Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina plays China card ahead of her visit to India

Hasina said that Bangladesh’s foreign policy was based on 'friendship to all, malice to none' doctrine and it had no intention to interfere in India-China relations

A day before embarking on a visit to New Delhi, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Sunday inaugurated the eighth bridge built by China and thus subtly sent out a message – India must keep its purse-strings loose to fund development projects in her country and stop her government from exploring the option of relying more on Xi Jinping’s ‘Middle Kingdom’.

Hasina virtually inaugurated the 1493-metre-long eighth “Bangladesh-China Friendship Bridge” – named after her mother and Bangladesh’s founder Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s wife Sheikh Fazilatunnesa Mujib – over Kocha river at Bekutia in Pirojpur in south-western region of the country. Beijing provided nearly $68.92 million as a grant to support construction of the $95 million bridge in Bangladesh – one of the South Asian theatres of China-India strategic rivalry.

China’s state-owned agencies completed construction of the bridge a couple of months back and the communist country’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi formally handed it over to the Government of Bangladesh during his visit to Dhaka early last month. Hasina, however, waited and chose to virtually inaugurate it on Sunday, just a day before arriving in New Delhi for a visit, which Dhaka would like to result in India pledging its continued support to development and welfare projects in Bangladesh.

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In an interview to Asia News International (ANI) ahead of her four-day visit to New Delhi, Hasina said that Bangladesh’s foreign policy was based on “friendship to all, malice to none” doctrine and it had no intention to interfere in India-China bilateral relations. She also said that poverty was the only enemy for all and her government would rather focus on making the lives better for people of Bangladesh. Her comments were apparently intended to send out a message to New Delhi that her government would seek to maintain a strategic balance in Dhaka’s ties with New Delhi and Beijing, notwithstanding the historic relationship between India and Bangladesh.

Nearly one-fourth of India’s commitments for credit lines to support development assistance in other countries were made to Bangladesh. The contracts signed for development projects supported by India in Bangladesh crossed $2 billion mark and the total disbursement crossed $1 billion.

Dhaka, however, wants more, obviously to ensure that Hasina’s Awami League, which is accused by opposition parties to be excessively friendly to New Delhi, can continue its winning streak and sail through the parliamentary elections in December 2023 – reaping the political dividends of construction of infrastructure, welfare programmes and the economic growth in the past 13 years of its uninterrupted rule over Bangladesh.

China has also been supporting construction of a number of infrastructure projects in Bangladesh, including seven bridges before the one on the river Kocha. Li Jiming, Beijing’s envoy to Dhaka, on Sunday said that China would continue to build infrastructure in Bangladesh within the framework of its “Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)”, including a ninth bridge.

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When Wang, Chinese Foreign Minister, had called on Hasina in Dhaka on August 7, he had also argued for aligning China’s BRI with Bangladesh’s Vision 2041, a national strategy plan drawn by the Awami League government for socio economic development of the country which would graduate from a Least Developed Country to a Developing Country by 2026.

Hasina’s government, however, is also aware of China’s debt-trap diplomacy and its implications for nations like Bangladesh. Her Finance Minister, Mustafa Kamal warned in an interview with Financial Times that the developing countries should think twice before taking more loans from China. The interview was published around the same time when the Chinese Foreign Minister was on a visit to Bangladesh.

Hasina has been consistent in acknowledging India’s historic role in supporting liberation of East Pakistan from the repressive rule of Pakistan and in giving birth to Bangladesh half-a-century ago. During her visit to New Delhi this week, she is likely to award scholarships to the descendants of the Indian Army soldiers, who had been injured or killed while fighting against the Pakistani Army during the Liberation War of Bangladesh in December 1971.

But her government is now also keen to take advantage of Bangladesh’s growing geostrategic importance in the wake of escalating India-China strategic rivalry, particularly for the security of India’s ‘Chicken-Neck’ corridor and its north-eastern states in the event of a military conflict with China.

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Hasina led her tiny nation of 16.3 million people to register an impressive economic growth of 8.4 per cent just before the Covid-19 crisis. In spite of showing signs of strong recovery after the pandemic, the economy is again facing headwinds as global commodity prices increased in the wake of Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine. That is why Dhaka is also expecting more trade concessions from New Delhi.

Beijing already granted 98 per cent products from Bangladesh duty-free access to the huge market in China, with effect from September 1.

The meeting between Hasina and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi on Tuesday is likely to result in Bangladesh and India agreeing to launch negotiations for a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) that would further boost bilateral trade, which already grew from $9 billion to $18 billion in the past five years. Bangladesh is now the fourth largest export destination for India, with growth of over 66 per cent from $9.69 billion in 2020-21 to $16.15 billion in 2021-22. India is also Bangladesh’s largest export destination in Asia.