Bangladesh Election: The BNP May Be The Lesser Evil For India — But An Evil Nonetheless

Bangladesh’s political pendulum has swung again. And this time, it has landed firmly in the hands of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party.

In parliamentary elections held on February 12, the BNP secured a commanding two-thirds majority, winning around 209 of the 299 contested seats, with turnout crossing 60 per cent. Jamaat-e-Islami, which many had projected as the rising force and possible kingmaker, is trailing well behind. The mandate is decisive. There is no ambiguity in the verdict.

At the centre of this victory is Tarique Rahman, the long-time BNP leader and son of former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia. After spending 17 years in exile in London amid corruption cases that he has consistently denied, and which Bangladeshi courts later overturned, Rahman now stands poised to lead the country.

This is not a routine political transition next door. It marks the return of a party that has governed before, but whose record in power left India deeply uneasy.

In New Delhi, the response has been swift and carefully calibrated. Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated Rahman on his decisive victory and spoke of strengthening bilateral ties. The choreography has been deliberate. But the mood is not celebratory. It is cautious. It is resigned.

For India, this was not the ideal outcome. It was the least damaging one available.

For decades, Bangladeshi politics oscillated between two poles, the Awami League and the BNP. Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League governed for 15 years until her dramatic ouster following the July 2024 uprising.

In the final two elections under Hasina, especially 2014 and 2018, the BNP boycotted or contested under protest, alleging fraud and labelling the polls neither free nor fair. By 2024, turnout had collapsed to 42 per cent and the political system had lost credibility.

Hasina’s removal altered the landscape entirely. The Awami League was subsequently banned under the Anti-Terrorism Act in April 2025 and could not participate in this election. The field reopened. The BNP regained lost ground. Jamaat, whose registration had been restored by the Supreme Court in June 2025 after more than a decade of exclusion, surged dramatically. For months, there was a genuine possibility that Jamaat might either form the government outright or dictate terms in a coalition.

That scenario would have been catastrophic for India.

Instead, the BNP has emerged dominant, while Jamaat, though still formidable with roughly 60-plus seats, will not control the state.

This matters. It matters enormously. But it does not erase history.

For most of the period during which Bangladeshi politics swung between the BNP and the Awami League, India’s preference was unmistakable. New Delhi preferred the Awami League. It did so not out of ideological romance but because of hard security arithmetic.

The Awami League’s political identity is anchored in 1971. India’s intervention in the Liberation War and the role of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman created a durable historical bond. That memory still carries weight. The Awami League sees India as the country that enabled Bangladesh’s birth. India sees the Awami League as aligned with the foundational narrative of Bangladesh’s independence.

The BNP emerged from a very different ideological genealogy. Founded by Ziaur Rahman, it constructed a nationalism partly defined by differentiation from India. Where the Awami League emphasised shared history, the BNP emphasised sovereignty and distance. Where one side leaned instinctively toward Delhi, the other viewed it with suspicion.

From New Delhi’s perspective, one was predictable and cooperative, and the other was variable and hostile.

The divergence became stark between 2001 and 2006, during Khaleda Zia’s BNP government. Those five years remain deeply etched in India’s memory.

Indian security agencies documented 172 camps of Indian insurgent organisations operating inside Bangladesh during that period. ULFA’s entire leadership functioned from Dhaka. Arabinda Rajkhowa and Paresh Baruah were not fugitives in hiding. They were operating with alarming ease.

The memory of the April 2004 Chittagong arms haul is still fresh in Indian memory. Ten truckloads of weapons, including 4,930 firearms, 27,020 grenades, and 840 rocket launchers, were intercepted at a government-owned jetty.

The arms were destined for ULFA. Key figures implicated included Jamaat chief Motiur Rahman Nizami (then Industries Minister, whose ministry controlled the jetty) and State Minister for Home Lutfozzaman Babar. Indian intelligence alleged the operation was impossible without Tarique Rahman's knowledge. The case was shelved during BNP's tenure and only prosecuted after Hasina's return to power.

Pakistan’s ISI reportedly expanded its footprint inside Bangladesh’s intelligence establishment during those years. For India, this meant that its northeastern insurgencies were not merely domestic challenges. They were being facilitated across the border.

