Reset, Now

India needs to adopt a magnanimous policy towards Bangladesh

Sudeep Chakravarti

Let us not mince words about ongoing realities of India-Bangladesh relations.

There is little chance of a reset so long as the Muhammad Yunus-led interim government remains in power.

There is little chance of a significant reset so long as India offers deposed Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina and her cohort sanctuary in India; and, perhaps more damagingly, offers them

space for machinations and polemic against a post-Hasina Bangladesh.

There is little chance that India will, in the near-term, manage the steady enhancement of Chinese and—over the past year—Pakistani influence in Bangladesh.

The next big flashpoint, rhetorical as well as real, could be the imminent elections in Bangladesh, expected in February 2026, to account for Ramadan. Sheikh Hasina’s sheltering by India will become election fodder.

This will quickly be followed by general elections to the state assemblies of West Bengal and Assam, due in March-April 2026. Communalist and ultra-nationalist rhetoric are already peaking in the attempt to win West Bengal and retain Assam. Bangladesh—and the attendant allegation of illegal migration—is already election fodder.

Is a makeover possible? Incredibly, yes.

It would be necessary from India’s perspective that India’s over-reaching policy hawks dial back their vision and presumption about Bangladesh. And it begins with the acceptance that a post-Hasina Bangladesh means a Bangladesh minus Hasina. The dynamic has changed. Bangladesh is moving on. Certainly China, the United States, and Pakistan can see it.

Equally, Bangladesh’s newly resurgent India baiters ought to realise the 4,096-km border between the two countries isn’t about to change yet. Bangladesh is encircled by India. With the naval pincer from Vishakhapatnam on India’s east coast to the steadily ramped up tri-service command out of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands that sits atop the Strait of Malacca, Bangladesh faces a strategic barrier in the Bay of Bengal too.

What appears to be a stalemate can become a reset if both countries jettison a bonhomie built on unsustainable self-preservation. And for now, it begins—and ends—with Hasina. Here’s a compacted trajectory of recent history.

Soon after she took office as prime minister for the second time in 2008, Hasina quickly displayed an outreach to India by, among other things, handing over several key Northeast Indian rebels who had found sanctuary in Bangladesh, to India. That bilateral bonhomie transferred from the UPA-led administration to the NDA-led one in 2014.

Indeed, it deepened, with a major land-swap agreement signed, more transshipment facilities opened to India to ship goods from eastern India to northeastern India via Bangladesh, to offset the longer time taken for transit through the slim and strategically risky Chicken’s Neck corridor near Siliguri. Road, railway and waterway facilities were improved with Indian funds. Bangladesh benefited too. All upgraded facilities and assets created were now Bangladesh’s. Bangladeshi importers, exporters, and citizens use and will continue to use that infrastructure for their own benefit. Call it India’s Cummerbund and Road Initiative!

Bilateral trade boomed, peaking at about USD14 billion in 2023, nearly USD12 billion in India’s favour. India benefited from medical tourism and regular tourism from Bangladesh. In 2023, with 1.6 million visas issued by the Indian High Commission in Dhaka and consular services in several smaller cities and towns, Bangladeshis replaced the UK as India’s second largest group of visitors after the US.

As we know, this bonhomie crashed in mid-2024. Even with undeniable socio-economic progress under Hasina, there was a parallel rise in acute autocracy, massive corruption and crony capitalism, and increasing inequity. While Hasina’s successive re-elections were increasingly aided by a hijacked state machinery and obtuseness by the opposition to not contest elections, by the time parliamentary elections of 2018 and 2024 came around, for most Bangladeshis, Hasina continued because it benefited India.

It was unsustainable. In the Awami League structure there was nobody after Hasina who could take over the reigns were she to lose an election, be deposed, or as must happen to us all, pass on. India treated Hasina as a perpetual machine. For all the indignant harrumphing from India’s diplomatic and security establishments after Hasina’s ouster and her flight to India, that was beyond India being red-faced. It was plain silly.

It became clear during the political upheaval in July-August 2024, that the League’s political opponents, including extremist groups, had begun to shrewdly piggyback on legitimate students’ protests. This violent second stage was immaculately prepped and timed, and fronted by legions of the poor, the unemployed, and the extreme.

