Bangladesh reset: India’s strategic dilemma
Two years after Sheikh Hasina’s exile in India, New Delhi finds itself navigating one of the most delicate diplomatic transitions in its neighbourhood
Two years ago, on the afternoon of August 5, 2024, Sheikh Hasina boarded a military aircraft in Dhaka and landed hours later at Hindon Air Base outside Delhi, ending more than fifteen unbroken years in power and, with them, the closest strategic partnership India had built with any government in its eastern neighbourhood. In the twenty-four months since, Bangladesh has moved through more upheaval than most countries see in a decade. An interim government led by the Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus took charge within days of Hasina’s fall, promising reform and, eventually, elections.
Later, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, led by Tarique Rahman, won that election, and Rahman was sworn in as Prime Minister. Dhaka has been demanding the extradition of Sheikh Hasina, convicted of mass murder and sentenced to death. It has repeated the request several times since her sentencing, invoking the bilateral extradition treaty the two countries signed in 2013. India’s reluctance to hurry an answer on extradition is often described in Delhi as caution; it would be more accurately described as a considered legal position.
India can no longer treat this as a waiting game, because Bangladesh is not waiting either. Prime Minister Rahman’s own language has been careful — he has spoken of shaping foreign policy around the interests of Bangladesh and its people rather than old alignments and has avoided the anti-India rhetoric of the interim years. However, his leaning towards China is unmistakable. His first foreign visit as Prime Minister was to Beijing, not Delhi, despite Modi’s early invitation. China has since pledged support for the long-delayed Teesta river management project — a scheme India itself had offered to help fund. Reportedly, China has gained a foothold at Bangladesh’s Mongla Port and is discussing a China-Myanmar-Bangladesh economic corridor that would give Beijing another route to the Bay of Bengal. Dhaka’s military and civilian contacts with Islamabad, revived through the interim years, have shown no clear sign of reversing under the new government.
India has the precarious task of managing Dhaka while not conceding its demand for Hasina’s extradition. Violence that followed Hasina’s fall did not end with her departure or with the election. Minority rights groups recorded several attacks on Hindus and other minorities in the first six months of this year alone, and 44 deaths - evidence that the intimidation of Bangladesh’s minorities has become a structural problem.
The most useful thing India can do for its own standing in Dhaka is finish what it has spent fifteen years promising. Reviving the Teesta project on workable terms, pushing the free trade talks that have moved at a crawl, and fast-tracking connectivity and energy projects would do more to blunt China’s advances than any number of démarches about Mongla Port. The task now is difficult, though doable: hold the legal line on Hasina without turning it into theatre, and do the patient work — on water, trade, connectivity and minority rights — that wins back a neighbourhood India cannot afford to lose to Beijing.
