The New Great Game

THE DRAMATIC OVERTHROW of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government on August 5 represents the biggest regional setback for India in more than a decade. The swift toppling, just six weeks after Hasina’s state visit to New Delhi, not only caught India by complete surprise but also carries adverse implications for Indian security. The development could weigh India down regionally at a time when New Delhi is seeking to play a greater role on the world stage.

Whereas New Delhi has reacted to the Bangladesh turmoil with deep concern and even alarm, India’s close strategic partner, America, has greeted Hasina’s fall with a sense of contentment. Washington’s smug satisfac­tion of Hasina’s exit extends, according to one analyst, to “gloating” by a section of the US establishment over the failure of the Indian project in Bangladesh.

US President Joe Biden’s administration had openly gunned for Hasina’s government, despite the fact that her secular regime kept the military and Islamists in check. Located thousands of miles away from the subcontinent, the US, in the name of democracy promotion, can afford to play geopolitical games without affecting its interests. But India, with vital security interests at stake, has no such luxury.

Democracy promotion has long served as a valuable geopolitical tool for the US. After greeting with glee the regime change in Bangladesh, the world’s eighth-most populous country, the Biden administration is now working on a new regime-change project by offering Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “amnesty” if he ceded power.

In fact, the US targeting of Hasina’s government served as a reminder for New Delhi of the wider divergence of American and Indian interests in India’s own neighbourhood, including in relation to Myanmar, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran.

After Myanmar—which is racked by an internal war that has been fuelled by stringent US-led sanctions and “non-lethal aid” to insurgents—Bangladesh could become the second immediate neighbour of India to be destabilised by short-sighted policies of the Biden administration. Greater turmoil in the region would seriously crimp Indian interests.

A destabilised Bangladesh would be India’s geopolitical nightmare. It would impose sustained costs on Indian interests, includ­ing potentially subverting the security of India’s vulnerable Northeast. It could also open the floodgates to the flow of Bangladeshi refugees to India, which is already home to countless millions of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, the most densely populated country on Earth, if one excludes micro-states and mini-states.

The rise of violent Islamism in Bangladesh, including scores of incidents of Islamist terrorism in this century, has been a growing Indian concern. Extremists linked with ISIS (Islamic State), Al Qaeda and the Bangladeshi, Pakistan-backed Jamaat-e-Islami have a long record of assaulting religious and ethnic minorities as well as secular, liberal activists. In a destabilised Bangladesh, such forces would proliferate and pose cross-border challenges to India’s security.

Meanwhile, New Delhi’s ‘Act East’ policy, already reeling from the growing turmoil in Myanmar, has suffered another blow from the regime change in Bangladesh, which has put at risk connectivity and transit links with India.

HAVING PLAYED A CENTRAL role in forcing Hasina to flee the country, the army has re-emerged as the final arbiter in Bangladesh politics. The interim government, made up of ‘advisers’ with little experience in handling national mat­ters, is just the civilian façade for military rule.

The army chief, General Waker-uz-Zaman, despite being related to Hasina by marriage, was instrumental in her down­fall. Like her late father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country’s charismatic founding leader who ignored warnings in 1975 that army officers in Dhaka were plotting to stage a coup and kill him, Hasina disregarded advice that appointing the ambi­tious, Islamist-leaning Zaman as army chief could invite an army takeover. Hasina took comfort in the fact that Zaman was married to her cousin.

But just six weeks after Zaman became the army chief, Hasina fell from power. As street protests intensified, it became apparent that Zaman was wavering in his support for the Hasina government.

Through deliberate inaction, Zaman allowed the situation to deteriorate to the point that the police and paramilitary forces could no longer contain widespread looting, vandalism and arson, including attacks on public infrastructure and the Hindu minority. The army chief then used the violent upheav­al to force the prime minister to leave the country on August 5. The night before, he bluntly conveyed to Hasina the army’s refusal to enforce the lockdown she had ordered, telling her that his soldiers would not fire on protesters, many of whom by then were rampaging through the streets of Dhaka.

But with “mission accomplished”, Zaman ordered his soldiers to fire on Awami League activists protesting against Hasina’s forced departure from the country. In Gopalganj, Hasina’s home district with a sizeable Hindu minority, the military action left several people killed or wounded.

