The imperative for practical India-Bangladesh ties

“Bangladesh-India” must surely be among the most misrepresented bilateral relationships in the region, and one to which governments of both countries and, to an extent even citizens, contribute with their denials and churlish behaviour.

The need to rewire the relationship ranges from Bangladesh bargaining harder for better and kinder border management and trade and transshipment quid pro quos, to ensuring equity in river water sharing and water management – life and death for Bangladesh, given its lower riparian location. Indeed, the fact that 54 major, middling, and minor rivers from India decant into Bangladesh; and that, every year, monsoon runoff from India contributes to flooding in Bangladesh – although hard rain and damaged rivers don’t give a damn about borders, as even Bangladesh’s surging India-baiters must surely realise – makes this an existential matter for Bangladesh.

Indeed, it’s a geographically existential matter, wrapped as Bangladesh is on three sides with a 4,096km-long border with India, its biggest immediate neighbour – China being the biggest proximate neighbour – and a slim opening to the Bay of Bengal to trade with the world. It’s now a very stressed canvas: both Bangladesh and India openly acknowledge the down-and-dirty of bilateral remission since Sheikh Hasina made a run for India on August 5.

Perhaps the greatest of bilateral misunderstandings of purpose, certainly in the public domain, has its roots in proportion. More precisely, lack of proportion. A slicing-and-dicing of the relationship can offer sharp relief.

Maritime routes and expanding airways for cargo and people, leading to trading with the wider world has ensured for Bangladesh a geopolitical and geo-economic diversification.

So, while India and Bangladesh in 2023 clocked about $13 billion in bilateral trade – a little over $11bn for India – this amounted to only about a tenth of Bangladesh’s total trade. China is by far Bangladesh’s biggest trading partner, topping India by more than $10bn; although Bangladesh’s exports to China are even less than Bangladesh’s exports to India.

India doesn’t count among Bangladesh’s biggest export destinations; the United States and several countries of the European Union do. In imports, India is Bangladesh’s distant second largest source after China.

But for both India and China, in the overall scheme of trade Bangladesh is a pale green dot. India’s overall trade in 2023 stood at well over $1 trillion; less than 1% of it was with Bangladesh. When it comes to China, that country’s trade with Bangladesh is less than 0.5% of its overall trade.

Bangladeshi reaction towards India rarely mentions the much larger China overhang in trade deficit and economic ingress.

Equally, this myopic view, of readily damning India while blithely ignoring China’s trade and policy ingress, also reflects India’s staggeringly poor optics in Bangladesh – an aspect this column has repeatedly highlighted. Compared to India’s cloddishly elephantine public relations – much trumpeting about “1971” and an implicit, now-grating undertone of demanding eternal gratitude from Bangladesh for it – China has played a quick-stepping, silver-tongued dragon: Saying little and doing much, from providing maximum input for Bangladesh’s infrastructure to supplying an overwhelming fraction of Bangladesh’s defense needs.

So, ironically, a “friend” from 1971 has earned suspicion, while a foe from 1971 – at the time China firmly stood by Pakistan and against an aspirational East Pakistan – has earned PR plaudits.

Elsewhere, chauvinistic drum-beaters in Bangladesh crow about the imminent meeting of the Chief Advisor to the country’s interim government with the US president in New York, after a high-level diplomatic, trade and “aid” delegation from that country visited Bangladesh earlier in September. Meanwhile, chauvinistic drum-beaters in India are crowing about the Indian premier having already met the US president this past weekend, as a part of the “Quad” security dialogue that also includes Japan and Australia.

Clearly, geo-strategic needs trump the quantum of trade, self-importance and cheap bilateral theatrics.

Bangladesh’s location makes it a prize. A robust Bangladeshi economy and any future hydrocarbon wealth will add to the icing on anyone else’s cake. Conversely, a demographically and economically fragile Bangladesh, and the merest likelihood of implosion, will add to local and regional risk.

Saner minds in both Bangladesh and India see this, know this.

The greatest impediment to bilateral relations then, remains that of attitude. And, here, India is hamstrung by its own insecurity and arrogance – and something will need to give for relations to be righted. But before that, a bit of background.

Bangladesh is relatively clear about what it needs from India, but sometimes there is a haziness here about the basic lens with which India has come to view Bangladesh.

Let me state this bluntly: India sees its border with Bangladesh as a great vulnerability. It’s not just about the slim so-called Chicken’s Neck or Siliguri Corridor, a pinch of land between southeastern Nepal and northwestern Bangladesh that connects India to its far-eastern landmass. If Bangladesh implodes, it has the power to reshape entire Eastern South Asia. And, so – and I say this with certainty – Bhutan, Nepal and even deeply fractious Myanmar also watch this possibility closely and will do everything to prevent its occurrence. In this they are somewhat taken with the Indian risk outlook.

Briefly, it goes something like this. Continue to establish bulwarks against China; and secure India’s borders by securing Bangladesh against every manner of implosion and explosion in a range from political to demographic. This scenario assumes the risk of everything from China intervening in India’s east, to climate change-related displacement in lower Bangladesh that would push people northward and outward; the resultant socio-political upheaval could exacerbate the crisis. And, from India’s perspective, essentially lead to a migration that no fence on earth can realistically prevent. This concern also feeds a majoritarian religious paranoia in that country besides feeding a territorial paranoia.

To go back to the risk, it’s something that Bangladesh itself is eminently aware of, and its best minds have been at work for some years to lessen it. After all, before a major crisis reaches any border, it would present an existential crisis right here at home.

Both the worst-case Indian scenario and Bangladesh’s future-oriented planning largely bets on Bangladesh’s economic growth – indeed, equitable economic growth – being its greatest insurance and absolution.

And all this, more than anything else, supplies the logic for India’s all-in approach with Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League, especially over the past decade, although the cementing of that relationship began during the pre-Narendra Modi years. A bonus was the demonstrated actions of the Hasina regime to ensure for India that refuge was denied to anti-India rebels.

It follows that any government of Bangladesh which soothes Indian insecurities will likely find an eager buy-in. It also follows that such a government will have great leverage to gain for Bangladesh a range of bilateral benefits that extend way beyond securing power for an elected monarch and coterie.

Surely the first such has to be the lessening or cessation of the abominable shoot-to-kill practice largely by Indian border guards all along the much-fenced border. It’s a practice that, since Sheikh Hasina decamped, has also claimed the life of two Bangladeshi teenagers, a boy and a girl; both Hindu, as Bangladeshis are quick to point out in their claim of India’s trigger-happy attitude.

In all the mind-boggling complexities that South Asia’s stressed histories and its enormously complex ethnic and religious matrices present to any opportunity for mutually respectful relationships and shared peace and prosperity, there is no room for more bad blood or winner-takes-all. It’s practical compromise, or nothing.

Sudeep Chakravarti is Director, Centre for South Asian Studies at University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh.

This article was first published on Dhaka Tribune.