India faces its most serious strategic test in its eastern neighbourhood, a parliamentary committee chaired by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor has cautioned. The panel, in a report submitted to the Government, argues that while Bangladesh is unlikely to slide into complete disorder, the current churn in Dhaka demands careful and calibrated handling from New Delhi.
“If India fails to recalibrate at this moment, it risks losing strategic space in Dhaka not to war, but to irrelevance,” the report warns. Bangladesh, currently, faces a deeper, generational shift, unlike the humanitarian crisis of the 1971 Liberation War, the report notes and goes on to warn a possible reordering of Bangladesh’s political landscape and a strategic drift away from India’s traditional influence.
The panel traces the present unrest in Bangladesh to multiple converging factors: the erosion of the long-standing dominance of Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League, the growing assertiveness of Islamist forces, and the expanding influence of China and Pakistan. Together, these trends, it says, are reshaping Bangladesh’s internal politics and its external alignments.