Sheikh Hasina’s dramatic ouster as Prime Minister of Bangladesh on August 5 this year after weeks of student protests evoked at the time comparisons with Sri Lanka, where Gotabaya Rajapaksa had to flee the country in July 2022 after a public uprising, and with the hasty exit of Ashraf Ghani from his presidential palace in Kabul when the Taliban took over Afghanistan in August 2021. The comparisons are not incorrect, but Hasina’s downfall is perhaps better understood from the perspective of Bangladesh’s unique five-decade history, and the preceding decades of struggle for liberation from Pakistan, rather than as part of a regional continuum of political churn.
India’s Near East: A New History
Hasina’s rise and fall have uncanny parallels with that of her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, over the four short years that he served as the leader of Bangladesh after its liberation. A small coterie, internal battles going back to the liberation struggle, the extraordinary political agency of students, the army that was part Pakistan’s toxic legacy and part liberation militia, the descent into authoritarianism—all these mirror the elements of Hasina’s five terms in office and her eventual downfall.
The book’s thesis
Given the proximity of events, the Bangladesh story may seem to be the centrepiece of Avinash Paliwal’s India’s Near East: A New History, but the book is actually about the complex set of forces and actors that shaped an entire region east of West Bengal, to which the author ascribes the term “near east”. The “new history” is a deep dive into India’s domestic and foreign policies in three parts of this near east: one within, two outside, each politically separated from the other by international boundaries yet densely linked and sundered by identity, the flows of people and goods, and a shared colonial past. The book’s thesis is that India’s challenge of cementing its own boundaries in its north-eastern region was intricately tied to the dynamics of military rule in East Pakistan and Burma (now Myanmar).
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As it tried to rein in communal and fissiparous tendencies in its own north-eastern region, India tried a potpourri of contradictory approaches: courting the generals in Burma and the “pro-India” secular liberal democrats in Bangladesh and bombing and bringing in the undemocratic Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act in its own north-eastern region. In the author’s words, his work is a “blurring of epistemic lines between the domestic and external”, how one works on and influences the other, mostly in contradictory ways.
The detailed study of India’s decision to intervene in East Pakistan, the denouement of Mujib, and the fading of the 1971 promise of peace for India on its double-edged eastern flank is the nerd version of a thriller. Paliwal unpacks the plot with an eye-watering 10 to 15 annotations a page. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement
Antinomy is a word that recurs through this volume. Thus, India is still trying to figure out what works best in its near east, which is why the book’s arc stretches from before Independence to the point of the Manipur breakdown from May 2023 (and still ongoing), and Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s infamous description of Bangladeshi migrants as “termites”, dredged up with much glee now in post-Hasina Dhaka. Paliwal details how Muhammad Ayub Khan’s coup in Pakistan and Ne Win’s takeover in Burma were early setbacks to India’s and Jawaharlal Nehru’s attempts at a postcolonial “constitutional solidarity” in the newly free region based on shared concern about communism. What they continued to have in common though was a distrust of China. Staring at a downturn in relations with Peking, and a rebellion in the Naga areas of north-east India, Nehru did not push the democracy button. Asked by a journalist how he planned to stop the “contagion” of military coups spreading to India, Nehru’s response was a mildly expressed hope that the “contagion [of democracy] from India would spread to these countries instead of the other way round”.
The Chinese threat
In 1959, Ayub met the Indian High Commissioner in Islamabad to discuss the Chinese threat to India and Pakistan to propose that they resolve their own issues to undertake “joint defence” against China. Nehru refused believing it was a ruse to force India to dilute its position on Kashmir. Soon after, China and Pakistan concluded a boundary deal. In the east, Burma patched up with China by giving up its claim at the China-Burma-India trijunction. “By simultaneously resolving boundary disputes with Burma and Pakistan, China was sending India a message, namely that there would be costs [to]of hosting the Dalai Lama,” Paliwal writes.
By the second half of the 1960s, “with the prospect of constitutional solidarities and Nehru himself both relics of the past, India was less wary of using force”. Pakistan and China’s backing of the Naga leader A.Z. Phizo, the outbreak of the Naxalbari movement in West Bengal, and the Mizo nationalist movement triggered India’s first search for solutions to the challenges of the near east. The Naxalbari uprising and a similar movement in East Pakistan, both with Chinese backing, were among the reasons that India considered in its decision to support a nascent movement for independence in East Pakistan, the book reveals.
“India knew there were different strands in Bangladesh’s liberation movement. Still, it chose to put all its eggs in the Awami League basket. The plan backfired.”
India’s decision to support a “hard core” of secular, liberal, and democratic East Pakistanis was contradictory to its desire that they also remain steadfastly “pro-India”. India knew there were different strands in Bangladesh’s liberation movement. Still, it chose to put all its eggs in the Awami League basket. The plan backfired. It made both India and Mujib unpopular, a theme that would play out again 53 years later in Hasina’s ouster. “It’s no surprise that Mujib’s populism quickly morphed into anti-Indianism,” the author notes.
