December holds great significance for every Bangladeshi. It was on 16 December 1971 that the Mukti Bahini, supported by the Indian Armed Forces, overran Dhaka, leading to Pakistan Army’s surrender at the Ramna Racecourse. Known as ‘Victory Day’, the historic moment is still remembered and celebrated with fanfare. But this year, two elements were notably absent—ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s face, and mentions of India’s help during the Bangladesh Liberation War.
Over 3,000 Indian service personnel laid down their lives for Bangladesh’s independence, and about 12,000 were wounded. The Indian side’s death toll was higher in comparison to the Mukti Bahini, which fought guerrilla battles for the most part.
India didn’t just help with military personnel and medical supplies. Long before Pakistan Air Force launched preemptive airstrikes on Indian airbases in Pathankot and Amritsar, Indira Gandhi travelled to several countries to shore up support for the liberation of Bangladesh.
Fifty-three years on, any debate over the importance of New Delhi’s military intervention in Dhaka is purely academic. But there’s little doubt that, without India, the war would’ve dragged on for months, if not years, and would’ve been much bloodier.
Delhi-Dhaka ties have hit a snag
Just as India’s Bangladeshi counterparts have forgotten to acknowledge its diplomatic and military help in 1971, Indian leaders haven’t named Bangladesh in their statements about the Liberation War. Prime Minister Narendra Modi called the event “India’s historic victory in 1971”, while home minister Amit Shah credited the Indian Army for making “a historic change on the world map” without so much as mentioning the word Bangladesh. The tone, in general, appears to be bipartisan. Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi, in a two-line post on X, remembered “the indomitable courage and supreme sacrifice of all the heroes of the 1971 war” without making a detailed mention of Bangladesh’s birth story.
The portrayal of Bangladesh’s liberation struggle as the 1971 India-Pakistan War hasn’t gone down well with Dhaka. Law adviser Asif Nazrul, who has advocated for the trial of crimes committed against Bangladeshis in 1971, protested Narendra Modi’s post. “India was an ally in this [Bangladesh’s] victory, nothing more,” he wrote strongly.
India-Bangladesh ties have hit an all-time low since the ouster of Sheikh Hasina in a mass upsurge on 5 August this year. The situation is worse than the aftermath of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s assassination in 1975. Despite initial tensions, India had quickly recognised the new government and a semblance of normality had returned swiftly to the India-Bangladesh relationship.
Shortly after Hasina fled Bangladesh, the Indira Gandhi Cultural Centre in Dhaka was looted and torched. Meanwhile in India, Bangladesh’s Assistant High Commission in Agartala was attacked and the Bangladeshi flag burned – an incident the Indian external affairs ministry termed “deeply regrettable”.
To make matters worse, Bangladesh’s Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearance submitted its report last Saturday, allegedly finding prima facie evidence of Sheikh Hasina’s involvement in the system of enforced disappearance in Bangladesh. Most of these people haven’t yet returned to their families.
Nur Khan Liton, a member of the commission and a human rights activist, has claimed that there is a persistent suggestion in law enforcement circles about some Bangladeshi prisoners in Indian jails.
Incidents of high-profile Bangladeshis getting abducted – only to be found in India –aren’t new. Shukhoranjan Bali, a witness in a war crimes trial, was abducted from Bangladesh Supreme Court premises and later resurfaced in an Indian jail. Bali, a Hindu, has alleged that he remained in detention in Dhaka for six weeks before being blindfolded and “handed over” to India’s Border Security Force in December 2012. Three years after the Bali incident, Salahuddin Ahmed, a joint secretary general of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), was picked up by the notorious Rapid Action Battalion from his residence in Dhaka, later found wandering aimlessly in the Indian city of Shillong.
The day of the submission of the commission’s report is politically charged as well. On 14 December every year, Bangladeshis pay tribute to the intellectuals who were abducted and killed by the Pakistan Army in 1971. Carefully orchestrated or not, the release of such a report on Martyred Intellectuals Day, and allegations against India of being involved in enforced disappearances, has touched a raw nerve in Bangladesh.
Also read: There’s a big obstacle to Awami League’s return to Bangladesh politics
India’s false friends
For years, India has turned a blind eye to Sheikh Hasina’s authoritarian governance, even intervening in Bangladesh’s politics on some occasions.
According to BNP’s Khaleda Zia, in the run-up to the 2014 general elections, India sent its then-Foreign Secretary Sujata Singh to convince the BNP to participate in the Bangladesh elections that year. After failing to do so, Singh reportedly went to Hussain Muhammad Ershad, former Bangladesh president and leader of the Jatiya Party. There, she argued that if his party did not participate in the election, fundamentalist parties such as the Jamaat-e-Islami would come to power. The Jamaat has rarely won more than five per cent of votes in elections, and Ershad refused to participate.
He was picked up by members of an intelligence agency soon after, and kept in a military hospital. Jatiya Party later participated in the 2014 polls.
The Jatiya Party, which is widely seen as a pro-India outfit, has been forced to play second fiddle to the Awami League too many times. So much so that it is becoming irrelevant in post-Hasina Bangladesh. What is left in this political vacuum is the BNP, which fought the India-backed Awami League’s brutal authoritarianism for over a decade and a half. Still, New Delhi appears to have found a willing friend in senior BNP leader Amir Khosru Mahmud Chowdhury.
Ten days after Hasina’s fall, Chowdhury told The Washington Post that India has nothing to worry about: “We’ve been in touch with India, trying to tell them, ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket’…We have tried to assuage whatever concerns India has. It would be stupid for both sides to carry the baggage of the past.”
