India Worries as Nationalists Win Bangladesh Election

 

The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) under Tarique Rahman won the country’s Feb. 12 election, gaining 209 of the 300 seats in parliament, while the Islamist-led Jamaat-e-Islami alliance took 68 seats. This came in the wake of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina being ousted in student-led protests in 2024 and with her Awami League being barred from contesting it.

Developments in Bangladesh are being closely watched beyond its borders. It is the world’s eighth-most populous country, and Rahman now faces the daunting task of steering the South Asian nation of around 180 million people through high inflation and rising unemployment.

The war in the Middle East  poses a massive energy crisis for Bangladesh, as one-third of its total gas supply comes from Qatar and Oman in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG).

Sheikh Hasina had been in power since 2014, after the BNP boycotted what they considered a “scandalous farce” of an election. Her regime fell after anti-government protests in summer 2024.  According to UN investigators, up to 1,400 people died in the student-led unrest. She is living in exile in India after being sentenced to death in absentia last November for crimes against humanity.

The main Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, had joined forces with the BNP following the student uprising. They allied with the youth-centered National Citizen Party, formed in 2025, that played a major role in the turmoil. The latter won six seats.

Rahman and his party must also contend with a package of reform proposals designed to prevent a return to authoritarian rule. Known as the July National Charter, the plan outlines constitutional, institutional and electoral changes, including introducing a bicameral legislature and setting term limits for prime ministers.

It was signed last October by leaders of the major political parties and approved by voters in a referendum held the same day as the parliamentary elections. The reforms will make it harder for an executive to act in a way that is unchecked by any other institution. That was a fundamental issue that needed to be addressed.

The BNP has already said it plans to deepen relations with China, Bangladesh’s largest trading partner. Relations with neighboring India, however, could prove more complicated. Delhi has so far not responded to requests from Bangladesh to extradite Hasina.

Students have turned against India, with “Dhaka, not Delhi” slogans splashed on walls at Dhaka University. The youth wing of Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh Islami Chatrashibir, stunned the country in September when it secured a major victory in the student elections at the university, a bastion of left-liberal politics where the 2024 revolution was hatched. They also prevailed in three other schools.

“Delhi is struggling in Dhaka because of deep anti-India sentiment in Bangladesh and a hardening, often a hostile turn, in India’s own domestic political discourse towards its neighbour,” according to Avinash Paliwal, who teaches politics and international studies at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

Many in the country blame Delhi for supporting an increasingly authoritarian Hasina in her final years. They remember the previous disputed general elections and Delhi’s endorsement of them. Bangladeshis think the destruction of democracy was supported by India and that it views Bangladesh less as a sovereign equal than as a pliant backyard. This grievance is layered atop older complaints over border killings. Jamaat-e-Islami’s strongest victories were in areas bordering India.

Jon Danilowicz, a retired American diplomat who previously served in Bangladesh remarked that the challenge for Rahman “will be how far the BNP can go towards restoring relations with India without facing a public backlash.”

Pakistan, India’s rival that Delhi defeated in 1971 to secure Bangladesh’s independence from the country it was once part of as East Pakistan, remains a central, if sensitive, factor in the equation. The Awami League supported the secession while the BNP has always been more favourable to Pakistan.

After Hasina’s fall, Dhaka wasted little time in mending fences with Islamabad. A direct Dhaka-Karachi flight resumed after a 14-year hiatus. Mohammad Ishaq Dar visited Bangladesh – the first visit by a Pakistani foreign minister in 13 years. Senior military officials have exchanged trips, security co-operation is back on the table, and trade climbed 27 per cent in 2024-2025.

The optics are unmistakable: a once-frosty relationship has thawed. “What concerns us is not that Bangladesh has ties with Pakistan -- as a sovereign country, it is entitled to,” Smruti Pattanaik of the Delhi-based Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, told the BBC. “What was unusual was the near absence of engagement during Hasina’s tenure. The pendulum had swung too far in one direction; now it risks swinging too far in the other.”

Delhi has tried to broaden its outreach. Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar travelled to Dhaka last December for the funeral of former prime minister Khaleda Zia, Rahman’s mother, and used the occasion to meet Tarique Rahman. India has also opened channels to Jamaat-e-Islami leaders, including an invitation to the Indian High Commission’s Republic Day reception. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi called Rahman and “reaffirmed India’s continued commitment to the peace, progress, and prosperity” of those in Bangladesh and India.

