India-Bangladesh Relations (PSIR Optional)

No relationship India has was created so deliberately by Indian power, and none has been so completely reset by an upheaval India did not see coming. Bangladesh exists partly because of an Indian intervention, shares India’s longest land border, and was for fifteen years the single success story of the neighbourhood policy — until the government that delivered it was driven out in a fortnight. What the relationship looks like afterwards cannot be answered in the vocabulary of the golden chapter.

The Structural Bases: What No Government Can Change

• The 4,096 km land boundary is the longest India shares with any neighbour, running through five Indian states — West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram — and touching a maritime boundary in the Bay of Bengal.
  • It is also the most densely populated international border in the region, cutting through villages, fields and river channels rather than through empty terrain.
  • Roughly 3,232 km stands fenced, on the Indian government’s own figures, with about 864 km unfenced and about 175 km assessed as not feasible to fence because of riverine and habitation constraints.
• Fifty-four rivers cross the boundary, and every one of them makes India the upper riparian. This single hydrological fact determines the emotional register of the relationship more than any treaty does.
• Language and culture do not stop at the line. Bengali is the mother tongue on both sides, and Rabindranath Tagore wrote both national anthems — a coincidence with no parallel anywhere in the international system.
• The North-East depends on Bangladeshi geography. The Siliguri Corridor — the 22-km “Chicken’s Neck” — is India’s only sovereign land route to eight states, and every alternative runs through Bangladesh.
  • Cargo to Tripura and southern Assam through Chattogram or Mongla is shorter, cheaper and faster than the corridor route by a wide margin.
  • The dependence runs both ways: Bangladesh earns transit revenue and gains market access, and its own north-western districts are equally hostage to Indian river flows.
• Geography compels cooperation, and both states have spent much of their history refusing it. This is C. Raja Mohan’s central observation about the pair, and it explains why the relationship swings so violently between warmth and estrangement.

“India and Bangladesh have normally worked against the logic of geography.”

— C. Raja Mohan

The Asymmetry That Frames Every Transaction

• Raja Mohan’s first analytical move is the strong-state–weak-state asymmetry. India is about twenty times Bangladesh’s size and roughly ten times its economy, so identical actions carry unequal meaning.
  • What Delhi experiences as assistance, Dhaka can experience as intrusion; what Delhi experiences as restraint, Dhaka can read as neglect.
  • His prescription runs both ways: India must be the more proactive party because it can afford to be, and Bangladesh must recognise, out of “enlightened self-interest”, that good relations with India serve Bangladesh at least as much as they serve India.
• Asymmetry makes India an actor in Bangladeshi domestic politics, whether or not India acts. Every Bangladeshi party must have an India position, which converts a foreign-policy question into an identity question.
• Smruti Pattanaik locates the causal arrow firmly inside Bangladesh: the country’s internal political dynamics, not Indian conduct, have driven its India policy through every phase.
• Muchkund Dubey supplies the reproach from the Indian side — that India has historically neglected its smaller neighbours, treating them as a residual category rather than as the first claim on its diplomacy.

“India needs to invest more in its neighbouring states to counter China.”

— Muchkund Dubey

Why Bangladesh Matters to India

• Security of the North-East — the single largest Indian gain of the last two decades, and the one most easily reversed.
• The land bridge of Act East — Bangladesh is the physical connection between the Indian mainland, the North-East and mainland Southeast Asia.
• Sea lines of communication and Bay of Bengal presence, where Chinese port access would sit astride India’s eastern approaches.
• Counter-terrorism and de-radicalisation, given the transnational networks that operated freely across the border in the early 2000s.
• Balancing China in a country whose two major parties have both cultivated Beijing since 1975.
• Bangladesh is the pivot of two Indian doctrines at once — the test case of Neighbourhood First and the precondition of Act East — which is precisely why its loss is expensive twice over.

Phase One, 1971–75: Liberation and the Assumption of Permanence

India’s decisive contribution to Bangladesh’s independence is a matter of record, and it created an expectation of permanent alignment that turned out to be the relationship’s founding error. India read gratitude as a structural guarantee; Bangladesh read it as a debt that had been discharged.

What India Actually Did in 1971

• The trigger was Pakistani, not Indian. The Pakistan army launched Operation Searchlight on 25 March 1971 against the Awami League’s electoral victory, and Bangladesh’s independence was proclaimed on 26 March 1971.
• India absorbed roughly ten million refugees into West Bengal, Assam, Tripura and Meghalaya, a burden that converted a neighbour’s civil conflict into an Indian fiscal and security emergency.
  • Indira Gandhi’s government made the refugee burden the legal and political justification for intervention, arguing that Pakistan had exported an intolerable cost across a border.
• India trained, armed and sheltered the Mukti Bahini through the middle months of 1971, giving the liberation struggle organisation, sanctuary and supply.
• The diplomatic groundwork came first. The Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation of August 1971 neutralised the risk of great-power intervention and secured a Soviet veto at the Security Council.
• India recognised Bangladesh on 6 December 1971 — the first state to do so — and the war of 3–16 December ended with the surrender at Dhaka and about 93,000 prisoners taken.
• The Simla Agreement of July 1972 converted the military outcome into a political settlement with Pakistan, and the tripartite Delhi Agreement of 1974 completed repatriation and Pakistan’s recognition of Bangladesh.

Instrument of Indian involvement	Character	Effect
Refugee absorption	Humanitarian and fiscal	Supplied the legal justification for intervention
Mukti Bahini support	Covert and military	Made the resistance a capable force
Indo-Soviet Treaty, August 1971	Diplomatic	Insulated India from external intervention
Recognition, 6 December 1971	Legal	Made the war a war between states
December 1971 campaign	Conventional military	Produced the surrender at Dhaka
Simla 1972 and Delhi 1974	Post-conflict settlement	Repatriation and Pakistani recognition

The Mujib Years and the Treaty of 1972

• Mujibur Rahman built the new state on four principles — nationalism, secularism, socialism and democracy — of which Bengali linguistic identity was the organising one, and each of them pointed toward India.
• The Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Peace of March 1972 was a twenty-five-year instrument with mutual consultation clauses, and it was allowed to lapse in 1997 without renewal.
  • Its lapse is more revealing than its signature: by 1997 neither state wanted a treaty that read as an alignment.
• India assumed the relationship was permanently secured, and therefore invested in the leader rather than in institutions, publics or opposition parties.
  • Indian troops were withdrawn within three months of the surrender — a genuine restraint that India has never received full credit for.
  • But the assumption that a liberated Bangladesh could never become a strategic problem in the east was falsified within four years, and would be falsified again in 2024.

