A transition misunderstood

The response of India’s political and intellectual establishment to the post-Hasina transition in Bangladesh had been marked by reflex. It, in all good senses, probably had revealed a conceptual blind spot from New Delhi in its inability to distinguish between “political Islam” as a governing project and the contingent, reactive alliances that emerge in moments of democratic rupture.

When Sheikh Hasina’s long autocratic rule unraveled under the weight of its own authoritarian excesses, India, instead of seeing it as long due a democratic opening, considered it a vacuum. And into that vacuum, it projected its worst fears.

That’s because for over a decade, India had invested heavily—politically and also psychologically—in the “stability” of Hasina’s government. That investment was not irrational. 

Under Hasina, Bangladesh aligned closely with Indian security interests, cracked down on insurgent groups along the border, and maintained a broadly cooperative bilateral framework. In New Delhi’s strategic imagination, Dhaka had become a rare success story. A friendly government in a volatile neighborhood.

But this closeness came at a cost. India’s policy apparatus increasingly conflated Hasina’s continuity with Bangladesh’s stability. As reports of electoral manipulation, repression of opposition, jailing of dissenters, and shrinking civic space mounted, New Delhi’s response was largely muted. Stability trumped democracy.

So when Hasina fell, India was without a framework for understanding what came next. The interim administration led by Muhammad Yunus was thus received in India through the prism of loss. The dominant narrative that quickly took hold in Indian media and policy circles was one of “Islamist resurgence.” 

The fall of a secular strongwoman, in this telling, could only mean the rise of religious conservatism.

This framing was not entirely invented. Bangladesh does have a history of Islamist political mobilization, and groups with religious orientations did indeed re-enter the political space after years of suppression. But the leap from political re-entry to systemic transformation was neither empirically grounded nor analytically rigorous.

Instead, it reflected a kind of strategic shorthand: if not Hasina, then Islamists.

This binary thinking shaped both the tone and substance of Indian commentary in the months following the transition. Influential voices frequently framed almost all incidents in Bangladesh under the Yunus government in terms of ideological drift. 

Concerns about “revisionism” of the Liberation War narrative and fears of an “Islamist transformation” became recurring themes.

Yet what is striking, in retrospect, is not that these concerns were voiced, but that they became the dominant lens through which all developments were interpreted.

Preconceived notion and misinterpretation

Take, for instance, the contrasting reactions of Indian establishments surrounding the two Genocide Day (March 25) statements in two consecutive years. 

When Tarique Rahman, now Bangladesh prime minister, issued a message this year on this day many prominent Indian commentators like Shekhar Gupta or Ashok Swain were quick to praise it. Gupta described the statement as “wise and mature,” while Swain welcomed it as a corrective to alleged historical distortions.

But a year earlier, when Yunus issued a similarly strong statement affirming the historical record, the reaction in India was notably muted. The silence was telling. It suggested that the issue was not the content of the message, but the identity of the messenger.

Yunus, unlike Hasina, did not fit neatly into India’s established categories. He was neither a traditional politician nor a known quantity in the realm of regional security. More importantly, he presided over a transitional moment in which multiple political forces, including Islamists and right-wing groups, were visible and vocal.

For many in India, that visibility was enough to trigger alarm.

But this is where the analytical error becomes most evident. The support that Yunus’s interim government received from Islamist and right-wing constituencies was not the product of a shared ideological project. It was, rather, the outcome of a shared opposition to Hasina’s rule.

To understand this, one must first reckon honestly with the nature of that rule.

By the end of her tenure, Hasina’s government had acquired many of the characteristics commonly associated with competitive authoritarianism. Elections were widely criticized as neither free nor fair. Opposition parties faced systematic repression. Civil society and media operated under increasing constraints. The space for dissent narrowed dramatically.

In such an environment, opposition is rarely neat or ideologically coherent. It becomes, instead, a broad and often uneasy coalition of actors united less by what they believe than by what they oppose.