The army brass saw forcing Hasina to flee to India as a better choice than killing or imprisoning her. Bumping off Hasina in the way her father was murdered would have made her a martyr in the eyes of the millions who still support her, while jailing the sitting prime minister would have created a constitutional crisis impeding the army’s appointment of a successor administration.

Hasina’s forced departure, however, triggered greater lawlessness, extending from widespread looting and revenge killings to atrocities against the long-persecuted Hindu minor­ity, which had faced Islamist attacks periodically even under the Awami League government. In the recent protests, armed rioters, according to the official count, killed 42 policemen and looted 7.62mm rifles from law enforcement personnel. Only members of Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion and police carry this type of rifle. After the bloody mayhem, Bangladesh is struggling to fully restore order.

The total collapse of government authority in Bangladesh was redolent of the 2022 chaos in Sri Lanka when the Rajapaksa brothers’ dynastic regime fell apart. Just as Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country on a military jet without resigning, Hasina arrived in India suddenly aboard a Bangla­desh Air Force C-130J Super Hercules military transport plane without formally tendering her resignation to the president. And just as protesters in Colombo occupied the presidential palace, mobs in Dhaka ransacked the prime minister’s sprawl­ing official residence, looting each and every article that could be carried away.

But, unlike in Sri Lanka, the army played a key role in the re­gime change in Bangladesh, including handpicking members of the new interim administration.

There is also one ominous parallel between the upheaval in Bangladesh and the 2012 political turmoil in the Maldives, in terms of what the rioters sought to accomplish.

When the Maldives’ first democratically elected president, Mohamed Nasheed, was forced to resign at gunpoint, Islamists ransacked the country’s main museum in Malé, the capital, smashing priceless Buddhist and Hindu statues made of coral and limestone, virtually erasing all evidence of the Maldives’ pre-Islamic past before Maldivians converted to Islam in the 12th century. “The whole pre-Islamic history is gone,” the museum’s director then lamented.

Similarly, no sooner had the army chief announced Hasina’s fall than rioters systematically sought to erase symbols of Bangladesh’s independence struggle and statehood, including burning down the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum in Dhaka and toppling or defacing the statues and portraits of the Father of the Nation, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The museum was cen­tral to the history of how Bangladesh was created—a violent birth that occurred after up to 3 million Bangladeshi civilians (mainly Hindus singled out by Pakistan’s army) were slaugh­tered, some 200,000 women were coerced into rape camps, and about 10 million people fled to India.

The August 5 vandalism against national symbols was an attack on Bangladesh’s identity, its history and its statehood. It showed that, more than half-a-century after the country’s birth, there are still elements within Bangladesh that have not reconciled to its secession from Pakistan.

Since 1975, Bangladesh has experienced more than two dozen army coups or coup attempts. By assassinating the father of the nation, the army became the most powerful political player, ruling Bangladesh directly or indirectly for extended periods. It was the ‘iron lady’ Hasina who kept the military (and Islamists) in check—until the recent violent uprising against her rule led the army chief to compel her to leave the country.

Today, General Zaman is the power behind the throne. When decisive power rests with an extra-constitutional authority, democratisation can hardly gain traction.

The interim government has no constitutional mandate. The Bangladesh constitution calls for elections to be held with­in 90 days of the dissolution of parliament, yet the duration (or the scope of powers) of the interim government has not been defined. Political discontent will grow if the constitutional deadline passes without the holding of elections.

The country’s president holds a largely ceremonial position. And the interim government consists only of advisers. Advisers are not the same as decision-makers. Despite a US-friendly chief adviser, Muhammad Yunus, nominally heading the interim government, Hasina’s overthrow has left a major power vacuum in the country that is being filled by the military—and Islamists.

The army is puppet-mastering the moves and decisions of the interim government advisers, who, in any case, owe their positions to General Zaman.

Against this backdrop, purges are in full swing, spurring greater uncertainty and fear in Bangladesh. The country’s chief justice and the next five senior-most justices of the Supreme Court were made to resign virtually at gunpoint. The purges have extended to all institutions, from the military, intelligence agencies and police to the central bank and universities.

One can expect more purges and crackdowns, some silent ones and some possibly violent ones. The aim is to stifle all sup­port for Hasina and demolish her family’s political legacy. The Awami League has already been directed to “reorganise” itself (that is, rid itself of Hasina’s influence) in order to participate in the next election.