Phase Two, 1975–90: The State Redefines Itself

• The coup of 15 August 1975 killed Mujib and most of his family, and it did not merely change a government — it changed what Bangladesh understood itself to be.
  • Sheikh Hasina and Sheikh Rehana, abroad at the time, were given asylum in India and remained there until 1981.
  • The coup had sympathisers well beyond the army, and the external environment — Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, China and the United States — was hostile to the Indo-Soviet alignment Mujib represented.
• Ziaur Rahman redefined the nation around Muslim rather than Bengali identity. The shift from “Bengali” to “Bangladeshi” nationalism was the decisive ideological move, because Bengali identity is shared with India and Bangladeshi identity is not.
  • Secularism was removed from the constitutional principles in 1977, replaced by absolute trust and faith in Almighty Allah.
  • Islam was made the state religion under H.M. Ershad’s Eighth Amendment in 1988, completing the reconstruction.
• Foreign policy followed identity. Dhaka turned to Pakistan, China, Saudi Arabia and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, and India was relegated from unique ally to one partner among several.
• Aid dependence institutionalised the turn. War devastation, the cyclone of 1970 and the famine of 1974 left Bangladesh reliant on external finance, and India did not appear among the leading donors.
  • Gulf aid frequently came attached to Islamic institutional causes, which reinforced the very identity shift that had displaced India.
  • Indira Gandhi’s efforts to rebuild the relationship through the late 1970s produced little, because the obstacle was structural rather than personal.

Farakka: The Grievance That Organised a Foreign Policy

• The Farakka Barrage sits on the Ganga in West Bengal, about eighteen kilometres from the border, and it diverts water into a feeder canal to flush silt from the Bhagirathi–Hooghly and keep Kolkata port navigable.
• India commissioned it in 1975 and operated it for years without a durable agreement, which made it the perfect symbol for a government looking to define itself against India.
  • The Indian case is that the diversion is required to preserve a port and that the Ganga’s dry-season flow is a shared scarcity, not an Indian theft.
  • The Bangladeshi case is that a lower riparian’s south-western districts — salinity intrusion, irrigation, the Sundarbans — bear the entire cost of an upstream decision they had no part in.
• Dhaka internationalised the dispute at the United Nations in 1976, a move India regarded as a breach of bilateralism and which set the template for every later water quarrel.
• Short-term arrangements followed — a 1975 interim understanding, a five-year agreement in 1977 with a minimum-flow guarantee, and memoranda in the 1980s — but the period from 1988 to 1996 passed with no arrangement at all.
• SAARC was Ziaur Rahman’s initiative, floated at the end of the 1970s partly as a device to embed India in a multilateral setting where smaller states could combine; the organisation’s own history belongs to the account of South Asian regionalism.
• The relationship was not uniformly cold. India joined the large international relief effort after the catastrophic cyclone of April 1991, alongside the American-led Operation Sea Angel, and disaster response has since become one of the few reliably non-political channels between the two.

Phase Three, 1991–2009: Alternation as Foreign Policy

South Asia offers no clearer case of domestic party politics determining foreign policy than Bangladesh between 1991 and 2009. Two parties alternated in power, and the India relationship swung with each alternation in a way that no change in India’s own conduct can explain.

The Two-Party System and Its India Dimension

	Awami League	Bangladesh Nationalist Party
Founding claim	The liberation war and its four principles	Bangladeshi nationalism defined against India
Identity register	Bengali, secular, socialist	Muslim, with Islam constitutionally entrenched
India posture	Cooperative, at times dependent	Distrustful, historically permissive toward anti-India actors
China posture	Cultivated — the 2016 strategic partnership	Cultivated — the 2002 defence agreement
Leadership	Sheikh Hasina, Mujib’s daughter	Khaleda Zia and now Tarique Rahman, Zia’s widow and son

• The constant across both parties is China, which is why treating the BNP as simply “the pro-China party” is an analytical mistake — the difference between them has been about India, not about Beijing.
• The 1996–2001 Awami League government produced the relationship’s two durable settlements.
  • The Ganga Waters Treaty of December 1996, signed by H.D. Deve Gowda and Sheikh Hasina, ended thirty years of dispute over Farakka with a thirty-year sharing formula.
  • The Chittagong Hill Tracts Accord of December 1997 ended an insurgency that had spilled refugees and armed cadres into Tripura and Mizoram for two decades — an Indian security gain achieved by a Bangladeshi domestic settlement.
  • India extended tariff concessions in the same period, the first serious attempt to treat the trade imbalance as a political problem.
• The 2001–06 BNP–Jamaat coalition was the low point. Sanctuary was extended to Indian insurgent organisations, and the state’s own intelligence services were implicated.
  • ULFA — the United Liberation Front of Asom — maintained its leadership and camps in Bangladesh, alongside NDFB and NSCN elements.
  • The Chittagong arms haul of April 2004 — ten truckloads of weapons intercepted at a state-owned jetty, destined for insurgents in India’s North-East — remains the hardest single piece of evidence of official complicity.
  • Transnational networks including Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami established a presence, and India’s charge was that Dhaka was at best indifferent to jihadist organisation on its soil.
• The military-backed caretaker government of 2007–08 suspended party politics without changing the underlying pattern, and the December 2008 election returned the Awami League with a landslide.

The Bangladeshi electorate has changed India’s strategic position in the east more often, and more sharply, than any Indian decision has.

