Jayanta Roy Chowdhury
New Delhi, Feb 11 (UNI) Bangladesh’s tryst with elections slated for Thursday is not merely a test for the South Asian nation’s democratic will, but also a test of how things will evolve on the larger South Asian canvas.
Along with a choice between two parties – the centrist Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the Islamist Jamaat-i-Islami party, citizens of Bangladesh will also choose their nation’s ideological orientation, institutional coherence, and capacity to govern amid deepening disorder.
For New Delhi, the stakes are high given Bangladesh’s position within its own body politic, yet the choices on offer are uncomfortably narrow.
Since the dramatic collapse of Sheikh Hasina’s government in August 2024, Bangladesh has been governed more by a volatile mix of street mobilisation, bureaucratic reshuffling, and ideological assertion.
Violence, labour unrest, and intimidation have ceased to be episodic disruptions and have instead become the background condition of politics.
In this unstable aftermath, Indian officials have privately acknowledged a hard truth — almost any elected government is preferable to a prolonged interim arrangement whose authority is diffuse, contested, and vulnerable to capture by hostile forces.
The mandate will at best be a flawed one, given that one major party has been barred from the elections and voters are witnessing a combination of intimidation and pre-poll violence, which will certainly influence voting patterns.
The impact of the state itself campaigning for a ‘Yes’ in a referendum being held along with the vote for a government is also expected to tilt heavily in favour of the Islamist parties, which are backing the referendum, despite misgivings from constitutionalists.
However, for Bangladesh and India, that flawed vote may still be better than a situation where there is no mandate at all and an unelected government presides over chaos and disorder, which threatens to spill over across our common borders.
The choices for Bangladesh, in the absence of Awami League, which, according to analysts including Western think tanks, still commands between 27-35 per cent of the popular vote, boil down to three: a BNP-dominated government, a mix of BNP and Jamaat, and a Jamaat-dominated regime.
The Bangladesh Nationalist Party, formed by the former freedom fighter-turned dictator-turned President Zia Ur-Rahman, had attracted the remnants of the old Pakistan-era Muslim League and those who broke with the Awami League. Its politics have been anti-India, pro-US, but at the same time practical and supporting right-of-centre economic policies.
The New York Editorial, a respected substack by top journalists, has analysed two sets of opinion polls in Bangladesh by Innovision Consutling which gives BNP a headstart with a 52.8 per cent vote share and gap with Jamaat of nearly 22 per cent and NarratiV/IILD survey, which narrows the gap to just 1.1 per cent.
Everyone recognises that the difference will lie with the Awami League’s former voters. Which way will they swing? If the majority of the 40 million voters who would have voted Awami decide to transfer their allegiance to BNP, Tarique Rahman, its leader who came back from a self-imposed 17-year-long exile, will laugh his way to a swearing-in. If that vote goes the Jamaat way, the cheers may come from his rival Shafiqur Rahman’s camp.
South Bloc believes it can do business with BNP’s new princeling Tarique Rahman, despite the fact that Bangladesh took a pro-Islamic fundamentalist groups and pro-Pakistani turn during the two stints when his mother Behum Khaleda Zia ruled and when he loomed large as an “extra-constitutional authority”.
Even though representatives of the Jamaat have met Indian diplomats both in Delhi and Dhaka to press their case as trustworthy partners, and a notable silence on their part on the usual pre-election anti-India tirade, prior experience of doing business with them hasn’t exactly been happy.
However, one has to understand that Jamaat has, during the 18 months of unelected rule, moved to consolidate influence within the state apparatus. One of its earliest actions after Hasina’s ouster was a sweeping reshuffle of lower-level administrators, particularly in education. In a country where elections are often administered by schoolteachers and college lecturers, this institutional leverage could translate into electoral advantage.
Links which many Jamaat leaders still have with Pakistan’s intelligence agency, their insistence on wooing China, talk of giving Beijing access to Sylhet and other airports haven’t gone down well with Indian policy makers. However, if the push comes to the shove, India will live with the Jamaat provided it minds its “ps” and qs”.
In the words of one policymaker at South Bloc, “For India, the choice sometimes feels not like between workable and less workable but between the devil and the deep sea”.
The memory of events in the 1990s and the 2000s – when BNP-led governments enabled Pakistan’s intelligence services to foment insurgency in India’s Northeast, while Jamaat and allied Islamist networks facilitated the training and funding of militant groups responsible for attacks inside India arev still fresh.
Also worrying is the fact that militants arrested during Hasina’s tenure were released after the 2024 upheaval, and Indian security officials believe many have since regrouped in dormant but operationally ready formations.
India’s strategic instinct has long been pragmatic rather than ideological. It has dealt with governments in Dhaka across the spectrum, recognising that neighbourhood diplomacy requires engagement with whoever holds power. Yet pragmatism has limits and patience, which have been shown in great measure over the last 18 months, can feel tested.
