BETWEEN FRIENDS AND FEARS

As Bangladesh navigates the transition to an elected government amid a fragile economy, India must tread carefully to ensure that its friendship with Dhaka rises above political anxieties

- BY NAMRATA BIJI AHUJA

From the Padma to the Ganga, Bangladesh's ties with India are bound by the shared geography of its largest land boundary. Their destinies have long flowed together beyond cartographic lines, shaped by a common linguistic and cultural heritage, a shared agro-ecology and an inclusive, open social fabric that cannot be judged by a few strains in the relationship. The strain in the Delhi-Dhaka bond came with Sheikh Hasina's journey into exile in India after the student-led protests in Bangladesh last year. This winter, Hasina, 78, the former prime minister and daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman—revered as the father of the nation—finds herself in an ironic twist. She is tasked with breathing new life into her party, the Awami League, while rebuilding trust with the people to lift her country out of its current uncertainty and return it to an elected leadership.

“The state must serve the people,” Hasina agrees. “As a young politician in the early 1980s, I set out to understand the needs of our people and learn about the realities and hardships they faced firsthand,” Hasina tells THE WEEK. A young Hasina had just come out of forced exile in New Delhi in 1981 after her father and most of her family were assassinated in a military coup in 1975. But when she returned to her country as the leader of the Awami League, she emerged as one of the key figures in the pro-democracy movement to end the military rule in 1991, along with Begum Khaleda Zia, leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). “Overall, our country was moving in the right direction,” says Hasina. “Most of the credit for this goes to ordinary Bangladeshis, not to politicians.”