Why Bangladesh could become India’s new Pakistan

India seems to have decided that it will not have any deep engagement with the interim government. It is left with hardly any friends in Bangladesh today

As Bangladesh heads towards chaos and instability, India seems to have decided not to waste time engaging deeply with the interim government. However, Bangladesh’s interim de facto prime minister, known as ‘Chief Adviser’, Nobel Laureate Mohammad Yunus, seems in no hurry to demit office.

Yunus has claimed that elections are likely to be held towards end-2025 or early 2026. But he has also suggested lowering the voting age from 18 to 17 years.

This will effectively delay the elections, as the time-consuming process of preparing new electoral rolls will have to be completed. It will also give the youth involved in the agitation ample time to launch their own political party, as they intend to do sometime this year.

While the agitating students want to tear down the old order, they are unclear about what to replace it with and how.

On December 31, some students leaders of the July uprising threatened to declare a ‘Second Republic’. Had the 'Students against Discrimination' and civil society organisation ‘Jatiyo Nagorik Committee’, done so, chaos would have ensued.

The first republic and its constitution would have become null and void. It would have delegitimised not only the judiciary and the armed forces but also the so-called interim government, whose ministers, called ‘Advisers’, had all assumed office swearing an oath on the 1972 Constitution.

The Bangladesh Army apparently sent a message through the interim administration that if such a declaration were made, it would be forced to act. An emissary was then sent to the students to call off their declaration and announced that it would itself bring a ‘Proclamation of July Revolution’. The students drew back but gave a deadline of January 15, for doing so.

The Yunus administration is also opposed to the 1972 Constitution and has appointed a former journalist as the head of a Constitution Reform Commission. He is not an expert on constitutional law.

Six reform commissions were set up last September by the interim government to look into corruption, reforming the election system, police administration, public administration, judiciary, and the constitution. Each commission has a student representative.

None of the commissions have submitted their reports. Since debate and discussion will have to take place before their recommendations are accepted, the reform plan will further increase the term of the interim government. Yunus wants to hold elections after he has reformed the system.

He, however, seems to have little control. His student adviser, Mahfuz Alam, who he described in New York in September, as the ‘mastermind’ of the July uprising, appears to wield great clout over him.

A Facebook post by Alam has upset India where he accused it of trying to ‘contain’ and ‘ghettoize’ Bangladesh, and suggested it ‘could come out of its cage’ by annexing some of India’s eastern and north-eastern territories.

Although the post was deleted two hours later, many other student activists are thought to share his expansionist sentiments. Earlier such toxic anti-Indian sentiment was only prevalent among the radical Islamists. The July uprising seems to have changed that.

The turmoil in Bangladesh may encourage Islamist political forces to come together into an overarching alliance for the next election. The resulting political formation is unlikely to be friendly towards India.

A straw in the wind is the relaunch of the strident Islamic newspaper, Amar Desh, on December 22. The paper had been shut down twice by the Awami League government in the past. Its editor, Mahmudur Rahman, was arrested both times. After three-and-a-half years in jail, he was granted bail and lived in exile, in Malaysia and Turkey.

Believed to be stridently anti-India, Rahman, returned from Turkey in September. He sees his paper as playing a major role in combating ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘domination’. Underlining that Bangladesh was a ‘90 percent Muslim country’, he claimed his mission was to write about ‘the oppression of Muslims in Kashmir, China's persecution of Muslims, the Rohingya crisis, and all the Muslims being persecuted around the world.’

Amidst the growth of all these tendencies, it is unclear where the Bangladesh polity is headed.

If the Americans were indeed sponsors of the July uprising as conspiracy theorists suggest, they have not been the main beneficiaries of the regime change. China and Pakistan are more likely to have profited.

China, which benefited from the Sheikh Hasina regime, has now written her off. After the July uprising, it sent in medical teams to treat injured agitators; flew the critically injured to China for treatment; invited a student delegation to visit China; opened channels with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) leadership and Bangladesh universities.

Pakistan, which tends to piggyback on China in South Asia, also has a re-invigorated presence in Bangladesh. Joint air exercises are planned with Bangladesh Air Force; the Pakistan Army is to run training programmes at the Mymensingh Cantonment for the Bangladesh Army, Pakistan visa has been made free and medical tourism is being encouraged. People-to-people contact took centre-stage with a recent concert by Rahat Fateh Ali Khan at the Dhaka Army Stadium to raise funds for the injured student agitators.

India, meanwhile, seems to have decided that it will not have any deep engagement with the interim government. The outcome of the Indian foreign secretary’s visit to Dhaka in December is uncertain. Within days of his visit, Bangladesh’s de facto foreign minister or foreign adviser formally demanded Hasina’s extradition.

India is left with hardly any friends in Bangladesh today. The BNP leadership, including its de facto leader Tarique Rahman, exiled in London, has been advising restraint to the party rank file about falling prey to anti-India sentiment. The party apparently intends to come out with a document on its neighbourhood policy soon.

New Delhi, however, has so far kept the BNP, which is an integral part of the process of the transition, at arm’s length. There have been no significant gestures — economic, social, or cultural — signalling that India remains friendly towards the people of Bangladesh. Instead, the Indian Home Minister recently threatened to hang any Bangladeshi illegal immigrant found in India, ‘upside down’!

If this policy of drift endures, then India will continue to be on the wrong side of history in Bangladesh, pushing the relationship to what it was prior to 1971.

(Bharat Bhushan is a New Delhi-based journalist.)

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