Bangladesh seems to be at the crossroads of great power rivalry without realising it, and its two top leaders seem to be steering the nation in two different directions, which could place great strain on that emerging nation.
Prof Mohammed Yunus, the chief advisor of the interim government, perhaps rattled by the emergence of the Trump administration and its denouncement of the alleged deep state funding for a regime change in Bangladesh, as well as its attacks on Dhaka’s human rights record, tried to embrace China by cancelling a traditional parade on Bangladesh’s Independence Day on March 26 to fly to Hainan and Beijing.
Over the years, China has become Bangladesh’s largest arms supplier and has built a mega submarine and naval base near Chittagong, which, by all accounts, is too big for the tiny navy of that Asian nation.
On the same day, when Chinese officials were feting Yunus, the power behind his throne, General Waker-Uz-Zaman, who heads Bangladesh’s army, was playing host to the deputy commander in chief of the US Indo-Pacific command and talking of replacing Beijing’s weapons with American ones.
Zaman had earlier, in a public speech, taken an independent stance from Yunus, warning politicians of fomenting trouble, which could endanger the country’s sovereignty. Rumours, which were denied officially by the Bangladesh government, had it that he had placed generals sympathetic to extremist radicals under surveillance.
Many feel that if indeed the US deep state under the Biden administration had been involved in toppling the previous Sheikh Hasina government, it was mainly because it had, in trying to balance New Delhi, grown too close to China for American comfort.
Some 72 per cent of Bangladesh’s defence equipment is bought from China. The only two rather dated submarines that Bangladesh has are retrofitted subs sold cheaply by Beijing. China has built a huge naval port, capable of hosting six submarines and eight large warships, near Chittagong, despite Dhaka’s navy not owning a single destroyer and owning just two submarines.
There are suspicions that the port may, in time, double up as China’s base in the Bay of Bengal, a fear which would have surely rattled the USA’s security strategists, as the Americans do not have any port to act as a base between Singapore and Diego Garcia.
Luckily for Bangladesh, which depends largely on the US as a market for its exports, Yunus, from the official accounts available, did not get much beyond a taste of Chinese tea and dumplings (unless secret deals were signed that were never made public).
The pacts officially signed weren’t much to write home about—one economic and technological cooperation agreement and eight Memorandums of Understanding, including deals to translate literary classics, and promote media, sports, and health.
The Bangladeshis, of course, made many offers which the inscrutable Chinese listened to politely. But only time will tell if they would bite on them. A new Chinese Industrial Economic Zone was offered (even though the first such zone hasn’t made much progress despite nine years having gone by since the deal to build it was inked), as was construction of the Teesta barrage project.
Possibly to needle India, Yunus pointedly asked Chinese companies to bid for the barrage project, knowing it was near the Siliguri corridor and Indians were sensitive to possible intelligence gathering in that area.
He also offered northeastern India’s marketplace to Chinese companies investing in Bangladesh, without realising that India’s duty-free import regime for Bangladesh’s products would last only as long as it remained a ‘Less Developed Nation’ and that status would end soon. Trade experts in Delhi also warned that the duty-free regime is specifically for products which have high local content and would not accept Chinese products retrofitted at Bangladeshi workshops.
Yunus also asked China to take up the modernisation and expansion of Mongla port, which had been developed to bring coal to a National Thermal Power Plant in that area. The problem is that the Chinese have a rival thermal power plant at nearby Pyara, for which a port was also built by the Chinese to bring in coal. However, because of the nature of the channel, coal-laden ships found it tough to negotiate the rough seas at the mouth of the riverine port.
The offer is, in some sense, an admission that the huge money borrowed from China to build facilities at Pyara has become a massive liability. Analysts estimate that in all, some $12 billion of China’s loans to Bangladesh are “risky” and could continue to suck that nation into a debt trap. In fact, one of the pleas made by Yunus to Beijing during his four-day trip was to reduce the interest rate charged by China on its many loans to that nation.
Under the circumstances, Yunus is lucky that the fresh loans and other financial assistance that China offered to him were little better than what China’s strongman Xi Jinping had offered Hasina weeks before she was toppled. While the Awami League government was offered US $2 billion, Yunus was offered US $2.1 billion, a 5 per cent increase to offset inflation over the last nine months between the two offers!
However, what is at stake for Bangladesh is not what Yunus was offered by the Chinese but the direction that country would take in global affairs and how that decision could place it at risk in the Great Power Game, which is being played out in the wider Indo-Pacific region.
If Yunus pushes Dhaka too close to China and it annoys either the US under president Trump or his principal backer, the Bangladesh Army, there may well be consequences. On the other hand, a marked shift towards Washington may not exactly make Beijing happy.
What weighs in the balance is who wields more power in the region— the US-India combination or China. Trying to dance the tango with three partners is always a dangerous game, and Bangladesh’s leaders need to be aware of that for the good of their own people.
The writer is former head of PTI’s eastern region network.
