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For fifteen years, India’s eastern flank was its most stable. Sheikh Hasina’s Bangladesh was, by any reasonable measure, New Delhi’s most cooperative neighbour: it cracked down on anti-India insurgents sheltering in its territory, helped resolve the connectivity puzzle between India’s northeast and the rest of the country, and maintained a relationship that Prime Minister Modi described, as recently as 2020, as a “golden chapter.”
That chapter ended in August 2024, when Hasina was ousted in a youth-led uprising and fled to India. What followed was not simply a change of government. It was a geopolitical pivot that India has yet to develop an adequate response to, and the longer it waits, the more it pays.
The Pivot That Happened While India Watched
The shift in Bangladesh’s external orientation since Hasina’s departure has been rapid and multidirectional. Bilateral relations with India have fallen to a historic low. Restrictions on each other’s exports have been imposed from land and sea. India halved its financial assistance to Bangladesh in its latest budget. Anti-India sentiment, always latent, has become politically operationalised, fanned by Islamist parties, amplified by the interim government’s rhetoric, and deepened by India’s decision to shelter Hasina, which Dhaka reads as a provocation rather than a humanitarian act.
Into this vacuum, China and Pakistan have moved with purpose. China has signed a defence agreement with Bangladesh to build a drone factory near the Indian border. Bangladesh is in active talks to procure JF-17 fighter jets, jointly developed by China and Pakistan. In June 2025, Bangladesh, China, and Pakistan held the inaugural meeting of a foreign secretary-level dialogue, a trilateral that India views as a direct effort to marginalise it in its own neighbourhood. China has meanwhile become Bangladesh’s largest trading partner, with bilateral trade exceeding India’s by a significant and widening margin.
In March 2025, Bangladesh’s Chief Adviser Mohammed Yunus told Chinese interlocutors that India’s northeastern states were “landlocked” and that Bangladesh was the “only guardian of the ocean”, a pointed formulation that New Delhi did not miss, and has not forgiven.
The Water Ticking Clock
Beneath the diplomatic frost lies a structural time bomb. The Ganges Water Sharing Treaty, which has governed one of the most critical river-sharing arrangements in the subcontinent, is due to expire in 2026. Negotiations have stalled entirely. Bangladesh’s government has openly expressed anxiety that India might use water as a pressure instrument during the dry season, and given the current state of relations, that anxiety is not irrational.
Water disputes are the kind of slow-burning crisis that hardens positions over years and becomes almost impossible to resolve once they become politically embedded. India allowing the Ganges treaty to lapse without a successor framework would be a strategic error that outlasts the current government in Dhaka by decades.
The Neighbourhood First Paradox
India’s Neighbourhood First policy rests on an assumption that has now been stress-tested: that economic interdependence and historical ties create a gravitational pull strong enough to anchor neighbours within India’s orbit regardless of domestic political change. Bangladesh has demonstrated that this assumption has limits.
The policy was built for governments that wanted to lean toward India. It has no real architecture for managing neighbours that have actively chosen to lean away, no toolkit of inducements calibrated to the new political reality, no differentiated engagement strategy that separates the government from the broader population, and no serious attempt to cultivate political relationships across party lines rather than betting everything on a single leader.
India’s new High Commissioner appointment, veteran politician Dinesh Trivedi, signals that New Delhi understands the stakes. But diplomatic signalling without a revised strategic framework is theatre. Bangladesh’s Hindu minority, roughly 13 million people, has faced a deteriorating security environment since Hasina’s departure. India’s failure to respond to this forcefully, beyond media outrage, has reduced rather than increased its leverage in Dhaka.
The Cost of Watching
Bangladesh is not lost to India. Geography, economics, and the deeply intertwined lives of people on both sides of a border that was always more political than cultural impose their own logic. Any government in Dhaka must ultimately deal with New Delhi.
But the terms on which it deals are being set right now, and India is not setting them. China is building infrastructure. Pakistan is selling jets. The trilateral dialogue is institutionalising. Every month India spends watching rather than engaging is a month that alternative relationships deepen and become structurally harder to displace.
Neighbourhood First needs a second chapter. This is what it looks like when it doesn’t have one.
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.