Bangladesh needs to stop looking at Myanmar through the Rohingya lens alone

Bangladesh's engagement with Myanmar has, for too long, been conducted through a single, narrow lens: Rakhine, Rohingya, repatriation, border security, repeated in that order, almost as a matter of habit.

This focus is understandable, given the scale of the humanitarian burden Bangladesh has carried. But it is incomplete, and the void carries real strategic costs.

Regional and international observers of Myanmar increasingly view the country through a broader, more networked frame: the junta's unravelling, the rise of ethnic armed organisations, the contested shape of a future federal union, and how China, India, Thailand and ASEAN are already positioning themselves inside that uncertainty.

To those who study Myanmar most closely, it is a state undergoing structural transformation. To Bangladesh, it too often still resembles a refugee-management file.

That gap matters because it shapes how seriously Bangladesh is taken as an interlocutor.

By most accounts, Myanmar-focused actors, diplomats, researchers and figures within the resistance movement do not currently regard Bangladesh as a decisive stakeholder in Myanmar's political future.

Bangladesh is relevant, but narrowly so: on the Rohingya question, on Rakhine, on humanitarian spillover and on border management.

Bangladesh is not yet seen as a party with a seat at the table on the federal question itself, on what kind of Myanmar emerges from this war, who governs which territory, and how power is eventually distributed among the Bamar centre, the ethnic states and returning populations.

If Bangladesh continues to engage Myanmar only through the repatriation lens, it risks negotiating the fate of over a million people with actors who see it as a peripheral humanitarian counterpart rather than a serious regional interlocutor.

This narrowness has consequences that go beyond diplomatic status. It leaves Bangladesh vulnerable to reading Myanmar's politics too optimistically.

Consider the National Unity Government. On paper, the NUG's 2021 policy position on the Rohingya — recognising citizenship claims, promising repeal of the discriminatory 1982 Citizenship Law and inviting Rohingya into the anti-coup movement — reads as a historic break with decades of Myanmar state practice.

It is easy, and tempting, for Bangladeshi policymakers to treat that document as settled political will inside Myanmar's opposition.

Successive Buddhist nationalist religious movements, most visibly the network historically organised as Ma Ba Tha, spent years normalising the idea that the Rohingya do not belong to the Myanmar nation at all, framing them instead as an existential demographic and religious threat. That framing still persists in social attitudes that extend well beyond any single armed group or political faction. Those attitudes draw, in part, on a wider Buddhist-majority suspicion of Muslims.  

Conversations with Myanmar experts and insiders complicate that reading considerably. Several people close to the exile government and to Myanmar's broader democracy movement made the same point in different words: publicly reversing course on the Rohingya is one thing; building durable domestic consensus for that reversal is another, and the NUG has been notably cautious about pressing the issue with its own base.

Aung San Suu Kyi's political fortunes were shaped in part by how toxic the Rohingya issue became with the Bamar Buddhist electorate; that lesson has not been lost on her successors in exile. Public statements exist.

The private appetite to act on them, several insiders suggested, is far thinner than the paperwork implies. A position paper written for an international audience is not the same thing as a mandate that will survive contact with Myanmar's own domestic politics, particularly in a country still fighting a civil war it has not yet won.

This is not a reason to dismiss the NUG's stated position, which remains the most progressive one on record from any major Myanmar political actor. It is a reason for Bangladesh to stop treating that position as a finished outcome rather than a fragile opening.

Repatriation planning built on the assumption of goodwill that has not been tested against Myanmar's internal politics is planning built on sand, and Rakhine State, where the Arakan Army now holds the ground the Rohingya would return to, is exactly where that sand is thinnest.

But under the formal policy lies a harder and less negotiable obstacle.

The Rohingya remain, in practical terms, largely unwanted across most of the political and social landscape they would be returning to. This is not confined to Rakhine nationalist politics.

Successive Buddhist nationalist religious movements, most visibly the network historically organised as Ma Ba Tha, spent years normalising the idea that the Rohingya do not belong to the Myanmar nation at all, framing them instead as an existential demographic and religious threat.

That framing persists in social attitudes that extend well beyond any single armed group or political faction. Those attitudes draw, in part, on a wider Buddhist-majority suspicion of Muslims that predates the Rohingya crisis itself and is not confined to Rakhine State.

This diffuse, largely unspoken social consensus, rather than any single group's declared position, is the real bottleneck. It is difficult to negotiate away in a repatriation agreement precisely because it does not sit with any one signatory.

A ceasefire can be brokered with an armed group and a government can legislate a citizenship pathway. Still, neither instrument reaches a broadly shared social reluctance to accept the Rohingya as fellow citizens.

For Bangladesh, this means the central obstacle to repatriation may not be resolved by any diplomatic breakthrough with the junta, the NUG or the Arakan Army alone; it will persist as a background condition shaping how any formal agreement is implemented on the ground.

The Rohingya are Myanmar's responsibility, the atrocities committed against them demand accountability, and Bangladesh has carried an extraordinary humanitarian burden with too little international compensation for eight years and counting. But precision about Myanmar's internal politics is not softness towards the moral claim. It protects it from misuse.

This is the point that matters most for policymakers in Dhaka going forward.

As Myanmar's civil war grinds on and international attention to the Rohingya periodically spikes, there will be no shortage of external powers seeking to shape the response.

Western governments and institutions will be prominent among them. They may frame the crisis in ways that serve their own strategic competition with China or their domestic political narratives, rather than the interests of those actually living with the consequences: Rohingya refugees, host communities in Cox's Bazar, and the wider security architecture of Bangladesh, Myanmar and India.

A crisis this raw, this prolonged and this internationally visible is easy to instrumentalise through selective pressure campaigns, funding conditionalities tied to geopolitical objectives, and narratives that quietly recast Bangladesh as either a permanent camp administrator or a proxy in someone else's contest with Beijing or Naypyidaw.

Bangladesh cannot allow that. It did not create this crisis, and it should not let the crisis be repurposed as leverage in a great-power contest that has nothing to do with why a million people are still living in Cox's Bazar.

Bangladesh should engage Western partners on funding and accountability without ceding the framing of the problem to them. It should deepen direct, unglamorous coordination with India, which shares hard borders and hard interests with both Bangladesh and Myanmar's ethnic borderlands.

Most urgently, Bangladesh should broaden its Myanmar expertise beyond the Rakhine-Rohingya axis. That would allow Dhaka to understand and engage with the federalism conversation now underway, rather than discovering its outcome only after others have settled it.

The Rohingya crisis will be resolved, if it is resolved at all, through patient and realistic engagement with Myanmar's actual internal politics, including both its public commitments and private hesitations. Bangladesh can earn a seat at the table only by understanding the whole board, not just the corner where its own crisis sits.

Simon Mohsin is a political and international affairs analyst. 

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of The Business Standard.