Sheikh Hasina has been out of power for more than two years, but she remains one of the most difficult questions in India-Bangladesh relations.
Dhaka wants her extradited from India. New Delhi says the request is moving through a legal process. Bangladesh has responded that law alone is insufficient: returning Hasina also requires Indian “political will.” Yet the same government says Prime Minister Tarique Rahman has not ruled out visiting India and that bilateral engagement must continue. The contradiction is useful. India and Bangladesh are trying to rebuild relations while disagreeing over the political figure around whom much of their previous relationship was organised.
Between 2009 and 2024, the two countries built security arrangements, reopened transport links, expanded energy trade and finally settled their land boundary. Much of that infrastructure has survived Hasina. What has not survived is the political alignment that made its construction comparatively easy. The question after Hasina is therefore not whether India has “lost Bangladesh.” It is whether a relationship built under unusually favourable political conditions can function when New Delhi must negotiate its interests through a more contested Bangladeshi politics.
India and Bangladesh began in 1971 with an intimacy unusual between neighbouring states. India had supported Bangladesh’s liberation, and the 1972 Treaty of Friendship located the relationship in the shared experience of the liberation struggle. But 1971 never produced a permanent Bangladeshi consensus about India.
After Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s assassination in 1975, successive governments sought greater distance from New Delhi. Under Ziaur Rahman, “Bangladeshi nationalism” distinguished the state’s identity from the Bengali nationalism associated with the Awami League while expanding relationships with China, Pakistan and the Islamic world. Attitudes towards India consequently became entangled with domestic arguments about sovereignty, national identity and the political meaning of 1971. The Awami League and BNP inherited different parts of that history. For the former, the liberation struggle made India easier to accommodate within its political imagination. The BNP was more willing to treat distance from New Delhi as an assertion of sovereignty. Hasina’s return in 2009 therefore did more than improve bilateral diplomacy. It produced an unusual convergence between the political preferences of the government in Dhaka and India’s strategic interests.
Hasina’s government acted against insurgent networks operating against India from Bangladeshi territory and expanded security cooperation. Rail connections reopened, inland waterways revived, and Indian access to Chattogram and Mongla ports offered the Northeast shorter routes towards the Bay of Bengal. The 2015 Land Boundary Agreement finally settled enclaves and other anomalies whose origins stretched back through Partition and 1971. Electricity and fuel networks further thickened the relationship.
These were substantial institutional gains. A settled boundary is difficult to unsettle; a railway, pipeline or transmission line creates constituencies interested in keeping it operational. However, physical integration did not settle the political argument over reciprocity.
Teesta is the clearest example. India and Bangladesh came close to a water-sharing agreement in 2011 before opposition from West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee prevented its conclusion. The failure exposed an asymmetry that persisted through the Hasina years. Dhaka could deliver on matters central to Indian national security and connectivity, while New Delhi could not always overcome its own domestic politics on issues carrying comparable weight in Bangladesh. Hasina nevertheless continued expanding cooperation. That was politically consequential; border killings remained contentious, and trade was heavily imbalanced. Teesta remained unresolved, and as Hasina’s rule grew increasingly authoritarian, India’s close relationship with her government let opponents argue that New Delhi valued a predictable partner more than political competition in Bangladesh.
India therefore acquired something more specific than influence during the Hasina period. It had a government willing to absorb much of the domestic political cost of cooperating with India. It made Indian interests comparatively inexpensive to pursue. Its disappearance after 2024 did not remove the infrastructure. It removed the favourable political conditions surrounding its use. The difference becomes visible in the subsequent relationship. Bangladesh still relies heavily on Indian food, fuel, electricity and industrial inputs. India, meanwhile, benefits from Bangladeshi territory as an alternative route into its Northeast. Its own Inland Waterways Authority describes the Bangladesh protocol routes as an alternative to the Siliguri Corridor. Neither country can easily remove the other from its geography. But dependence does not automatically produce influence.
In April 2025, India withdrew a facility allowing Bangladeshi exports to third countries to transit through Indian territory, officially citing congestion and costs for Indian exporters. New Delhi later restricted several Bangladeshi products from entering through land ports. The policy could also narrow access created through integration.
Dhaka has simultaneously widened its relationships with China, Pakistan and other partners. China matters here less as a replacement for India than as an additional option. Chinese capital, infrastructure and defence ties can improve Bangladesh’s bargaining position; they cannot replace a 4,096-kilometre border, shared rivers or proximity to Indian markets. Nor can India assume that geographic indispensability produces political deference. This is what interdependence looks like without alignment: the connections remain, but their terms become negotiable.
The BNP consequently matters more than a simple change of government would suggest. Historically, it could criticise the Awami League for excessive proximity to India. In office, Tarique Rahman’s government must manage the same geography. It needs cooperation on water, trade, border management and energy while demonstrating that engagement with New Delhi does not reproduce the perceived asymmetries of the Hasina years. Its insistence this week that Bangladesh wants “strategic autonomy,” while simultaneously affirming the need for direct bilateral engagement with India, captures that tension. India faces the mirror image. A durable Bangladesh policy can no longer assume that close relations with the Awami League and close relations with Bangladesh are effectively the same thing.
For Dhaka, Hasina’s continued presence in India reinforces the suspicion that New Delhi’s relationship was not merely with the Bangladeshi state but with a particular political order. For India, returning a former partner who delivered on major Indian security interests carries its own legal and political implications.
Each government consequently wants the other to compartmentalise. Dhaka wants India to separate its historical relationship with Hasina from its relationship with Bangladesh. New Delhi wants Bangladesh to prevent Hasina from determining cooperation on water, connectivity, trade and security. The approaching expiry of the Ganges Water Sharing Treaty makes this problem concrete. The treaty expires in December without an automatic renewal provision. Bangladesh has prepared for negotiations and is awaiting India’s response. Unlike Hasina’s extradition, water cannot indefinitely remain an irritant around which the rest of the relationship works. The negotiation will also test reciprocity in a different way than Teesta. Bangladesh and India share 54 rivers but have only one water-sharing treaty. A relationship that has become considerably denser in trade, energy and connectivity will now have to demonstrate whether that institutional depth can produce a politically acceptable bargain when the governments are no longer closely aligned.
Under Hasina, India had an unusual convergence between its strategic interests and the political preferences of the government in Dhaka. The infrastructure built during those years now helps prevent political estrangement from becoming strategic separation. But infrastructure cannot reproduce the favourable political terms under which it was created. The shift after Hasina is therefore not from friendship to hostility. It is from political alignment to political bargaining.
This may be the harder test of what the previous fifteen years achieved. If security cooperation, connectivity and water negotiations can survive under a government that does not share the Awami League’s historical relationship with India, then India and Bangladesh will have built something more durable than the Hasina partnership. If they cannot, New Delhi will discover that it institutionalised cooperation without fully institutionalising the relationship.
Essay: Preksha Jalan- Associate Fellow, Digital History Lab at The Advanced Study Institute of Asia (ASIA).
Produced by Decypher Team in New Delhi, India