Ishfak Farhan SiyamThe fall of Sheikh Hasina in August 2024 did not simply end a government. It ended a foreign-policy consensus. For fifteen years, Bangladesh-India relations had rested on a singular bargain: an Awami League government delivered New Delhi’s core strategic interests, including security cooperation that weakened insurgency in India’s restive Northeast, transit and port access, and political stability on India’s eastern frontier. In return, India provided diplomatic backing, economic support, and what its officials proudly called a “golden chapter” in bilateral relations. When that government fell, the bargain collapsed with it. What followed was not merely a cooling of ties, but a structural reorientation whose logic runs far deeper than the emotions of transition.
That distinction matters. Much of India’s early commentary framed the shift as the product of Islamist resurgence, anti-India populism, or external conspiracy. That reading was analytically thin and strategically costly. The rupture emerged instead from accumulated public grievances, structural asymmetries, and political choices made and avoided over many years.
The Collapse of an Old Consensus
Three overlapping grievances explain why the old consensus could not survive.
The first was a sovereignty anxiety that had accumulated, often invisibly, beneath official claims of friendship. By the late Hasina years, many Bangladeshis had come to associate India less with the solidarity of 1971 than with humiliation and silenced dissent. Border killings by India’s Border Security Force remained a persistent wound. The 2011 killing of Felani Khatun, whose body was photographed hanging from the border fence, became an emblem not only of Indian border violence but also of the Bangladeshi state’s muted response, which critics read as evidence of political subservience. The 2019 killing of Abrar Fahad deepened this alarm. A university student beaten to death by ruling-party activists after criticising Bangladesh’s water and energy agreements with India, Abrar came to symbolise the fear that India’s influence had entered the domestic political space, making criticism of the relationship itself fatal.
India’s own domestic politics deepened that anxiety. The BJP’s description of undocumented Bangladeshi migrants as “termites,” the Citizenship Amendment Act’s implicit grouping of Bangladesh with Pakistan and Afghanistan as sources of persecuted minorities, and the ruling party’s Akhand Bharat rhetoric collectively generated the impression of a neighbour that claimed friendship while appearing to treat Bangladesh as a demographic threat and civilisational periphery. These perceptions were not always fully warranted, but in politics, perception is power.
The second grievance was structural asymmetry. Bangladesh had delivered extraordinary strategic returns to India: security cooperation that dramatically reduced insurgent activity in the Northeast, transit corridors, port access, and a stable eastern frontier that transformed New Delhi’s regional security calculus. Many Bangladeshis, however, came to see the exchange as strikingly uneven. The Teesta water-sharing agreement, long anticipated, repeatedly promised, but never delivered, became the clearest symbol of this imbalance. For a lower-riparian country dependent on shared rivers, Teesta was not symbolic; it meant agriculture, livelihoods, and ecological security. The grievance sharpened when India also expressed discomfort at Bangladesh’s efforts to explore Chinese alternatives for river management: New Delhi had not resolved the problem, yet appeared resistant to Dhaka’s search for other solutions.
That broader perception of unequal reciprocity extended into trade, connectivity, and infrastructure cooperation. Transit corridors were framed as regional integration but read by critics as asymmetric access: Bangladesh provided territory while its expected access to Nepal and Bhutan through India remained constrained. The Adani power deal further reinforced that perception. Signed under Hasina with a company widely seen as close to the Modi government, the agreement was criticised as commercially unfavourable and insufficiently transparent. As Hasina herself reportedly remarked in an unguarded moment, India would always remember what she had given them. Whether boast or warning, the comment captured the underlying pathology: strategic cooperation had become personalised and transactional rather than institutional and reciprocal.
