The first signs of a reset in India-Bangladesh relations have arrived not through a grand summit or a formal agreement but through two carefully choreographed meetings in Dhaka.
On Monday, Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Tarique Rahman met Indian High Commissioner Dinesh Trivedi in what was the first such high-level engagement after months of Trivedi’s tenure in Dhaka. When it almost seemed that Rahman was set on snubbing New Delhi by not meeting with its first minister-ranking envoy in Dhaka.
A day before that, RAW chief Parag Jain, accompanied by a delegation of senior spooks from India’s external intelligence agency, arrived in Bangladesh to hold talks with his Bangladeshi counterparts on Monday, almost at the same time as when Rahman was busy talking to Trivedi and posing for photo-ops with the usual warm handshake and smile.
Diplomatic engagement at the political level, accompanied by the reopening of intelligence channels, suggests that New Delhi and Dhaka may be attempting something more consequential than merely repairing an uncomfortable bilateral relationship. They appear to be testing whether the relationship can be stabilised around a narrower but more durable foundation: security, geography, and economic interdependence.
Of course, as is usual in a country riven by political bad blood, press officers in Bangladesh gave a spin to the two meetings that they were designed to seek the repatriation of Sheikh Hasina from India. Though insiders aver that such a demand was made almost in the passing “without much seriousness” and was never the core issue discussed. In fact, they point out that BNP leader Mirza Fakhrul Islam, now tipped to be the next president of Bangladesh, had, for quite some time, already made it clear to all and sundry that Hasina’s presence will not be a deterrent to “good’ relations with India.
What is important from India’s point of view is that the twin meetings signify a shift from the increasingly transactional and adversarial dynamic that has characterised ties between the two nations since the fall of Sheikh Hasina’s government.
Jain and his delegation’s talks with Bangladeshi intelligence officials assume particular importance at a time when India has been closely monitoring the re-emergence of extremist and militant networks following the release of a large number of terrorism-related detainees during the previous Muhammad Yunus-led interim administration.
India’s security apparatus and, indeed, the country’s leadership do not view this as a problem for Bangladesh alone. A politically unstable Bangladesh, sitting astride India’s northeastern land bridge and overlooking the Bay of Bengal, can quickly become a regional security problem for all.
For decades, one of the most important achievements of India-Bangladesh cooperation was the dismantling of militant networks operating from Bangladeshi territory against India’s northeast. Any reversal of that progress would have consequences well beyond the bilateral relationship.
The intelligence meeting, therefore, carries a message that the diplomatic encounter alone cannot convey: however deep their political differences, India and Bangladesh have strong incentives to cooperate against militant organisations and transnational criminal networks.
The timing of the two meetings is equally significant for all parties. Tarique Rahman may now send his travel plans to New Delhi for the BRICS Summit in September, where he has been invited in his capacity as chair of BIMSTEC. An encounter between Rahman and Prime Minister Narendra Modi could well provide the political imprimatur for a broader reset.
While the phrase “win-win” may sound diplomatic boilerplate, the fact is that a meeting between the two is of the utmost importance for Bangladesh. It needs a renewal of the Ganges water-sharing treaty signed first in 1996 and then later extended. The treaty runs out in December this year.
Without a water-sharing formula, India can, whenever it so chooses, reduce or increase the flow of water into lower riparian Bangladesh. In the recent past, India suspended the Indus Water Sharing Treaty with Pakistan after a brief skirmish between the two nations’ missile and air forces.
Bangladesh also needs India for trade, transit, energy, and access to the wider Indian market. India, meanwhile, needs a stable Bangladesh for the security of its northeastern states, connectivity to the Bay of Bengal, and the protection of its eastern strategic flank.
The problem is that despite the obvious need for the two neighbours to look out for each other, over the past several months, Dhaka has sought to demonstrate that it has alternatives. Rahman’s visit to Beijing in June, followed by agreements for major construction projects close to India’s borders, was viewed with considerable concern in New Delhi.
Bangladesh has also explored defence cooperation with Pakistan, including reported discussions over the acquisition of JF-17 multi-role combat aircraft and the upgrading of its ageing tank fleet.
Many in Dhaka saw these moves as leverage in negotiations with India. Bangladesh could signal that it was no longer prepared to operate within what some in its political establishment regarded as an India-centric strategic framework.
However, the problem with such signalling was that the leverage politicians and diplomats in Dhaka believed they were creating was being viewed as overreach by their counterparts in Delhi.
For the Indian establishment, the prospect of Bangladesh simultaneously deepening strategic ties with China and Pakistan is qualitatively different from Dhaka simply diversifying its foreign policy. China is India’s principal strategic competitor, while Pakistan remains India’s principal security adversary. A convergence of Chinese infrastructure, Pakistani military equipment, and a politically unsettled Bangladesh would present a substantially more complicated security environment for India and a development which it would not be willing to tolerate.
Dhaka may, therefore, have discovered that playing the China and Pakistan cards will not only not be the best way to extract concessions from India, but it will also make India less willing to lend an ear to her neighbour.
Many believe that the United States, with which India has had both run-ins as well as increased collaboration since the Trump administration took its oath, may well have played an important role in exposing this strategic constraint and counselling Rahman to mind his ‘Ps’ and ‘Qs’.
The recent visit to Dhaka by US Ambassador to Central and South Asia Sergio Gor, who met both Rahman and Trivedi, may well have been the theatrical stage where the advice was passed on. According to people familiar with the discussions, Washington conveyed concerns shared by India and Western governments over reports of extremist and militant groups regrouping in Bangladesh, while also signalling the broader American concern about excessive Chinese strategic penetration in the Indo-Pacific.
The triangle that unfolds as a result of all this diplomatic activity is as layered as it is contradictory. Washington wants Bangladesh to remain sufficiently stable and strategically open to prevent its drift into China’s orbit. India wants Bangladesh to remain secure and predictable along its eastern frontier. Bangladesh wants to maximise its strategic autonomy and extract economic and diplomatic benefits from all three powers.
How Bangladesh will resolve these conflicts or, for that matter, how India will react to new signals and indeed how other actors, such as China or Pakistan or their proxies in Bangladesh, will behave is yet to be seen.
The writer is Editor, United News of India.
