Why New Delhi needs to handle Dhaka with care

Eighteen months after Sheikh Hasina’s ouster from Bangladesh as the country’s Prime Minister, hopes for normalcy between India and Bangladesh remain elusive as the bilateral relationship plunges from one crisis to another.

- Happymon Jacob

The ongoing protests in Dhaka and growing anti-India sentiments are only indications of that. While there is a hope in New Delhi that things could get better after the February elections in Bangladesh, there is little certainty of that. New Delhi must change its approach to Dhaka, shedding a politi¢o-emotional framing to adopt a clinical and problem-solving national security framework.

For India, the rapidly deteriorating relationship with Bangladesh poses a threefold challenge: growing insecurity and infiltration along the 4,000-kilometer border; the rising threat of anti-India forces establishing cross-border bases; and the exploitation of the rift between Dhaka and New Delhi by Islamabad and Beijing at a time when Bangladesh actively pivots towards a Pakistan-China axis in the region.

Consider the rapidly shifting geopolitical context. In June this year, a trilateral meeting in China’s Kunming, involving the foreign secretaries of Bangladesh and Pakistan and Chinese vice-minister Sun Weidong, set a concerning tone for New Delhi. This was followed by the unprecedented visit of a Pakistani Naval ship to Bangladesh's Chittagong port in late 2024, and Beijing is intensifying its engagement with the Muhammad Yunus government.

Whichever way one looks at it, the current state of bilateral relationship is deeply unhelpful to India. It harms the interests of Bangladesh and its people even more, but perhaps not the regime in Bangladesh for whom tensions with India help cover its domestic failures and incompetence, economic or otherwise. Therefore, our assumption that an unhealthy relationship with India is worse off for Dhaka could be a significant miscalculation.