They say a leopard never changes its spots. But political parties do. Take India’s Congress Party, that once had a cow and a calf as election symbol. Now it frequently calls for
reservation for Muslims.
The BNP, that has come to power with a supermajority in Bangladesh, is not an unknown entity for India. Therein lies the rub. For now, ‘Dark Prince’ Tarique Rahman, who descended to Dhaka after 17 years of self-exile in London and has taken over as the prime minister, is making all the right noises.
The time is opportune. The ‘Yunus curse’ that befell on Bangladesh has lifted, leaving behind a resurgent Jamaat, a polarized country struggling in almost all basic parameters, and minorities – the little that are left – living in mortal fear.
During his short but eventful term, Muhammad Yunus adopted a nakedly antagonistic posture towards India led by meth-fuelled dreams of ‘Greater Bangladesh’, presided over one of the darkest chapters in Bangladesh’s chequered history of violence against Hindu minorities, pivoted sharply towards China and hewed Bangladesh closer to Pakistan, the country from which it seceded violently in 1971 through a blood-splattered war of liberation and sent over 10 million refugees to India.
That Bangladesh’s independence wouldn’t have been possible without India’s moral and materiel support as well as direct military intervention is not even a footnote in Bangladesh’s recent revisionist history.
That’s okay.
New Delhi has indicated that it is ready to turn over a page. Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the first world leader to congratulate Rahman on his election victory, and sent external affairs minister S Jaishankar to attend the funeral of former prime minister Khaleda Zia, Rahman’s mother.
Pundits, some from
across the border, who advice India to take the first step towards engaging with the new government in Bangladesh would do well to note that New Delhi has already taken the initial steps, but it must equally be met with genuine intention from the other side to arrest the decline and restore a modicum of normalcy in ties that were damaged severely during Yunus’s tenure.
There’s no denying, however, that India has residual scepticism towards a BNP government in Dhaka, and it is almost entirely rooted in history. More specifically, the ‘precedent’ set by Khaleda Zia’s tenure from 2001-2006, a period marked as one of the most strained chapters in India-Bangladesh relations as the BNP-Jamaat coalition’s policies and actions endangered India’s internal security and regional stability.
Can India be expected to forget the rise of radicalization and terror, abetting of insurgency in India’s sensitive North-East, savage attacks on Hindu minorities and the geopolitical swing towards China and Pakistan?
Those who accuse New Delhi of backing Sheikh Hasina, overlook that New Delhi’s pivot to the Awami League was not merely a diplomatic preference; it was a strategic survival mechanism. The BNP-Jamaat government had proven to New Delhi that a hostile government in Dhaka wasn’t just a ‘difficult neighbor’, but an existential threat to India’s security and territorial integrity.
Forgetting lessons from history could be a costly mistake. New Delhi would remember Dhaka’s complicity in allowing Indian insurgent groups, especially ULFA and NSCN, to use Bangladeshi soil in establishing extensive networks of camps and training facilities.
New Delhi would also remember that the BNP-Jamaat government’s testing of India’s red lines – leveraging of actors India considers security threats, violence against minorities, Pakistan-China tilt took place despite the then Atal Bihari Vajpayee government’s quick overtures, exactly as Modi government has done now.
“Despite early courtesies – India’s then national security adviser Brajesh Mishra was the first foreign dignitary to congratulate Khaleda Zia – trust proved thin. The apparent ease with which the BNP maintained relations with Washington, Beijing and Islamabad fed Delhi’s suspicion that Dhaka was drifting strategically,” observes BBC in a recent report.
Strategic decoupling was soon superseded by developments that violated India’s core concerns. In April 2004, a massive consignment of weapons – 10 truckloads full of 4,900 sophisticated firearms and 27,000 grenades – were seized at Chittagong. Investigations later revealed that Bangladesh’s biggest arms haul was intended for ULFA and other rebel groups in India’s North-East and were being facilitated by high-ranking officials in the BNP government.
Major General Gaganjit Singh (retd), who was then the deputy director general of India’s Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), told India Today in a 2023 interview that ULFA chief
Paresh Barua was the mastermind of the whole plot to destabilise Assam and he was “operating in close coordination with DGFI and some NSI officials who had close links with (then BNP chairman) Tareque Rahman (sic) and his cronies.”
Has Rahman changed his spots? We shall soon find out.