Phase Four, 2009–2024: The Golden Chapter and Its Hidden Price

The Security Breakthrough

• This was India’s largest and least publicised gain, and it came first because Dhaka chose to deliver it.
  • Arabinda Rajkhowa, the ULFA chairman, was handed over in December 2009; the general secretary Anup Chetia followed in November 2015 after seventeen years in Bangladeshi custody.
  • Camps were dismantled and the sanctuary that had sustained North-East insurgency for two decades was closed, which is the proximate cause of the peace agreements that followed in Assam.
• The Extradition Treaty of 2013, amended in 2016 to remove the requirement of evidentiary proof, institutionalised the arrangement — and, with a certain irony, is the instrument Dhaka now invokes against India.
• Coordinated border management and intelligence exchange became routine, and Bangladesh publicly committed that its territory would not be used against Indian security.

Connectivity, Energy and Money

• Rail links were restored one by one, reversing the severance of 1965: Petrapole–Benapole, Gede–Darshana, Singhabad–Rohanpur, Radhikapur–Birol, Haldibari–Chilahati in 2020 and Agartala–Akhaura in 2023.
  • Three passenger services ran — the Maitree Express to Dhaka, the Bandhan Express to Khulna and the Mitali Express linking north Bengal to Dhaka.
• Port access was the strategic prize. Agreements on the use of Chattogram and Mongla for cargo to the North-East, coastal shipping and inland waterway transit under the Protocol on Inland Water Transit and Trade shortened routes that had run through Siliguri since 1947.
• Energy became the densest layer of interdependence. Cross-border transmission carried about 1,160 MW into Bangladesh, and a trilateral arrangement from November 2024 began wheeling Nepali power to Bangladesh across Indian territory.
  • The 1,320 MW Maitree plant at Rampal was built as a joint venture; the India–Bangladesh Friendship Pipeline began carrying diesel to Parbatipur in March 2023.
  • The 1,600 MW Adani plant at Godda in Jharkhand was purpose-built to export to Bangladesh and became the most politically toxic single asset in the relationship.
• Roughly US$8 billion in Indian lines of credit was extended across three tranches, including a US$500 million defence line — the first India had ever offered Bangladesh.
• Development delivery went beyond infrastructure — high-impact community projects, training for thousands of Bangladeshi civil servants and judicial officers, scholarships for the descendants of liberation-war veterans, and railway rolling stock.

The Boundaries Settled

• The maritime boundary was settled by arbitration in July 2014, and Bangladesh won the greater part of the disputed area.
  • India accepted an adverse award without demur, which remains the strongest available rebuttal to the charge that India rejects third-party settlement in principle.
• The land boundary was settled in 2015, treated in full below, and stands as the only case in South Asia of a territorial dispute closed by agreement rather than left frozen.

The Framing — and What It Concealed

• Modi and Hasina both spoke of a “Shonali Adhyay”, a golden chapter, and C. Raja Mohan read the phrase seriously: political stability and policy continuity had let the two capitals deepen ties over a decade and begin to overcome the tragedy of Partition.
• S. Jaishankar went further and called Bangladesh the “model relationship” of the subcontinent.

“…a continuation of the bonds that were forged in blood, fifty years ago.” — S. Jaishankar

• The criticism the framing omitted is the one that matters. India built its position on a party rather than on a country, and on a party whose electoral legitimacy was steadily eroding.
  • The elections of 2014, 2018 and 2024 were each contested, boycotted or managed, and Indian support for the incumbent through all three was read in Bangladesh as endorsement of an unfree system.
  • Indian official thinking hardened into the formula that there was no option but the Awami League, which is a description of a foreign policy that has run out of options rather than a strategy.
  • Warmth at the state level therefore coexisted with accumulating hostility in Bangladeshi public opinion, and anti-Hasina and anti-India sentiment fused into a single current.
• Nothing was built to survive an alternation. There was no serious engagement with the BNP, no institutional depth below the leader-to-leader channel, and no delivery on the two commitments — Teesta above all — that would have converted goodwill into interest.

India built a relationship with a party and mistook it for a relationship with a country; August 2024 presented the bill.

Phase Five, 2024–2026: Rupture and Partial Reconstruction

The Uprising and the Interim Government

• The July 2024 student movement began over a quota system reserving public employment for the descendants of liberation-war veterans, and escalated into a general revolt against authoritarianism, disappearances and corruption.
• Sheikh Hasina fled to India on 5 August 2024 after fifteen unbroken years in office, and has remained there since — the single fact that now organises the entire relationship.
• An interim government under Muhammad Yunus took charge, launched constitutional and institutional reform, and prosecuted Awami League figures under anti-terrorism and tribunal law.
• India’s position was immediately awkward. It had no relationship with anyone in the new dispensation, had sheltered the deposed leader, and found its officials described in Dhaka as having backed one side of a domestic conflict.
• Attacks on Hindu and other minority communities in the months after the fall generated a fierce Indian domestic reaction; the arrest of the monk Chinmoy Krishna Das in November 2024 became its focal point.
  • Dhaka’s position was that most incidents were political retaliation against Awami League affiliates who happened to be Hindu, not communal violence as such.
  • The Indian position was that the interim government bore responsibility for minority safety whatever the motive, and the exchange became a fixed feature of the estrangement.

The Trade War of 2025

• India withdrew the transhipment facility on 8 April 2025, ending Bangladesh’s use of Indian territory to export to third countries — the first hard economic instrument India had used against Dhaka in decades.
• Restrictions followed on 17–18 May 2025: ready-made garments were confined to the seaports of Kolkata and Nhava Sheva, and a range of consumer goods was barred from land ports in the North-East and West Bengal.
• Bangladesh retaliated in kind, restricting Indian yarn imports through land ports and squeezing the Indian textile trade at exactly the point where it was most exposed.
• The measures were reciprocally self-harming, which is the strongest argument that the underlying interdependence is real: both sides began seeking their reversal within a year.
• Modi and Yunus met on the margins of the BIMSTEC summit in Bangkok in April 2025; it was the only leader-level contact of the interim period, and was described as constructive without producing anything.

