Hasina lies is the past, India needs to do business with those who count in the future

Sudeep Chakravarti

In a column in FORCE this past January, this writer described Tarique Rahman as ‘a shoo-in as a future prime minister’ of Bangladesh.

And so it has come to pass.

Rahman, at the head of the revived Bangladesh Nationalist Party juggernaut won by a landslide in parliamentary elections held on February 12 and was sworn in as premier five days later. The BNP holds a two-thirds majority in the Jatiya Sangsad with its 209 seats in an elected assembly of 300—212 with allies. As significantly, the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, former political allies of BNP, clocked a remarkable 68 seats on its own, signalling an Islamist wash over Bangladesh with nearly a third of the vote share, and slim loss margins in several seats.

In the absence of the ousted kleptocracy of the Awami League, banned from contesting these elections—as much by judicial authority as public mood, after a horrific and deadly administrative meltdown in mid-2024 that was a decade and more in the making—this is a reboot.

This is also a chance to reboot the dysfunctional India-Bangladesh relationship.

India, like Bangladesh, must urgently jettison hoary practices and kindergarten assumptions. This bilateral relationship is unarguably among the most significant in the region in terms of a strategic and security outlook, trade and connectivity—and a future that holds either shared prosperity or a shared poverty of ideas and attitudes.

Let us be direct. India’s border with Bangladesh threads 4,096 km across land and rivers across West Bengal—which shares more than half the border—Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura—that has Bangladesh to its north, west and south—and Mizoram. This fact, and Bangladesh’s population heft of 170 million-plus and growing, means that a socio-economic or political implosion in Bangladesh can severely jolt India’s eastern arc. 

In a worst-case scenario—which I first mapped in a position paper for a think-tank way back in 2009 and presented it to a group of foreign policy practitioners, technocrats, and select CEOs at a retreat at Infosys’s Mysuru campus—such dislocation can take easter