BNP’s rise, Awami League’s retreat, India left adrift

By endorsing a flawed election and ignoring Hasina’s strength, India risks compounding its policy mistakes in Bangladesh

India is losing the Awami League without gaining the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).

Awami League leaders who had sought refuge in Kolkata following the overthrow of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina are trickling out of India. The younger and brighter ones do not see themselves spending the rest of their lives in quiet exile in Kolkata or in New Delhi under restraints imposed by India’s security and intelligence agencies. These Awami League functionaries — who include former ministers — believe they have a vital stake in Bangladesh’s future, which is at a crossroads. So does the Awami League, in their view.

Malaysia is the favourite destination of those dribbling out of India. The second destination is Singapore, but it is a distant second because of the inevitable political restrictions in the city state. The education of children and family comforts in exile are their main considerations for choosing Singapore over Malaysia. The departure of these Awami League leaders is a long-term strategic loss for India. It is yet another mistake by New Delhi, which has compounded previous mistakes in its policy towards Bangladesh. This litany of mistakes landed New Delhi in a soup, so to speak, with the surprise ouster of Hasina.

Public discourse in India since the BNP’s landslide victory paints a naively rosy future in bilateral relations with excessive weightage for history and civilisation. This ignores the schizophrenic nature of Bangladesh society, where the affinity for Pakistan is a strong undercurrent. A vast segment of Bangladesh’s population is anti-India without knowing why they are anti-India. An influential former adviser to Hasina once told this author that at least half of Bangladesh’s population belongs to this segment.

It is surprising — even painful for millions of Bangladeshis — that India endorsed the February 12 elections in Bangladesh without any reservations. It was a lop-sided election with the Awami League not having been allowed to participate. Rahul Roy-Chaudhury, Senior Fellow for South and Central Asia at the London-headquartered International Institute for Strategic Studies, has concluded that many traditional Awami League supporters voted for the BNP to keep the regressive Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) and the ragtag student protestors’ National Citizen Party out of power. In support of this contention, Roy-Chaudhury points to the “BNP gaining majorities in at least 62 constituencies previously considered Awami League strongholds.” Risking their lives, Hasina's surrogates told the European Union Election Observation Mission, which also included poll observers from Canada, Norway, and Switzerland, that they tactically voted for the BNP, according to sources in Strasbourg, the European Parliament’s headquarters. This is not in their preliminary statement, but is expected to find a place in the observation mission’s detailed, final report, these sources said.

When Hasina addressed the New Delhi-based Foreign Correspondents’ Club of South Asia (FCC) in the run up to the elections, her address had an online viewership of nearly two million. Hasina has been giving print media interviews in India, but the FCC speech was her first in-person address since she was forced into exile. Such viewership showed her continuing popular strength, which New Delhi ignored, post-election. This will have adverse consequences for long-term bilateral relations.

Other credible observers have concluded that the Bangladesh Army played a role below the radar to ensure that their country did not slip into obscurantism, which is alien to Bengali culture and drift towards an Islamic State through any phenomenally strengthened JeI. Prime Minister Tarique Rahman will have no difficulty with the Army playing a stabilising role. He may even need it in the coming months and years in view of the colossal challenges he is facing. Rahman is a product of the Army. His late mother, former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, was the wife of an army chief who became president. Rahman’s father, General Ziaur Rahman, broadcast Bangladesh’s Declaration of Independence in 1971 as a junior officer from a secret radio station inside East Pakistan, said to be operated by Indian intelligence agencies.

It is important, therefore, that India’s defence forces should collaborate with their counterparts in Bangladesh before the new prime minister inevitably falters because of his lack of political experience and an anti-India foreign minister, Khalilur Rahman. He was national security adviser to interim adviser Muhammad Yunus during the worst phase of recent New Delhi-Dhaka ties.

It will rarely be articulated in public, but India must not stop interfering in the affairs of Bangladesh. The country with a 4,000-km common border is too important strategically for India to be left to its own devices, never mind sentiment across the border.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.