Why do you feel India-Bangladesh ties are going through a low in recent times?
The 15-year-rule of Sheikh Hasina was in many ways a golden period for India’s relationship with Bangladesh. But it was an unrealistic way of maintaining a relationship. You cannot have somebody who is autocratic at home, unable to handle any opposition, crushing all opponents and describing them as agents of Pakistan or as extremist Islamists. That created the situation in which the July 2024 uprising took place. Now I believe that the Awami League still has a substantial following and support in Bangladesh. That is why they had to be banned. Nobody bans a party that is not going to have any support. So they have been banned essentially to make it easier for the others to sort of have a cakewalk.
Do you believe the rise of the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami has contributed to the tensions between India and Bangladesh?
Not all anti-India elements in Bangladesh are Islamists and not all Islamists are anti-India in Bangladesh at least. Many Bangladeshis understand Bangladesh has to have good relations with India. I think that among the many factors that have contributed to the ferment in Bangladesh are domestic Bangladeshi politics, overconfidence that came from a sense that nothing can remove us from power, total exclusion of others from the political process. If the BNP (Bangladesh Nationalist Party) and even the Jamaat had won 20, 30, 40, 50 seats in the last two elections, how would that have impaired Sheikh Hasina’s governance? Or if there had been one or two newspapers that were critical of her. But there was complete intolerance and that really did create a reaction.
Do you feel India should have spotted this trend earlier?
This has been happening in Bangladeshi politics for a long time. Even a man like Dr Kamal Hossain who wrote Bangladesh’s first constitution, who was Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s closest lieutenant who went to prison with him and he was one of the two people who were kept in West Pakistan as hostages during the entire Bangladesh liberation war along with Sheikh Mujib. Even he was not allowed to be able to speak out and he was ideologically never going to be against the fundamentals of a secular Bangladesh. But his mistreatment, those are the things that were mistakes and India’s big mistake was never to speak to Sheikh Hasina about any of this. It was being the friend that didn’t ask questions or pointing out mistakes and not realizing that all of this was being listed by the general populace as Hasina equals India and therefore every mistake of Hasina is India’s mistake and every mistake of India is Hasina’s mistake.
What lessons should be learnt from this? Indian analysts of Bangladesh have to acknowledge they simply did not pick up those signs. None of them because many of them I've spoken to and it seems to me none of them predicted it, anticipated it or thought about it. And that I think is a mistake for a country that has great power aspirations because you cannot be a great power internationally if you cannot predict, anticipate and analyse your own neighbourhood correctly.
Coming to Pakistan, has the ISI been playing any role in Bangladeshi politics?
I have no knowledge but I can certainly say it would be in keeping with the logic of things that Pakistan security services would continue to have allies, partners, agents of influence and operatives in Bangladesh. Any attempt to try and coerce India would obviously involve a strategy of trying to squeeze India and so Bangladesh can be useful in that in terms of putting pressure on the silvery corridor in the northeast etc. If there are going to be insurgencies in the northeast as was the case in the past then Bangladesh is important. So it fits into the logic of those people to continue to put India in trouble or create trouble for India. So that is definitely a reality.
Even in 1970-71 there were certain individuals, certain families and certain people who thought that the Pakistan army had committed excesses but it wasn’t enough for them to leave the idea or original idea of Pakistan. So those people survived the 1971 war and continued and their legacy can be seen in contemporary Bangladeshi politics. Now, there are people in Pakistan who still have a fantasy that they can somehow reunite the original Pakistan if not as a country then as some kind of an alliance. And those who have a strong anti-India worldview as the foundational ideology whether as Pakistanis or Bangladeshis they have that in common.
What is your assessment of former interim chief Muhammad Yunus?
Professor Yunus’s problem is that he became head of the interim government as a result of a series of events which he has made as the defining events of Bangladesh's life and history. He did not look on himself as, or did not see himself as somebody who has been asked to be an interim figure. He saw himself as the person who has been called upon to fulfil the mission of the revolutionaries. Now, we all know, in many countries, those who come to the streets are a minority and not necessarily representative of the entire population.