The third and most politically consequential grievance was the perception that India had become invested not in Bangladesh’s stability but in the Awami League’s survival. The International Crisis Group reported that an Indian diplomat said in June 2024, “We have no option but the Awami League.” India’s acceptance of the contested elections of 2014, 2018, and 2024 with full diplomatic support appeared to confirm that preference. When Bangladesh’s own foreign minister reportedly said in 2022 that he had asked India to do “whatever necessary” to keep Hasina in power, an allegation seemed to collapse into something closer to an admission. The opposition, and a broad section of the public, came to see India not merely as a difficult neighbour, but as an external pillar of what they viewed as a domestic authoritarian order.
By the time the July Uprising began, anger toward Hasina had already absorbed anger toward India. The movement was fundamentally about authoritarian rule and state violence. But it carried a powerful anti-India undercurrent because many who took to the streets believed the regime they were resisting had survived, in part, with Indian backing. Consequently, for any post-Hasina administration, legitimacy depended not only on distancing itself from the Awami League’s domestic authoritarianism, but also on demonstrating that Bangladesh would no longer conduct the Hasina era’s India policy.
New Delhi’s Reluctant Adjustment
If the July Uprising made strategic autonomy a new source of legitimacy in Bangladesh, India’s early response made recalibration increasingly difficult to avoid. New Delhi appeared to read the rupture as a temporary political disturbance rather than the structural collapse of an old bargain. That misreading set the tone for what followed.
External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar’s statement to the Indian parliament the day after Hasina’s fall was an early signal. By framing the upheaval largely through unrest, polarisation, and violence, while giving almost no attention to the state repression that had transformed a student protest into a nationwide uprising, India appeared to many Bangladeshis to be echoing the Awami League’s own narrative.
The Yunus-led interim government, however, did not begin by seeking confrontation. It kept diplomatic channels open and sought high-level engagement with Narendra Modi, including on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. India’s reluctance to grant that engagement, its caution toward the interim authorities, and its continued sheltering of Hasina deepened the impression in Dhaka that New Delhi was unwilling to accept the legitimacy of the post-July order.
Administrative decisions carried the rupture into ordinary life. India’s sharp reduction of visas for Bangladeshis affected patients, students, business travellers, and families, weakening one of the strongest people-to-people foundations of the relationship. Medical travel had long been one of India’s most effective sources of soft power in Bangladesh; restricting it made a diplomatic crisis deeply personal. Cross-border train suspensions, tighter border measures, trade disruptions, and the withdrawal of transshipment facilities further eroded the cooperative logic of the “golden chapter.”
The deterioration was amplified by the information environment. After Hasina’s fall, many Indian outlets portrayed Bangladesh through the lenses of chaos, Islamist resurgence, minority insecurity, and foreign conspiracy. Some concerns were real and deserved attention. Yet sections of the Indian media exaggerated and communalised them, depicting post-Hasina Bangladesh as if it were descending into Taliban-style disorder. To many Bangladeshis, this denied the legitimacy of the uprising and reinforced the Awami League’s longstanding claim that only it could protect Bangladesh from extremism.
These narratives spilled beyond television studios and social media into public behaviour. Protests, flag desecration, and the December 2024 attack on Bangladesh’s Assistant High Commission in Agartala suggested that hostility toward Bangladesh’s post-Hasina political order had extended into the public sphere.
Against this backdrop, Dhaka’s response was not simply retaliatory. It marked a shift from accommodation to assertive reciprocity. The interim government reviewed India-linked deals, challenged Adani, resisted fencing attempts, and questioned earlier understandings it deemed unequal. The same mood even spilled into cricket, one of South Asia’s most powerful theatres of popular emotion. Bangladesh’s refusal to play its 2026 T20 World Cup matches in India, after tensions over one of its players’ IPL exclusion and official security concerns, showed how far the rupture had travelled beyond diplomacy. For a cricket-obsessed country to accept missing a World Cup rather than appear insulted by India suggested that Dhaka’s harder line was not merely an elite energy; it resonated with a wider public mood.
