Hasina’s return in Bangladesh comes with huge diplomatic cost for India

Immediately after securing her fourth term in office, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina described India as a “trusted friend” and recalled her seven years of personal uncertainties after the 1975 military coup that left almost her whole family dead.

“We are very lucky...India is our trusted friend. During our Liberation War, they supported us. Not only that, after 1975, when we lost our whole family — father, mother, brothers, everyone (in a military coup) — and only we two (Hasina and her younger sister Rehana) survived...they gave us shelter. So, we have our best wishes to the people of India,” she told media persons in a response calculated to ensure the Indian endorsement of a third successive controversial election marred by boycott by leading Opposition parties and large-scale electoral fraud.

India’s support critical for Hasina

Amid fears of rejection of the poll verdict by Western democracies and a lack of credibility evident in Chinese and Russian endorsement, India’s continued support is critical for the survival of Hasina’s largely one-party rule.

She has delivered on India’s critical security and connectivity concerns without getting Delhi to reciprocate in kind on critically-needed agreements on river-water sharing, like the one on the Teesta. But though Delhi has failed Hasina on appropriate payback in bilateral issues, it has more than made up for it by helping her out with survival in the face of determined US-sponsored regime-change operations.

Many with deep knowledge of US-India backroom parleys suggest considerable effort by Delhi’s policy mandarins in softening up Washington on Hasina — the visual element of which became evident in PM Narendra Modi’s efforts at getting US President Joe Biden agree to a selfie session with Hasina (and daughter Putul) during the G20 last year.

Systematic elimination of India-friendly politicians

But though Hasina has delivered on India’s core concerns and makes no secret of her success in “doing for India which no other foreign leader can or will”, her systematic undermining of pro-Indian elements who are deeply wedded to the values of the 1971 Liberation War is worrying Indian policymakers, especially those in the Deep State.

Not one of the 25-odd possible candidates suggested by India in back-channel parleys got official party nominations and, some of those, like 1971 war hero Mir Mostaque Ahmed Robi, who contested as an independent candidate, were allegedly defeated by orchestrated manipulations by intelligence services.

An unlikely friendship

India has good reasons to worry over the systematic elimination of India-friendly traditional middle politicians in a clinical purge started and overseen by Hasina’s adviser Salman F Rahman who was described by Pakistan president Arif Alvi as “my childhood friend”. Rahman’s overpowering influence over Hasina upsets the Indian Deep State because he openly backs Pakistan’s cause in Dhaka with his Beximco conglomerate (which employs many Pakistani ex-soldiers) issuing paid media advertorials on Pakistan Independence Day.

“It is unbelievable how someone in Bangladesh could back a country that killed 3 million Bengalis and raped 3 lakh Bengali women,” said Sukhoranjan Dasgupta, author on Bangladesh. “It is even more unbelievable that such a man, whose father, as a Pakistani minister from the Muslim League, suggested using the Arabic script for Bangla language, is conceded so much political space by Hasina whose father spearheaded the Bengali autonomy and Independence movement.”

India’s loss of influence in the Salman-dominated Awami League may get worse after this election, unless Delhi can get some of its ideological supporters into key positions in the Hasina Cabinet through the technocrat and women’s reserved quotas. A lucrative power-purchase deal with Adani is poor compensation for a functional democracy like India, which has to suffer huge embarrassment having to endorse such controversial elections thrice in a row.

A unique model election

Former Election Commissioner Brig. Gen. (retd) Sakhawat Hussain termed Sunday’s polls as unique compared to the previous two elections. “This time, the election is taking place between candidates from the same party in the name of independents and dummies. As a result, voters are less interested in the polls,” said Hussain.

“So, it is a unique model election… Results of the election are certain; everybody knows who is going to win. The only uncertain thing is who will be in the Opposition bench,” he added.

On Friday, the UN Special Rapporteur, Clement Nyaletsossi Voule, said he was “deeply disturbed” by the repressive environment surrounding the polls this time.

Diplomatic cost for India

Finding itself on the same page with authoritarian states like China and Russia on Bangladesh and at odds with its Western allies imposes considerable diplomatic cost for India because supporting Hasina’s “dummycracy” leads to an unusual spurt of anti-India sentiments in Bangladesh. Loss of influence both at the decision-making and popular levels in Bangladesh is an unacceptable double whammy, more so because it follows India’s similar loss of influence in the entire neighbourhood, from Nepal to Maldives, and calls to question Modi’s much trumpeted “Neighbourhood First” policy.

Hasina’s Model Mosque initiative, spearheaded by Salman Rahman, which seeks to create Islamic Cultural Centres around 560 government-sponsored mosques across the country, threatens to supplant Bangladesh’s largely secular and syncretic sociocultural space with attendant political consequences. The withering away of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party may leave the Awami League with no Opposition in parliament but it opens up the Opposition space for six to seven radical Islamist groups like Jamaat, Hifazat, and Islami Andolan, which draw inspiration and hope from the BJP-RSS’s political and electoral success in India.

It is time India stopped putting all its eggs in the Awami League basket and took a close look at genuinely secular platforms in the gender, minority, labour, and youth space to back an alternative platform with the potential to emerge as a party like the AAP.

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