As Bangladesh began to show its first signals of hard geopolitical steering, drifting away from India and embracing China, that too strategically, India must ensure that its tactical footprint and core interests remain intact on the ground. The recent visit of Bangladesh Prime Minister Tariq Rahman to China has given strong signals of diplomatic vectoring that goes beyond sensible and sound pragmatism. Instead, it is a deliberate shift that puts the Indo-Bangla relationship on the back burner, maintaining only slim functionality in the relationship, which contradicts decades of close partnership and relations between the two countries.
The Rahman’s Policy
Tariq Rahman wants to project Bangladesh’s policy of engagement as engagement fuelled by pragmatic thought which goes beyond India. Still, in reality, it goes beyond India; it directly or indirectly seeks to rely on an alternative power, which is not pragmatism but a hedging strategy. The ambitious Bangladesh First Policy, which prioritises Bangladesh’s interests and gives autonomy in diplomatic engagement, in reality appears to be a policy that enables strategic embrace of China.
To make this policy a success, Bangladesh has very little structural leverage to offer emerging or middle powers to counter India or China. The asymmetry is further illustrated by Rahman’s visit to Malaysia, either to counter China’s first narrative or to lend value to Bangladesh’s first policy. Malaysia can absorb migrant labour and sign minor trade pacts, but it cannot provide the multi-billion-dollar security, satellite, or industrial infrastructure required to truly balance a regional giant.
Similarly, Bangladesh has limited middle-power alternatives, as it is more aligned with the Western framework and maintains a delicate balance in its relationship with both India and China. Overall, from a realist perspective, only Rahman’s China visit stands out among these paradigmatic outreach efforts by Bangladesh, as it goes far beyond standard trade or “hedging” behaviour; they represent deep, long-term structural dependencies. Bangladesh’s asymmetrical diplomatic behaviour, dubbed autonomy and paragamitism, fails to recognise that in the short term it may offer some benefit to its developing economy or strategic assets, but in the long term it makes it more prone to dependency and harms its strategic space by deliberately steering away from India in disguise.
Bangladesh’s Pivoting Experiment
Bangladesh’s pivoting experiments have burned Dhaka’s own hands, as history shows these pivots were less strategic and more politically motivated to appease the domestic environment and anti-India sentiments. In the early 2000s, former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia made a similar attempt, pursuing an ambitious ‘Look East Policy”. The first pivot was to economically embrace China, hoping for massive economic windfalls and to pivot out of India’s orbit and dependencies. Instead, Beijing heavily exploited Bangladesh’s market, turning the country into a dumping ground for cheap Chinese goods, with one-sided trade creating a heavy trade deficit. During Zia’s landmark visit in 2002, Zia directly pleaded with the Chinese leadership to grant duty-free access to narrow the widening trade gap. Beijing flatly denied this request, offering minor tokens instead.
The most ambitious deal was the defence deal in 2002, where the China-Bangladesh Defence Cooperation Agreement gave Bangladesh-China significant room to explore a strategic partnership, but instead it became another one-sided affair. The pact locked Bangladesh into becoming a strict military-equipment client state of Beijing, mirroring Pakistan. The pact also provided low-cost hardware and, in return, locked Bangladesh into high-priced logistical and maintenance support from China. This single defence deal strained the Dhaka-Delhi relationship, stalled key bilateral progress on water sharing, and led to cold diplomatic relations.
Similarly, India and Myanmar proposed a trilateral pipeline to transport natural gas from Myanmar’s Shwe gas fields directly to India through Bangladeshi territory. However, Zia’s regime saw that this deal would push Dhaka towards cooperating with India, which could result in domestic criticism and backlash. Under politically motivated considerations, Zia blocked the initiative by placing heavy, unrelated conditional demands on India, including demands for trade corridors to Nepal and Bhutan. This deadlock, caused by Dhaka, frustrated Myanmar and India, leading to project abandonment. Bangladesh lost billions of dollars in guaranteed annual transit fees and the project itself, which had positioned Bangladesh as a key energy corridor in the region.
During Zia’s regime, Dhaka faced rejection from ASEAN despite actively lobbying to become a sectoral dialogue partner with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). However, Southeast Asian nations saw a country plagued by severe domestic political turmoil and a deteriorating relationship with its largest immediate neighbour, India. ASEAN systematically ignored Dhaka’s bids.
