India must lose its blinkers on Bangladesh: it an Islamist society and its politics reflects a 1947 reality, not 1971

 A Bangladeshi writer has written a post-election analysis focusing on what is happening inside his country, and how India must wake up to the new realities there. A Times of India article, written by Shahab Enam Khan, a professor of International Relations at Jahangirnagar University, and executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Indo-Pacific affairs, is blunt in its analysis of India-Bangladesh relations going forward. It is necessary for India to take note.

Indian foreign policy tends to take a rose-tinted view of what happened in 1971, but the new (ie, post-2024) Bangladesh wants to put that behind it and de-emphasise India’s role in that liberation struggle. The author puts the message sharply: “Forget shared history. That’s over”. Khan wants the new relationship to be transactional in nature, with the two countries as equal partners.

First off, India’s foreign policy makers must accept that how Bangladeshis want to view their history is their business. Our army helped them get freedom from West Pakistan, but that is our truth. If they want to be in denial, so be it. If they want to erase all memories of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his party, the Awami League, so be it. That the party was recently led by his daughter Sheikh Hasina, who was dethroned by the student agitation in 2024, is also not our business, though we should not feed her to the Islamist wolves in Bangladesh. She did help contain some anti-India elements in her country, and that was important in stabilising our north-east. 

We cannot also run away from the reality that the two parties that represent today’s Bangladesh polity, the victorious Bangladesh National Party (BNP) and the newly energised Jamaat-e-Islami, are Islamist and anti-India in their rhetoric. So the author’s views, which too tends to be anti-India in tonality, can be said to represent this perspective. Not for nothing does he warn that he wants only a transactional relationship with India, and makes it explicit that “Beijing remains the economic guarantor regardless of government, and Washington, Ankara and Islamabad will offer defence diversification solutions”. He could not have been more explicit about who Dhaka sees as partners, and who is the potential threat: India.

But while we can rewrite history, we cannot entirely forget it. Especially Indians who think somehow that Bangladesh is different from anti-Hindu, anti-India Pakistan. In fact, those in India who want to believe that Sheikh Mujib was somehow a secular individual, also need to give weight to the probability that he would have been a silent force behind the Great Calcutta Killings of 1946 during Jinnah’s Direct Action Day on 16 August. Huseyn Suhrawardy was Prime Minister of Bengal and he is said to have transferred all neutral police officers in order to let Muslim mobs target Hindus in the first round of killings. After that it became a two-sided communal carnage. Mujib was a student leader of the Muslim League at that time, eager to separate Muslim Bengal from undivided India, and equally keen to get as much territory for East Pakistan as possible.  

Mujib himself wrote in his autobiography that he supported the idea of Pakistan, and, at the time of partition, he believed both Karimganj and Cachar should have come to Bangladesh. He also believed that Assam ought to be a part of post-partition East Pakistan, since it had mineral and other resources that the new country would need to be economically viable. So how is it any different when spokespersons of the interim Yunus administration displayed maps showing the whole of the north-east as part of a wished-for future Greater Bangladesh?

That we tried to portray Mujib and his daughter as secular individuals is our problem, not of anyone in Bangladesh. A book by Deep Haldar and Avishek Biswas, Being Hindu in Bangladesh: The Untold Story, points out that some Awami Leaguers had targeted Hindus as much as those from the Jamaat-e-Islami or the BNP. With its huge mandate, the BNP under Tarique Rahman has no need to be extreme in its views on India, but he will be pushed by the Jamaat repeatedly to prove his anti-India credentials.

Shahab Enam Khan, the author of The Times of India article, however, manages to create false equivalence between the security concerns of India and Bangladesh, and especially the fate of minorities in the two countries. At the very least, India, with its tenuous geographical link to the north-east through the narrow Chicken’s Neck area, has more to worry about than Bangladesh. Three statements he makes in his Times article are worth noting.

