Maj Gen HRM Rokan Uddin (Retd)
For fifty-five years, Bangladesh’s relationship with India has been framed in the language of liberation-era gratitude, yet the substance of that relationship, examined through trade balances, water-sharing outcomes, border security, and political interference, tells a more complicated story than the friendship narrative suggests. India’s trade surplus with Bangladesh has consistently run in the billions of dollars annually, with Bangladesh importing far more from India than it exports, a structural imbalance that successive Bangladeshi governments have raised without securing meaningful correction. The Farakka Barrage, operational since 1975, remains the starkest symbol of this asymmetry: India’s unilateral control over the Ganges’ upstream flow during dry seasons has affected agriculture, fisheries, and salinity intrusion across southwestern Bangladesh for decades, and the 1996 Ganges Water Treaty, though a step forward, has not resolved recurring disputes over actual water flow guarantees. The Teesta River issue remains unresolved even longer, blocked for over a decade by West Bengal’s own domestic political objections, a reminder that India’s federal structure allows a single state government to indefinitely stall a bilateral commitment affecting an entire neighboring nation’s northern agricultural belt.
Smaller South Asian states have faced comparable patterns. Nepal’s 2015 border blockade, widely attributed to Indian displeasure over Kathmandu’s new constitution, cut off fuel and essential supplies for months and triggered a humanitarian crisis that hardened Nepali public sentiment against Indian influence for years afterward. Sri Lanka’s experience with India’s alleged role in the Tamil insurgency during the 1980s, including training camps reportedly operated on Indian soil before New Delhi’s own intervention through the 1987 Indo-Sri Lanka Accord, left lasting Sri Lankan skepticism about Indian intentions. The Maldives has cycled through its own “India Out” political movements, most visibly under President Mohamed Muizzu’s 2023 election campaign, reflecting a broader regional pattern in which smaller neighbors perceive Indian engagement as tilted toward strategic control rather than equal partnership. Bangladesh’s own post-2024 political environment has surfaced similar sentiment, with public debate intensifying over the extent to which the previous government’s security and intelligence coordination with India shaped domestic politics, appointments, and policy in ways that prioritized Indian strategic comfort over Bangladeshi institutional independence.
The reported presence of foreign-aligned actors occupying sensitive positions within Bangladesh’s civil administration, security services, and other institutions, a concern raised repeatedly since 2024 by reform commissions and political figures across the spectrum, illustrates a specific mechanism through which foreign influence operates: not through overt annexation but through the quieter capture of decision-making nodes, personnel appointments, procurement channels, and intelligence-sharing arrangements that gradually align a smaller state’s institutional behavior with a larger neighbor’s preferences. This is a well-documented pattern in the study of asymmetric regional influence globally, and it is precisely why Bangladesh’s ongoing efforts at intelligence sector reform, restructuring DGFI and NSI toward professional, depoliticized, and law-governed operation, matter as much for external sovereignty as for internal governance.
History offers Bangladesh useful precedent in how smaller or sanctioned states have nonetheless built credible defense capacity without waiting for larger patrons to bless the effort. Vietnam, having endured a brutal war and subsequent Western trade embargo lasting until 1994, nonetheless built one of the most battle-tested and organizationally disciplined militaries in Southeast Asia, later modernizing significantly through diversified partnerships with Russia, India, and increasingly the United States, without becoming dependent on any single patron. Iran, under comprehensive sanctions since 1979 and intensified further after 2018, has nonetheless developed an extensive domestic missile, drone, and naval capability, demonstrating that sustained economic pressure does not automatically prevent a determined state from achieving significant indigenous defense capacity. Pakistan, despite chronic economic fragility and periods of international isolation, successfully pursued an independent nuclear weapons program by 1998, driven by a strategic determination not to remain permanently dependent on any external power for its core security guarantees. Serbia, operating under sanctions through the 1990s, still maintained functioning domestic arms production. These examples do not require endorsement of the political systems involved to draw the relevant lesson: economic constraint is not destiny, and a state serious about sovereignty finds ways to invest in indigenous defense capability, diversified alliances, and secure supply chains even under difficult conditions.