BNP’s inclusion of Jamaat-e-Islami in its cabinet was the first time an openly Islamist outfit was given a formal share of power in a country that had for half a century seen politics dominated largely by two dynastic outfits.
Jamaat, that had opposed Bangladesh’s independence and maintains deep historical, ideological, and operational ties with Pakistan, created the breeding ground for an alphabet soup of terrorist organisations such as Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI-B) and Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) that India viewed as proxies for cross-border terror and destabilizing forces in a sensitive region.
But BNP’s original sin was a series of serious human rights violations and systematic violence against Hindu minorities, who were perceived as traditional supporters of Awami League, in the immediate aftermath of the 2001 elections. See the pattern?
Post election attacks on Bhola and Jessore districts are among the darkest episodes of communal violence in Bangladesh’s history. These were not random riots; human rights organizations and a later judicial commission described them as a meticulous persecution campaign to punish the Hindus for their perceived support of Awami League and to facilitate land grabbing.
Bhola, an island district, witnessed in 2001 what many survivors and journalists later described as a “reign of terror.” The violence was noted particularly for the scale of sexual depravity used as a tool of intimidation.
A report in Bangladesh newspaper The Daily Star, titled
‘The Night of the Lost Nose-pins’ documented the horrific details of mass sexual violence.
“In one night, nearly two hundred women were raped in Char Fashion (Char Fasson subdistrict) of Bhola, and amongst them were an eight-year-old girl, a middle-aged amputee and a 70-year-old woman. They were raped in the paddy field, in the bush, on the riverbank, in the house, and in the open field by gangs of men, who had come to spare nothing in the village. It was an open house for debauch men who were roused by the aphrodisiac of extreme prejudice.
“…The village was sprinkled with the bodies of molested women, numb with pain and shock in the aftermath of nightlong abuse. They were beaten, bitten, scratched, pummelled, dragged and ravished; the jewels of their honour despoiled like the sanctity of an abandoned house.”
In October 2002, the Khaleda Zia government initiated a joint military drive involving the army, navy, Bangladesh Rifles (BDR), and police, ostensibly to curb crime, called ‘Operation Clean Heart’. According to a subsequent report by the US State Department and NGOs such as
Geneva-based OMCT, the controversial drive resulted in significant human rights violations targeting mainly the minority population.
In its 2003 report, the
US State Department wrote: ”83 persons died as a result of the use of lethal force by the police and other security forces during the year. Fifteen of those deaths occurred during the army-led anti-crime drive ‘Operation Clean Heart’ that began on October 16. An additional 148 deaths occurred in custody, 31 of those following arrest and interrogation by the army during Operation Clean Heart. Government statements regarding these deaths at first asserted that the deceased had died of heart attacks or of drowning while trying to escape.”
While the Khaleda Zia government claimed the drive was ‘impartial’, observers noted that many opposition activists, including those from the Awami League, were targeted and detained under the Special Powers Act.
The ‘icing’ on the cake? In January 2003, the BNP government passed the ‘Joint Drive Indemnity Ordinance’, granting legal immunity to security forces for actions taken during the operation.
Alongside,
Zia strengthened ties with China and Pakistan, and consistently blocked India’s requests for transit rights to its North-Eastern states and refused to sell natural gas to India, viewing such cooperation as a ‘compromise of sovereignty.’
Incidentally, in a mirror image of the past, the Yunus regime has been accused of presiding over more than
2,900 incidents of targeted violence against mostly Hindu minorities – including cases of killings, arson and land grabbing.
Faced with these allegations from credible sources, including the Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council (BHBCUC), Bangladesh’s primary domestic watchdog for minority rights, Yunus’s favourite deflection mechanism has alternated between outright denial and a specious claim that these “political attacks” do not qualify as “communal” in nature. Tell that to the family of Dipu Chandra Das who was
dragged out, beaten to death and his corpse set on fire as a mob of bloodthirsty Islamists danced around the ‘spectacle’.
Trust deficit exists, and it cannot be wished away or memory-holed into perpetual oblivion. However, as I have said before, Rahman is making all the right noises. In his first speech as prime minister, Khaleda Zia’s son vowed to rid Bangladesh of Islamist vigilantism and establish rule of law as the “final word in running the state”. In a welcome outreach to minorities, he said, “regardless of being Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or Christian, and irrespective of party affiliation, religion, or caste, whether living in the hills or the plains, this country belongs to all.”
