The Awami League and its alleged 'subservience'
AL's India policy is outdated and lacks assertiveness
Awami League President and Pakistan Prime Minister H. S. Suhrawardy took an assertive but pragmatic approach towards India in this interview in 1957.
Former Pakistani diplomat Hussain Haqqani recently noted allegations of the Awami League’s ‘subservience’ to India. In a piece on the challenges of the interim government, Haqqani talks about the “Awami League’s close association with India as subservience”. Several months before Sheikh Hasina’s fall, Chris Blackburn wrote “critics argue that India's involvement has undermined Bangladesh's democratic processes and sovereignty. This sentiment is reinforced by concerns over India’s interference in various domestic affairs of Bangladesh, including election manipulation and the appointment of key administrative positions”. While Blackburn notes that these critics are yet to substantiate their claims with concrete evidence, this kind of situation gives rise to the question of whether Bangladesh’s bureaucracy and police forces were under the indirect control or influence of India. If Bangladesh’s sovereignty was indeed compromised, this poses grave questions. The International Court of Justice laid out the test of effective control in the case of Nicaragua v. United States to determine foreign interference in the sovereign affairs of a country.
Bangladeshi bureaucrats have gone on TV to complain that they had to be silent during meetings with Indian counterparts. Bureaucrats are complaining of ‘Dadagiri’ by their Indian counterparts, which is a Bengali term to refer to ‘big brother’ syndrome. Sherlock Holmes has been told that Blackberries were distributed to Bangladeshi bureaucrats and ministers in 2009 to monitor their communications at the Bangladesh Secretariat, which is the nerve center of the government.
The Awami League’s silence on border killings caused huge public resentment in Bangladesh. In many cases, the AL decided to abandon or delay projects simply because India objected, such as the Sonadia deep seaport, the Ganges Barrage and the Teesta Barrage. These megaprojects could have brought a multiplier effect for the Bangladesh economy. People are saying that even Sheikh Mujibur Rahman would never have appeased India in this fashion, considering it was Mujib who successfully negotiated the withdrawal of Indian troops from Bangladeshi territory in 1972.
In the 1950s, AL was led by Suhrawardy who took an assertive but pragmatic approach towards India. In the 1960s, there was a strategic partnership between AL and India to bring autonomy, and eventually independence, to East Pakistan in 1971.
In the decades after the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the equation seems to have changed and tipped towards unadulterated reliance on India. Under Sheikh Hasina, the historically pragmatic AL became overly reliant on India. Hasina returned to Bangladesh in 1981 and took on the leadership of the party. In the 1990s, politicians at diplomatic gatherings noticed that AL leaders like the venerable and much respected Syeda Sajeda Chowdhury were peculiarly silent when Indian diplomats criticized Bangladesh. Many have construed this silence as subservience.
Why is the AL silent on the problematic aspects of India’s relationship with Bangladesh? Why can’t it be assertive? Why can’t it capitalize on anti-India sentiment? It seems AL has overenthusiastically given benefits to India, which perhaps India didn’t seek or wish for. Take corruption for instance. Indian bankers helped AL financiers like former Land Minister Saifuzzaman to launder millions into tax havens. The Chittagong-based S Alam Group, which is also related to Saifuzzaman’s father and historic AL financier Akhtaruzzaman Babu, has built a property empire in Singapore, including the Hilton Garden Inn Hotel and properties in Little India. Ironically, their hometown of Chittagong has only one five star hotel.
India-backed projects like the Adani Power Plant in Jharkhand have mired Bangladesh in debt. Bangladesh is having to pay higher prices to the Adani Group simply because Narendra Modi wants us to buy from his billionaire friend’s power plant.
A Frontline piece argues that Sheikh Hasina clearly had agency over what was happening in her own government. To what extent did she allow covert Indian influence in the bureaucracy and security forces? To what extent did this covert influence extend to the central bank? After Sheikh Hasina’s fall, a top level meeting of the Indian government has even considered creating bases for the AL in the border areas of Bangladesh and India.
Days after Hasina’s fall from power and exodus to India, Dhaka Tribune Editor Zafar Sobhan wrote “Sheikh Hasina remains an honoured guest of the republic of India and her son, presumably at the behest, or at the very least with the approval, of his masters in New Delhi openly calls on India to ensure elections in Bangladesh in short order, suggesting to Bangladeshis that India somehow feels that it has that right. India has yet to come to terms with the fact that it backed a scrub, has lost badly, and that it needs to make its peace both with the interim government and the Bangladeshi people if it wishes to repair its relations with its eastern neighbour”. The Awami League’s legacy and reputation has been reduced to shambles if one reads the editorial of the English edition of Prothom Alo, where Ayesha Kabir writes “does it have the moral right to even think of contesting in the election?” The pro-BNP civil society activist Baidul Alam Majumder would be happy to see the Awami League not take part in the next general election at all.
Sheikh Hasina clearly had a choice to be assertive on India when she needed to, which she demonstrated with the purchase of Chinese submarines to the ire of India. To be fair, the AL did secure many aspects of Bangladesh’s interests in dealings with India, from winning 70% of disputed territory in a maritime boundary case to implementing a long pending Land Boundary Treaty which settled the status of former enclaves across a 4,000 km border. A credit line from India was used to build flyovers in Dhaka and other projects, while border trade received a boost with the ‘Border Haats' (border bazaar) program. Indian credit was even used to buy armored cars and tugboats for the military. But all this was overshadowed.
The spate of human rights abuses, which was amplified by the massacre of students and citizens in the July-August uprising in 2024, ultimately caused Sheikh Hasina’s downfall. Her silence on border killings, her appeasement of Indian objections to river sharing and seaport projects, and her ignorance of the human rights situation under Narendra Modi in India itself, only exasperated her downfall. Some people even say Modi didn’t help Hasina and things could have been different if a Congress government were in power in India. The AL desperately needs to understand that India has changed. The India of 1971 vanished long ago. In 1971, the Parsis, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists who united to help Bangladesh are no longer existent. Today, it is a more envious, aggressive and Hindu nationalist India. Bangladesh has to be assertive.
The AL’s India policy has become outdated. How can the party which achieved Bangladesh’s independence fail to uphold the sovereign rights of Bangladeshi citizens when it comes to border killings, river waters, and fiscal prudence? The AL Twitter account is dishing out a discredited and exaggerated narrative of minority attacks. Is the party willfully ignoring the majority of Bangladeshis?