Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s recent visits first to India and then, two weeks later, to the PRC, the two leading Asian countries, constituted a very remarkable development in terms of the unfolding situation in the Indo-Pacific region as a whole.

A few words about Bangladesh

Situated on the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh has land borders with India on three sides (except for a small section of border with Myanmar, in the south-east). The country regularly suffers from catastrophic natural disasters, especially hurricanes, floods, and droughts. With an area three times smaller than the current territory of Ukraine, with over 170 million people, it has approximately ten times the population.

It is a poor but rapidly developing country, which the renowned economist Jim O’Neill, best known for coining the acronym BRIC, listed Bangladesh as one of the Next Eleven in the mid-2000s. This list featured the 11 countries that its compiler saw as future engines of global economic development. As far as Bangladesh is concerned, it is too early to talk about such a role today, but, nevertheless, it is doing its best.

The political challenges faced by the country, both domestic and foreign policy-related (and these are, as always, closely connected) present a serious obstacle to its achieving this ambition. Of the domestic challenges, we should first mention the decades-long bitter struggle between the (relatively) “secular” and “nationalist and religious” (90% of the population in Bangladesh is Muslim) political currents.

The secular politicians are headed by the current prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, who is the daughter of Mujibur Rahman, one of Bangladesh’s founders, and the sole member of her family who was not killed in the country’s 1975 coup. The religious and nationalist group is headed by the equally charismatic Khaleda Zia. At the beginning of January this year, when the country was holding its scheduled general parliamentary elections the rivalry between the two groups and their ambitious leaders escalated into open confrontation. However, it was something of an absentee vote, as the opposition forces, led by Khaleda Zia, boycotted the elections. Be that as it may, the outcome was that Sheikh Hasina retained the post of Prime Minister, a position she has held continuously since 2009.

The trips to India (June 21-22) and China (July 8-10) were her first foreign visits since she was reelected as Prime Minister, the most important post in Bangladesh, which is a parliamentary republic.

Visit to India

Bangladesh’s relations with India play a central role in all aspects of its nationhood. This is due to both the geographical factor, as described above, and the fact that India is........

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