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India reaches out to Dhaka, wants military to restore peace and normalcy

The Modi government has left to ousted leader Sheikh Hasina to decide her next steps.

Updated on: Aug 6, 2024, 13:07:28 IST
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New Delhi: India has reached out to the military leadership of Bangladesh led by Army Chief General Waker-us-Zaman and asked for early restoration of peace, law and order and normalcy in the strife hit country.

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and Bangladesg Army chief General Waker-us-Zaman.
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and Bangladesg Army chief General Waker-us-Zaman.

According to top government sources, the Modi government has already reached out to Army Chief and has extended any support to restoration of normalcy in the country after ouster of Sheikh Hasina on Monday.

It is understood that ousted Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina is being treated as the guest of the country and it is for her to decide her future stay.

S Jaishankar at all-party meeting

In the all party meeting, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar when asked by Opposition on whether Pakistan had any role to play in the ouster of Hasina, pointed to the displayed pictures of Bangladesh Opposition on social media accounts of Pakistani diplomats. He apparently said that the role of Pakistan interference was still being examined.

Incidentally, Sheikh Hasina had already indicated to her Indian interlocutors that she did not want to fight the January 2024 general elections way back in April 2023 and only after persuasion from her supporters she reluctantly went into the electoral ring.

Knowing fully well the threat she was facing from Islamists as well as regime change agents of the west, Hasina did not want any one in her family to succeed her as she knew that they would be killed by her opponents. In that way, Hasina was a formidable wall against Islamists that fell down due to machinations of protestors on Monday.

While Hasina is still to recover from her shocking exit from Dhaka, the Modi government will not let down India’s friend in the neighborhood and will leave the decision of political asylum in a third country to the ousted PM.

Even though the Army and euphoric radicals are celebrating the exit of Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh itself is on the verge of economic crisis like Pakistan, Maldives and Sri Lanka and will need support of western backed financial institutions to survive. Given the rate of unemployment, the radical students owing affiliation to Jamaat e Islami may turn against the Army if the solution offered is not to their liking.

Sheikh Hasina’s exit has left India between a rock and a hard place as a radical regime will pose a threat from the eastern front with New Delhi now facing an increasingly unstable neighborhood. While the Modi government will offer its support to stabilize the interim government in Bangladesh, anti-Sheikh Hasina supporters in the west will set their own anti-India play into motion. Barring Bhutan, all India’s neighbors are currently facing political turmoil and the situation is expected to get worse in future. The only option that India has is to insulate itself from cross border challenges through better security and advance intelligence apart from tackling the fifth columnists within.

 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta

Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.

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