Sheikh Hasina’s exit as Prime Minister and from Bangladesh has set off an uncertainty in the future direction of India’s relations with its eastern neighbour after having been on the upswing for more than a decade.

How does India look at a post-Hasina Bangladesh? There are two clues to an answer to this question: (1) the remarks of External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar made during an interactive session after the Jagjit Singh Memorial lecture in New Delhi on August 4 when he suggested India should be ready to deal with government changes in its neighbourhood and (2) the manner which India’s relations with the Maldives are shaping up after President Mohd Muzziu won the elections in the island nation on an “out India” campaign in September last year that cast severe strain on bilateral ties.

Leaving the past behind, New Delhi and Male reached out to each other to mend the ties. Muizzu attended Modi’s swearing in as PM on June 4. Right now, Jaishankar is on a three-day (August 9-11) official visit to the Maldives during which he will inaugurate community development projects funded by India’s soft loan. Can Jaishankar’s remarks and the current potentially turnaround in India-Maldives ties serve as a model for India’s relations with whoever is in power in post-Hasina Bangladesh? Neither India nor any party in Bangladesh should harbour adversarial relations among them.

By not remaining engaged with the Muizzu government in the Maldives, India would have risked not heeding to the mandate of free and fair elections in that country. Similarly, India cannot be oblivious of the widespread public anger against the Hasina government as reflected in the students' movement that ultimately led to her ouster.

In its first official response prior to the oath-taking of the interim government headed by Mohd Yunus, the Indian Foreign Ministry had said last week that it was too early to comment but made it clear that the expectations and the interests of Bangladesh would be foremost for the government and people of India. Shortly after Yunus took oath, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated the Nobel Laureate on assuming his new responsibilities and flagged an important concern of India over attacks on minorities in Bangladesh after Hasina’s exit from power and an end to violence.   

There is no official reaction as yet to the composition of the Yunus-led interim government but it has been noted that at least two of its members were also part of the caretaker government from 2006 to 2009. They are A F Hassan Arif and Brig Gen (Retd) M Hussain who was a member of the election commission between 2007 and 2012. Also noteworthy is that two other members of Yunus’ interim dispensation Sharmeen Murshid and Faruk-e-Azam have close links with the Bangladesh liberation war. While Sharmeen was a member of a cultural troupe which performed in refugee camps during the war, Azam took part in the war targeting Pakistan naval assets. India hopes the inclusion of Sharmeen and Azam reflecting the new interim government stays on course of the legacy of the liberation war.    

One big challenge for India would be to live down the perception in Bangladesh that it has always been a close ally of Awami League. The people in Bangladesh must understand that Awami League has always enjoyed an undisputed bipartisan support in India, leaving little space and time for engagement with Bangladeshi opposition groups like BNP or Jatiya Party. India’s ties with Awami League have been based on trust, goodwill and respect for sovereignty. New Delhi has repeatedly stressed bilateral ties with Dhaka under Hasina as a model for South Asia and beyond.

True, India failed to deliver on the Teesta water-sharing agreement largely due to opposition from West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, it worked hard to address Bangladesh’s development needs and also acted as Hasina’s principal backer in the international community, insulating her government from Western criticism about democratic backsliding in Bangladesh. Hasina addressed India’s security interests by cracking down on Indian insurgents operating from Bangladesh territory during BNP rule and Islamist elements to target India. A large portion of the credit for peace in north eastern India’s borders with Bangladesh goes to the Hasina government which handed over a number of insurgent leaders to India.

It should be remembered that India did make a number of attempts to reach out to BNP when Khaleda Zia returned as PM in 2001 only to return empty-handed. The Vajpayee government had rushed National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra to Dhaka as its points-man. But the move was cold shouldered by the BNP. When Khaelda Zia was the leader of the opposition and visited Delhi in 2012 the then PM Manmohan Singh hosted her for lunch and she had meetings with the then Foreign Ministers S M Krishna and Salman Khurshid. While in New Delhi, she made the right noises before the media, including this writer, about ties with India. But on returning to Dhaka, Khaleda Zia made a U-turn on her remarks in Delhi with anti-India remarks. In March 2014, Begum Zia refused to meet visiting Indian President Pranab Mukherjee in Dhaka in a bid to keep happy her ally Jamaat-e-Islami which called on general strike in protest against Mukherjee’s visit. India was disappointed about its attempts to reach out to BNP and appear even-handed being rebuffed.

There has always been a subtle anti-India strain in BNP’s foreign policy and it is at the core of its ideological sustenance of Bangladeshi nationalism. BNP should introspect if it needs to come out of this mindset.

India’s biggest challenge in resetting ties with a new government in Dhaka, interim or post-election, lies in creating a robust framework for bilateral relations with not just Bangladesh but all its South Asian neighbours that sustains any change of government there. But a great deal of the success for this framework would also depend on response from players traditionally not friendly to India and if they are sincerely ready to make a break from the past.

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The writer is a veteran Indian journalist