Fifteen years of silent complicity: how India built and broke its own influence in Bangladesh

Geography is not a choice. Bangladesh and India will share a border long after every current government has passed into history. The question, therefore, has never been whether relations will exist, it is what kind of relations they will be. Built on mutual respect and sovereign equality, or sustained through asymmetry, political favoritism, and the slow accumulation of distrust? That is the question the current crisis forces both countries to answer honestly.
The origins of this crisis are not difficult to trace. Between 2009 and 2024, Bangladesh-India relations reached their warmest point since independence. Security cooperation deepened, trade expanded, connectivity improved, and India secured strategic access to its northeastern states through Bangladeshi territory. On paper, the relationship looked like a regional model. Beneath the surface, it was something more complicated.
Throughout those fifteen years, Bangladesh experienced serious democratic deterioration. Elections were contested, political opponents were silenced, enforced disappearances became a documented pattern, and press freedom eroded systematically. Western governments and international human rights organizations raised consistent objections. India, with equal consistency, either stayed silent or continued its warm engagement regardless. The message this sent to ordinary Bangladeshis was not ambiguous: New Delhi valued a friendly government in Dhaka more than it valued the democratic rights of the Bangladeshi people. Whether or not that reading fully captures India’s calculations, it became a political reality. When the mass uprising of August 2024 removed Sheikh Hasina from power, that accumulated perception did not dissolve. It hardened.
In diplomacy, perception is rarely a secondary concern. It is often the only one that matters.
No single-issue captures India’s dilemma more sharply than the continued presence of Sheikh Hasina on Indian soil. A state retains the sovereign right to grant shelter to foreign political figures, that principle is not in dispute. What is in dispute is the line between humanitarian shelter and implicit political endorsement, a line India has conspicuously refused to draw. The Bangladeshi people, through a popular uprising whose scale cannot be credibly dismissed, rejected a government. When the principal figure of that government was permitted to remain in India while continuing to make political statements, a significant portion of the Bangladeshi public reached a logical conclusion: that India had not accepted the new political reality, and that the Awami League remained its preferred interlocutor in Dhaka. India could have adopted a clearer, more transparent posture on this question. It chose not to. That choice carries consequences.
India is, by every meaningful measure, the dominant power in South Asia. Its economy, military capacity, and regional influence dwarf those of its neighbors. But disproportionate power generates disproportionate responsibility. When tensions arise between a stronger and a weaker state, the expectation of greater restraint and diplomatic maturity falls naturally on the more powerful party. This is not sentiment; it is the foundation of any sustainable regional order. A regional power that uses its weight to pressure rather than reassure its neighbors does not produce stability. It produces resentment.
The political transition of August 2024 gave India a clear opportunity: to demonstrate, convincingly, that its relationship was with Bangladesh as a nation and not with any particular political party. India did not take that opportunity. Influential sections of Indian media and political commentary produced a sustained narrative portraying Bangladesh as unstable, hostile to minorities, and approaching state failure. Many of these claims were later shown to be exaggerated or factually false. Yet they shaped public opinion in both countries, and the damage to Bangladeshi trust was real. Simultaneously, social media discourse in India filled with references to military operations and aggressive scenarios directed at Bangladesh. These were not official government positions. But states are judged not only by what their governments formally declare, they are also judged by what their political culture tolerates and amplifies.
Border conduct has added another layer of tension. Bangladesh has formally raised complaints about push-in operations, instances where individuals were transferred across the frontier outside established diplomatic and verification procedures. Both countries possess functioning bilateral mechanisms for handling such matters. When those mechanisms are bypassed in favor of unilateral, informal action, it does not read as routine border management. It reads as political pressure. Many Bangladeshis have drawn precisely that conclusion.
Then there is the question of military signaling. Every state has the right to develop its defense capabilities, India’s sovereign right in this regard is unquestioned. But military posture also functions as a political language, and context determines meaning. Bangladesh has never made a territorial claim against India. It has never adopted an aggressive military stance. It has not joined any alliance directed against Indian interests. On the contrary, it has cooperated with India on security matters across successive governments. When security framing and military messaging intensify specifically toward a neighbor that poses no military threat, during a period of political strain, the message being communicated is not reassurance. A mature regional power should make its neighbors feel secure, not anxious.
Bangladesh today is pursuing a diversified foreign policy, strengthening relations with China, Malaysia, Türkiye, the Gulf states, Japan, and Europe. This is not anti-India policy. It is sovereignty in practice. India itself maintains concurrent relationships with the United States, Russia, and France without treating this as a contradiction. Bangladesh deserves the same latitude. A confident Bangladesh pursuing its interests through multiple partnerships is ultimately a more stable and reliable neighbor than one kept dependent and resentful.
India’s deepest strategic error, however, may be simpler than any of this. It treated the Awami League and Bangladesh as if they were the same thing. No political party, however long in power, is coterminous with a nation. Bangladesh existed before the Awami League and will continue long after it. By investing its political capital so completely in one electoral force, India created distance between itself and a large, diverse, and politically conscious society. That is the distance it is now struggling to close, from a position of diminished trust.
Bangladesh is not without its own responsibilities. Minority communities must be protected, not as a concession to external pressure, but as a constitutional and moral obligation. The rule of law must be upheld without exception. Foreign policy must be grounded in realistic national interest rather than reactive emotion. Political sentiment is not a substitute for strategic thinking. These obligations belong to Bangladesh regardless of what India does or does not do.
But responsibility in this relationship is not equally distributed. India’s sustained alignment with the previous government, its handling of the Hasina question, its border conduct, its tolerance of hostile narratives, and its position as the dominant regional power. all of this places the heavier burden of repair at New Delhi’s door.
What Bangladesh asks of India is not charity. It is recognition. Recognition that the Bangladesh of 2026 is not the Bangladesh of 2023. That its people made a sovereign political choice which deserves respect. That a relationship worth having must be founded on equality rather than managed through leverage.
Geography cannot be renegotiated. Diplomatic behavior can. And in the present moment, the first meaningful step toward rebuilding trust must come from India, not because Bangladesh is without fault, but because the country with the greater power and the longer record of consequential choices carries the greater obligation to move first.