The Election of February 2026 and the End of the Two Begums

• The general election of 12 February 2026 was held with the Awami League barred, on a turnout of 59.88%.
  • Of the 297 declared seats, the BNP won 209, Jamaat-e-Islami 68 and the student-founded National Citizen Party 6.
  • A concurrent referendum on the July National Charter passed with about 60% “Yes”, endorsing a bicameral parliament with a 100-member upper house, prime-ministerial term limits, greater representation for women, stronger judicial independence and parliamentary oversight of the executive.
• Tarique Rahman was sworn in as Prime Minister on 17 February 2026, after seventeen years in exile, ending the “two Begums” era that had defined Bangladeshi politics since 1991.
• The doctrine is “Bangladesh First” — relations conducted on the stated basis of sovereign equality, national dignity, non-interference and mutual benefit, a formulation whose target is unmistakable.
• Jamaat’s 68 seats are the underappreciated result. A party India has treated as an adversary since 1971 is now the second force in parliament, which constrains how far any BNP government can go toward Delhi.

The Hasina Question

• The International Crimes Tribunal sentenced Hasina to death in absentia in November 2025, on charges of incitement, ordering killings and failing to prevent atrocities during the 2024 crackdown; her former home minister received the same sentence.
• Dhaka has formally demanded extradition, first under the interim government and again at the first foreign-minister-level meeting after the election, and has called non-compliance an unfriendly act.
• India has neither refused nor complied, and the legal ground for refusal is available in the treaty India itself signed.
  • Article 6 of the 2013 treaty permits refusal for offences of a political character, and a further provision allows refusal where the request is not made in good faith or in the interests of justice.
  • India’s own extradition statute supplies the same discretion, and no Indian government could send a former head of government to a death sentence without conceding the legitimacy of the tribunal that imposed it.
• The cost of keeping her is continuous. Hasina’s public statements from Indian soil are read in Dhaka as India actively hosting an opposition-in-exile, and each one has stalled the diplomatic calendar.

The Contested Memory of 1971

• 1971 is not settled history in Bangladesh but a live partisan question, and India’s standing in the country is attached to one side of it.
  • The Awami League’s claim to rule rested on custodianship of the liberation war, and its International Crimes Tribunal from 2010 tried and executed senior Jamaat figures for collaboration with the Pakistan army.
  • Opponents accepted the offences and disputed the process, so the trials simultaneously delivered accountability and deepened polarisation.
• The quota that triggered the uprising was itself a liberation-war entitlement, which is why a protest about jobs became a protest about the founding narrative.
• Jamaat’s 68 seats and the National Citizen Party’s arrival mean the parliament now contains forces with no investment in the 1971 story as the Awami League told it.
• The Indian implication is uncomfortable but clear. A relationship anchored in the memory of 1971 is anchored in a contested domestic settlement, and it needs a second anchor — interests, trade, water, transit — that does not depend on how Bangladesh chooses to remember its founding.

The Beijing Turn

• Tarique Rahman visited Beijing from 22 to 26 June 2026, before any visit to India — the sequencing was itself the message.
  • Fifteen memoranda and two agreements were signed, with a joint communiqué elevating the relationship toward a “community with a shared future” and about US$300 million in grants.
  • China agreed to support the Teesta River Comprehensive Management and Restoration Project and the modernisation and expansion of Mongla port, and backed Bangladesh’s BRICS participation and its Shanghai Cooperation Organisation partnership application.
  • An exploratory 2+2 dialogue on diplomacy and defence was agreed, and a BNP–Communist Party of China inter-party accord created a channel that outlives any single government.
• The Teesta offer is the sharpest instrument China has ever used in Bangladesh. It converts India’s fifteen-year failure to sign a water agreement into a Chinese infrastructure project on a river system that runs close to the Siliguri Corridor.
• Mongla matters for the same reason Hambantota did — not because a commercial port is a naval base, but because the operating presence is what later makes a naval presence unremarkable.

The Reconstruction Under Way

• Normalisation has been quietly substantial, and the gap between the political mood and the working relationship is the most important thing to notice about 2026.
  • Visa services were progressively restored — tourist visas resumed in February 2026 and full services, including medical and business categories, by around May.
  • Khalilur Rahman met S. Jaishankar in New Delhi on 8 April 2026, the first ministerial contact after the election, covering visas, diesel and fertiliser supply, and extradition.
  • By March 2026 Dhaka was publicly seeking the reopening of land ports and border haats; by August 2026 both sides were discussing land-port normalisation, the yarn restrictions and a joint business task force.
  • CEPA talks were revived in March 2026 with an agreement to accelerate technical consultations.
• What has not happened is a visit. No Indian prime-ministerial visit to Dhaka and no Bangladeshi prime-ministerial visit to Delhi had been scheduled as of August 2026, and Dhaka has signalled it wants Indian movement beyond symbolism first.

	Golden chapter, 2009–24	Reset, 2024–26
Political channel	Leader-to-leader, single party	Ministerial, transactional, no summit
Security cooperation	Insurgent handovers, treaty-based	Preserved in form, untested in substance
Trade	Growth to about US$14 bn	Restrictions both ways, then partial rollback
Water	Teesta promised, never signed	China offers Teesta; Ganga treaty expiring
China	Present but balanced	Party-to-party accord, ports, rivers, arms
Public opinion	Warm state ties, cooling publics	Hostile publics, cautiously working states

The Land Boundary Settlement

• Created by pre-colonial treaty and frozen by Partition. Enclaves in the Cooch Behar sector originated in agreements between the Kingdom of Cooch Behar and the Mughals, and Radcliffe’s line in 1947 turned them into fragments of one sovereign state entirely surrounded by another.
• The Nehru–Noon Agreement of 1958 attempted an exchange, and the Supreme Court’s opinion in the Berubari Union reference held that ceding Indian territory required a constitutional amendment — the legal obstacle that delayed settlement for over half a century.
• The Land Boundary Agreement of 16 May 1974 was signed by Indira Gandhi and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Bangladesh ratified it at once; India did not, and the asymmetry became a standing Bangladeshi grievance.
• The Protocol of September 2011 updated the 1974 agreement, fixed the undemarcated stretches and settled the treatment of adverse possessions — land held by one state’s nationals on the other side of the line.
• The Constitution (One Hundredth Amendment) Act, 2015 gave effect to the settlement by amending the First Schedule, and was passed unanimously by both Houses — an unusual instance of foreign policy carried by cross-party consensus, with the West Bengal and Assam governments brought on board.
• The exchange took effect at midnight on 31 July 2015.

