Bangladesh has been thrust into a new and unsettling geopolitical reality since the dramatic fall of Sheikh Hasina’s government and her escape to India on 5 August 2024. The Muhammad Yunus-led administration—widely criticised as unconstitutional and unelected—is quickly shifting away from the Awami League’s historical foreign policy, which maintained close ties with India. But distancing Bangladesh from India—the very country that played a decisive role in its independence in 1971 and remains its largest trading partner—demands new alliances, and what may be better than reaching out to India’s arch-rivals Pakistan and China. His handshake with Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif in Cairo last December was more than symbolic—it signalled a willingness to “strengthen relations” and settle the wounds of 1971.
Rewriting history to replace India?
But how can Pakistan, after all its brutalities against their Bengali countrymen, be trusted, especially its army—whose high-ranking officials visited Bangladesh recently? Dhaka watchers in Delhi find it unsurprising because it is a very predictable course for Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and Jamaat-e-Islami-led foreign policy, which capitalise on anything anti-India. However, the new generation of young Bangladesh is not so perplexed about the growing nexus between Dhaka and Rawalpindi, as the 1971 Mukti Juddho resonates little with them.
The so-called “Second Coming” in August 2024, led by a group of students, appears to have set the stage for a complete rewriting of history—one that deliberately erases 1971, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the Awami League, and the legacy that Sheikh Hasina relentlessly claimed and projected for her own political prospects. In a Muslim-majority country deeply rooted in a syncretic cultural identity, rulers like Hasina were required to bridge political divides with the opposition, even if that meant engaging with groups that privileged Islamic identity over nationalist ideals. However, tying Bangladesh’s national identity solely to the Awami League proved to be a fatal political miscalculation.
