lThe pathetic end to the reign of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, forced to flee her country in haste in early August to escape an angry mob threatening to lynch her in her palace, is bad news for India. The new interim government of Bangladesh, headed by the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, is notoriously very angry with its great neighbour, accused of having supported for too many years this “iron begum” who has fostered the evolution over the years of her regime towards a sinister “democracy”.
More broadly, this episode illustrates the ongoing changes in the South Asian geopolitical field, an evolution that forces 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 that are infinitely less belligerent and yet eager to escape its tutelage, or at least willing to negotiate the terms of its “kind assistance”. “…
A development that is all the more worrying for the Republic of India since this paradigm shift has occurred in recent years in a context of regional competition between New Delhi and Beijing. The fall of M.me Hasina thus risks having an almost mechanical consequence: giving an advantage to China if it turns out that the new Bangladeshi power decides to rebalance the country’s foreign policy in a direction less favourable to New Delhi.
Battle at the top
“The close relationship that [l’Inde] enjoyed with [le Bangladesh] during Hasina’s tenure now faces considerable riskconfirmed political scientist Sumit Ganguly in August in the magazine Foreign policy. India is particularly concerned about the possibility of a government [bangladais] does not resort to China. »
Bangladesh is not the only difficulty facing the strategists of the government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The fall of his precious ally Sheikh Hasina has just added to the setbacks suffered in recent months by the “Great Mother” of South Asia. In less than a year, leaders quite hostile to India have come to power in two countries whose geographical position concerns it more: first in the Maldives, this small archipelago in the southern Indian Ocean that New Delhi considers to be its “private preserve”; then in Nepal, this Himalayan republic whose north borders Chinese Tibet.
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