Do our friends get it?

The US is reportedly in contact with India and other regional countries on recent developments in Bangladesh. A US government spokesperson on August 15 described it as “private diplomatic discussions” on Bangladesh that do not include Bangladesh.

There are many odds in the narratives driving the US-India joint venture on foreign policy vis-à-vis Bangladesh.

The Bangladesh next Afghanistan fallacy

You can’t help but wonder whether they get what is happening in Bangladesh in mid-July 2024. Such episodes occur rarely, once in over half a century in our case. The upheaval, steered by Gen Z, was a response to society hitting a combination of walls – economic, social, moral, political – with the path changing momentum coming from the dynamics of the Anti-Discrimination Student Movement. 

You cannot understand the ongoing political change simply as an antidote to youth unemployment and economic struggles. Accumulated disaffection to repression of the right to express, vote and protest were as important. It galvanised the students, their parents, and people from many other walks of life against the incumbents. The increasingly restricted democratic and civic space, partisan state institutions, judicial dominance, capture of conventional media, and disinformation in social media fanned public outrage. You had to be blind to not see the evidence of the rampant breach of electoral norms again and again at the national and local levels, election after election, not to speak of political, moral, and financial corruption. 

The ruling elites in our big neighbourhood and farthest market decided to go with Hasina. The resident US diplomats overtly expressed concerns about jailing rivals and critics ahead of the election in January 2024. The US threatened visa restrictions on individuals and sanctions on institutions undermining democracy or human rights. Indian officials allegedly demanded that the US tone down its pro-democracy rhetoric! They perceived Bangladesh becoming a breeding ground for Islamist groups posing a threat to both India’s national security and US interests. 

The existential versus democracy framing equated “existence” with the Hasina regime. Indian foreign policy made strategic partnership with US on the Bangladesh issue assuming the alternative to Hasina is the inevitable advent of religious bigotry and Islamic terrorism. The gullibility of the US and Indian foreign policies to this narrative emboldened Hasina. She understood very well that the US government does not perceive scaling up visa restrictions and sanctions, as propagated, is in its self-interest even though it is posturing. She called their bluff. The Biden administration shied away from further sanctions, convinced that the alternative to the strategy supported by India is to let Bangladesh glide or slide into “next” Afghanistan. 

There could be no bigger fallacy. Historically, political and economic institutions in Bangladesh have not posed “existential” threats to Indian or US geopolitical interests. Current floods have in fact reversed the concern vis-à-vis India, albeit not necessarily for the right reasons.

Facing the misses

Policymakers in both New Delhi and Washington appear to be finding it hard to accept that they did not know when to say enough is enough, call a spade a spade and be on the right side of history. The train left well before they made it to the station. Suddenly those you thought you could work with to keep the business of diplomacy going are gone. The unthinkable happened. You were not exactly on the side you can publicly admit you were comfortable with, to say the least. 

Grapevines report divisions within the US government over how to handle Bangladesh. Those arguing for a tougher stance retired, not necessarily coincidentally. It is hard to believe the US administration cowed to threats to the safety of US diplomats in Dhaka. They chose not to alienate the autocracy and antagonise India. Values gave way to what was erroneously perceived as “pragmatism” in balancing a “very complicated” number of interests, including their own. 

The irrelevance of public sentiment and human rights in the conduct of the foreign policy of our friends is remarkable but not surprising. Alienation of the general public from the government you are dealing with carries no weight in their (mis)calculus. They were not ready to give up finding “constructive” ways to engage with the administration in power. All bet on Hasina, even as she grew defiantly autocratic and massively unpopular. And they are still struggling to grow out of it.

Diplomatic blind spots

The preliminary report by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, released on August 16 shows how distant their foreign policy stances were from reality. The report affirms the “majority of deaths and injuries have been attributed to the security forces and the student wing affiliated with the Awami League”. 

It nails the tipping points that the security and political intelligence of Indian and US foreign policy completely missed. Demonstrations descended into violence in mid-July, “particularly following senior Government officials’ (read the Prime Minister) inflammatory remarks referring to the protesters as “razakars”. Subsequently, “the Awami League General Secretary Obaidul Quader personally made incendiary statements” and unleashed their student wing against the protesters.

The gaslighting was all but done. The rest is history that took a decisive turn with the fall of the government on August 5. Measly expressions of “observing with concern” aside, the silence of the international media and the community against state brutalities was deafening. Not only were the security forces “unnecessarily disproportionate”, so were our big friends disproportionately out of touch in gauging the pulse of the Bangladesh society. 

False narratives on “communal violence” propagated by the international media, pundits, intellectuals, influencers, and some members of the general public overlook the political identity of those targeted post August 5. Evidence on political targeting is the strongest. This is not to condone reprisals. But the post August 5 violence is what the facts say it is: predominantly political, not communal violence. 

The student protesters and many others guarded Hindu temples and neighbourhoods. Fears regarding an alleged Islamist takeover or for that matter US involvement have little merit. It is sad that the US finds the latter “laughable” but not the former.

Geopolitical nearsightedness

How can we explain this failure to read the writing on the walls, not just in Bangladesh but in the entire South Asian region? Absent malicious intent, an inexcusable error of omission of this magnitude, made by the governments, not necessarily the people they work for, perhaps reflects geopolitical nearsightedness. US and Indian foreign policies converge on looking at Bangladesh through a lens made in China. The US strategy since the Obama administration has been to let India have space to meddle as it likes to countervail China. 

It’s not as if Mody or Biden necessarily admired Hasina’s autocracy. Their comfort zone owed to Hasina playing the same tune on the security and business fronts while giving her space for manoeuvring deals with China. When some deals soured the transactional relations, her flip flops were no more than minor distractions in the larger geopolitical game.

South Asia is largely subsumed under the US Indo-Pacific strategy driven by perceived threats to the “liberal” international order from the ambitious China and Russia. The Bangladesh-US relationship, never mind the rhetoric, is subordinate to the India-US partnership.

Disinformation on steroid

Unfortunately, and amazingly, India is awash with different variants of the CIA–ISI joint venture narrative on the game behind the game changer on August 5. They totally disregard the growing and diverse background of the participants and the timeline of the chain of events. 

A logical corollary of this theory is Hasina must have been a suicide agent of CIA or ISI. She foolhardily sought to crush what started as a peaceful, logical and straight to handle demands of the students. The absurdity of any proposition that relies on Hasina acting willy-nilly to CIA-ISI provocations to self-destruct is self-evident from the timeline of events leading to August 5.

Some US and Indian officials justifiably and some opportunistically are in the “I told you so” mode. The horsepower bolted the stable when Abu Sayeed and Mughdo took bullets. The cosmic difference between Bangladesh 2.0 and Afghanistan is as stark as the difference between night and day.

Zahid Hussain is a former lead economist of World Bank Dhaka office