People at the heart of Dhaka-Delhi ties

A sustainable reset is about insulating bilateral ties from partisan cycles and investing in the everyday networks of trade, transit, and people

- Syed Munir Khasru

A new government with a credible mandate, irrespective of identity and ideology, gives New Delhi a unique opportunity to reboot relations.

(AFP)

The India-Bangladesh relationship is experienced before it is debated - in bus routes and border queues, in families crossing for treatment, and in markets stocked with goods that travel a few hundred kilometres rather than across oceans.

It is rooted in shared history, language, and geography, and something rarer, fighting together for an outcome that reshaped the region. In 1971, India's support for Bangladesh's Liberation War became a foundational reference point in New Delhi's neighbourhood diplomacy. That legacy matters, but it cannot manage today's expectations.

More than five decades of IndoBangla relations show a recurring pattern. After Independence, early alignment with India was closely associated with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The rupture of 1975, following Mujib's assassination, changed the rhythm of relations. Under Ziaur Rahman (mid-1970s to 1981), Bangladesh pursued a diversified foreign policy, seeking wider strategic space, not hostility toward India, but less of the post-1971 intimacy.

Then, under the military ruler, general Hussain Muhammad Ershad (1982-1990), an alumnus of India's National Defence College, ties were steadied through pragmatic engagement. His ouster in 1990 ushered in parliamentary democracy in 1991, but politics thereafter in Bangladesh became dominated by intolerant rivalry and recurring disputes over electoral credibility. As successive governments recalibrated foreign policy, relations with India increasingly became entangled in domestic political contestation.