India-Bangladesh ties need to be bigger than one leader

For decades, the relationship between India and Bangladesh was cited as a rare success story in South Asian diplomacy — a partnership built on shared rivers, a long land border, deep trade links and cooperation on security matters that mattered to both capitals.

That relationship is now under visible strain, and much of the public conversation has narrowed to a single question: what should New Delhi do about Sheikh Hasina's continued presence and occasional political commentary from Indian soil?

It is a fair question, but it is the wrong starting point.

The more useful question is what kind of relationship India wants with Bangladesh as a nation, irrespective of who happens to be governing it at any given time.

Critiques of New Delhi's Bangladesh policy sometimes treat India's caution as pure sentimentality — an emotional attachment to a fallen ally. That understates what is actually at stake.

India's northeastern states are connected to the rest of the country by a narrow corridor squeezed between Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan. Cooperation from Dhaka on transit rights, denying safe haven to insurgent groups and managing a porous 4,000-kilometre border is not a diplomatic nicety; it is a core security requirement.

Energy-sharing arrangements, river-water management under agreements such as the one governing the Ganges, and cross-border infrastructure projects all depend on a functioning working relationship with whichever government sits in Dhaka.

These interests do not vanish because a government changes. But they also cannot be preserved by trying to keep the previous government's favoured leader politically relevant.

If anything, treating continuity of personal relationships as a proxy for continuity of strategic interests is precisely the trap India should avoid — and the same trap it appears to have fallen into in Nepal, the Maldives and Sri Lanka in years past, when identification with one faction complicated relations with whichever government followed.

The distinction India needs to make

There is an important distinction that gets lost when this issue is discussed only in terms of whether India should "keep hosting her".

Granting refuge to a former head of government fleeing a mass uprising is, to some extent, a defensible humanitarian and legal act. States provide refuge under such circumstances without necessarily endorsing that person's politics.

What generates legitimate friction is different: public statements, rallies or media appearances from Indian soil that function as active intervention in Bangladesh's internal politics.

India can maintain the first without permitting the second.

A policy that offers Hasina safety while declining to provide her a platform for political activity would address Dhaka's core objection without abandoning basic humanitarian norms — and would be far easier to defend internationally than either extreme.

The danger of personalised diplomacy

It is tempting to fold the current friction with Bangladesh into a single storyline about India losing influence across South Asia — Nepal's monarchy and constitutional upheavals, Sri Lanka's economic collapse and political realignment, the Maldives' swings between India-leaning and China-leaning governments, and Myanmar's civil conflict.

There is a real pattern worth noting: New Delhi has repeatedly found it easier to build ties with individual leaders or parties than with durable state institutions, and has paid a price when those individuals lost power.

But each of these cases has its own domestic drivers, and treating them as identical repetitions of the same mistake risks oversimplifying genuinely different political histories.

The more precise lesson is not that "India always backs the wrong horse", but that personalised diplomacy is inherently fragile in any democracy where power changes hands — a lesson equally applicable to how other large powers manage their regional relationships.

Whatever the political temperature in Dhaka or New Delhi, the underlying geography has not changed.

Bangladesh remains wrapped around India's northeastern gateway; India remains Bangladesh's neighbour on three sides. Millions of people cross the border each year for medical care, education, trade and family visits. Supply chains, river systems and security cooperation cannot simply be put on hold while political disputes are resolved.

That interdependence is exactly why a relationship built on institutions — trade agreements, water-sharing treaties, security protocols and people-to-people exchanges — will always outlast one built on personal loyalty to a particular leader or party.

Bangladesh's political order has changed before and will change again. The geography and the mutual needs it creates will not.

Separate the individual from the state

None of this means India should sever ties with Hasina abruptly or dismiss the genuine security cooperation her government provided.

It means separating two things that have become tangled together: legal and humanitarian obligations towards an individual, and a strategic partnership with a state.

New Delhi can honour the first without letting it define the second.

For Bangladesh, the more durable ask is not that India pick a side in its domestic politics, but that it commit to engaging with whatever government Bangladeshis choose, on the basis of mutual interest and sovereign equality rather than personal familiarity.

That is a harder discipline to maintain than nostalgia for a known and cooperative partner.

It is also the only version of the relationship likely to survive the next change of government in either capital.

Mahmudul Hasan Komol is the spokesperson for the Bangladesh Study Forum (BDSF). 

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.