The Reorientation Takes Root
India’s hesitation also widened Bangladesh’s diplomatic options. China moved quickly into the opening, offering investment discussions, infrastructure cooperation, Teesta management, port projects, and party-to-party outreach. Pakistan, largely frozen out during the Hasina years, re-entered the picture through diplomatic consultations, trade discussions, visa facilitation, and military engagement. These were not ordinary alternatives. China is India’s principal regional competitor, and Pakistan remains its historic rival. Their renewed importance underscored the strategic cost of over-personalising India’s Bangladesh policy around the Awami League.
Yet this was not an anti-India rupture. Yunus and Modi eventually met in Bangkok in April 2025. Bangladesh restored senior diplomatic presence in Kolkata and Agartala. Yunus sent mangoes to Modi and other Indian leaders. India sent medical aid after the Dhaka Air Force crash. These gestures showed that Dhaka was not trying to abandon India, but to renegotiate the relationship on more reciprocal terms.
Despite these gestures, several reports suggested that New Delhi viewed the interim government as transitional and preferred a fuller political reset after Bangladesh returned to elected rule. The subsequent transition, however, revealed that the challenge ran deeper than the government’s composition.
The BNP’s electoral victory did not restore the old India consensus. It institutionalised the shift. Historically, the BNP has been more cautious of India than the Awami League and more open to strategic balancing through China, Pakistan, and Muslim-majority partners. But its post-Hasina posture was also informed by recent experience. Before the 2018 election, India engaged the BNP and encouraged its participation, partly to avoid another boycott like 2014 and to lend the contest greater credibility. BNP leaders entered the election expecting a fairer process. When the vote was widely seen as rigged, and India quickly welcomed the result, many within the party concluded that New Delhi’s outreach had not been designed to ensure democratic competition, but to contain street opposition while preserving Hasina’s rule.
For a party kept out of power for fifteen years under an India-backed Awami League order, a rapid return to Hasina-style intimacy with New Delhi was politically impossible. Chinese economic zones, the Teesta project, the shift of some bureaucratic training from India to Pakistan, and Tarique Rahman’s early outreach to Malaysia and China all signalled continuity with the post-July reorientation. This does not mean Bangladesh is joining an anti-India bloc. It means India can no longer assume Bangladesh’s cooperation without bargaining for it.
The Need for a Reciprocity-Based Reset
The only durable way forward is a reciprocity-based reset. India can no longer secure durable influence in Bangladesh through reliance on a single party. It must engage Bangladesh’s full political and civil society, including the BNP, Jamaat-e-Islami, and the NCP. Engagement does not mean endorsement. It means understanding Bangladesh as it exists, not as New Delhi wishes it to be. China’s stronger post-July positioning in Bangladesh offers an uncomfortable lesson: Beijing kept channels open across the political spectrum, while India placed too much faith in a single political basket.
No issue offers India a clearer opportunity to demonstrate reciprocity than Teesta. For years, New Delhi argued that it supported a water-sharing agreement but was constrained by the Mamata Banerjee government’s resistance in West Bengal. But as the BJP now controls both New Delhi and West Bengal, Dhaka will naturally ask whether India can finally deliver what it has long claimed to support. If Teesta remains unresolved, many Bangladeshis will conclude that New Delhi was never serious. If India does not help settle the issue bilaterally, Bangladesh will seek Chinese technical and financial assistance for river management. India may reasonably worry about Chinese infrastructure near sensitive geography, but the best way to reduce that space is to remove the grievance that makes it attractive.
Rebuilding public trust is equally important. Even if Dhaka is prepared to reset the relationship, any rapprochement will remain fragile unless the Bangladeshi public accepts it. India still retains considerable soft power in Bangladesh through Bollywood, the IPL, tourism, medical care, and everyday cultural familiarity. But soft power cannot compensate for mistrust or perceptions of disrespect. More measured media coverage of Bangladesh and respectful treatment of Bangladeshi visitors would do more for India’s image than another diplomatic communiqué. The extradition of Awami League figures convicted or accused in proceedings related to crimes against humanity would be the strongest possible signal that India seeks a relationship with the Bangladeshi people, not with a fallen political order.
