An advisor to the interim Bangladeshi government that took power after early August’s US-backed regime change against former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina accused India of being responsible for the latest floods due to it allegedly opening up a dam amid heavy rains in the region. This followed some student protests in support of what they described as a fairer water-sharing deal with India and coincided with the interim Environment Minister declaring readiness to “forcefully” advocate for this.
The Indian Ministry of External Affairs denied Bangladesh’s claim that the latest floods were due to anything that it did, but it’s clear that this won’t make any difference since Dhaka’s new political setup has already made up its mind to once again politicize this issue. It’s highly emotive in this riparian country of an estimated 170 million people, the eighth most populous in the world, and can thus be leveraged to mobilize continued support for the post-coup authorities.
The narrative was already spun by US Government-funded pundit Derek Grossman, who’s a senior defense analyst on the Indo-Pacific at the RAND Corporation, that India might have opened the dam without telling Bangladesh “in political retaliation” against the new government. The US has an interest in dividing-and-ruling India and Bangladesh because the resultant perception among the latter of newfound security threats from its much larger neighbor can lead to it finally giving a base to the US.
Hasina claimed after her ouster that she wouldn’t have been overthrown had she surrendered her country’s sovereignty by handing over St. Martin Island to it in the northern part of the Bay of Bengal. Bangladesh’s ties with neighboring Myanmar have been very difficult ever since the Rohingya issue emerged in 2015 and then severely worsened in 2017, but that wasn’t enough to get her to comply with these demands at the expense of regional stability, nor were Myanmar’s claims to that same island.
The precedent set by her defiance and then exposure of this US plot impedes her successors’ efforts to give it a base, ergo the need to artificially manufacture a regional security crisis in order to justify this in the court of domestic and international opinion. The initial means to that end was mob violence against Bangladesh’s Hindu minority in the immediate aftermath of the coup, but when that failed to provoke even implied threats from India, the decision was made to politicize their water dispute yet again.
Hasina handled this sensitive issue very diplomatically during her time in office, but her opponents from the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) have a history of exploiting it for domestic and regional purposes, the first with regards to mobilizing support and the second as a pretext for hosting separatist groups. About that, the Pakistani-friendly BNP shares Islamabad’s vision of “Balkanizing” India’s Northeast States, but they can’t openly admit their ideologically driven geopolitical agenda.
For that reason, it was hinted during the time that they were in power that one of the reasons why they host such anti-Indian groups is because of continued disagreements with India. Although Hasina’s trade and military ties with China were much closer than with India, she nevertheless shared her Indian counterpart’s vision of regional peace and integration. She therefore reversed her predecessors’ policy of harboring anti-Indian groups and mercilessly cracked down on them during her administration.
They’ll now likely soon return though in parallel with the BNP-backed interim government once again politicizing the water-sharing issue, thus explaining their lie about India being responsible for the latest floods. This false claim serves as the cover for once again hosting anti-Indian separatists, which could in turn provoke the implied threats from India that the post-coup authorities initially hoped to generate via mob violence against the Hindu minority and thus create the pretext for giving a base to the US.
