Wasbir Hussain | War cry in Northeast India after Yunus’ China embrace

In what looks like a calculated provocation, the head of Bangladesh’s interim government, Muhammad Yunus, has ignited nothing short of a firestorm with his brazen pitch to China, framing Bangladesh as the “only guardian of the ocean” for India’s landlocked Northeast. During his four-day visit to Beijing last week, Mr Yunus didn’t just indulge in desperate lobbying for Chinese investment -- he dangled the strategic vulnerability of India’s eight northeastern states, suggesting that China could exploit the region’s geographic isolation through Bangladesh’s ports. This was an open invitation to China to expand its operations in Bangladesh territory along India’s strategic east and northeast region.

In doing so, Mr Yunus was not indulging in diplomacy, or whatever he knows of it, to further Bangladesh’s economy. His move of embracing China and acting like the head of a vassal state is actually a geopolitical jab at India’s underbelly, the “Chicken’s Neck”, the strategic 21-km corridor linking the Northeast to the rest of India.

Dhaka’s treachery led to a swift and ferocious response from both political leaders and ordinary people in the Northeast -- a war cry echoing from Tripura to Assam. Tripura royal scion Pradyot Deb Barman, by far the most vocal tribal voice from the state located at a stone’s throw from Bangladesh territory, said, without mincing words, that India should snatch the sea route by breaking up Bangladesh.

Barman, who is the founder of Tipra Motha, the state’s largest tribal-dominated political party, an ally of the BJP, said people belonging to tribal groups like the Tripuri, Khasi, Garo and Chakma who inhabit Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts have been keen on joining or merging with India since 1947. Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, one of the country’s top BJP leaders, branded Mr Yunus’ remarks “offensive” and “condemnable”, warning of “deeper strategic considerations”. Mr Sarma suggested the need to work on “alternative routes” linking the Northeast to mainland India, including building underground communication linkages by overcoming engineering challenges.

It is imperative to take a look at what the Assam CM has exactly said: “This remark (by Yunus) underscores the persistent vulnerability associated with India’s strategic ‘Chicken’s Neck’ corridor. Historically, even internal elements within India have dangerously suggested severing this critical passageway to isolate the Northeast from the mainland physically.” He added: “Therefore, it is imperative to develop more robust railway and road networks both underneath and around the Chicken’s Neck corridor. Additionally, exploring alternative road routes connecting the Northeast to mainland India, effectively bypassing Chicken’s Neck, should be prioritised. Though this may pose significant engineering challenges, it is achievable with determination and innovation.”

The outrage in the Northeast isn’t simple rhetoric; it’s rooted in real fear of encirclement by China through a Bangladeshi proxy. Even the Opposition Congress condemned Mr Yunus’ action, with party spokesman Pawan Khera saying Bangladesh was “actually inviting China to encircle India”. An unelected leader at 84, Muhammad Yunus has clearly overestimated his leverage by acting against India, a country that helped give birth to his own nation in 1971. What Mr Yunus is doing here, after the snub he got from the Trump administration in the United States and India giving refuge to ousted Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina, and ignoring Dhaka’s plea to deport her home, is to weaponise geography, revive old separatist dreams and challenging India’s security establishment.

In fact, Mr Yunus left Dhaka for China last week on Bangladesh’s Independence Day itself. As President Droupadi Murmu and Prime Minister Narendra Modi were sending congratulatory messages to Dhaka to mark the day and recalling 1971, the Bangladeshi leader had already arrived in China’s southernmost island city of Hainan. Was the visit, when Mr Yunus met Chinese President Xi Jinping, therefore, meant to signal a shift in Dhaka’s strategic calculus away from India and towards Beijing?

What are some of the pull factors of Bangladesh towards China? The economy in Bangladesh has been battered due to inflation, there is rising debt and the ongoing costs of hosting over one million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar has become too much for Dhaka to bear. As China is Bangladesh’s largest trading partner, Beijing offers an enticing opportunity with the promise to take care of some of those gaps. During the visit, the two sides signed eight agreements, including deals to expand Mongla Port and another on the new China Industrial Economic Zone. However, despite China being Bangladesh’s largest trading partner, Dhaka’s exports to Beijing are insignificant as the trade deficit reached close to $17 billion last year.

All said and done, Mr Yunus heads a government that is unaccountable to the electors in a country in which political instability has been common. Now, if Bangladesh hands over Mongla port development work, the Chittagong Port expansion project and the development of the Teesta river, to China, it will be nothing but a hasty step ahead of the elections that will be held within less than a year from now.

For the record, in June last year, less than two months before her ouster, Sheikh Hasina visited India. After the meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, New Delhi decided to send a technical team to Bangladesh to kickstart a mega project to conserve and manage the Teesta river, and also decided to move ahead to start negotiations on a comprehensive trade pact and boosting defence ties. The two sides had then signed 10 agreements providing for bolstering ties in a range of key areas such as the maritime sphere, blue economy, digital domain, railways, space, green technology, health and medicine. Is this history now? One has to wait and watch.

The big question also is: Can Dhaka actually afford to totally antagonise India? The answer is a clear “no” because its geographical proximity makes it a neighbour that cannot be brushed aside. But having said that, Bangladesh seems to have invested heavily on China to the extent that it has allowed Beijing to set up a submarine base at Pekua in Cox’s Bazar after having procured or received two submarines from China and adding it to its naval infrastructure.

Mr Yunus does not know the mind of the masses really as he has never tasted electoral victory. In the political maze that is Bangladesh, looking only northwards towards China and ignoring its closest neighbour India that was instrumental in helping it attain freedom can cost Dhaka dearly. But anything can happen in a country whose people, or a section of it, can vandalise and bring down the statues and all symbols of its founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, just because he was Sheikh Hasina’s father.

Wasbir Hussain, author and political commentator, is editor-in-chief of Northeast Live, Northeast India’s only satellite English and Hindi news channel. The views expressed here are personal.