Readers will know that for close to two years, this column has consistently, and insistently, advocated the rewiring of India’s institutional thinking and approach to South Asia in general, and Bangladesh, Nepal, and Myanmar in particular, to lessen an attitude of entitlement and the body language of a sub-continental zamindar.
In the wake of seismic political changes in Bangladesh since August 5, there are some suggestions for a clean-slate approach. While we shall in future columns discuss various nitty gritty aspects of what this rewired relationship could, and should, look like based on specific agendas, here are a few urgent to-dos and should-consider from a policy-and-personnel perspective, as it were.
The foremost move surely needs to be the recall of India’s High Commissioner to Bangladesh, Pranay Verma. Once the process of establishing initial contact with Bangladesh’s interim government is completed, it would be for the best if he left to make way for an envoy who would have the unenviable task to build trust over public distrust, public distress and, unequivocally in some cases, public disgust.
He’s now tainted in Bangladesh, the same as India’s foreign policy in this country; indeed, almost the entire region. High Commissioner Verma’s tenure witnessed enhanced bilateral trade and connectivity, built on the work of his predecessors and accrued in the cumulative way that public policy and diplomacy necessarily works. But the tenure is now exposed with him unalterably being the representative of an India that stood by the exceedingly muscular and supremely violent government of Sheikh Hasina and the entire despotic, numbingly corrupt, and wayward Awami League party infrastructure – for the purpose of securing India’s national interest.
Even though India’s security, foreign policy, and ultra-rightwing ideological imperatives have in tandem run regional policy since 2014, as New Delhi’s man in Dhaka, Verma is the face of a discredited India. A new face – outgoing, less cussed, more situationally aware – won’t immediately mend ties but it will certainly be the first significant stitch in the torn bilateral fabric.
Even before this change in envoys, a special envoy should begin the Bangladesh outreach in all earnestness.
This columnist isn’t the only one to repeatedly suggest the urgent arrival of a special envoy or goodwill ambassador to Bangladesh. My colleague in the Dhaka policy space, Shafqat Munir, has broached this imperative in his interactions since August 5 with several Indian media outlets.
There were suggestions of sending Harsh Vardhan Shringla, former high commissioner to Bangladesh, who went on from that appointment to be ambassador to the United States, and then India’s foreign secretary. Shringla remains an active ingredient in the foreign policy space; most recently he shepherded the preparation, logistics and execution of India’s G20 presidency. Indeed, it was during that presidency that Bangladesh was invited as a special guest – a great prestige irrespective of who governs Bangladesh.
As foreign secretary, Shringla visited Dhaka in August 2020, nearly four years to the day, to convey a “personal message” from Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Sheikh Hasina. Among other things, it was also to smoothen ties after a series of denigratory, communally-charged, and ethnically incendiary remarks made by several top officials of the Bharatiya Janata Party against Bangladeshis. (As it would turn out, injury would follow insult, as India would soon renege on promised supplies of Covid-19 vaccines to Bangladesh.)
Evidently, the visit aimed to also shore up India’s trade and connectivity interests. And, significantly, to push back against China’s $1 billion proposal to shore up the Teesta River basin in northern Bangladesh; a region close to the so-called Siliguri Corridor, or the slim “Chicken’s Neck”. The sharing of the Teesta’s waters and the negative groundwater, flooding, agricultural, and livelihood fallout have remained in India’s diplomatic penumbra. India, Bangladesh and China watchers will note with interest the run to Dhaka of yet another Indian foreign secretary, Vinay Kwatra, this past May, when China’s Teesta proposal was emphatically revived.
Anyway, to back to current envoys of emergency. Shringla is seen by many as being an unsuitable peacemaker especially after Sheikh Hasina and her flight to India on August 5. His remarks to the Indian media at the height of the protest led largely by students, and the Awami League government’s crushing blowback, are widely perceived in Bangladesh as problematic.
There are suggestions to have the current Indian foreign secretary, Vikram Misri, who took over from Kwatra in mid-July after a stint as deputy national security advisor, as the goodwill envoy. One could throw in another name in the peacemakers’ hat, that of Sanjay Bhattacharyya, who retired as India's ambassador to Switzerland. He knows Bangladesh, and has also worked closely to sort out the enclaves or “Chhitmahal” issue in 2015. And dare one think of Vikram Doraiswami's return to Bangladesh as High Commissioner? The outgoing, affable and networked diplomat moved to London as India’s high commissioner to the UK in September 2022; Verma succeeded him. It’s perhaps unusual to expect Doraiswami’s return to Dhaka as high commissioner, but these are unusual times. In any case his return as a peacemaker wouldn’t be unusual.