After the one-sided trading affair, Bangladesh’s pragmatism, dubbed the Look East policy under the Zia regime, miserably failed to extend beyond its traditional sphere of influence, especially India, and to strategically build its economic and military capabilities. The ambitious pragmatism project failed because it was motivated by sentiment rather than strategy. At the surface level, Zia’s efforts were limited to projection, not results. A similar story perhaps is being played out by the current Prime Minister Rahman, though he is hard-steering towards pragmatism. Bangladesh has been facing a critical problem that spoils all the mathematics of pragmatism, namely the absence of strategic leverage, or a leverage deficit.
There is less realisation in hyper-ideological regimes that Bangladesh operates within a multi-trap of leverage deficits. At the economic level, Bangladesh heavily relies on the garment sector, lacks economic diplomacy, has weak bargaining power, faces political volatility and security instability, and has policy short-termism and a steep rise in the revenue deficit over the past year. At the external level, weak regional integration with organisations such as ASEAN and BIMSTEC, and a heavy tilt towards China and Pakistan, create a tightrope and security concern for the West. A hostile attitude and cold relations with India further push Dhaka to the backseat in terms of strategic leverage or strategic relevance in both traditional spheres, and restrict its ability to extend its influence beyond that.
Hasina’s Equidistance Diplomacy
In this case, Sheikh Hasina’s diplomacy offers key insight: Hasina’s regime’s calculated and strategic balancing position helped Dhaka not only to calculate and hedge against powers but also to maintain a balance with hard-power realities. Hasina’s regime realised that Bangladesh suffers from a leverage deficit and therefore avoided extreme banking or ideologically heavy hyper-pragmatism, opting for strategic equidistance. Hasina’s regime remained closely aligned with India for security and political needs and gave a slight push towards China for some military needs, like the submarine deal in 2016, but also signed defence cooperation frameworks with India and purchased advanced military hardware from Turkey, Western Europe, and the United States.
If China offered to build a deep-sea port at Sonadia, the project was cancelled when India expressed security concerns. China was compensated with alternative ports, and the Matarbari deep-sea port project was given to Japan. This balancing act gave Hasina room not only for strategic manoeuvring but also for her regime to avoid conflict or entanglement in hard-power politics and rivalries. Hasina’s equidistance diplomacy had its own merits; in Dhaka, it was able to extract the best of both, which contributed significantly to its strategic and economic development. The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) gave a positive outlook for Bangladesh’s economy based on its performance during the Sheikh Hasina regime, projecting it to become a $1 trillion economy by 2040.
By avoiding over-reliance on a single power, Hasina leveraged foreign investments from multiple global players to upgrade infrastructure and boost the country’s textile and manufacturing exports. However, critics argue that, in the long term, the equidistant strategy proved difficult to sustain as domestic pressure against Hasina grew, especially after the elections, coupled with socio-political developments that led to her ouster.
India’s Strategy and Rahman’s Embracing China
India found itself in a difficult position when Yunus’s interim regime delisted Indian companies for port development, especially at Mongla port. The issue escalated when Rahman’s regime gave port development responsibility to China and, to further worsen the situation, even extended the Teesta River Comprehensive Management and Restoration Project. The Teesta River basin sits extremely close to India’s Siliguri Corridor. This 22-km stretch of land, with Chinese presence and access, presents a serious security risk to India’s Northeastern region. In 2024, India offered to fund the project itself to keep Beijing out, but Dhaka ultimately chose Chinese technical expertise. With China’s spin and ideologically tinged hyper-pragmatism returning after decades, India must prepare for some strategic reorientation to avoid a reactionary response while remaining firm in a preventive, assertive diplomacy strategy with Dhaka.
In short, India must maintain its tactical footprint and ensure that core interests remain intact instead of a complete loss of grip. India must exercise backchannels and advance communication to assert its position while ensuring that room for core interests remains on the table. If Chinese companies are getting the port, India must try not to lose complete access; at least some logistical or aid access must be ensured to maintain India’s small window of access to ports and other strategic interests or assets in Dhaka. In a nutshell, India must ensure that it can strategically communicate with Dhaka to prevent further deterioration of relations while asserting its influence and footprint in Bangladesh.