RUDYARD KIPLING’S PORTRAYAL of strategic skulduggery in his 1901 novel Kim popularised the “Great Game” of the time between the British Empire and Tsarist Russia for control over Afghanistan and Central Asia. Since then, several other Great Games have been played out or continue to be at play.

The de facto coup d’état in Bangladesh and the externally fuelled internal war in Myanmar hint at a new Great Game at play in southern Asia, despite the risks that the machinations could extend Myanmar’s destabilisation to Bangladesh and Northeast India, thereby spurring greater regional tensions and an up­surge of radical Islamism. This Great Game is being played on several levels, including diplomatic, espionage and economic, as well as through political manoeuvrings.

The US and China have separately sought to enhance their interests in southern Asia in ways that are generat­ing acute security and economic risks for India, the regional power. But while China sees India as an adversary, the US and India are friends, yet on regional issues of core Indian interest, Washington and New Delhi are not on the same page.

The US-India strategic divergence over Bangladesh began in 1971 when US President Richard Nixon turned a blind eye to the Pakistani genocide in East Pakistan and sought to prevent the birth of Bangladesh, including by urging China to open a military front against India. The US grudgingly recog­nised Bangladesh as an independent nation in April 1972 after a majority of countries had already done so.

In the subsequent years, even as India-US relations im­proved, the strategic dissonance between the two powers over Bangladesh never disappeared. US interests, after all, never aligned with Indian interests. Indeed, the dissonance became more pronounced when the Biden administration started gunning for Hasina, ignoring Indian concerns about the growing Islamist menace and political volatility in India’s neighbourhood.

In the name of seeking to restore democratic governance, the US has maintained cosy ties with every military or military-backed regime in Bangladesh since 1975.

Now, after the ouster of Hasina, Washington has said its approach to the military-chosen interim government would be based on “Bangladeshi people’s democratic aspirations and … a path to democratic governance”. It has welcomed the new interim government in Dhaka, saying it will work with it “as it charts a democratic future for the people of Bangladesh”.

But the new administration, with a radical Islamist leader as one of its advisers, is just a civilian setup for army rule. In a nod to the growing power of Islamic fundamentalists and extrem­ists in Bangladesh, the army chief included in the interim administration a leader of the Hefazat-e-Islam, a coalition of Islamist organisations that seeks a system based on Sharia (Islamic law). The Hefazat-e-Islam has been linked to attacks on the Hindu minority and to last year’s killing of a young blogger.

The Biden administration’s hard line toward the Hasina government began with its December 10, 2021 imposition of sanctions on Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) on grounds that RAB committed alleged human rights abuses as part of its war on drugs. Bangladesh was excluded from the Summits for Democracy convened by Biden in December 2021 and March 2023, while military-dominated Pakistan was invited both times though it did not attend either.

Bangladesh’s impressive economic growth trajectory under Hasina stood in stark contrast to the chronic political and economic turmoil in Pakistan. But, while continuing to reward Pakistan by prioritising short-term geopolitical considerations, the Biden administration sharply stepped up its criticism of democratic backsliding in Bangladesh.

It also started wielding the visa-sanctions stick against the Hasina government. Secretary of State Antony Blinken un­veiled a new US policy on May 24, 2023 to restrict the issuance of visa for any Bangladeshi individual believed to be involved in undermining the democratic election process in Bangladesh. Washington’s increasing hard line approach emboldened anti- Hasina political forces in Bangladesh, including Islamists and the largest opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which had allied itself with the Jamaat-e-Islami.

Now Hasina, alleging a US role in her overthrow, has reportedly claimed that, “I could have remained in power if I had surrendered the sovereignty of Saint Martin’s Island and allowed America to hold sway over the Bay of Bengal.” Ha­sina’s son, Sajeeb Wazed, who holds an American green card, apparently came under immediate pressure to recant her mother’s allegations. Hours after confirming to WION television chan­nel Hasina’s remarks about the US and St Martin’s, Wazed posted on X denying that she made any such statement.

The White House, asked about Hasina’s allegation that she was over­thrown because of her refusal to lease St Martin’s to the US, stated flatly that “we have had no involvement at all” in the events in Bangladesh.