Beyond cosmetic surgeries, it would perhaps be in order to take a deep look at the BM (Bangladesh-Myanmar) Division in the Ministry of External Affairs. And, for good measure, perhaps the SAARC and Northern (Nepal-Bhutan) Divisions too. These divisions do the grunt work as dictated by those on high.
As for those on high, it appears that a process of auto-chastisement is already on its way, with India’s foreign minister S Jaishankar having made a high-level visit to the Maldives over August 9-11, widely portrayed in Indian media as a sort of comeback after India’s disastrous policy-and-practice run in that archipelago nation over the past two years. (Foreign Secretary Misri visited Nepal over August 11-12.) In the wake of the great public- and social media bad blood against India’s outright support of Sheikh Hasina and her government, it might be too soon for Jaishankar to make an apologetic policy-and-practice run to Dhaka. The only thing he could realistically expect at present is a cold shoulder served with opprobrium. An appropriately humble Misri or other special envoys might have better fortune.
In any case India’s muscular regional policy must end. Alongside the establishment and its think-tank torchbearers and mouthpieces, it’s a reality that India’s largely establishment-fed media has also suddenly woken up to, after Sheikh Hasina’s ouster.
India’s policy with Bangladesh and Eastern South Asia is predicated on boosting northeastern India as a bulwark, primarily against China; to stave off in-migration from Bangladesh as a result of implosion caused by a range of reasons from a climate crisis to socio-economic uncertainties; stave off as a corollary any overt and covert Islamist groundswell in Bangladesh that is perceived as being inimical to India in general and its eastern aspect in particular; and to ensure that on no account anti-India rebels find refuge in Bangladesh, Myanmar and even Bhutan – where some rebels compelled sanctuary not too many years ago.
This mono-focal approach has for long been spearheaded by India’s national security establishment, and headed by Ajit Doval, who was again signed on as India’s national security advisor by Modi for his third term as premier earlier this year. Such an approach, however, has also proved to be a blinkered approach, certainly in the cases of Bangladesh, Nepal and Myanmar, where India has for more than a decade driven its foreign policy and security imperatives without regard to the situation on the ground and with disregard for citizenry.
In Nepal, the establishment has been transparently interventionist in a range of issues from the design and purpose for a new constitution, to the proliferation of rightwing pro-Hindu organisations, especially along the Terai plains.
In Myanmar, India placed the eggs of Indian geo-political and geo-economic interests in the basket of the riotously controversial military junta and the Tatmadaw- or army-led administration. It has resulted in a blanking of Indian energy, port and transportation interests particularly in western Rakhine State and adjacent Chin, with steadily expanding rebel strongholds in these regions.
In Bangladesh, the situation resembles FUBAR, a colourful acronym a long-gone generation of American soldiers coined alongside SNAFU. All Indian eggs placed in the Hasina and Awami League baskets even in the face of a nationwide meltdown was only the apex FUBAR of an Indian establishment woefully and willfully out of touch with ground realities for several years. Moreover, a disinformation campaign that has resolutely attempted to paint a largely student-led movement as being a project hatched by the United States at best and radical Islamists at worst has capped an unlovely run of public perception in Bangladesh. Yet again India has been wrongfooted by its own inflated sense of self.
Perhaps it is time to retire India’s key national security and foreign affairs spearheads. Surely India has groomed and ready national security successors and foreign policy successors? Surely India’s vast national interest cannot be placed in a single executive basket? To put it another way, entrusted only to holy cows?
As a corollary, it will not hurt India to delink transparently establishment organisations like India Foundation from the Ministry of External Affairs’ regional outreach activity. India Foundation officials and a whole barmy army of establishment-fed policy analysts and fixers have descended on Bangladesh especially in the past two years – as this column has repeatedly noted. It doesn’t require rocket science to realise that they won’t be welcome in Bangladesh in the foreseeable future.
A fresh approach often works best with a fresh team.
Sudeep Chakravarti is Director, Center for South Asian Studies at University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh.
Indian diplomacy: What happens when regional cooperation devolves into ‘subcontinental zamindari’?
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