Feature	Content
Enclaves to Bangladesh	111 Indian enclaves, about 17,160 acres
Enclaves to India	51 Bangladeshi enclaves, about 7,110 acres
Adverse possessions	India received about 2,777 acres; transferred about 2,268 acres
Population	About 37,000 in Indian enclaves, about 14,000 in Bangladeshi enclaves
Nationality	Residents chose between the two citizenships; about a thousand opted to move to India
Undemarcated stretches	Daikhata-56, Muhuri River–Belonia, Lathitila–Dumabari — settled
Instrument	100th Amendment, First Schedule; exchange effective 31 July 2015

• India ceded net territory and gained a settled boundary, which is the transaction in one line — and the reason the settlement is cited as evidence that India will pay a real price for a durable outcome.
• The human dimension is the least discussed. Enclave residents had lived for sixty-eight years without schools, policing, electricity or legal identity, and the settlement’s real achievement was ending statelessness rather than tidying a map.
• The boundary-making analytics — allocation, delimitation, demarcation — belong with the treatment of South Asia’s border disputes; what belongs here is that this is the region’s only completed territorial settlement and that it was completed with Bangladesh.

Trade and the Politics of Asymmetry

• Bangladesh is India’s largest trading partner in South Asia, and India is Bangladesh’s second largest overall, with two-way trade at roughly US$13 billion.
  • The peak was about US$14 billion in 2023–24, of which Indian exports were around US$12 billion and Bangladeshi exports under US$2 billion.
  • The restrictions of 2025 pulled the total down through 2025–26, and the composition — Indian cotton, yarn, machinery and food against Bangladeshi garments and jute — has barely changed in twenty years.
• India granted duty-free, quota-free access under SAFTA in 2011 on all tariff lines but a short negative list covering alcohol and tobacco, which is a more generous concession than any other SAFTA member has made.
• The asymmetry is nonetheless the political fact. A ratio of roughly six or seven to one converts an economic structure into a grievance, and no amount of tariff concession has changed the perception.
  • Non-tariff barriers do the real damage — testing and certification requirements, port infrastructure at Benapole and Petrapole, anti-dumping actions and clearance delays measured in weeks.
  • World Bank work has suggested a comprehensive agreement could raise Bangladeshi exports to India by a very large multiple, which locates the constraint in facilitation rather than tariffs.
• CEPA is the answer both sides name and neither has delivered. A joint feasibility study concluded years ago, negotiations were repeatedly announced, and the agreement remains unsigned.
  • Bangladesh’s LDC graduation — scheduled for 2026, with Dhaka seeking a three-year deferral — makes CEPA urgent, because graduation ends the LDC preferences on which its garment exports depend.
• Rupee–taka settlement of part of bilateral trade was agreed in 2023, and border haats — small markets on the line, of which a handful operate — remain the single most popular Indian initiative among border populations and the most under-scaled.
• India’s 2025 restrictions were a strategic error dressed as leverage. They confirmed the Bangladeshi thesis that Indian market access is a political instrument, and their partial rollback has not undone that.

Where the Complementarities Actually Are

• Cotton and yarn into garments is the largest and least appreciated fact of the trade: Indian raw cotton and yarn feed the Bangladeshi ready-made garment industry that then competes with India’s own.
  • This makes the two economies vertically linked rather than merely competitive, and it is why Bangladesh’s land-port ban on Indian yarn hurt both sides at once.
• Pharmaceuticals run the other way. Bangladesh is one of the few developing countries with a genuinely export-capable generics industry, and Indian regulatory barriers rather than Bangladeshi capacity are what keep it out of the Indian market.
• Agricultural trade is seasonal, political and badly managed. Indian export bans on onions, rice and sugar, imposed for domestic price reasons and announced without notice, have done disproportionate reputational damage in Dhaka.
• Services, investment and digital commerce are almost entirely unaddressed, which is exactly the gap a comprehensive agreement exists to fill.
• Informal trade across the border is large and untaxed, and formalising it through expanded border haats is the cheapest available trade policy either government has.

Connectivity: The Asset India Built and Then Suspended

• Rail is the deepest layer. Six operational cross-border links now exist, and the Agartala–Akhaura link cut the Kolkata–Agartala distance from over 1,600 km through the Siliguri Corridor to a few hundred through Bangladesh.
• Passenger services were suspended after August 2024 — the Maitree, Bandhan and Mitali Express services have not run since, and their restoration is the cheapest confidence-building measure available to either government.
• Roads and buses run on five routes, including Kolkata–Dhaka since 1999 and Dhaka–Agartala since 2001, supported by six integrated check posts with more planned.
• Inland waterways operate under a protocol first signed in 1972 and repeatedly extended, carrying cargo along river routes that Partition had closed.
• Port access at Chattogram and Mongla is the strategic core: it gives the North-East a sea outlet and gives Bangladesh transit revenue, and it is the arrangement most exposed to political reversal.
• BBIN — the Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal Motor Vehicles Agreement — remains operative among three of the four after Bhutan’s parliament withheld approval, and functions as the practical alternative to a blocked SAARC.
• Connectivity is India’s most persuasive argument and its most fragile asset. Every link was built by agreement, and every one can be suspended by a single administrative decision, as 2024 and 2025 demonstrated in both directions.