The contrast under Sheikh Hasina was transformative. After returning to power in 2009, she dismantled insurgent networks, arrested and handed over ULFA leaders, and cooperated extensively with Indian intelligence. Seventy bilateral institutional mechanisms were established across security, defence, trade, and connectivity. India gained transit access to its landlocked Northeast through Bangladeshi territory.

The December 2023 ULFA peace accord, involving thousands of surrendered cadres, would not have been possible without Hasina eliminating the space for the outfit to operate with impunity from Bangladesh.

For India, the Hasina years were not simply comfortable. They were stabilising. Cross-border insurgency receded. Intelligence cooperation deepened. The eastern frontier quietened.

That stability came at a cost to Bangladesh’s internal democratic health, a cost many in India acknowledged but were willing to tolerate because the security dividends were tangible. The Hasina doctrine of India’s Bangladesh policy rested on the assumption that anchoring the relationship to a single dependable partner was sustainable. It was not.

Hasina’s fall exposed the fragility of that model. When the Awami League disappeared from the ballot, India faced an uncomfortable recalibration.

Jamaat’s resurgence added urgency. The party not only regained legal status but demonstrated durable electoral strength, winning over 60 seats as part of an 11-party alliance that blended Islamist politics with the revolutionary credibility of the student-led National Citizen Party. Islamist politics, far from being marginal, proved structurally embedded.

Even more unsettling for Delhi were signs of external engagement with Jamaat. A leaked recording in early 2026 revealed a US diplomat discussing outreach to Jamaat and other Islamist groups, dismissing concerns about Sharia governance on the assumption that American economic leverage would deter radical outcomes.

Whether routine diplomacy or strategic misjudgment, it confirmed India’s fear that Western actors were willing to experiment in Bangladesh’s volatile political environment.

India had warned repeatedly against destabilising Hasina’s government without ensuring that extremist forces did not fill the vacuum. Those warnings went unheeded.

In this context, the BNP began to look like the lesser evil.

Unlike Jamaat, the BNP is a mainstream political party with experience governing. Unlike smaller Islamist movements, it understands international finance, global markets, and the costs of reckless confrontation. Tarique Rahman, returning from 17 years in London exile after courts cleared him of 84 cases, positioned himself as a nationalist rather than an Islamist. Crucially, for the first time since 1991, the BNP contested separately from Jamaat in an attempt to project ideological moderation.

India responded pragmatically.

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar travelled to Dhaka in December 2025 for Khaleda Zia’s funeral, the highest-level Indian visit since Hasina’s ouster. Indian High Commissioner Pranay Kumar Verma met Rahman shortly after he assumed BNP chairmanship. The symbolism was unmistakable. India was preparing for a new reality.

Yet this engagement is born of necessity, not trust.

India remembers the BNP’s record. It remembers the 2004 arms haul. It remembers the insurgent camps. It remembers the ISI’s shadow. It remembers that the BNP historically aligned with Jamaat in elections. It remembers that anti-India rhetoric was often instrumentalised during BNP rule.

The present environment is even more combustible.

Anti-India sentiment in Bangladesh has intensified since Hasina’s removal. India’s decision to provide her refuge has been weaponised by critics. Protests have targeted Indian diplomatic missions, including attacks on the Assistant High Commission in Chittagong. Greater Bangladesh maps incorporating India’s northeastern states have surfaced in university spaces. Minority violence has escalated, with thousands of documented attacks on Hindu communities between August 2024 and late 2025.

Simultaneously, the Pakistan-Bangladesh defence rapprochement has accelerated. Reports of ISI visits, Bangladesh’s participation in Pakistani naval exercises, negotiations over JF-17 fighter jets, and the inauguration of a China Pakistan Bangladesh trilateral framework have raised alarms in Delhi.

In this atmosphere, the BNP cannot afford to appear overly accommodating to India. Domestically, it will need to prove that it is not an Indian proxy. It will need to demonstrate distance from Hasina’s perceived closeness to Delhi.

Rahman may feel compelled not to appear insufficiently Islamic, particularly with Jamaat commanding a significant parliamentary bloc and the broader opposition landscape more ideologically Islamist than before.

