India was for decades the most reliable international backer of Bangladesh’s Sheikh Hasina, sheltering her as a young exile and supporting her government long after Bangladeshis began turning against its brutality.
This week, New Delhi’s bet on the long-governing prime minister backfired spectacularly. After weeks of escalating protests and violence, Sheikh Hasina on Monday fled to India as anti-government demonstrators marched on her official residence.
The sudden collapse of her government after 15 years has left a precarious power vacuum in Bangladesh, a country of 170mn that India considers its most dependable regional partner.
It has also set back New Delhi’s regional strategy at a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi is seeking to counter growing Chinese influence. And India’s decision to support Sheikh Hasina until the end risks damaging its image in the eyes of many Bangladeshis.
“It is India’s unequivocal support that has protected her from wrath and shielded her from international pressure,” said Ali Riaz, an expert on Bangladeshi politics at Illinois State University.
“This moment is a message to New Delhi that they continued to support a regime whose human rights record was appalling and [which was] completely isolated.”
Indian officials have responded with alarm to the violence that followed Sheikh Hasina’s flight. Over 130 deaths were reported in Bangladesh on Monday and S Jaishankar, India’s foreign minister, warned that minorities — especially Hindus, who are the majority in India — were targeted.
“India-Bangladesh have been exceptionally close for many decades over many governments”, Jaishankar told parliament on Tuesday. He said India “will naturally remain deeply concerned till law and order is visibly restored”.
India, a behemoth that with 1.4bn people and a $3.5tn economy is larger than the rest of South Asia put together, has a complicated history with its neighbours.
Indian officials have long worried about extremists and Chinese encroachment in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, which is geographically almost encircled by India. They saw secularist Sheikh Hasina’s main rival, the Bangladesh Nationalist party, as soft on Islamism and closer to Beijing.
Some pro-Indian government social media accounts and news outlets have presented the uprising in a critical light, in some cases painting it as a western plot.
India’s bond with Sheikh Hasina has its roots in Bangladesh’s 1971 independence war with Pakistan when it intervened to support her father, separatist leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
After he and most of his family were murdered in a 1975 coup, 27-year-old Sheikh Hasina was granted asylum in Delhi before returning to Bangladesh in 1981 and emerging as India’s preferred leadership choice.
Sheikh Hasina became a linchpin of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s strategy to bolster regional economic ties and connectivity in response to proliferating Chinese influence in the region.
India has opened lines of credit to Bangladesh worth $8bn, more than to any other Asian country. The politically well-connected Adani infrastructure conglomerate is among the Indian businesses that secured lucrative power supply deals in Bangladesh.
“Hasina was pro-India and was open to transforming the relationship,” C Raja Mohan, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute in Delhi, said. “The strategic question is: can we create structural relationships which will survive regime changes?”
Sheikh Hasina was the first leader to visit Modi after his re-election in June despite growing anger at home towards her authoritarianism and poor human rights record.
India did not join powers including the US and UK in criticising a crackdown on the opposition BNP ahead of Sheikh Hasina’s re-election in January, and some Bangladeshi civil society activists accused New Delhi of using its clout to shield her regime.
“Over the last couple of years, India should have read the tea leaves better,” said Kanti Bajpai, an Indian foreign policy scholar. “The Indian government could have begun to step away from such a close relationship . . . This is now a problem.”
Sheikh Hasina’s downfall follows another diplomatic setback for India in the Maldives, which in November elected President Mohamed Muizzu on an “India Out” platform and went on to expel a small contingent of Indian troops.
In Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan, India is vying with China for influence.
One of India’s immediate challenges is what to do with Sheikh Hasina. Jaishankar confirmed that she had arrived near Delhi on Monday “at very short notice”.
In providing her with safe passage shortly before protesters stormed her Dhaka residence, India helped shield her from potential violence and prevent further chaos in Bangladesh.
But her continued presence risks reinforcing New Delhi’s image as a friend of the 76-year-old former prime minister and could complicate relations with Bangladesh’s next government, analysts said.
Sheikh Hasina is seeking asylum in a third country, but her son Sajeeb Wazed told broadcasters she had not decided where to go and was “going to stay in Delhi for a little while”. Jaishankar reportedly told Indian party leaders that she was in a “state of shock”.
Bangladesh’s newly appointed interim leader Muhammad Yunus, a celebrated economist and Nobel laureate, said he would work to restore stability and create “a road map to new elections”.
New polls in Bangladesh could allow the BNP to make a comeback, and the party has tried to shake off its reputation as a historic antagonist of India.
“The BNP is always looking to India as an important regional development partner,” said Tabith Awal, a BNP executive committee member. “We just hope the Indian government will stop depending on only one person, which was Sheikh Hasina, and work directly with the people of Bangladesh.”
Analysts said that whoever comes to power in Bangladesh would likely have little choice but to lean on its larger neighbour.
“There is a lot of angst in New Delhi right now about what shape the government will take,” said Shafqat Munir, senior fellow with the Bangladesh Institute of Peace and Security Studies. “But geopolitics and geographic realities dictate that . . . it will be very important to work with India.”
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