Energy: Interdependence and Its Discontents

• Bangladesh imports about 1,160 MW from India across cross-border transmission links, institutionalised through a Joint Working Group and Joint Steering Committee.
• Forty MW of Nepali power has been wheeled through India to Bangladesh since November 2024, which is the first working instance of regional electricity trade in South Asia and matters far beyond its size.
• The Friendship Pipeline carries diesel from Siliguri to Parbatipur, supplying up to about 180,000 tonnes a year — a supply Dhaka asked India to increase at the first post-election ministerial meeting.
• The Adani Godda plant is the cautionary tale. A 1,600 MW coal plant in Jharkhand built solely to sell into Bangladesh, under a 2017 power purchase agreement, supplying over a tenth of Bangladesh’s electricity.
  • Payment arrears accumulated, supply was curtailed during the 2024–25 crisis, and a Bangladeshi review committee reported in January 2026 that the tariff was far above comparable imports and that Indian corporate tax had been passed through to Bangladeshi consumers.
  • The commercial dispute is secondary to the political effect: a single Indian project became the standing proof, in Bangladeshi argument, that Indian partnership is extractive.
• The general lesson is about structure, not about one firm. Energy interdependence binds only when it is priced defensibly and governed transparently; otherwise it converts every tariff review into a nationalist grievance.

People: Medical Travel, Visas and the Human Layer

• Bangladesh was the largest single source of India’s foreign medical patients, supplying more than a third of them and over half of India’s medical-tourism revenue.
• Visa issuance collapsed after August 2024, reduced to emergency medical and student categories, and the effect was felt hardest by exactly the constituency most favourably disposed toward India.
  • Bangladeshi patients redirected to Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and China, and a share of that traffic will not return.
  • Tourist visas resumed in February 2026 and full services by around May, but an eighteen-month interruption in a market with substitutes is not costless.
• Education and training were the quiet ballast — ICCR scholarships, the Muktijoddha scholarships for liberation-war descendants, and training programmes for thousands of Bangladeshi civil servants and judicial officers.
• People-to-people depth is the asset China cannot replicate, and India spent much of it in eighteen months of visa restriction for no discernible strategic return.

The Machinery of the Relationship

• The bilateral has more standing institutions than any other India runs in the region, which is why the working relationship survived 2024–26 even as the political one collapsed.
  • The Joint Consultative Commission, at foreign-minister level, is the apex review body and reports on the full range of sectors.
  • The Joint Rivers Commission, created in 1972, is the oldest and the most tested; it has met unevenly and its technical committees continued through the estrangement.
  • Sector groups cover trade, power, border management, water resources, shipping and railways, alongside home-secretary and director-general level talks between the border forces.
• The border forces meet regularly at director-general level, and those talks are the only forum in which the killings issue is formally raised.
• The weakness is not the number of mechanisms but their subordination to the leader-level channel. When summitry stopped, the machinery lost its instructions rather than its existence.
• Disaster response is the one channel that has never failed. Relief after cyclones, floods and the pandemic has moved in both directions across every political rupture, and it costs almost nothing to institutionalise further.
• Symbolic diplomacy has been generously used and thinly banked — jointly observed anniversaries of the 1971 victory, honours for foreign friends of the liberation war, restored rail lines named for friendship — none of which survived contact with a change of government.

The Multilateral Layer

• Bangladesh works with India inside every regional institution at once, and the pattern of that work is revealing: the bilateral is warm where the multilateral is cold, and vice versa.
• In SAARC, Bangladesh has been a consistent revivalist and India has not. Dhaka has pressed since 2024 for the resumption of summitry, and the Secretary-General, Md. Golam Sarwar, is Bangladeshi.
  • The SAARC COVID-19 Emergency Response Fund of March 2020 is the counter-example both capitals cite — an Indian initiative Bangladesh joined immediately, and evidence that narrowly framed functional cooperation still works when the political frame is removed.
• In BIMSTEC, Bangladesh leads the trade, investment and development pillar, and the organisation’s utility for India has always been that it delivers Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and the Bay littoral without delivering Pakistan.
  • The one leader-level contact of the interim period took place on the margins of the Bangkok summit of April 2025, which is a fair measure of what regional forums are for when bilateral channels close.
• BBIN is the working sub-region, and it exists because SAARC does not; it is also the frame in which the Nepal–India–Bangladesh power trade became possible.
• IORA and the wider Indian Ocean architecture matter more than they did, because a Bay of Bengal in which Bangladesh’s ports are being modernised by China is a different maritime space for India.
• Bangladesh supports India’s Security Council claim, and the two have coordinated on climate finance and development goals — but multilateral alignment has never survived a bilateral quarrel, which is the limit of the layer.

Defence and the China Factor

• India’s defence engagement is thin and treated with suspicion, which is the standing anomaly of the relationship.
  • Exercises exist — Sampriti with the army, Bongosagar and coordinated patrols with the navy, and Bangladeshi participation in the multilateral Milan — and about 1,350 Bangladeshi personnel have trained in India since 2015.
  • The US$500 million defence line of credit agreed in 2017 was substantially unused, because procurement from India carries a domestic political cost in Dhaka that procurement from China does not.
• China is the dominant supplier by an enormous margin, accounting for reported shares upwards of seventy per cent of Bangladesh’s arms imports.
  • China signed its first defence cooperation agreement with Bangladesh in 2002, under a BNP government — the point at which Beijing became a structural rather than an incidental presence.
  • Two refurbished Ming-class submarines were delivered in 2016, and a submarine base at Pekua near Cox’s Bazar was built with Chinese assistance.
  • Xi Jinping’s visit in 2016 elevated the relationship to a strategic partnership and brought Bangladesh substantively into the Belt and Road Initiative.
  • Negotiations reported through 2026 for a squadron of J-10CE fighters would, if concluded, mark the first Chinese combat-aircraft transfer to Bangladesh and a qualitative change in the Bay of Bengal air balance.
• The pattern is regional, not bilateral. Port access, submarines, BRI projects and party channels reproduce in Dhaka what China has assembled at Gwadar, Hambantota and Malé — the arrangement Indian strategic writing labels the string of pearls.
• China’s approach is politically indifferent, which is its comparative advantage: it dealt with the Awami League, with the Yunus interim government and now with the BNP, and its party-to-party accord is designed precisely to survive alternation.
• India’s counter is not to match Chinese capital. The regional contest and India’s instruments — Neighbourhood First, SAGAR and its successor framing, the Colombo Security Conclave, currency swaps and digital public infrastructure — belong to the account of China’s footprint in South Asia; what belongs here is what India can offer Bangladesh that China cannot.

