The New Great Game: Bangladesh as the Pivot in the Redrawing of South Asia’s Geopolitical Map

১৬ ই অক্টোবর, ২০২৫ সন্ধ্যা ৭:২০

The New Great Game: Bangladesh as the Pivot in the Redrawing of South Asia’s Geopolitical Map

1. Introduction: The Silent Remapping of a Region
South Asia’s cartography is being redrawn not by territorial conquest but through a multidimensional struggle for economic, strategic, and ideological primacy. The post–Cold War pattern of Indian pre-eminence now faces a more complex geometry of power. At the center stands Bangladesh—a state of high strategic significance at the hinge of South and Southeast Asia and on the maritime crossroads of the Bay of Bengal. Forged in the 1971 Liberation War, Bangladesh has become a principal arena where regional and extra-regional ambitions collide. These interventions—blending overt statecraft with covert influence—affect not only Bangladesh’s domestic trajectory but also the regional balance, generating new alignments and corridors of influence that extend beyond its borders.

2. The Four-Horse Race: Overt Interventions and Strategic Competition
The contest for influence in Bangladesh involves four principal actors, each deploying tools shaped by history and contemporary imperatives.

2.1 India: The Anxious Hegemon
India’s relationship with Bangladesh is foundational, multilayered, and frequently fraught. Its 1971 military intervention—catalyzed by a humanitarian crisis and strategic calculus—was decisive in Bangladesh’s creation [1]. That legacy confers on India a dual image: liberator and natural partner. In recent decades, India has emphasized connectivity and interdependence through rail links, port access, energy cooperation, and trade facilitation, aiming to embed Bangladesh within Indian-led regional circuits [2]. Yet proximity generates friction. Long-standing disputes over transboundary rivers (e.g., Teesta) and episodic border incidents sustain perceptions in Bangladesh of asymmetry and hegemonic overreach [3]. India’s strategic objective—to secure a friendly buffer protecting its vulnerable northeast—thus coexists with political sensitivities that complicate policy.

2.2 China: The Disruptive Game-Changer
China’s rise in Bangladesh over the last two decades marks a structural shift. Unencumbered by historical baggage, Beijing has pursued a pragmatic partnership anchored in the Belt and Road Initiative. Its footprint is tangible—bridges and power plants, large-scale investments, defense sales including submarines—and positions China as one of Bangladesh’s major trading partners and its leading arms supplier [4][5].
Strategically, this engagement dilutes India’s predominance and expands China’s access in the Bay of Bengal. For Dhaka, Chinese finance and technology offer leverage in bargaining with other partners. Risks persist, including debt vulnerabilities and entanglement in Sino-Indian rivalry, but the diversification logic remains compelling.

2.3 The United States: The Rules-Based Balancer
The United States engages Bangladesh through the lenses of its Indo-Pacific Strategy and democracy/rights diplomacy. Washington’s instruments—public statements on electoral integrity, targeted sanctions, visa policies, and development partnerships—aim to shape a regional order consistent with a “free and open Indo-Pacific” [6][7]. This approach contains a paradox: pressure intended to uphold democratic norms can be perceived in Dhaka as sovereignty intrusion, sometimes nudging Bangladeshi elites to hedge toward partners that eschew political conditionality. Managing this tension is central to the sustainability of U.S.–Bangladesh ties.

2.4 Pakistan: The Historical Spoiler
Pakistan’s contemporary leverage is limited, yet its legacy remains potent. The East Pakistan period (1947–1971)—culminating in the brutal Operation Searchlight—left enduring political and cultural scars [8]. Today, the memory of 1971 operates as a narrative baseline in Bangladesh’s identity and foreign-policy discourse. Islamabad’s influence functions mainly through selective diplomatic signaling and ideological networks, often as a counterpoint to Indian narratives, but far short of its pre-1971 centrality.

3. The Covert Dimension: Intelligence, Influence, and the Battle of Narratives
Beyond overt statecraft lies a quieter field: information operations conducted through media ecosystems, policy forums, and quasi-academic platforms. Typical features include:
1. Elite cueing and agenda setting: Policy briefs, seminars, and journalist outreach shape interpretive frames used by political and bureaucratic elites;
2. Perception management: Coordinated messaging amplifies particular risk frames (e.g., “debt trap,” “hegemony,” “democratic regression”) to tilt public consent;
3. Cross-pressure tactics: External narratives exploit domestic cleavages to complicate decision-making and constrain strategic autonomy.
Such operations do not redraw borders; they redraw the cognitive map through which policies are debated and chosen. Their effect is to magnify great-power competition while narrowing Bangladesh’s room for error—a hallmark of the contemporary, “neo-geopolitical” contest.

4. Redrawing the Map: Consequences and Regional Realignments
The cumulative effect of competing interventions is a reconfiguration of regional structure:
• From buffer to pivot: Bangladesh is shedding a passive “buffer” image and acting as a pivot state, leveraging competition to diversify partners and extract resources and policy space [10].
• Corridors of power: Overlapping connectivity projects—BRI-linked east–west arteries and India-Japan-led north–south linkages—are rewiring logistics, trade flows, and strategic depth, thereby altering the region’s functional geography [5].
• Maritime militarization: Chinese naval transfers and infrastructure support, combined with the presence of U.S. Naval forces, elevate the Bay of Bengal from a secondary theater to a potential locus of great-power signaling and deterrence.
• Dhaka’s agency—and constraints: Bangladesh practices calibrated multi-alignment. The strategy’s payoff is diversification; its constraint is exposure to external conditionalities and rivalry spillovers, which demand sustained diplomatic dexterity.

5. Conclusion: A Map Transformed
South and Southeast Asia’s strategic map is being redrawn in functional, not cartographic, terms. The singular dominance of any one power has given way to a competitive, multipolar field in which China’s economic statecraft, the United States’ normative and strategic engagement, India’s proximity-based interests, and Pakistan’s historical imprint intersect in Bangladesh. While lines on the political map remain stable, the operative cartography—spheres of influence, economic corridors, and information ecosystems—is in dynamic flux. The outcome is uncertain, but the Indo-Pacific balance will be shaped disproportionately by how Bangladesh navigates this multidomain contest.
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References
[1] Bass, G. J. (2013). The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide. Alfred A. Knopf.
[2] Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India. (2022). India–Bangladesh Relations. Retrieved from mea.gov.in.
[3] Human Rights Watch. (2021). Trigger Happy: Excessive Use of Force by Indian Troops at the Bangladesh Border.
[4] Singh, A. (2021). Bangladesh’s Chinese Submarines: A Strategic Shift in the Bay of Bengal. The Diplomat.
[5] Chowdhury, I. (2023). Bangladesh’s China Turn: What It Means for South Asia. Institute for Security & Development Policy.
[6] U.S. Department of State. (2023). Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Bangladesh.
[7] The White House. (2022). Indo-Pacific Strategy of the United States.
[8] Bass, G. J. (2013). The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide. Alfred A. Knopf.
[10] Muni, S. D. (2022). India’s Neighbourhood: Challenges in the Next Decade. Routledge.

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