Lhe pathetic end to the reign of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who was forced to flee her country in early August to escape a raging mob threatening to lynch her in her palace, is bad news for India. The new interim Bangladeshi government, led by 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, is notoriously angry with its big neighbour, accused of having supported for too many years this “iron begum” who has evolved her regime over the years into a sinister “democratura”.
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More broadly, this episode illustrates the changes underway in the geopolitical field of South Asia, a development that is forcing New Delhi to adapt to new constraints and to revise the modus operandi of its foreign policy. More than ever, India seems to be surrounded not only by enemies (China and Pakistan), but also by other neighbours who are infinitely less belligerent and yet anxious to escape its tutelage, or at least inclined to negotiate the conditions of its “benevolent aid”…
A development that is all the more worrying for the Republic of India as this paradigm shift has emerged in recent years against a backdrop of regional competition between New Delhi and Beijing. The fall of Mme Hasina thus risks having an almost mechanical consequence: giving an advantage to China if it turns out that the new Bangladeshi power chooses to rebalance the country’s foreign policy in a direction less favorable to New Delhi.
Battle at the top
“The close relationship that [l’Inde] enjoyed with [le Bangladesh] during Hasina’s term now faces considerable riskpolitical scientist Sumit Ganguly confirmed in the journal Foreign Policy. India is particularly concerned about the possibility that a government [bangladais] does not turn to China.
Bangladesh is not the only challenge facing the strategists of the government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The fall of her precious ally Sheikh Hasina has just added to the setbacks suffered in recent months by the “Big Mother” of South Asia. In less than a year, leaders rather hostile to India have come to power in two countries whose geographical position concerns it most closely: first in the Maldives, this small archipelago in the southern Indian Ocean that New Delhi considers to be part of its “private hunting ground”; then in Nepal, this Himalayan republic whose north borders Chinese Tibet.
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