The Yunus regime, that under the garb of ‘student revolution’ was backed by an opportunistic Islamist uprising, had bowed before
regressive demands of the Jamaat, such as scrapping music and physical education teachers in government-run schools, or retreating from plans to introduce music classes and cultural education alongside religious and academic curriculum.
To his credit, Rahman, whose worldview has likely been shaped by his days in the West, has said that it is important for
children to be involved in cultural activities such as music, dance, painting etc.
On India, Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, the seniormost leader in BNP has said that bilateral ties won’t be held hostage over Hasina. The BNP understands that New Delhi won’t be handing the former PM over to Dhaka, and hence any progress in ties must be delinked from the issue.
Expressing willingness to discuss issues that are important to both sides, Alamgir, speaking to The Hindu newspaper, said both sides need to talk about water or border management, and
sought to dial down the rhetoric. “We can’t fight a war with India. We need to talk. Those who talk about fighting India are speaking like insane.” This is a good start.
The scaffolding is in place for the discussion of topics crucial to both sides, such as restoration of visa services that would boost cross-border mobility, water, safety for minorities in Bangladesh, border-related issues, and India’s concerns over its internal security, safe haven for insurgents and terrorists, cross-border radicalization and rise of anti-India rhetoric in Bangladesh politics. The key is sincere engagement.
Rahman likely understands the indispensability of maintaining good relations with India as he tries to stabilize the economy and get Bangladesh back on track. It won’t be easy. The Yunus regime has dealt a body blow to Bangladesh’s economy. Growth has slowed down, inflation is up, tax-to-GDP ratio is touching record lows and external debt is reaching new highs.
The textile sector, the backbone of Bangladesh economy, is reeling from the effects of political transition and subsequent labour unrest. Between August 2024 and May 2025, over 100 factories permanently shuttered down in industrial hubs such as Gazipur and Savar, leading to an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 job losses.
One of the issues that Rahman spoke about during his inaugural speech was austerity, calling on government and private officials, employees, and the general public to practice measures for belt-tightening as he seeks to carry on with the IMF bailout package negotiated by Yunus regime. Under the $4.8 billion bailout terms, Rahman’s administration must navigate a series of austerity measures that could be politically explosive.
Among the most sensitive of terms could be the directive to drastically cut subsidies in Bangladesh’s electricity and energy sectors. This will likely lead to multiple rounds of power tariff hikes throughout 2026 and may trigger another round of youth outrage due to rising prices and falling purchasing power.
And Rahman knows that with a resurgent Jamaat as the chief Opposition, that has historically lent street muscle to BNP’s right-wing conservative politics in opposition to the centre-Left positioning of Awami league, the ideological space for BNP’s politics would be squeezed.
As Saqlain Rizve points out in The Diplomat, Jamaat’s “historical ties to controversial positions in the 1971 Liberation War and its advocacy for conservative Islamic governance mean that parliamentary debates may now revolve heavily around religious, social, and cultural issues, making it more challenging for the BNP to pursue progressive reforms in education, gender equality, labor rights, or civil liberties. The ideological contrast between the BNP’s pragmatic conservatism and Jamaat’s rigid Islamic stance could slow legislative decision-making and require careful negotiation to pass even routine policy measures.”
Jamaat will likely use its 68 seats to push for a more ‘Islamic’ legislative agenda. If the BNP tries to maintain a moderate or inclusive image, Jamaat can accuse them of ‘betraying’ Islamic values, effectively outflanking the BNP from the right.
BNP won’t have too much fiscal space or time to address structural problems and institutional constraints. If it fails to deliver on economic promises such as curbing inflation or unemployment, Jamaat has the organizational capacity and muscle to launch nationwide strikes or student-led protests through its student wing, Islami Chhatra Shibir, that has a near monopoly on student politics.
Bangladesh will need serious statecraft, and this creates an opening for a more meaningful engagement between New Delhi and BNP-led Bangladesh. For India, BNP is the less risky partner for normal state-to-state ties. A strong Jamaat means rise of Islamist majoritarianism that often correlates with social friction that spills over into India. So, the complementarities for an honest engagement backed by mutual trust are in place. Rahman must walk the talk.
(Views expressed are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)
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