In Delhi last week, Sheikh Hasina held a press conference that Dhaka promptly read as an act of political provocation. Bangladesh's interim government demanded clarification on India's policy position — not a diplomatic nicety, but a formal assertion that New Delhi had crossed a line by providing a platform to a deposed leader whose government collapsed under mass protest. Meanwhile, Dhaka deepened its engagement with Beijing, with China positioning itself as a willing and unencumbered partner for the country's reconstruction. And then, a warning from an unexpected quarter: Sheikh Hasina's son warned that Bangladesh risks becoming 'another Pakistan' — a country that fell into strategic dependency on a single external patron and lost its room to manoeuvre.
That warning deserves to travel northward and westward, to the foreign-policy establishments of South Block. Because the Pakistani parallel cuts both ways. Pakistan did not lose India through a single rupture. It drifted, decade by decade, through a series of choices — some made in Rawalpindi, some enabled by Washington, and some that New Delhi simply watched rather than engaged. Bangladesh today is not at that terminus. But the direction of travel is visible to anyone willing to look clearly.
The Architecture of a Self-Inflicted Problem
The honest accounting begins here: India's Bangladesh policy for much of the last decade was not really a Bangladesh policy. It was a Hasina policy. New Delhi built an extraordinary density of bilateral cooperation — connectivity projects, trade facilitation, security coordination on insurgency and border management — but routed almost all of it through a single political relationship. When that relationship's subject fell from power in August 2024 under the weight of a youth-led uprising, India found itself holding the architecture of a partnership with no interlocutor inside it.
This is not a partisan observation. It is a structural diagnosis. Bangladesh's interim administration under Muhammad Yunus came to power with a democratic mandate born of mass mobilisation, not a military coup. It has legitimate political roots and an international standing that New Delhi would be unwise to dismiss. Yet India's initial posture — sheltering Hasina in Delhi, maintaining a visible distance from the new government, allowing the impression to form that it was waiting for a restoration — gave the interim government every reason to seek alternative patrons. Beijing was not slow to offer itself.
The sequence matters. China did not create this vacuum. India created it. Beijing is simply filling it — as any strategically competent power would.
What Beijing Is Actually Building
China's deepening engagement with Bangladesh is not merely transactional. It follows a pattern New Delhi should recognise from Sri Lanka, Nepal, and the Maldives — each of which has at different moments swung toward Beijing when India's engagement calcified around a single political faction. The Chinese playbook in South Asia is not about ideological affinity; it is about institutional depth. Beijing builds ports, roads, digital infrastructure, and development finance arrangements that outlast individual governments. The partnerships it forges are with states, not with parties.
India knows how to do this. The Neighbourhood First doctrine articulated precisely this ambition — connectivity as the foundation of durable influence, shared prosperity as the architecture of regional stability. The road and rail linkages, the power grid connections, the port access arrangements that emerged from this doctrine were genuine achievements. The problem was not the philosophy. It was that implementation privileged the political over the institutional. When the political relationship broke, the institutional scaffolding had no independent load-bearing capacity.
In Dhaka today, a generation that did not grow up revering the 1971 liberation — for which India's role was decisive and honourable — is now setting the terms of the relationship. For that generation, India is not a liberator. It is a neighbour that backed the government they overthrew. That is the political reality New Delhi must engage, not circumvent.
From Personality to Institution: The Recalibration India Needs
The remedy is neither apology nor confrontation. It is statecraft of a more patient and more architecturally sophisticated kind.
The first requirement is direct, high-level engagement with the Yunus-led interim administration — not through back-channels or exploratory contacts, but through substantive diplomatic exchanges that signal India's recognition of Bangladesh's current political reality. Dhaka's demand for clarification on India's policy is, at its core, a demand to be taken seriously as a sovereign interlocutor. India should meet that demand.
The second requirement is to decouple India's bilateral programme from its political-relationship management. The connectivity investments, the trade arrangements, the water-sharing frameworks, the border management protocols — these must be placed on an institutional footing that does not require constant political reaffirmation. Treaties and mechanisms that survive government transitions are the currency of durable regional influence. India has the diplomatic capacity to build them; it must now deploy that capacity with urgency.
Third, and most consequentially for the long arc: India must engage Bangladesh's civil society, its universities, its business chambers, and its emerging political class. The generation that led the uprising in 2024 will govern Bangladesh through the 2030s and beyond. If their only frame for India is the image of a patron sheltering their former oppressor, the strategic cost compounds annually. India's soft power in Bangladesh — rooted in language, culture, shared history, and economic interdependence — is a genuine asset. It is being allowed to depreciate through inaction.
The Viksit Bharat Stakes
There is a larger frame here that South Block's strategists cannot afford to lose sight of. India's ambition to achieve developed-nation status by 2047 rests in significant part on the realisation of its northeastern economic potential — the connectivity corridor that links India's landlocked northeast to the Bay of Bengal, to Southeast Asia, and to the broader Indo-Pacific trade architecture. Bangladesh is not incidental to that ambition. It is the land bridge on which the eastern arc of India's economic geography depends.
A Bangladesh that is structurally integrated into China's regional infrastructure network — its ports, its digital backbone, its development finance ecosystem — does not merely complicate Indian diplomacy. It potentially forecloses the eastern connectivity strategy that Act East requires as its terrestrial foundation. The strategic cost of losing Bangladesh's cooperative engagement is not measured in bilateral trade figures alone. It is measured in the viability of India's own northeastern development vision.
S. Jaishankar has written with clarity about the distinction between a dependent mindset dressed as globalised thinking and a genuine strategic vision that uses foreign policy as both instrument and insurance. The Bangladesh situation is a test of whether India can apply that distinction to its own neighbourhood — whether it can shed the comfort of a familiar political relationship and build something more durable in its place. The answer that New Delhi gives in the coming months will say more about the maturity of Indian statecraft than any number of well-crafted multilateral communiqués. Hasina's departure was not India's failure. Failing to build a relationship with Bangladesh beyond Hasina — that is the failure that now demands correction.