Yet these tactical shifts have done little to arrest the broader slide. The current chill is a low unseen even during earlier crises. The contrast with the Sheikh Hasina years is stark.

France and U.S. Spar Over Left-Wing Violence

By Henry Srebrnik, Fredericton Daily Gleaner

Police in France arrested nine people on Feb. 17 in connection with the death of a 23-year-old student in Lyon. Most are members of the “Young Guard,” an extremist splinter group of Antifa. They also appear linked to Jean-Luc Melenchon’s left-wing La France Insoumise (LFI).

Quentin Deranque was a right-wing nationalist who had been providing security to a feminist group who were protesting the appearance of Rima Hassan at the Institute of Political Studies in Lyon. He was beaten to death. Hassan is a rising star in the LFI and has made a name for herself as a ferocious critic of Israel.

There had been scuffles outside the venue and the violence spilled out into the surrounding streets. Deranque and a couple of other nationalists were set upon by several masked individuals. Such were the ferocity of the injuries inflicted on Deranque that he died in hospital. On learning of the arrest of Favrot, Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu posted a message on X telling LFI that it “needed to clean out its ranks.”

For many years Melenchon has turned a blind eye to the activities of the Young Guard, which was founded in Lyon in 2018 by Raphael Arnault. Arnault himself has a history of violence, but that didn’t trouble LFI when he was selected as a candidate for the 2024 parliamentary election. He won his seat with the help of the centre-left Socialist party, who urged voters to cast their ballot for him to thwart Marine Le Pen’s National Rally.

But the killing also divided Washington and Paris, after Sarah Rogers, the U.S. State Department under-secretary for public diplomacy, in criticizing the murder, warned about the spread of far-left violence in France. In an interview on Feb. 22, France’s Foreign Minister, Jean-Noel Barrot, scolded her for wading into a matter that “concerns only our national community.”

Barrot accused Washington of trying to make political capital out of Deranque’s death and added that France has “no lessons to receive” from outsiders on political violence. To underline their anger, the French government summoned U.S. ambassador Charles Kushner for a meeting -- but he didn’t show because of “personal commitments.”

In response, on Feb. 23 France temporarily barred Kushner, the father of President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, from meeting with any French officials until he clarified Washington’s position. “When these explanations have taken place, then the U.S. ambassador in France will naturally regain access to members of the French government,” Barrot told the broadcaster France Info. Until then, the ban “will naturally affect his capacity to exercise his mission in our country.”

An explanation did come a day later, when Kushner finally called Barrot, who told the American envoy that France would not accept “any form of interference or manipulation of its national public debate,” according to a Foreign Ministry official. “The ambassador took note, expressed his desire not to interfere in our public debate.” As to Kushner’s initial no-show when summoned, Pascal Confavreux made allowances for the American real-estate magnate, who only took up his functions as ambassador to Paris last July, being relatively new to the more genteel world of diplomacy.

(Actually, France had previously criticized Kushner last August after he accused the French government of fuelling antisemitism through its criticisms of Israel.)

Of course that was itself a diplomatic answer to smooth things over. The truth is that no one wanted a diplomatic rupture in this of all years. The date of the June the G7 summit of leading economic countries in Evian was moved to allow for Trump’s birthday. This year also marks the 250th anniversary of what Washington describes as its oldest alliance, as America celebrates the Declaration of Independence. “I know it’s a very important date for the U.S., also for us.  And so there are ups and downs in such a relationship,” Confavreux said.

But President Trump and his allies have long expressed their support for the political right. This was made official in the United States National Security Strategy (NSS) published last December. The document suggests that there is a real risk of Europe facing “civilizational erasure” because of its migration policies and states that the “growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.”

The Trump administration has been active behind the scenes too, according to Magali Lafourcade, the secretary general of France’s human rights commission (CNCDH). Last April, she raised the alarm about foreign interference with the French Foreign Ministry. Actually, Barrot had already announced a new strategy against foreign interference on Jan. 29, 2025 – just one week after Trump’s inauguration.

The tone of French foreign policy has been toughening in keeping with Washington’s rhetoric. In his New Year’s address to the armed forces, President Emmanuel Macron used strong language. “To remain free, one must be feared, and to be feared, one must be powerful,” he told them. To make his point, Macron visited the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, deployed to the Mediterranean following Iranian drone strikes on Cyprus March 9.

The French president wants more nuclear warheads as Europe becomes increasingly wary of its U.S. ally, and he will extend the deterrent to cover other European countries, It would be the first time since 1992 that the French arsenal is expanded.