Borders, Rivers and a Relationship in Flux: India and Bangladesh After the Hasina Era

For much of the fifteen years that Sheikh Hasina governed Bangladesh before her removal from office amid mass protests in August 2024, India-Bangladesh relations were frequently described, by officials on both sides, as the best they had ever been, and by several measures this was not mere diplomatic flattery. Bilateral trade grew substantially, India extended lines of credit exceeding eight billion dollars for infrastructure projects across roads, railways and power, connectivity agreements allowed Bangladeshi goods transit access through Indian territory to India's northeastern states and permitted Indian cargo movement through Bangladeshi ports and waterways, and security cooperation, particularly Bangladesh's crackdown on separatist and militant groups from India's northeast that had historically used Bangladeshi territory as a safe haven, delivered concrete security benefits India's own security establishment repeatedly credited to Hasina's government specifically.

This depth of cooperation, however, always rested on a foundation narrower than either government's public rhetoric acknowledged, because it depended substantially on a close personal and political relationship between Hasina's Awami League government and successive Indian governments, rather than on institutionalised agreements resilient to a change in Dhaka's political leadership. Two long-standing disputes in particular, left unresolved through the very years the relationship was being celebrated as historically strong, illustrate how much genuine business remained undone beneath the warmth.

The Teesta that never got shared

The Teesta river, originating in Sikkim and flowing through West Bengal into Bangladesh before joining the Brahmaputra, has been the subject of water-sharing negotiations between India and Bangladesh since at least 1983, with a comprehensive interim sharing agreement drafted and ready for signing during Manmohan Singh's 2011 visit to Dhaka, only for West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to withdraw her state's support at the last moment, citing concerns that the proposed sharing formula would leave North Bengal's own agricultural and drinking water needs inadequately protected during the dry season when the river's flow is already severely reduced. Because water is a state subject under India's constitutional scheme and Teesta's headwaters lie substantially within West Bengal's jurisdiction, the Union government has been unable to conclude a binding agreement without West Bengal's concurrence, and Banerjee's government has maintained its objection consistently across more than a decade of subsequent central government efforts, including under the current dispensation in Delhi, to revive the negotiation.

The consequence has been an unresolved dispute of genuine humanitarian and economic consequence for northern Bangladesh, where dry-season Teesta flow reductions have measurably affected irrigation-dependent agriculture, and the absence of a settlement has been repeatedly cited by Bangladeshi political actors across the spectrum, not only critics of the Awami League, as evidence that even a warmly disposed Bangladeshi government could not extract from India a resolution to one of its most politically salient bilateral grievances, a point that fed into broader public sentiment in Bangladesh, cultivated actively by opposition parties including the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, that the Hasina government's closeness to India had yielded disproportionately modest returns on issues that mattered most to ordinary Bangladeshis.

Border killings and an unfinished security bargain

The second persistent friction concerns the India-Bangladesh border, among the longest and most porous in the world, where the Border Security Force has for years faced accusations, documented extensively by Indian and international human rights organisations including Human Rights Watch, of using lethal force against Bangladeshi nationals, most often accused of cattle smuggling or unauthorised crossing, in circumstances that rarely appear to meet a proportionate necessity standard even under India's own stated non-lethal-force protocols agreed with Bangladesh in 2011. Fatality numbers have declined from their peak in the mid-2000s following periodic diplomatic pressure and joint coordination mechanisms, but killings have continued to occur most years, each one generating renewed anger in Bangladesh and periodic formal protest from Dhaka that has never translated into a fully resolved joint mechanism with binding accountability for personnel involved in disputed incidents.

This issue, like Teesta, persisted through the years of supposedly peak bilateral warmth precisely because it was never central to the elite-level cooperation that defined the relationship's public narrative, illustrating a recurring pattern in India's regional diplomacy where government-to-government infrastructure and security cooperation advances considerably faster than the border-level and resource-sharing disputes that shape how ordinary citizens on the other side actually experience the relationship.

The reckoning since Hasina's departure

Hasina's ouster in August 2024, following weeks of student-led protests against a discriminatory civil service quota system that escalated into a broader anti-government uprising, and her subsequent flight to and continued residence in India, has placed the bilateral relationship under genuine strain for the first time in over a decade. The interim government led by Muhammad Yunus, along with a resurgent Bangladesh Nationalist Party and other political forces long critical of what they characterised as excessive Indian influence over Awami League governance, have adopted a more openly skeptical posture toward India, including public criticism of India's continued shelter of Hasina, who Bangladesh has sought for extradition to face charges related to the crackdown on protesters that preceded her fall, a request India has so far neither granted nor formally rejected, leaving the issue in diplomatically uncomfortable limbo.

Reports of attacks on Hindu minority communities and religious sites in Bangladesh in the months following the political transition, contested in their scale and characterisation between Indian and Bangladeshi accounts, have further strained public sentiment on the Indian side, while Bangladeshi commentators have in turn accused Indian media coverage of exaggerating the scale of these incidents for domestic political consumption, a dispute over facts and framing that has itself become a fresh irritant layered atop the older, unresolved grievances over water and the border.

What durable partnership would require

The lesson of the post-Hasina reckoning is not that India's engagement with Bangladesh over the preceding fifteen years was without value, since the infrastructure, trade and security cooperation achieved during that period delivered real and mutual benefit that a change of government in Dhaka does not retroactively erase. The lesson is that a relationship this consequential, between two neighbours sharing one of the world's longest and most sensitive borders and a river system whose management affects tens of millions of people's livelihoods, cannot be allowed to rest primarily on the durability of a single political relationship, however successful, without addressing the underlying disputes that persist regardless of who governs in Dhaka. A serious Indian effort to finally resolve the Teesta sharing formula, including the harder domestic work of building genuine West Bengal government buy-in rather than treating the state's objection as a permanent veto to be worked around indefinitely, and a genuinely binding, transparent accountability mechanism for border force conduct, would do more to secure India's long-term interests in Bangladesh across future governments of whatever political persuasion than any amount of infrastructure financing extended to a single friendly administration whose own durability, the events of 2024 demonstrated conclusively, could never be taken for granted.