Paliwal shows that Nehru’s decision to remain “neutral” on East Pakistan after Mujib’s arrest in 1962, when he crossed back from his first exploratory foray into Agartala as the leader of the Bangladesh Liberation Front, “scarred” the Bangabandhu. Although India warmed to him later that decade, he remained wary of its intentions and, in 1971, preferred going underground in East Pakistan rather than cross the border like his other colleagues, leaving the first provisional government of Bangladesh, headquartered on the India-Bangladesh border, to be headed by Tajuddin Ahmad. As Mujib’s insecurity grew, Tajuddin’s friendliness with New Delhi would make him suspect in the eyes of his leader. His assassination, within three months of the massacre of Mujib and his family on August 15, 1975, was intended to preclude any Indian plan for a post-Mujib pro-India government in Dhaka.
In later years, India “almost” intervened militarily in Bangladesh in February 2009, Paliwal asserts. Soldiers of the Bangladesh Rifles mutinied and were killing officers and their families. A threatened Hasina dialled New Delhi, unable to trust her own army. He quotes the then Bangladesh Foreign Secretary saying that India warned General Moeen Uddin Ahmed against using force to end the mutiny as it might exacerbate the situation. As it turned out, in the months before Hasina’s ouster in 2024, one of the complaints against her was that she had given in to the mutineers and granted them amnesty. Notably, in the weeks after Hasina’s ouster in August, Ahmed sought to clear his name, stating that while he was prepared with tanks to subdue the mutineers, Hasina had taken charge of the situation. He made no mention of an Indian role.
The detailed study of India’s decision to intervene in East Pakistan, the denouement of Mujib, and the fading of the 1971 promise of peace for India on its double-edged eastern flank is the nerd version of a thriller. Paliwal unpacks the plot with an eye-watering 10 to 15 annotations a page; this is true across the book, which slows down the pace considerably but puts the storytelling on solid footing.
A rare and valuable study by an Indian on Burma’s history
The book is also a rare and valuable study by an Indian on Burma’s history as it criss-crossed with India’s state-building. New Delhi’s engagement with the junta in the first decade of the new century corrected the previous decade’s miscalculation over the Tatmadaw’s staying power, and what was a love fest with the democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi changed into a calibrated relationship with the junta. Then ongoing, the Naga peace process contributed to this engagement. Junta boss General Than Shwe helped secure a ceasefire with the Khaplang faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland, which was based in Myanmar. This had proved elusive earlier despite a truce with the group’s Isak-Muivah leadership. Keeping the junta on its side was also crucial to India at a time when relations with Bangladesh, under its then leader Khaleda Zia, had deteriorated to a point beyond repair. Paliwal quotes the then Foreign Secretary (later National Security Adviser) Shivshankar Menon as stating that bringing Myanmar out of China’s fold was also a reason for the engagement with the Tatmadaw, welcomed by the junta at a time when it had been excommunicated by the West.
But as the decade changed, several developments, including Western pressure led by President Barack Obama in the US, the devastation wreaked by a cyclone (which Paliwal does not mention), and the inadequacy of the junta’s response to it, converged to force the junta to begin a process of political reform with Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD).
In New Delhi on January 26, 2018, Aung San Suu Kyi, the then State Counsellor of Myanmar, and Lee Hsien Loong, the then Prime Minister of Singapore, greet the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his wife at a function at Rashtarapati Bhavan. | Photo Credit: V.V. Krishnan
Once again, “antinomies” were at play. “India’s decision to overlook Myanmar’s civil-military relations for strategic reasons, propensity to congratulate itself for nudging the junta towards reform, and the conviction that Myanmar could weaned away from China proved illusory,” the author points out. India’s border raid in 2014 was a public relations disaster in Myanmar. The author was told by a NLD Minister that the “Myanmar military lost face” and called it “interference in the country’s sovereignty”. Meanwhile, ahead of the 2015 election in which Suu Kyi would contest for the first time since 1988, her message to the Indian Ambassador at the time, Gautam Mukhopadhyaya, was that “we are going to win, so don’t make the mistake” of siding with the junta. All this at a time of a new-found solidarity between Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar (and Sri Lanka too) and Hindutva, which tempered India’s responses to the Rohingya crisis. The “termites” epithet and the 2019 amendments to India’s Citizenship Act showed how unsettled India’s relations with its neighbours in the east continue to remain, giving a whole new meaning to Modi’s “Act East” slogan (as opposed to Manmohan Singh’s “Look East”).
Paliwal’s command over the geography and his access to sources are evident. This deeply researched book, despite the daunting complexity of the narrative as it weaves in and out of the three regions and the nearly 100 pages of “notes”, is a must-read for anyone who wants a better understanding of India’s “near east” beyond the communal and racist narratives that now dominate public understanding of this strategically important region.
Nirupama Subramanian is an independent journalist who has worked earlier at The Hindu and at The Indian Express.