The BNP’s invocation of a Bangladesh First doctrine is not rhetorical flourish. It signals a deliberate repositioning of the country’s foreign policy away from what its critics called the Awami League’s India tilted orientation.

For Tarique Rahman, this posture is politically necessary. He did not win on a platform of continuity. He won on a promise of restoring sovereignty, recalibrating relationships, and demonstrating that Dhaka will no longer appear deferential to Delhi.

That recalibration will first surface in existing bilateral agreements. Over the past decade and a half, Sheikh Hasina’s government signed a series of connectivity, power sharing, transit, and security arrangements with India.

Many of these deals delivered tangible benefits to both sides. But in Bangladesh’s current domestic climate, they are framed by sections of the opposition as asymmetrical agreements where India gained transit routes to its Northeast, energy corridors, and intelligence cooperation, while Bangladesh appeared overly accommodating.

Rahman has already signalled that such agreements will be reviewed. Even if no dramatic rollbacks occur, the very act of review introduces friction. What was once routine cooperation may now become subject to nationalist rhetoric and renegotiation.

Then there is the Teesta River. For years, India and Bangladesh have failed to finalise a Teesta water sharing agreement, largely due to opposition from the West Bengal government. The BNP has indicated its willingness to pursue the China backed Teesta River Master Plan, a move that carries both symbolic and strategic implications.

The issue of border shootings is equally combustible. The India Bangladesh border, stretching over 4,000 kilometres, has long been a flashpoint, particularly around cattle smuggling and illegal crossings. The BNP has pledged to take the strictest possible stance on incidents involving India’s Border Security Force.

Under Hasina, such episodes were often managed quietly through diplomatic channels. Under a BNP government operating in a highly charged nationalist environment, they may be amplified. Each incident risks becoming a domestic rallying cry. Each confrontation could spiral into media outrage on both sides of the border.

Layered atop these structural issues is the impending expiry of the Ganges Water Sharing Treaty in 2026. Negotiations over water are politically delicate in both countries. In India, any perception of conceding too much water to Bangladesh becomes fodder for opposition parties in West Bengal. In Bangladesh, failure to secure equitable flows is framed as evidence of Indian indifference. Renewal negotiations will unfold in an atmosphere already thick with suspicion.

Then there is Sheikh Hasina herself. Bangladesh has sentenced her in absentia. She remains in India. Dhaka’s demand for her extradition is unlikely to be met, but it will not disappear either. The BNP cannot afford to appear soft on this issue. It will need to signal to its domestic base that accountability is being pursued.

For India, extraditing a former prime minister who governed for 15 years and cooperated extensively on security is politically and strategically unthinkable. The issue will linger.

Finally, domestic politics in India will only complicate matters. State elections in Assam and West Bengal in early 2026 will amplify the very real issues of illegal migration, border security, and demographic change. Bangladesh will become an issue during the campaign. Statements made for domestic consumption in India will be reported and amplified in Bangladesh, reinforcing narratives of Indian hostility. The cycle is predictable. It is also difficult to control.

Taken together, these are not minor irritants. They are overlapping pressure points. Each is manageable in isolation. Combined, they create an environment in which trust will be thin, negotiation harder, and miscalculation more likely.

This is the uneasy reality that defines the present moment.

For India, the BNP is preferable to a Jamaat dominated state. It is an experienced adversary rather than an ideological insurgent. It understands the grammar of governance. It knows the limits of confrontation. It is constrained by economic interdependence.

But it is not the Awami League. It does not share the same historical affinity with India. It does not instinctively prioritise Delhi’s security concerns. It does not view India as a partner in the same narrative of liberation. It will seek to rebalance. It will test boundaries.

And it will operate in a Bangladesh that is more Islamist, more polarised, and more openly suspicious of India than at any point in the past decade.

That is why the relief in Delhi is muted.

The worst case scenario has been avoided. Jamaat does not control the government. Bangladesh remains within the orbit of conventional party politics rather than overt Islamist transformation.

In the hierarchy of undesirable outcomes, the BNP is the least destabilising. But that does not make it benign. From India’s perspective, the BNP may indeed be the lesser evil. But it is still an evil nonetheless.