But not everyone in the BNP agrees with Chowdhury. Gen Z Nationalist, a Facebook page that sports BNP founder Gen Zia’s face as its profile picture, posted a song a few days ago, with the caption “Bangladesh stands tall against imperialism and Indian aggression.” But that is just one example. Ruhul Kabir Rizvi, a top BNP leader, recently said that if India carries on with its “aggressive policy on Bangladesh, his party will stake claim to the Nawab of Bengal’s territory—Bengal, Bihar and Odisha.” In another speech, he was seen making xenophobic comments about ordinary Indians —“If you travel from Kolkata to Delhi by train you’ll see that there’s no other place to defecate but open fields.”
Last Wednesday, thousands of BNP activists held a programme called “Long March to Agartala”, protesting the attack on the Bangladeshi diplomatic mission in Tripura.
Rizvi’s tall claims and the long march can be seen as moves meant solely for domestic consumption. But then again, the party has a long history of spewing anti-India rhetoric that, at times, has spiralled out of control. Despite claiming to be a Centrist party, the BNP has long harboured extreme Right-wingers who, once in power, will become uncontrollable.
During the party’s last term in office, leaders of the United Liberation Front of Asom and other Northeast Indian insurgent groups found a haven in Bangladesh. After coming to power in 2009, however, the Sheikh Hasina-led Awami League government extradited to India the leaders of such outfits, ensuring they couldn’t use Bangladeshi territory to carry out their designs. For India, thus, Bangladesh’s political status quo was crucial in keeping its ethnically diverse, politically restive, and insurgency-prone Northeast calm. This explains why New Delhi broke all foreign policy norms to put all its eggs in one basket—the Awami League.
This has turned out to be fatal— the Awami League is widely despised in Bangladesh, and India, as its sponsor, is bearing the brunt. The Jatiya Party has never been taken seriously, and the BNP leadership doesn’t sing in one tune—it never has, and there’s no reason to believe that it ever will.
Also read: Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami can’t go far with anti-India rhetoric. It must address its 1971 role
Rebooting the relationship
The India-Bangladesh relationship needs a major overhaul. India shares the world’s fifth-longest land border with Bangladesh. Therefore, after Beijing and Islamabad, Dhaka should be one of New Delhi’s foreign policy priorities. But the South Block, it seems, is still refusing to think outside the box.
An early election in Bangladesh can bring the BNP back, whose voters might be more anti-Indian than the student leadership that ousted Sheikh Hasina. The demand for a review of all treaties and trade agreements with India can come to the fore once an election is held. To make matters worse, an elected government will find it difficult, if not impossible, to withstand public demand.
India’s best bet lies in a reformed, corruption-free democratic Bangladesh. To do that, it has to keep an eye on Muhammad Yunus’ reform initiatives and increase people-to-people contact. India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party should also put a plug on the xenophobic, and sometimes racist propaganda that some of its leaders have spread to achieve political objectives. Such actions only fuel radicalised fringe groups in Bangladesh.
Sheikh Hasina is going to be a thorn in the flesh of the India-Bangladesh relationship. Her occasional diatribes from India, such as comments about the student uprising, can be set aside if both countries decide to rekindle their relationship as old neighbours willing to help each other in extraordinary times.
New Delhi must not harbour Bangladeshi criminals, and Dhaka should address India’s security concerns vis-à-vis its northeastern states. Both countries share a common history and, in the case of West Bengal, a common language and culture. There’s no reason why a new beginning based on friendship and equality cannot be made soon.
Ahmede Hussain is a Bangladeshi writer and journalist. He is the editor of The New Anthem: The Subcontinent in Its Own Words (Tranquebar Press; Delhi). He has just finished writing his first novel. His X handle is @ahmedehussain. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)
The author treats events post July 2024 as the premise behind all of the opinion pieces that he has written in The Print. One thing that is indeed puzzling is that he fails to consider history and forget to ask himself why India ended up trusting Sheikh Hasina more than Bangladesh and Bangladeshis. The answers lies in the long and forgotten past which will be dubbed as “Indian media propaganda” by the current interim government and their media friends. The irony is that many of the incidents that happened have had happened in the past.
My guru for understanding Bangladesh has been the reputed journalist Anthony Mascarenhas. Mr. Mascarenhas in his seminal book “Bangladesh: A Legacy of Blood” would give many first timers a rather rare insight on what went wrong with the country and how it has never considered India as an ally let alone a friend. And there is a reason for that. Not only assassinations of two of its earlier leaders (Muijb and Zia) happened to get rid of perceived Indian control of the country, Ershard and Begum Khaleda Zia have always used anti Indian rhetoric for political motives. Not to mention people like Mr Babar belonging to the ruling dispensation whose name is taken in the same breath as ULFA by historians in India.
To top it off many people might know that Sheikh Mujib blamed Indian smugglers for rampant corruption that his regime along with the famous 16th Brigade (Mascarenhas’s term for collaborators) unleashed on Bangladeshi people. Even the people were not spared during the famine of 1974 and somehow they managed to show us as the perpetrator. These are things that Mr. Hussain would not tell you here. The above actions even gave birth to a myth that India stole from a newly independent Bangladesh despite Indian Army withdrawing by early 1972 and was responsible for repairing crucial infrastructure such as the Hardinge Bridge.
I recommend my fellow Indians to read the book by Mr Mascarenhas and enlighten themselves. This would explain why GOI “put their eggs in one basket” because there was no other choice unfortunately. I am afraid this aspect is only getting validated by many of the steps and actions of the interim government. Our friendship was with Hasina because the people of Bangladesh by and large along with its other ruling elite dispensation do not want to be our friends.
Another book I recommend is the book on ULFA by Rajiv Bhattacharya. The part on Bangladesh is quite the eye opener I must say.
It’s best that India keeps away from it’s dysfunctional neighbours. Bangladesh brings nothing to the table and never has. It first needs to sort out it’s own internal issues before seeking anything from India.