	What India can offer	What China can offer
Geography	Adjacency — transit, land ports, grid, pipelines	Distance; everything arrives by sea
Water	The only possible partner on 54 shared rivers	Engineering finance, not flow
Market	Duty-free access to a large adjacent economy	A market on the far side of the Bay
People	Language, kinship, medicine, education	Scholarships and training, no shared society
Capital	Concessional, conditional, slow to disburse	Large, fast and without political conditions
Politics	Historically tied to one party	Indifferent to who governs

China can outbid India on capital in Dhaka; it cannot outbid India on geography, water, the grid or the shared language — which is why India’s losses there have been self-inflicted rather than imposed.

The Irritants

Water: the Ganga Treaty’s Expiry and the Teesta Vacancy

• The Ganga Waters Treaty of 1996 expires in December 2026, and its renewal is the most consequential item on the bilateral agenda.
  • It provides a sharing formula at Farakka across ten-day periods in the dry season from January to May, with a guaranteed release of the order of 35,000 cusecs to Bangladesh in alternating periods.
  • Bangladesh’s complaint is that actual receipts at Hardinge Bridge have repeatedly fallen short of the assured quantum, and it is expected to seek a higher guaranteed release, a longer renewal term and better flood-data sharing.
  • India’s position is that the treaty must be renewed through the existing bilateral mechanism, and technical delegations have met on both sides of the border through 2026.
• Teesta has been unsigned since 2011, when the draft — India 42.5%, Bangladesh 37.5% in the lean season — collapsed on the eve of signature.
  • The political veto is gone. West Bengal’s assembly election of April 2026 replaced the state government in May, ending the fifteen-year administration whose consent was withheld in 2011 and again in 2017.
  • The hydrological objection is not gone. North Bengal’s own dry-season command area is real, the Teesta’s lean flow is genuinely inadequate for both sides, and a new state government has its own constituency to protect on the same river.
  • The federal constraint therefore changes character rather than disappearing — from a veto exercised against the Union government to a bargaining position held within it.
  • China’s Teesta offer has altered the price of Indian delay, because a project India will not fund on a river India controls upstream is now on offer from Beijing.
• Negotiations continue on the smaller rivers — the Feni, on which an interim arrangement for drinking water to Sabroom in Tripura was agreed, the Kushiyara, on which an understanding was reached in 2022, and the Manu, Muhuri, Khowai, Gumti, Dharla and Dudhkumar under a framework covering eight rivers.
  • The pattern is that the small rivers move and the large ones do not, because the large ones carry a domestic constituency in an Indian state.
• The riparian law, the hydrology and the wider basin argument belong with the treatment of river water disputes; here water functions as the relationship’s most reliable generator of grievance.

Border Killings

• The most emotive issue in Bangladeshi public opinion, and the one Indian discussion consistently underweights.
• The scale is not marginal. Bangladeshi human rights monitors record on the order of 1,185 deaths between 2000 and 2019, and annual figures have run in the twenties and thirties through the 2020s, peaking at over forty in 2020.
• The case of Felani Khatun, a fifteen-year-old shot in January 2011 and left hanging on the border fence for hours, became the defining image; the resulting trial ended in acquittal, and no BSF personnel have been convicted for a border killing.
• The Indian case is that the border is a smuggling frontier — cattle, narcotics, gold, human trafficking — that fatalities involve criminal incursion rather than ordinary civilians, and that a “non-lethal” posture with pump-action guns has been in force since 2010–11.
• The Bangladeshi case is that the deaths are of poor border residents rather than organised criminals, that the non-lethal commitment has never been reflected in the numbers, and that impunity is systemic.
• The strategic point is disproportion. Whatever the merits of any individual incident, the aggregate cost in Bangladeshi goodwill vastly exceeds any smuggling suppressed, and it hands every Bangladeshi party a permanent anti-India argument at no cost.

No other Indian policy toward Bangladesh destroys so much goodwill for so little strategic return as the way the border is policed.

Migration, the NRC and the CAA

• Illegal migration is India’s oldest bilateral grievance, and Bangladesh’s most consistent denial. Dhaka has never accepted the premise that large numbers of its nationals are in India unlawfully, and no agreed number exists.
• The Assam NRC exercise and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2019 were domestic Indian measures with an unavoidable bilateral effect.
  • The CAA’s fast-tracking of non-Muslim minorities from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan was read in Dhaka as an official Indian statement that Bangladesh persecutes its minorities.
  • Indian political rhetoric about deporting “infiltrators” compounds the effect, because it converts a policy question into an ethnic one in a country that shares the ethnicity.
• Veena Sikri’s argument is the constructive one and remains the most useful frame available.

“Migration between the countries cannot be stopped; the aim should rather be to regularise it through a better work visa regime.”

— Veena Sikri

• She adds two extensions. The push and pull factors — labour demand in India, land scarcity and wage differentials in Bangladesh — must be addressed rather than policed; and climate change will intensify displacement from a low-lying delta, so only a long-term arrangement can work.
• The security analytics of cross-border movement belong with the treatment of illegal migration; here it is a bilateral grievance with two governments telling incompatible stories about the same people.

Minority Security

• The Hindu share of the population has fallen from over a fifth at Partition to under a tenth today, and the trend line is itself an argument.
• The violence of late 2024 and after placed the issue at the centre of Indian domestic politics and gave Indian commentary a stick that Bangladeshi opinion experiences as interference.
• The bilateral structure of the issue is genuinely difficult. India cannot be indifferent to it, and any Indian statement about it is treated in Dhaka as an assertion of a right to comment on Bangladesh’s internal affairs — the exact charge “Bangladesh First” was formulated to answer.