The NCP, which represents the students who led the protests, was not a major political force. It had to align with the Jamaat-e-Islami to get whatever seats it got. Yunus saw these students as his constituency and by extension, the Jamaat, because the Jamaat was close to these students. He therefore lifted the ban on the Jamaat, released all its people, and unfreezed the funding. All of his decisions have ended up favouring the Jamaat-e-Islami without him being an Islamist.
Why was he catering to the Islamists?
Yunus believed, as some others in Bangladesh do, in the illusion of a moderate Jamaat-e-Islami. That is why there was at one time talk of, oh, we will have a revolutionary charter instead of the constitution. Instead of a transition, he saw it (Hasina’s departure) as a revolution, as if this is 1790 France or 1979 Iran or 1917 in Russia. This was Professor Yunus’s biggest mistake. Now, whether that mistake has been committed by design or just by miscalculation, I think is something we will find out over time. But I would say that that mistake is very obvious. That is very clear there. Now, the Pakistan factor in that, I think, has essentially been inadvertent. Because if you’re going to increase anti-India sentiment, all anti-sentiment has to have a pro-something. They didn't want it to be pro-China because that would have upset the Americans. So the only thing that could be offered as a counterpart to anti-Indianism was pro-Pakistanism. And that is all that has happened. And that is what the administration had done.
Do you think this trend will continue?
No. The Bangladeshi army chief has been very cautious and careful. He does not want to pick a fight with India. The Bangladeshi army does not need conflict and Bangladesh does not need conflict. India is on all sides. You just look at the map and you understand why India and Bangladesh need to have good relations. On the Pakistani side, I'm not sure what the Pakistani leadership thinks. But there have always been people in Pakistan since 1971 who had this fantasy of avenging 1971, and of proving that the loss of Bangladesh was just the result of a series of miscalculations and not a historical change. And so those people are definitely going to continue to try and dabble in Bangladeshi affairs in a way in which they can shape the events to their ideological preference.
It would be dangerous, in my opinion, for Pakistan’s civil or military leadership to get into the game of trying to put pressure on India through Bangladesh. It would destabilize Bangladesh. It would destroy its economic potential. And it could result in all kinds of consequences. The best thing for the entire subcontinent would be for all actors, and here I mean all actors on the subcontinent, to actually avoid proxy wars and not undermine each other.
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Let us come to Tarique Rahman. What will his leadership mean for both India and Pakistan?
I think Tarique Rahman will tread very carefully. He does not need to take a hard line on anything. He just needs to bring Bangladesh back to a more normal discourse. One thing he has managed done very carefully is to sever the symbiotic relationship between the BNP and the Jamaat-e-Islami that had evolved in the 1990s. At some point, Awami League will have to be normalized and be allowed to be a normally functioning political party. I do not see Tarique Rahman taking steps that would be contrary to India’s interests, nor would he unnecessarily beat the Pakistanis. He will tread a very moderate course in foreign policy and will focus more on domestic harmony and economics. He may also not go as far as the Yunus administration did in punishing the people from the previous government.
I think that was one of the biggest excesses of the Yunus government. There were Awami League workers who were killed and of course, there were students who were killed. And that has been responsible for the breakdown of law and order in Bangladesh over the last one year or so. One of the reasons is that the police doesn't come on duty. Policemen feel scared and don’t want to take steps because they are afraid that what if tomorrow another government comes and puts up some trial. So the law enforcement machinery has been weakened from that particular position. And I think Tarique Rahman will focus on trying to restore that.
India has been worried about the Hindu-Muslim clashes in Bangladesh? What is your view?
The fact that such a major change took place in Bangladesh, whom India’s leaders saw as the model neighbour have resulted in a reaction in India. My personal belief is that this is disproportionate to what the events merit. There have been acts of violence against some Hindus, but they used to take place even in the Awami League era. Maybe the government was more vigilant in punishing them then and has been less vigilant in punishing people now. But I don’t think it is in the interest of anybody in Bangladesh to create another 1947 like situation in which Bangladesh’s Hindu population starts leaving the country. They don’t want that.
There’s enough reason to criticize what has happened in Bangladesh. But an overly simplified account of things is also not right. You have to understand that all politics, all development of events involves multiple actors doing multiple things. It’s not right, you know, it's never right to say only one party was right always, was right even in this, will always be right and everybody else. That’s not the way to analyse situations.
