The ouster of former Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, and the vulgar political chaos that followed, has stunned the world. To a nonplussed India, it has unravelled many a quandary. It has nudged at an epoch of South Asian history where young nations fought to change territorial boundaries forced upon them in cold blood. Indian Army’s valour and sacrifices, which helped create an independent Bangladesh in 1971 and defeat arch-rival Pakistan as its army surrendered en masse—stood battered and bruised.
The very country that Hasina’s father Sheikh Mujibur Rehman had founded with the help of India, desecrated his busts and idols as his daughter fled. Meanwhile, the Bangladesh Army remained nonchalant about the destruction, looting, and attacks on Hindu minorities. It just repeated the tone-deaf iteration of the ‘army has taken over’. Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, though, has been brought back to the country to head the caretaker government. Hasina’s arch-rival, former Bangladesh PM Khaleda Zia, has also been released from house arrest.
Hasina is reportedly in India, struggling to get asylum in either the United Kingdom or the United States. Her fate remains undecided for now. But the longer she stays in India, the more delicate its position in the neighbourhood will become.
In the decades since 2009–when India supported an authoritarian Hasina—Bangladesh’s public sentiment, Opposition, religious groups and army all turned against her. People’s wrath knew no bounds when she won the fourth consecutive term in a national election boycotted by the main Opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).
And when she fell from grace on 5 August, alongside fell India’s lone “friend” in a hostile neighbourhood. It is easy to be genius and argue that India, in hindsight, should have cultivated other power brokers in Bangladeshi politics. But at the heart of this problem is the nation’s repeated insistence to look at specific leaders as “friends” – even if that came at the cost of its own interests.
Power vs influence
There are no permanent friends or enemies in the heartless terrain of international politics. Nations must pursue their interests and decide the syntax of their diplomacy accordingly. However, several analyses of India’s foreign policy evolution since 1947 shows that it has often paid the price of conflating influence and status with power.
New Delhi’s strategic vision of chasing non-alignment to assert its role and leadership during the Cold War turned out to be a noble but impractical decision. Especially for a nation with two unsettled borders on either side of its continental expanse.
Take the country’s humiliating defeat in 1962, at the hands of an alleged bhai (brother) China. Or the 1971 decision to return 90,000 captured Pakistani soldiers without getting a Kashmir solution in lieu. Or the selective support to Hasina without necessary pragmatism that would further India’s interests in the country. All of this shows that New Delhi placed more premium on spreading its influence and status, often misreading power equations that called the shots. Yes, practicality came in bits and pieces, but after scathing blows to India’s interests and never as a preferred option commensurate with its national goals.
India’s call for ‘Neighbourhood First’ is a wonderful strategy to counter China’s asymmetric rise in the region. But it offers little attractiveness to the neighbours themselves, who fall for Beijing’s deep pockets.
That there is no real influence without power remains the writing on the wall.
Insightful commentaries that followed Hasina’s ouster admit that India should have cultivated ties with Opposition leaders such as Khaleda Zia. It should not have kept all its eggs in Hasina’s basket. Some have rightfully argued how the present crisis can be turned into an opportunity for more pragmatic engagement with Bangladesh.
But there is more to deconstruct.
India endorsed Hasina because she presented herself as the sole protector of secular tradition in an Islamic state. She kept Islamists and Jihadists at bay, which suited India. But Hasina also played other sides, even with India’s arch-rivals.
As she fell, New Delhi saw its patronage backfire with “India out” calls. Meanwhile, the other players she engaged with and extracted maximum mileage from did not undergo such angst.
Ironically, only India seems to have paid the price of backing Hasina, not analysing her pragmatic multi-alignment enough.
Also read: Sheikh Hasina was no progressive. She knelt down to Islamic fundamentalists, created a demon
Playing all sides
Positing herself as India’s special friend, Hasina, since 2009, forged close ties with China, the US, the European Union and Russia. Now that she is gone and the radical stream is flowing unabashed – formerly banned outfits with deep links to the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) are tasting freedom again – Pakistan’s radicals must be rejoicing about getting their ‘brothers’ back. Hindu minorities are vulnerable and their likely exodus into the Indian state of West Bengal will further destabilise an already porous border situation.
It was under Hasina’s tenure from 2009-2024 that China emerged as a major player in Bangladesh’s strategic ambitions. India remained suspicious of China’s Beijing-style loans, especially in its backyard. However, Bangladesh signed up for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2016, and started calling itself a strategic member of the BRI community of states. India kept playing ‘friend’ as Xi Jinping visited Dhaka in 2016 and signed lavish contracts together totalling $40 billion.
As China fell short of expectations, Bangladesh showed more pragmatism. The Hasina administration started engaging the US when it pivoted to the Indo-Pacific and offered the country investments to counter the Chinese influence. In 2023, the US emerged as the top destination for Bangladeshi exports, and the biggest source of FDI in Bangladesh, followed by the UK.
However, Dhaka kept playing Beijing as well. Between 2018 and 2019, China made significant investments in Bangladesh’s power sector. Nine new agreements were signed during Hasina’s visit to Beijing in 2019.
Additionally, utilising its strategic location in the Indian Ocean region, Bangladesh was also the only country in India’s neighbourhood to have received a €400 million project in October 2023 under the EU’s ambitious connectivity programme, the Global Gateway.
Bangladesh also diversified the nature of its relationship with China successfully. Between 2019 and 2023, China emerged as the largest weapons supplier. Dhaka got 86 per cent of its defence imports from China, an even higher percentage than Islamabad, which got 82 per cent of its arms imports from Beijing.
Defence trade forms a critical part of the China- Bangladesh bilateral relations. Their growing bonhomie was reflected in joint military exercises in 2024.
The Hasina administration also forged close ties with Russia. A year after she came to power in 2009, Dhaka reached out to Moscow seeking help for developing gas explorations. The next decade saw an unprecedented rise of Russia- Bangladesh cooperation in energy, which continued unabated till the war in Ukraine began in February 2022.
For nuclear energy cooperation, the Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission and the Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom signed a contract in 2015 for the construction of the Rooppur nuclear power plant at $12.65 billion.
Moscow became one of the top exporters of wheat with a record 3 million tonnes of exports to Dhaka in 2024. Russia has also been one of Bangladesh’s topmost trading partners. Toward the end of last year, their bilateral trade turnover had grown by 16.5 per cent.
Russia would be keen to ensure that a new government doesn’t dampen the previous bonhomie. It has already steered clear of any controversy by calling Hasina’s ouster an internal matter. This has paved a neutral way forward for engaging the emerging power brokers. Bangladesh remains important for Russia’s Indo-Pacific ambitions, which are now more aligned with China.
Moscow’s recent focus on engaging key players in South Asia and South East Asia is indicative of a new game in the Indo-Pacific whose outcomes will not remain anodyne in the current global disorder.
In late 2023, Russia conducted joint military exercises with Myanmar for the first time and with Bangladesh for the first time in 50 years. These developments have come alongside growing China-Russia strategic alignment. It has been expressed through joint military drills in the Indo-Pacific region, which the ‘no–limit friends’ are keen to call the Asia Pacific.
The emerging alignments will have implications for India, which should pursue ‘national power’ and not the complacency of ‘status’ in its neighbourhood and beyond.
The writer is an Associate Fellow, Europe and Eurasia Center, at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. She tweets @swasrao. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)