It was on June 21, 2023 that Hasina openly raised the St Martin’s issue, tell­ing a news conference at her official resi­dence in Dhaka that if she were to “lease the island of St Martin’s to someone, then there would be no problem” with her staying ensconced in power. But, she added, such a lease “won’t happen” on her watch.

The US sought to build close defence ties with Bangladesh by urging the Hasina government unsuccessfully to sign the General Security of Military Information Agreement (or GSOMIA) and the Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (or ACSA). But the US has never acknowledged wanting to lease St Martin’s, a small island that is closer to Myanmar than to Bangladesh’s coast.

There are already around 750 American military bases spread across at least 80 countries. The US may be seeking to expand its strategic foothold to new areas where its presence is non-existent or weak, including the Bay of Bengal.

St Martin’s, with its vantage location just eight kilometres from the Myanmar coast, could serve as a US listening post. Such a listening post, however, would be more useful for elec­tronic surveillance of sanctions-battered Myanmar and friendly India than America’s sole challenger at the global level, China.

The new Great Game, of course, also includes Russia and China. The Hasina foreign policy embraced the concept of “equidistant diplomacy” in relation to China and India to help underscore Bangladesh’s neutrality in the Sino-Indian geopo­litical rivalry. Beijing, however, saw a pro-India tilt in Hasina’s foreign policy, a perception reinforced by her more recent an­nouncement that Dhaka would chose India over China for the multibillion-dollar Teesta River development project, which is to come up on Bangladeshi territory close to India’s narrow Siliguri Corridor known as the ‘chicken neck’.

Yet, like Russia, China sees a likely American hand in the regime change in Bangladesh, with Chinese state media stating that if any foreign power deserves blame for Hasina’s overthrow, it is the US. Three weeks before the January 7, 2024 Bangladesh election, the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman had warned that, if Hasina were re-elected to a third term in office, the US would create an Arab Spring-type of upheaval to bring about regime change in Dhaka.

Strategic skulduggery rarely leaves any political fingerprints. The truth may never be known, including whether, as some sug­gest, the CIA worked through its longstanding partner, Pakistan’s rogue Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, to foment an upris­ing against Hasina’s rule. In Pakistan, Imran Khan has blamed the US for helping to topple his own government in 2022 in league with the Pakistani military and his political opponents.

What is clear, though, is that, despite Washington and New Delhi pledging in a joint statement last year to become “among the closest partners in the world”, American interests do not align with India’s core interests in the arc extending from Myanmar to Iran. Bangladesh is just the latest wake-up call for New Delhi.

Dealing with this unpalatable reality puts India on the horns of a dilemma, with no easy choices. Although India will continue to cultivate deeper ties with the US, the Indo-US stra­tegic dissonance in India’s own neighbourhood is already quite jarring, given that Narendra Modi is widely seen as the coun­try’s most pro-US prime minister since Indian independence.

As for Bangladesh, its recovery from the political turmoil is likely to be an extended and difficult process. This is apparent from the retribution campaign extending to expanded purges and crackdowns.

Political upheaval or prolonged instability imposes major economic costs. Consider the case of Pakistan, which has repeat­edly sought International Monetary Fund bailouts in recent years.

In Bangladesh, the political upheaval, by stalling economic activity and creating unrest in the banking sector, is likely to usher in hard times, with inflation already spiralling and foreign-exchange reserves dwindling fast. It will not be easy to restore the confidence of foreign investors after the large-scale looting, vandalism and arson, including attacks on public infra­structure and setting ablaze hotels, hospitals and homes.

In the post-Hasina era, Bangladesh is likely to bolster its ties with China and Pakistan, which could come largely at India’s expense, including the security of the northeastern Indian states. At stake also are India’s transit rights through Bangladesh, Indian security and counterterrorism cooperation with Bangladesh, Indian investments in Bangladesh, and cooperation with Dhaka to control illegal migration to India, including by the Rohingya.

India’s longest land border is with Bangladesh, not with Tibet or Pakistan. And this is a porous border. India has no choice but to make major investments in strengthening the security of its borders, including with Bangladesh and Myanmar. India’s open border with Nepal poses a different set of challenges, which also need to be addressed.

BangladeshChina-PakistangeopoliticsIndia-Bangladesh relationsJoe BidenMuhammad YunusPolitical power struggleSheikh Hasina