While acknowledging India’s security concerns over extremism, he writes that “extremism is Dhaka’s nightmare too. But in pursuit of national security, persecution of minorities does not go unnoticed across borders.” This is no different from Pakistan claiming that it is a bigger victim of terroism, though its state-sponsored terrorism is primarily targeted at India. It is the fallout from this terrorist mindset that is now engulfing Pakistan. Bangladesh’s anti-Hindu extremism has been in evidence both in its pre-1971 avatar as East Pakistan, and its post-Mujib avatar as an Islamic republic. The constitution today is formally secular, but its society is not.

Khan’s attempt at false equivalence, by comparing what is happening to minorities on both sides of the border, is manifestly false. We dont’s have to deny that Muslims have been lynched or attacked in India by anti-social Hindu elements, but the targeting of Hindus in Bangladesh is qualitatively different. The attacks on some Muslims are isolated and anecdotal, the targeting of Hindus in Bangladesh is systemic. The two are not the same. No country which has seen its Hindu population fall from 31 percent at the time of partition to 22 percent in 1951 and now below eight percent can claim that there is no sustained campaign of intimidation and violence that is eviscerating the Hindu minorities there. In India, Muslims have been targeted, but their demographic numbers have only grown from nine percent at the time of independence to more than 14.5 percent now. 

Abul Barkat, a Dhaka University professor, has documented the systemic targeting of Hindus in his book, “Political economy of reforming agriculture-land-water bodies in Bangladesh”. He says that Hindu properties were targeted as enemy property, thus denuding them of economic strength. Not surprisingly, the average rate at which Hindus were leaving Bangladesh was 632 daily. He mentioned this figure in 2016, when discussing his book. This trend did not decrease much no matter who was in power, including the Awami League. Barkat predicts that no Hindu will be left in Bangladesh in 30 years if the trend continues.

Shahab Enam Khan notes that anti-Bangladesh rhetoric in India may have helped both BNP and the Jamaat, which is the new opposition, to win big this time, but he overstates his case when he suggests that “conjuring spectres of Bangladeshi illegal migrants” is somehow far from the truth.

Yes, it might annoy Dhaka, but is it really a false narrative? Both Hindus, who have had to flee persecution, and Muslims, who come here from economic reasons, are illegal migrants. But we cannot treat those fleeing persecution in the same way we do the others. If it is Bangladesh’s case that very few of their nationals have crossed over illegally, surely a mutually acceptable way of determining that can be arrived at. Why not have a mechanism to share Bangladesh’s citizen/voter lists, and check to see if those who have crossed over are their citizens, or related to them, or not? For its part, India can agree to let the illegals remain here on special work visas, as long as they acknowledge their Bangladeshi citizenship and these facts are documented.

A study by professors Vidhu Shekhar and Milan Kumar estimates that West Bengal has 1.04 crore more voters than what population data indicates. So while it may be fair to accuse Indian politicians of using illegal migrants as a means to get more votes, the fact of high levels of illegal migration cannot be denied.

The Times author is right to emphasise that “it is not Dhaka’s sole responsibility to fix the tentative relationship between the two neighbours,” but nobody is saying that at all. The question is whether any politician in Bangladesh is willing to accept that a fair deal is not a sellout to India? Just as anti-Bangladesh rhetoric may sway a few votes in India (in fact, they can sway the votes in both directions, depending on the religious communities involved), but this is more real in Bangladesh, where there is now no secular party left. The only Hindus elected this time around were on BNP or Jamaat tickets.

India must get ready to deal with Bangladesh on its own terms, and as equal partners, but the history of the sub-continent cannot be wished away. The unfinished business of partition is that the breakaway parts decided to become either theologically Muslim or demographically skewed towards one community’s dominance, whereas in India it is the opposite. This reality cannot be lost sight of while negotiating with Bangladesh in future.  

The polity of Bangladesh, after a brief interlude of formally secularism, is reverting back to its pre-partition reality. India must negotiate based on this understanding. No tilted glasses; no aman ki aasha. Just pragmatic deals where both sides get something in return for giving some.