesh’s ideological landscape can still be mapped cleanly through the lens of 1971 is disingenuous at best, and ahistorical at worst.

Indeed, the near automatic invocation of Islamist takeover as symbolized by Jamaat-e-Islami’s political ambitions as the specter haunting Bangladesh’s future serves another, rather convenient, purpose. It distracts from the uncomfortable fact that Bangladesh’s democracy was allowed to atrophy under a ruler that India openly and unapologetically supported.

India’s Jamaat Problem Is a Hypocrisy Problem

When Indian commentators wring their hands about Jamaat-e-Islami’s political future, they do so under the guise of preserving regional stability. Let Jamaat come to power, the argument goes, and India’s northeastern states, West Bengal, and beyond will be threatened by Bangladesh’s decision.

This argument is rarely made with any sense of intellectual humility, much less consistency. The Bharatiya Janata Party is today in power in India because of an ideological mother ship, the RSS, that has repeatedly and explicitly renounced secularism as it is understood in constitutional democracies. Its laws targeted minority groups, citizenship, and free speech, which have drawn international opprobrium. But when it comes to Bangladesh, suddenly India’s friends can dictate which ideologies should or should not be tolerated in a democracy.

Bangladeshis see this hypocrisy. And they resent India’s paternalism.

What Indian Journalists Aren’t Asking

There is one question that gets almost no play in Indian analyses of Bangladesh: Why are Bangladeshis so angry?

Angry at the previous government, yes. But also angry at India. And no amount of hashtag-disinformation campaigning will change that reality.

This anger is borne of political experience. Bangladeshis have, for fifteen years, watched their elections become increasingly questioned at home and validated by India. They’ve seen legitimate political dissent labeled criminal by their own leaders and celebrated by Indian powerbrokers as “stability.” They’ve been told by Indian journalists and politicians that Bangladesh somehow doesn’t “fully” qualify as a democracy because it is strategically useful to India as a security buffer.

To hear Indian commentators talk about Bangladesh, you’d think these feelings didn’t exist.

Is India Granting Strategic Autonomy to its Neighbors?

There is a tendency in Indian commentary to speak loftily about “strategic autonomy” when push comes to Washington, London, or Brussels over their criticisms of India. India will not compromise its sovereignty to please external powers, we are told. India will say “no thank you” to any foreign deal that requires us to play by anyone else’s rules.

Except vis-à-vis Bangladesh (and, to a certain extent, Nepal).

India has for too long lectured rather than listened to its neighbors. India has, for too long, behaved toward Bangladesh not as a friend or equal, but as a regional patriarch. OK, the language might not be “we’re going to invade your country if you don’t shape up” like it sometimes has been in the international arena. But the expectation that Bangladesh will hear Indian “quiet advice” and nod politely in agreement has outstayed its welcome.

Bangladesh has changed. South Asia has changed. Alliances of convenience between small countries and big powers are no longer deemed necessary evils; they’re renegotiated on terms that prioritize democratic dignity over geopolitical handholding.

…and What India Can Learn From It

Make no mistake: Bangladesh’s political transition is also a moment of broader global realignment. The institutions, assumptions, and power structures that have governed global politics since the end of World War II are showing serious signs of wear. Younger political generations across South and Southeast Asia are less liberal, yes. But they are also less reflexively loyal to Cold War alliances, transactional in their foreign policy expectations, and intolerant of any nation-state that lectures them on sovereignty.

Bangladesh is part of this trend. Trying to force Bangladesh’s politics into a Cold War-era ideological straitjacket, or understanding it solely through the context of 1971, misses the mark. Bangladesh’s politics is trying to tell us something about the present, not the past.

India, too, needs to listen. Bangladesh’s upcoming election isn’t just a challenge to Bangladeshi democracy. It is a challenge to India’s own political imagination: Can it accept a neighborhood that has become more democratic and more assertive without becoming paternalistic? Can it see that whether Bangladesh builds a “friendly” government or not has little to do with Indian grand strategy and everything to do with Bangladeshi politics?

Improved people-to-people ties between India and Bangladesh won’t come from sermons, ideological gatekeeping, or a cherry-picking of historical memory. They will come when India realizes that Bangladeshi votes and political expression don’t need Indian validation to matter.

India can either rise to this test or cling jealously to an imagined era of Big Brother lecturing an indebted neighbor. It’s a choice India will have to make. But either decision will define India’s relationships across South Asia for years to come.