For Bangladesh, the practical implications are threefold. First, defense modernization, across naval capacity given the country’s extensive coastline and maritime economic zone, air defense, and border security technology, needs sustained investment and diversified procurement partnerships rather than reliance on any single supplier relationship shaped by political convenience. Second, intelligence and security institutions require thorough, transparent reform to identify and remove personnel whose loyalties or handling arrangements compromise institutional integrity, a process several reform commissions have already recommended but which requires sustained political will to implement fully. Third, foreign policy diversification, deepening engagement with China, Japan, the Gulf states, ASEAN partners, and Western democracies on defense cooperation, trade, and technology transfer, reduces the structural vulnerability created by overdependence on a single regional relationship. None of this requires hostility toward India as a matter of principle; it requires only the ordinary prudence any sovereign state exercises when a single neighbor’s influence has, over five decades, proven persistently asymmetric rather than reliably equal. The task ahead for Bangladesh is not to manufacture new enemies but to insist, finally, on relationships built on parity rather than presumption.
The concept of “shadow war,” a term increasingly used by security analysts to describe hybrid, below-threshold coercion between states, deserves closer examination in Bangladesh’s specific context, because the tools involved rarely resemble conventional aggression and are therefore easy for the public to underestimate. Modern shadow warfare typically combines several instruments simultaneously: financial leverage through trade dependency, media and narrative manipulation through funded outlets or coordinated disinformation networks, cultivation of sympathetic factions within bureaucracy, security services and political parties, and selective intelligence sharing designed less to build mutual security than to create dependency and visibility into a partner state’s internal deliberations. India’s Research and Analysis Wing have, according to multiple South Asian security analysts and several leaked diplomatic assessments over the years, historically maintained an extensive footprint of contacts and informants across Bangladeshi political, bureaucratic and media circles, a pattern consistent with how larger regional powers typically manage smaller neighbors rather than unique to any single case. The 2024 political transition in Bangladesh brought public scrutiny to exactly this dynamic, with reform commissions and civil society voices calling for a full audit of security and intelligence personnel whose career advancement had been unusually tied to foreign liaison relationships rather than domestic merit structures.
The economic dimension of this asymmetry deserves its own accounting. Bangladesh’s bilateral trade with India has for years produced a deficit exceeding six billion dollars annually in India’s favor, even as Bangladeshi exporters faced persistent non-tariff barriers, testing delays, and port bottlenecks on the Indian side that Bangladeshi trade bodies have repeatedly documented as disproportionate compared to the near-frictionless access Indian goods enjoy entering Bangladesh. Border security has its own grim statistics: Indian Border Security Force killings of Bangladeshi civilians along the frontier have been documented by human rights organizations at a rate of dozens of deaths annually across multiple years, a pattern that has drawn periodic diplomatic protest from Dhaka but no structural change in the rules of engagement along the world’s fifth-longest land border.
Other small and middle powers offer a further instructive contrast in how to convert vulnerability into resilience through deliberate policy rather than resignation. Finland, sharing an 830-mile border with a vastly more powerful neighbor and having fought two wars against it in the twentieth century, built a defense doctrine of comprehensive national resilience, total defense, that integrated civilian infrastructure, reserve mobilization, and domestic arms production so thoroughly that Finland maintained credible deterrence for decades without formal alliance membership, before eventually joining NATO in 2023 once its own threat calculus shifted. Israel’s founding generation, surrounded by hostile states and denied Western arms in its earliest years, built an indigenous arms industry from near nothing into one of the world’s top ten arms exporters within a few decades. Singapore, a city-state with no strategic depth whatsoever, adopted a policy explicitly named the “poisoned shrimp” doctrine, building a disproportionately capable, technologically sophisticated military specifically to make aggression against it costlier than any conceivable gain, despite total dependence on imported energy and resources.
Bangladesh’s geography, a river delta with a long coastline, dense population, and land borders enclosed almost entirely by one neighbor, resembles the vulnerability these states faced far more than it resembles countries with natural buffers. The lesson from Helsinki, Jerusalem, and Singapore alike is not that any of their political circumstances are directly comparable to Dhaka’s, but that vulnerability of geography has never been treated by successful small states as an excuse for permanent strategic subordination. It has instead been treated as the specific problem that focused national policy, defense investment, and institutional integrity are meant to solve.
hrmrokan@hotmail.com
