It is now widely recognised that India’s foreign policy towards Bangladesh, with its focus on backing the Sheikh Hasina-led Awami League party, has been less than successful. Most analysts have focussed on India’s backing of the flawed 2024 election results, as Narendra Modi became the first international leader to congratulate Hasina, paving the way for others to acknowledge the results of the election. It must be noted that, unlike the 2018 (also widely criticised) elections, the Indian ambassador met with the principal opposition party – the Bangladesh National Party (BNP) in 2023. But this one meeting with the BNP, the only one in a decade, also indicates how limited Indian engagement had become.
The narrow range of official interaction, except between Modi and Hasina, is reflected in other aspects as well. The first major treaty signed between India and Bangladesh was the 1972 Treaty of Peace and Friendship. One of its key outcomes was the Joint River Commission, which is supposed to meet around four times a year. Its last meeting was in August 2022, after a gap of 12 years. Bangladesh shares 54 transboundary rivers with India, and river cooperation impacts almost all aspects of the political economy of a riverine country like Bangladesh. India, apparently, could not care less.
If such official cooperation was considered unnecessary, it is little surprise that India has said nothing about the political prisoners ‘disappeared’ by the Hasina government, some of whom are only appearing after eight years. The extended attack on Muhammad Yunus, which was perceived by many as Hasina’s personal vendetta against someone who was often seen as more credible than her, drew not a word from India. And now that Yunus is the head of the interim administration, the Indian government is left with few links, and can only resort to a combination of threats and bluster – that too outsourced to retired diplomats and security officials on the news channels.
The list of failures is long and bitter, and begs the question of how India got it so wrong. This is why it was appropriate that India’s National Security Adviser (NSA), Ajit Doval, received Hasina when she arrived in India. Other than our diplomatic corps, the one person most responsible for gathering information and briefing the government on how to act on foreign relations is the NSA, and thus he shares much of the responsibility for this turn of events.
There are three possible explanations for why the Indian government misread the situation so catastrophically. It could be that the intelligence gathering skills of our agencies in Bangladesh is remarkably poor. Or it could be that the intelligence agencies were instructed badly, and while their information was good, it was not processed properly. Or, lastly and least likely, that the NSA credibly informed the government of the intelligence and was overruled. In other words, either the NSA oversees an incompetent operation, or he is incompetent himself, or he commands no authority in the government.
Unfortunately, the Indian public is not likely to find out what went wrong. This is because of the peculiarity of having built a formidable office and mechanism to deal with national security issues, but no real oversight. The Modi government elevated the NSA to cabinet minister rank in 2019, and we have a powerful National Security Advisory Board – a deputy NSA is now the foreign secretary, but most Indians will be surprised to note that there is no legal definition of “national security” in India. Although we have had a National Security Act since 1980 – to facilitate preventive detention – we never bothered to define the term.
In that gaping legal void, an increasingly powerful national security architecture has great licence but little accountability. Unlike most democratic countries, India’s parliament has no oversight of intelligence matters – unlike say the House Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in the United States. Given the sensitivity of intelligence information, it is wise not to have public hearings, but surely a committee of MPs, which includes the opposition, should have a chance to ask why such failures are happening.
Incidentally, this is not the first failure on Doval’s watch. As the government’s lead on border talks with China, the NSA bears primary responsibility for allowing India to be surprised by Chinese actions on the LAC. He is also the person who should be answering questions about allegations that a government agency may have murdered, and attempted to murder in North America, Sikhs with Canadian or American citizenship.
Instead, all we have is silence, and an Indian public increasingly worried about how we keep seeming to get it wrong, time and again, as if we had no intelligence at all.
Omair Ahmad is an author and journalist.
This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