Rohingya

• Bangladesh hosts over 1.3 million Rohingya, including roughly 120,000 who arrived after the Arakan Army’s 2024 offensive, with about 35,000 relocated to Bhasan Char.
• India’s position has been cautious to the point of appearing indifferent, because it does not wish to antagonise Myanmar and treats the roughly 40,000 Rohingya in India — of whom over 22,500 are UNHCR-registered — as an illegal-migration question rather than a refugee one.
• India’s material contribution came through Operation Insaniyat and subsequent relief consignments, but Dhaka’s expectation was diplomatic pressure on Naypyidaw, which India did not apply.
• Indian caution reads in Dhaka as abandonment, on an issue where Bangladesh carries an enormous cost for a crisis it did not cause.

Trafficking, Smuggling and Insurgent Sanctuary

• Trafficking in women and children, narcotics — particularly the methamphetamine tablets moving out of Myanmar through Bangladesh — cattle smuggling and wildlife poaching are chronic and largely apolitical.
• Proposed remedies are institutional rather than dramatic: a standing joint task force on narcotics and trafficking, smart border management replacing manual policing, and coordinated prosecution.
• Insurgent sanctuary is the one irritant currently in remission. The camps were closed after 2009, and the open question is whether the arrangement survives a government with no political stake in the Awami League’s security legacy.

The Scholarly Assessments

Scholar	Core proposition	What follows from it
C. Raja Mohan	Strong-state–weak-state asymmetry; the two have worked against the logic of geography	India must be proactive; Bangladesh must act on enlightened self-interest
Veena Sikri	Migration cannot be stopped, only regularised; climate will worsen it	A work-visa regime, not a fence and a denial
Muchkund Dubey	India has neglected its smaller neighbours	Invest and assist at a scale that answers Chinese finance
S. Chatterjee	Domestic determinants drive the relationship on both sides	Accommodate federal units; build across the party spectrum
Smruti Pattanaik	Bangladesh’s internal political dynamics shape its India policy	Indian influence over outcomes is structurally limited
Sumit Ganguly	The closeness of the Hasina years is at considerable risk	Expect a turn toward China; plan for it rather than lament it
S. Jaishankar	Bangladesh as the “model relationship” of the subcontinent	A claim that 2024 tested and that must now be re-earned

• S. Chatterjee’s argument deserves emphasis because it is the one with an Indian domestic remedy. Alternation between the Awami League and the BNP introduced instability from the Bangladeshi side, and regional governments in India — West Bengal above all — complicated matters from the Indian side.
  • His prescription is to accommodate the federal unit or subsume its interest within the national one, and the Teesta failure is the case that proves the cost of doing neither.
  • The 2026 change of government in West Bengal is the first real test of whether the constraint was partisan or structural.
• Sumit Ganguly’s warning that India will be “especially wary” of a Bangladeshi government turning toward China was made before the February 2026 election and has been substantially borne out by the June 2026 Beijing visit.
• Harsh V. Pant’s framing is useful as a corrective: Indian foreign policy under Modi has been personalised and leader-driven, which delivers speed when the counterpart is stable and delivers nothing when the counterpart disappears.

What the Rupture Teaches

• The first lesson is about the unit of investment. India invested in an incumbent; the correct unit is a country — its institutions, its opposition, its business class, its students and its publics.
  • Leverage built on a party is exhausted at the first alternation; leverage built on interests survives it.
  • The corrective is neither difficult nor expensive: engagement across the political spectrum, party-to-party contact, and a diplomatic presence that is not indexed to who is in office.
• The second lesson is about delivery. The single most damaging Indian failure was not a hostile act but fifteen years of not signing Teesta while asking Bangladesh to deliver on security, transit and connectivity.
  • Undelivered commitments are converted by opposition parties into evidence of bad faith, and by China into an opening.
• The third lesson is about instruments. Trade restrictions and visa suspensions were used in 2025 as signals, and they signalled the wrong thing — that access to India is conditional on political alignment, which is precisely the Bangladeshi thesis about Indian power.
• The fourth lesson is about publics. India’s reputation in Bangladesh was allowed to become an appendix to Sheikh Hasina’s, so that her unpopularity became India’s unpopularity — and border killings, the Adani tariff and the CAA each supplied independent confirmation.
• A conditional reset is available under Tarique Rahman, and its terms are visible.
  • What India can offer: Ganga treaty renewal on improved terms, a serious Teesta proposal now that the political veto is gone, full restoration of land-port trade and passenger rail, CEPA, and demonstrable movement on border killings.
  • What India will want: continuation of the security understanding, no sanctuary for anti-India actors, protection of minorities, and no strategic Chinese presence at Mongla or on the Teesta.
  • What neither can resolve quickly: Hasina’s presence in India, which is a legal question India cannot concede and a legitimacy question Dhaka cannot abandon.

Conclusion

The relationship’s fundamentals were never in doubt and were never sufficient. Fifty-four rivers, a shared language, an indispensable transit geography and thirteen billion dollars of trade guarantee that India and Bangladesh must deal with each other; they guarantee nothing about the terms. What determines the terms is politics, and for fifteen years India read Bangladeshi politics as settled.

• The golden chapter was real. Enclaves exchanged, a maritime award accepted, insurgent sanctuaries closed, rail links restored, a grid connected — this is a substantial record and it was not rhetoric.
• It was also structurally fragile, because every strand ran through one leader whose domestic legitimacy was eroding while the Indian assessment of it never changed.
• The reset is less catastrophic than feared and less complete than claimed. Trade restrictions came and are being unwound; visas were cut and restored; the security architecture survives on paper; and the working relationship is being rebuilt without a summit to announce it.
• China has gained the things India left available — the Teesta project, Mongla, the arms relationship and a party channel — rather than the things India holds, which are adjacency, water, market and language.
• The test of Indian neighbourhood policy is now a specific one: whether the Ganga treaty is renewed generously in December 2026, whether a Teesta proposal follows the change in West Bengal, and whether the number of people shot on the border falls.

Bangladesh has always been the clearest case in South Asia of Raja Mohan’s proposition that geography compels cooperation between states that keep finding reasons to refuse it. The last two years added a corollary he did not need to state: that when a great power organises its regional policy around a friendly government rather than around the interests it shares with a neighbouring society, it has not built a relationship at all — it has taken a position on someone else’s election, and elections end.