It began with messy political finger pointing, before quickly escalating into diplomatic and trade fallout. Then, over the past week, the two nations turned their spat into what could amount to a sports boycott of each other.
Relations between India and its neighbor Bangladesh, which share one of the world’s largest land borders and deep cultural ties, have been in a spiral for more than a year. Ties began unraveling after the 2024 overthrow of Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s oppressive leader who had strong support from New Delhi. She was ousted by a protest movement and fled to India, which has since been criticized by Bangladesh’s interim government and the protesters for refusing to hand her over to face justice at home.
New Delhi has in turn protested hostile statements by parties in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, and incidents of violence against Bangladesh’s Hindu minority. It suspended its visa operations in the Bangladeshi city of Chattogram last month after mobs targeted its mission there. Bangladesh reciprocated by pausing visa operations for Indians after its mission in New Delhi faced tense protests from right-wing Hindu groups.
Protests in India from the Hindu right also led to its national cricket body stopping the participation of a Bangladeshi player in the country’s cash-rich Indian Premier League. In reaction, Bangladesh announced that its team would not travel to India next month for the cricket World Cup, and it asked the game’s international governing board to move its matches to a neutral venue.
The prospect of diplomatic efforts to reduce tensions are complicated by domestic politics in both countries, as the acrimony has become a major rallying point in imminent elections on both sides of the border.
For New Delhi, the struggle with its eastern neighbor is part of a larger challenge of responding to intense political churn in its neighborhood as it seeks to establish itself as a major global power. In recent years, South Asia has seen several popular uprisings and changes of government, forcing Indian policymakers back to the drawing board for strategies in a sphere where China is also jostling for influence.
For Dhaka, the chaotic vacuum after Ms. Hasina’s fall, with law enforcement in tatters and extremist forces unchecked, has unearthed a deep identity crisis.
India long held a favored status in Bangladesh since it helped it in the war of independence in 1971, when Bangladesh split from Pakistan. In recent decades, Indian leaders sought to deepen the bonds by expanding economic and trade ties with the country of 170 million people. Over the past few years, Bangladesh had sent its goods through Indian ports per the terms of a transshipment agreement, until India recently discontinued it.
But as Ms. Hasina monopolized the legacy of that independence war for her party during her 15-year rule, she grew increasingly brutal in crushing her opposition to remain in power. A frustrated younger generation in Bangladesh saw India as the key enabler of human-rights abuses under Ms. Hasina, who ran a widespread campaign of jailings and disappearances of dissenting voices. Her crackdown on protests that ultimately toppled her left around 1,400 people dead.
“Aligning so closely with an increasingly unpopular ruler amplified anti-India sentiment in Bangladesh and left India poorly positioned when a mass uprising forced Hasina from power,” the International Crisis Group said in a recent analysis.
Bangladesh has set parliamentary elections in February and effectively banned Ms. Hasina’s party from participating. Many of the candidates have turned the anger at India into a campaign issue, a sentiment that is mixed with rising Islamic extremism in the country.
Bangladesh’s interim leader, Muhammad Yunus, has struggled to find a balance that keeps the political forces that brought him to power happy while maintaining a working relationship with India. The administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India has refused Mr. Yunus’s requests for Ms. Hasina to be sent back to face trial, or to stop her party leaders sheltering in India from engaging in Bangladeshi politics from there.
Pro-government news outlets in India have labeled Mr. Yunus, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, an extremist sympathizer who is not reining in the violent forces behind attacks on Bangladesh’s minority Hindus.
Bangladesh’s leaders have said that those attacks have been part of a larger pattern of lawlessness that they have been trying to control, and that it has not only targeted Hindus. They accused their bigger neighbor of political opportunism, pointing to similar attacks and lynchings of religious minorities in India during the same period. Bangladeshi leaders have also accused pro-government channels in India of running a disinformation campaign to destabilize Bangladesh’s interim government.
The anger over attacks against Hindus in Bangladesh has become an election issue in West Bengal and Assam, two key Indian states with around 140 million people between them that share borders with the country. Both states will hold polls in the coming months.
The leader of Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in West Bengal marched on the Bangladeshi consulate in the state and called on New Delhi to teach its neighbor a lesson “like Israel taught in Gaza.”
Analysts say that away from the chaotic political shouting, both countries are seeking a way to contain the fallout.
India appears to be waiting out Mr. Yunus’s interim government and building bridges to the Bangladesh Nationalist Party that is expected to perform best in the February elections. New Delhi has a troubled past with the B.N.P., which has fiercely rivaled Ms. Hasina for decades.
India’s foreign minister, S. Jaishankar, traveled to Dhaka last month to attend the funeral of Khaleda Zia, the B.N.P.’s longtime leader who once served as Bangladesh’s first female prime minister. He met with her son, Tarique Rahman, who is considered a likely future prime minister. But unlike other foreign dignitaries, he did not meet with Mr. Yunus.
A second Bangladeshi political force, the conservative Jamaat-e-Islami party, is a trickier one to navigate for New Delhi. Jamaat has performed well in recent university elections, tapping into the society’s increasing embrace of an Islamic identity and eyeing national leadership that has until now been shared between the B.N.P. and Ms. Hasina’s Awami League.
Immediately after Ms. Hasina’s fall, pro-government Indian news channels labeled both the B.N.P. and Jamaat as extremist forces, but in recent months, those channels have focused their criticism mostly on Jamaat.
Constantino Xavier, a senior fellow at the Center for Social and Economic Progress who studies India’s regional policy, said India was concerned not just about the upcoming elections. The political and generational upheaval in Bangladesh is such that New Delhi has to figure out a longer-term policy for a country with ramifications for its security.
“There will be a day, I think, that the Jamaat will form the government in Bangladesh — five years from now, four years from now,” Mr. Xavier said. “You have to work backward from that if you want a long-term Bangladesh policy.”
Mujib Mashal is the South Asia bureau chief for The Times, helping to lead coverage of India and the diverse region around it, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan.
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