A firestorm of anti-state violence erupted across Dhaka and in several other places in Bangladesh. Rioters destroyed public property and killed ruling party workers, even police. Curfew and shoot-at-sight orders were imposed at midnight on July 19. The army came to the streets.

A week later, I dined at the Dhaka residence of a major businessman along with a newspaper editor. The army being deployed was interpreted to me as an indication that India had Sheikh Hasina’s back—even though she and her regime already had copious quantities of blood on their hands, as has been diligently recorded at the time, and subsequently proved by human rights watchdogs and media investigations. At dinner there was talk of ‘enduring regimes’; the chances of Sheikh Hasina’s sister Rehana stepping in, supported by her technocrat son and a daughter who was an MP in United Kingdom. Hasina’s two children—her daughter had earned a position as regional director at WHO in New Delhi with India’s brazen diplomatic heft—were written off.

By 5 August 2024, Sheikh Hasina was out. In January 2025, the domino effect of formal corruption allegations by Bangladesh’s interim government had nixed her niece Tulip Siddiq’s UK cabinet position. In mid-July this year, WHO sent Hasina’s daughter Saima Wazed on indefinite leave as it investigated corruption charges formally levelled against the family.

In the past year, the tourism pipeline has crashed. Trade has lessened. Over the summer, India has yanked some third-country transshipment facilities for Bangladeshi goods, blocked entry of some, and closed convenient entry points for several categories of goods.

The entire border is now politically radioactive, with India indulging in what is called ‘push-in’—dumping those it catches crossing the border from Bangladesh as well as those it claims are Bangladeshi with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement)-like drives in several Indian cities, into the no-man’s land between bilateral fences. This radical option is now extended to Rohingya refugees too, some of whom have accused India of casting them adrift in the high seas off the coast of Myanmar.

India is evidently reacting to slights it perceives, from the inglorious ouster of an ally with whom its presumptuous foreign and security policies were tied, to diplomatic snafus committed by the head of the interim government, Muhammad Yunus.

During an official visit to China in March, among other things Yunus sold Bangladesh to Chinese officials and businesses as being China’s commercial launch pad for a ‘landlocked’ northeastern India. With India already concerned about an offer by China to develop the Teesta River basin in Bangladesh uncomfortably close to the Siliguri Corridor, this proved to be too much. Even the Bangladesh government walking back that statement didn’t help.

But if India thinks that turning the screws on Bangladesh will endear it to either the interim government that still has several months to run; or to a new government next year; or to pressure Bangladesh to lessen its dependence on China; or dilute its growing relationship with Pakistan, it is chasing Fool’s Gold. The way back is with more outreach, not less.

The simple truth is that both the political equation and public mood in Bangladesh have undergone seismic shifts. India and any other country need to recognise that. To repeat: China has, Pakistan has. Russia, the US, Japan, South Korea, and the European Union have, among most of the rest of the world. So should India.

At this point the best available approach for India is to dial back its disinformationazi dog-whistlers and work at détente. Demonstrably. India paid a huge price in goodwill and diplomatic loss by blockading Nepal for several months in 2015, not long after a horrific earthquake there, all because the government wished to score political brownie points at home. Will it sacrifice more goodwill with Bangladesh by employing political trolling against that country by attempting to win in West Bengal and Assam? The short answer is, ‘yes.’ More fool India.

There’s another significant way in, besides restoring and productively enhancing trade protocols—especially with the chaos of US-imposed tariffs. Indeed, if India can scuttle across to China for expedient discussions in the wake of the US upset, surely it can undertake the much shorter trek to Bangladesh?

The thirty-year bilateral treaty for sharing waters of the Ganga is due for renewal in 2026. This is hugely important for Bangladesh. An equitable sharing of waters by factoring in climatic and hydrological changes since 1996 will greatly boost India’s image in Bangladesh. An agreement on the Teesta River and cooperation in flood control for rivers that flow from northeastern India into eastern Bangladesh will also help. Hugely.

India needs to recognise that Bangladesh—or any other country in South Asia for that matter—is done with even a hint of unilateralism.

(The writer has tracked South Asia for three decades, first as a journalist and then an independent analyst. He was in Dhaka during the political upheaval in July-August 2024 that led to the ouster of Sheikh Hasina and her government. His column, ‘Compass,’ will focus on South Asian affairs)