Economic ties require a similar recalibration. Controversial Hasina-era deals should be reviewed transparently, not as an anti-India exercise, but to restore public confidence in bilateral cooperation. Agreements associated with excessive costs, weak accountability, or politically connected firms have become symbols of asymmetry.
The same logic applies to connectivity: India’s transit and port access need not be abandoned, but they must be made politically defensible in Bangladesh through proper fees, sovereign regulation, reciprocal benefits, and meaningful Bangladeshi access to Nepal and Bhutan. Connectivity can still be valuable, but only if it is seen as mutual gain rather than asymmetric access.
A reciprocity-based reset must also address the security dilemma that pushed India toward one-party dependence in the first place. New Delhi’s concerns about its Northeast were genuine. A destructive shadow war marked earlier periods of bilateral mistrust: India was accused of aiding separatists in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), while Bangladesh, especially under BNP governments, was accused of assisting insurgent networks targeting India’s northeastern states. That history helps explain why India came to see the Awami League as its only safe partner.
The present context offers a chance to escape that old shadow war. With many urgent and serious challenges at home, Bangladesh has little incentive or capacity to revive weakened insurgent networks in India’s Northeast, and it would gain nothing from inviting renewed pressure in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Dhaka should therefore credibly assure India that it will not aid northeastern separatists, while India should reciprocate with similar restraint regarding the CHT. Such an understanding, however, will be possible only if mutual trust is rebuilt.
Bangladesh should also avoid reckless anti-India populism. Unlike earlier periods of intense Awami League-BNP rivalry, when foreign policy became a marker of partisan competition, the post-Hasina landscape gives the BNP greater room to pursue a pragmatic and balanced India policy. Strategic autonomy does not mean burning bridges. Dhaka should address India’s legitimate concerns and protect minorities seriously. At the same time, India should avoid exaggerating minority violence in Bangladesh while overlooking its own communal tensions.
There are already modest but encouraging signs on both sides. India’s appointment of a Bengali veteran politician, familiar with Bangladesh’s history, culture, and political sensibilities, as High Commissioner to Dhaka with the rank of Union Minister signals serious political attention. The restoration of visa services for Bangladeshis was another positive step. Dhaka, too, has kept the door open: Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman’s April 2026 visit to New Delhi signals readiness for renewed engagement, and senior BNP figures have spoken of a reset based on mutual respect and Bangladesh’s new political reality.
Yet the path to normalisation remains uneven. Anti-Bangladesh rhetoric during the West Bengal election, border push-in attempts, and the detention of one of Prime Minister Tarique Rahman’s advisers at Delhi airport generated fresh resentment in Bangladesh. Developments after August 5, however, elevated that friction to the official level and suggested that the obstacles ran deeper. After Hasina addressed international media virtually from New Delhi, Dhaka issued an unusually strong protest, describing the event as an affront to Bangladesh’s sovereignty and warning that it could undermine efforts to reset bilateral relations, although India said it had neither organised nor endorsed the event.
Yet neither side closed the door. Days later, Indian High Commissioner Dinesh Trivedi paid a courtesy call on Tarique, conveying India’s intention to pursue relations in a “positive, constructive and forward-looking manner.” Tarique, in turn, called for a “conducive environment” to advance bilateral ties while renewing Dhaka’s demand for Hasina’s extradition. These developments point to the contours of a recalibrated relationship: Dhaka remains prepared to engage New Delhi, but is unwilling to accommodate what it perceives as interference in its domestic political order.
The future of Bangladesh-India relations, therefore, depends on replacing patronage with partnership. India may not receive the exceptional strategic accommodations it enjoyed under Hasina, but it can still secure a steadier and more durable relationship if it chooses respectful, broad-based engagement over reliance on one party. A more confident Bangladesh, for its part, can defend its sovereignty while reciprocating goodwill, taking India’s security concerns seriously, and acting as a responsible neighbor. The old India consensus is over, but a new and more balanced one can still emerge if it is built not on fear, nostalgia, or political dependency, but on sovereign equality, reciprocity, and public trust.