Islamist groups, many of which had been marginalized or suppressed under Hasina, saw in the transition an opportunity to re-enter the political arena. Right-wing actors, similarly sidelined, found space to mobilize. But so too did student movements, civil society organizations, and technocratic reformers.

The interim administration under Yunus functioned as a kind of holding structure for this diverse and often contradictory set of forces. Its legitimacy derived from its role in facilitating a transition away from an increasingly untenable status quo, rather than from ideological alignment.

To interpret the presence or support of Islamist actors within this broader coalition as evidence of an “Islamist takeover” is to misunderstand the dynamics of political transition. It is to mistake participation for dominance, and contingency for design.

Inorganic interpretation of an organic transformation 

Moreover, it ignores a crucial point: that the very conditions which enabled Islamist groups to gain visibility were themselves the product of prolonged repression.

When political systems suppress mainstream opposition, they often create openings for more radical or marginalized actors to step in. This is not unique to Bangladesh; it is a pattern observed in multiple contexts. The re-emergence of Islamist voices after Hasina’s fall was thus less a sign of their ascendancy than of the sudden removal of constraints.

In this sense, their support for Yunus was not driven by an “ulterior motive” to reshape the state along ideological lines. It was driven by a more immediate and pragmatic calculation. That the interim administration represented a break from a regime that had excluded them.

The same logic applied to other right-leaning groups. Their alignment with the interim government was situational, of course not structural. It reflected a convergence of interests in a specific moment. India’s failure to recognize this distinction has had tangible consequences for its relationship with Bangladesh.

The post-Hasina period offered New Delhi an opportunity to reset ties with Dhaka on a broader and more inclusive basis. Instead, initial reactions were marked by hesitation and suspicion. This hesitation was compounded by a tendency within Indian media to amplify worst-case scenarios. 

Reports and commentaries often foregrounded the risks of radicalization while downplaying evidence of continuity in Bangladesh’s foreign policy and governance priorities.

Even as the interim administration signaled its commitment to maintaining cooperative relations with India, these signals were frequently overshadowed by narratives of instability. The result was a kind of perceptual lag. While realities on the ground in Bangladesh evolved, Indian perceptions remained anchored in an earlier moment of uncertainty.

And that initial misreading continued to cast a shadow.

Narrow lens and need for change 

At its core, India’s blind spot lies in its tendency to view neighboring countries primarily through the lens of its own security concerns. This is understandable, but it can become limiting when it obscures internal dynamics.

In the case of Bangladesh, this meant prioritizing the question of “who might come to power” over “why the previous government fell.” It meant focusing on the ideological identities of political actors rather than the structural conditions that shaped their behavior.

A more nuanced approach would have started from a different premise: that Bangladesh’s political transition was driven by accumulated grievances against an increasingly authoritarian system, rather than by ideological realignment.

From that perspective, the diversity of actors supporting the interim administration should have become less alarming and more intelligible. It would have reflected the breadth of dissatisfaction with the previous regime….not the coherence of a new ideological order.

Such an approach would also have allowed India to engage more constructively with the interim government from the outset, recognizing both its constraints and its potential.

Instead, by allowing fears of “Islamist transformation” to dominate its early assessments, India risked alienating a government that was, in many respects, seeking stability and continuity.

The lesson here is not that India’s concerns were entirely misplaced. Regional powers must remain vigilant to shifts that could affect their interests. But vigilance need not preclude nuance.

If anything, the experience of Bangladesh’s transition underscores the importance of resisting analytical shortcuts. Political realities are rarely as binary as they appear in moments of upheaval. Alliances formed in such moments are often fluid and temporary.

To read them as fixed or ideological is to misread the situation—and, in doing so, to risk miscalculation.

As India and Bangladesh move forward–espeically after the election and Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s strong mandate, there is of course a renewed opportunity to build a more grounded and less reactive framework for engagement. Doing so however will require a broader shift in how political change in the region is understood.

It will require, above all, a willingness to see beyond familiar categories…and to recognize that, sometimes, what looks like ideological alignment is simply the messy, contingent politics of transition.

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