Last week’s meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Bangladesh’s chief adviser, Muhammad Yunus, on the sidelines of the BIMSTEC Summit in Bangkok has lent itself to divergent interpretations.
Within India, there is a section in the government that feels Modi need not have responded to persistent requests from the Bangladeshi side for a bilateral meeting, the first since Bangladesh’s interim administration assumed charge in August 2024. Since the attitude of the post-Awami League dispensation in Dhaka has been anything but friendly towards India, it was felt that Yunus should be left to stew. This was more so because a meeting would have been tantamount to India conceding the legitimacy of the Yunus dispensation.
As opposed to this policy of calculated cussedness, the view that eventually prevailed was that snubbing Yunus repeatedly — he had sought a meeting before embarking on his visit to China — would be discourteous and would take relations between both countries to a near-breakdown level. It was argued that it would make more sense for Modi to state India’s mounting concerns directly and bluntly to the chief adviser. At least New Delhi would not be accused of unilateralism in the coming months.
It is not known how South Block has digested the outcome of the Bangkok meeting. However, since Bangladesh attached greater significance to the hour-long meeting than did India, it is interesting to observe its reactions. Since the language of discourse in Bangladesh is almost exclusively Bangla — the use of English is negligible — some of the reactions may not have been appropriately internalised in Delhi.
First, any assessment of how Bangladesh perceives its bilateral relations with India must consider the staggering degree of anti-India sentiment that exists after the fall of the Sheikh Hasina government last August. For those accustomed to the spectacular bonhomie that marked relations with India in the past 15 years, the turnaround has been unbelievably sharp. With the supporters of the Awami League hounded out of public life or in exile, the discourse in today’s Dhaka centres on the shades of anti-India sentiment.
It therefore follows that the publicly-stated assessment in Bangladesh of the Modi-Yunus meeting has not cast India in a favourable light. The meeting has been viewed in the politically-controlled Bangladesh media as evidence of India grudgingly acknowledging the paramount importance of Bangladesh in the region. Those more charitably disposed towards Yunus believe that it was the chief adviser’s ‘successful’ visit to Beijing that nudged Indian diplomats into accepting the wisdom of the Bangkok meeting. By the same logic, it was felt in Bangladesh that Yunus’s sharp reminder to India about the strategic vulnerability of the Seven Sisters of northeastern India had forced Modi to get off his high horse. It was also suggested by another associate of Yunus that India may have been moved by the calculation that how it treats its Muslim minorities could result in ‘reciprocal or collateral damage’ to the Hindus in Bangladesh. In short, Bangladesh also has the ability to bare its fangs.
Secondly, it was clear that the coterie around Yunus sought to use the meeting to bolster his political profile domestically. It is instructive to remember thatin the fortnight or so before Yunus’s visit to China, Bangladesh was gripped by rumours of an imminent military coup. This followed an expression of disgust by the army chief, General Waker-Uz-Zaman, at the ugly political bickerings and the deteriorating law and order in the country. In the aftermath of the meeting with Modi, Yunus’s supporters, particularly those in the newly-formed National Citizen Party of student activists, started the buzz that the chief adviser should be elevated to the status ofan elected leader and hold office for the next decade.
It is entirely possible that Shafiqul Alam, the press secretary to the chief adviser, got carried away by the decision to project his boss as a political leader of great consequence by proffering a version of the Bangkok meeting that was colourful enough to provoke an unattributable rejoinder by the ministry of external affairs. However, Alam’s Facebook post that was described by Delhi as both inaccurate and “malicious” was not an individual act of indiscretion. It stemmed from the belief in the interim administration that Bangladesh is ripe for a radical makeover involving a complete detachment from the legacy of the 1971 liberation and the friendship with India. To the coterie around Yunus, foreign-policy success lies in increasing tensions with India.
For example, the systematic destruction of nearly all the symbols of the liberation struggle, including the demolition of the Dhaka residence of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was not the handiwork of wayward elements giving vent to pent-up feelings against the Awami League’s authoritarian impulses. Unless the so-called students enjoyed the blessings of Yunus and the section of Bangladesh society that identifies with the defeated side of 1971, this recasting of the country’s past would not have been possible.
The fears of Bangladesh moving steadily in an Islamist direction are no longer alarmist. All over the country, there are reports of women being forced indoors and made to wear burqas and even of strictures against musical performances. Meanwhile, following the spate of attacks after the regime change, the Hindu minority is living in permanent tension. So far, thanks to the spirited mobilisation by a new breed of leaders, including the imprisoned Chinmoy Krishna Das, Hindus have chosen to fight inside Bangladesh rather than join the refugee trail to India. However, this fragile peace could be unsettled any day.
In his talk with Yunus, Modi spelt out India’s desire to see a democratic government in Bangladesh after free and inclusive elections. This was a targeted message since it is now becoming clear that the group around Yunus is anxious to delay elections until 2029 by which time the new forces would have become more entrenched. The pro-Yunus hotheads have also floated the idea of a Second Republic and a new Constitution that will take Bangladesh into a different political orbit.
For India, the internal politics of Bangladesh is of consequence because it involves national security. Any official patronage of radical Islamism in Bangladesh is bound to have a fallout in West Bengal and Assam. During Hasina’s rule, many Bangladeshi Islamists had taken refuge in West Bengal. Fearing peremptory deportation to Dhaka —the fate of one of Bangabandhu’s killers who had hidden in Calcutta for some two decades — they have kept aloof from public life in India. With the new dispensation in Dhaka, these sleeper cells could become a new headache for Indian authorities. What were until last year merely border states could just as easily become the new frontline.
