Northeastern View | What Sheikh Hasina’s downfall means for security in Northeast India
India must remain diplomatically agile and open-minded if it wants to keep its Northeast secure and peaceful.
The significance of the fall of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh cannot be understated. It marks a dramatic shift in the locus of power and a potential turnaround in Bangladeshi politics after 15 years of tense but stable rule by the Awami League.
The end of Hasina’s rule amid violent street protests, just months after she returned to power for a record fourth consecutive term in a controversial election, will have direct ramifications on India’s security environment. This is particularly so in the case of the Northeast, which shares an 1879 km-long border and a tenuous history of cross-border insurgencies with Bangladesh.
Hasina was a longstanding ally of New Delhi and went to great lengths to protect Indian interests along the eastern frontiers. So, would her sudden departure from Bangladeshi politics threaten these interests again? Is the Northeast suddenly vulnerable to a fresh set of cross-border threats? What are the contingencies here?
The pre-Hasina threats
On January 6, 2009, Hasina was sworn in as the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, three years after the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP)-led government of Begum Khaleda Zia went out of power. This was a decisive moment for India, as until then, successive regimes in Dhaka had flagrantly ignored Indian security concerns.
Under BNP’s watch, Dhaka allowed a whole host of Indian Insurgent Groups (IIGs) from the Northeast — including those from Assam, Tripura and Nagaland — to use Bangladeshi territory as a base for networking, arms procurement, training and planning. Bangladesh practically became a launchpad for insurgent attacks against India.
Not just that, the Pakistani intelligence liberally used the country to funnel arms and finances to the IIGs in cahoots with its Bangladeshi counterparts. In 2004, when Bangladeshi security forces seized a massive arms haul purportedly meant for militant groups in India, the Zia government’s callousness about India’s security became all too clear.
The United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) was perhaps the biggest benefactor of the subversive assistance that IIGs received in Bangladesh. In fact, it was able to set up bases in Bangladesh even before the BNP came to power as far back as 1989.
By the mid-2000s, especially after Bhutan flushed the IIGs out of its territory in a massive counterinsurgency drive in 2003, almost the entire top echelon of the Assamese nationalist outfit had moved to Bangladesh, engaging in an array of illicit activities that included investments in local commercial entities.
Hasina’s crackdowns
In 1996, following several months of intense strikes and a tense election under a caretaker government, Hasina took charge as Bangladesh's premier for the first time. Just a year later, her government arrested the then general secretary of ULFA, Anup Chetia. It was a clear message to New Delhi — India could rely on the Awami League government to secure the Northeast.
When she returned to power in 2009, her government doubled down on the IIGs in Bangladesh, rounding up top rebel leaders and handing them over to India. These included the senior-most ULFA leaders, such as Arabinda Rajkhowa and Sasadhar Choudhury. In 2013, the Hasina and Manmohan Singh governments also signed an extradition treaty, setting the stage for the quick transfer of wanted individuals from Bangladesh to India. Two years later, Dhaka handed ULFA supremo, Chetia, back to India.
The Hasina government also initiated a fierce crackdown on hybrid Islamist militant networks affiliated with the Islamic State (IS) after the bloody Holey Artisan Cafe terror attack in Dhaka in 2016. Parts of these networks were using the India-Bangladesh border to move around and procure arms, creating a common threat to both countries.
In that sense, subsequent Hasina governments played a pivotal role in diffusing the insurgent threat in the Northeast. While many of the IIGs eventually moved away to western Myanmar, Dhaka consistently denied them a backyard right next to India and more importantly, easy access to arms trafficking routes in the Bay of Bengal.
What happens now?
Naturally, then, Hasina’s abrupt flight should make India nervous. It creates a power vacuum that certain organisations and political factions hostile to India, mostly those allied to the BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI), could rush in to fill. For India, this could revive the ghosts of the 1990s and early 2000s. Subversive networks, including those linked to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), could now regain ground.
Moreover, the rise of Hindutva forces in India and the introduction of sectarian legislations like the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) have drawn sharp criticism from non-government quarters in Bangladesh, souring India’s image in the country. Fundamentalist forces across the border could piggyback on such sentiments to rebuild their networks and legitimacy.
However, India's security projections must not fall hostage to alarmism. The overall politico-security landscape of the Northeast has shifted. The older IIGs, such as the ULFA, have splintered and joined political processes. The only non-ceasefire faction of ULFA has been reduced to a non-entity, with its leader, Paresh Baruah, living in obscurity somewhere along the Sino-Myanmar border.
Others, such as the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN), People’s Liberation Army-Manipur (PLA-Manipur) and United National Liberation Front (UNLF), are confined to western Myanmar. The Tripura insurgency, which had some of the strongest linkages with Bangladesh, has all but petered out, much like Meghalaya-based armed groups like the Hynniewtrep National Liberation Council (HNLC) that had once set up bases right across the border.
So, there is little for anti-India actors to exploit from Bangladeshi soil today. Moreover, if a non-BNP government that is free of the Jamaat’s influence comes to power as part of the interim (or post-interim) arrangement, New Delhi might have some space to retain favour in Dhaka and keep its frontiers secure from potential cross-border threats.
Given the tidings of a new era, marked by a more secure India-Bangladesh border and a stronger Indian security apparatus, even a BNP-dominated government might not want to engage in the kind of subversive manoeuvres that its previous renditions did against India in the decades past.
Yet, there are other variables at play here, including the long Chinese shadow, which has become only longer in India’s neighbourhood over the last decade. India must be cognisant of these precarities and remain diplomatically agile and open-minded if it wants to keep its Northeast secure and peaceful.
Angshuman Choudhury is a New Delhi-based researcher and writer, formerly an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research and focuses on Northeast India and Myanmar. The views expressed are personal.
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