Deconstructing Sheikh Hasina’s Secret Treaties to New Delhi

The collapse of the Awami League administration on August 5, 2024, did far more than terminate fifteen and a half years of continuous autocracy; it pulled back the curtain on a vast, deeply entrenched architecture of asymmetric bilateralism. For nearly two decades, a dense network of clandestine treaties and memoranda of understanding has been executed between Dhaka and New Delhi. The fall of Sheikh Hasina in the face of a cataclysmic mass uprising led by students and citizens left behind an institutional vacuum and a highly controversial paper trail. 

The unsealing and publication and legislative review of these secret pacts should be reviewed. The fallen regime systematically resisted publishing the specific parameters of its engagements with India precisely because these arrangements prioritised external political validation over domestic constitutional autonomy. The core grievance within the contemporary Bangladeshi polity rests on the reality that state sovereignty was repeatedly leveraged as currency in exchange for regime survival. Hasina herself explicitly crystallised this transactional relationship when she famously remarked that what she had bestowed upon India would guarantee their eternal gratitude, an admission that strategic experts interpret as definitive proof of a foreign-dependent dictatorship that ruled without public franchise.

The systematic erosion of territorial authority is most visibly manifested along the shared frontier where the basic geography of statehood was reconfigured. In 2010, the administration formally acquiesced to New Delhi's sweeping strategy to construct an expansive barbed wire barrier deep within the boundary zones. This foundational concession was codified through four separate memoranda of understanding that effectively superseded established international boundary protocols. Under the legally binding terms of the 1975 Bangladesh-India Joint Border Guidelines, both nations are explicitly prohibited from completing any defensive structures or undertaking unilateral development initiatives within 150 yards of the zero line without explicit mutual consensus. By discarding this protective spatial buffer, Dhaka permitted the Indian state to complete its enforcement apparatus across 3271 kilometres of the 4156 kilometre shared border.

The strategic liabilities of this structural submission became glaringly obvious in the twilight years of the regime and continue to complicate contemporary border security. Indian Border Security Forces regularly mobilise these Hasina-era agreements to paralyse defensive manoeuvres by the Border Guard Bangladesh whenever the latter attempts to halt illegal construction within the prohibited 150-yard perimeter. Over nearly a decade and a half, India deployed its full engineering and paramilitary capacity to encircle the remaining 885 kilometres of the frontier. Although the post-uprising interim administration initially resolved to issue a formal diplomatic communication demanding the cancellation of these highly compromising memoranda, bureaucratic paralysis has delayed implementation, leaving the border security apparatus heavily skewed in favour of New Delhi's unilateral spatial enforcement.

The historical trajectory of this structural capitulation traces its origins to the immediate aftermath of the 2009 administrative transition, which directly followed the highly contested 1/11 caretaker government. Senior ministers and bureaucrats within the incoming ruling party initiated a coordinated public relations campaign designed to manufacture domestic consent for regional transit facilities. The political elite deployed grandiose economic metaphors, claiming that granting expansive logistical corridors to India would rapidly elevate Bangladesh into a global commercial hub mirroring the developmental success of Singapore, Bangkok or Dubai. Proponents went so far as to promise a level of seamless prosperity comparable to Western Europe or North America, yet the legal frameworks undergirding these promises told a vastly different story.

By 2015 a highly restrictive maritime protocol was appended to the baseline 2010 transit framework, allowing Indian commercial fleets to freely navigate four vital internal river channels. This agreement effectively granted Kolkata and Murshidabad a direct low-cost logistics corridor through the heart of Bangladeshi territory to connect with the landlocked northeastern states of Assam, Tripura and Meghalaya. 

The institutional subversion required to finalise this protocol highlights the deeply authoritarian nature of the executive branch at the time. When the draft text was submitted to the Ministry of Law for mandatory legislative and regulatory vetting, the sitting law minister, Shafique Ahmed, formally objected to the terms and returned the file, stating explicitly that the agreement would inflict severe long-term damage on national economic and security interests.

Executive dominance quickly overrode this rare display of institutional friction. Following direct instructions from the prime minister, the law ministry was forced to retract its legal objection and issue a revised opinion favouring the maritime transit framework. This domestic policy shift paved the way for subsequent road transit privileges and extensive rail corridors that split the country's interior geography.

The domestic political blowback was immediate and severe. A broad coalition of opposition factions led primarily by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party initiated an aggressive anti-transit resistance movement. In the northeastern region of Sylhet, opposition leader Ilyas Ali organised a massive public long march targeting the Ashuganj river port, which served as a primary node for Indian logistics. The state response to this localised resistance was swift and chilling; Ilyas Ali was subjected to an enforced disappearance on April 17, 2012. Within political and strategic circles it is widely recognised that his vocal opposition to New Delhi's unilateral transit access transformed him into a primary target for the security apparatuses of both nations, signalling that dissent against bilateral agreements carried fatal consequences.

The logistics concessions culminated in the systematic integration of Bangladesh’s primary maritime assets into India's domestic supply chain. Building directly upon the 2015 transport protocols, the two governments signed a comprehensive Standard Operating Procedure in October 2018. The regulatory finality of this mechanism was achieved on April 25, 2023, when the National Board of Revenue issued a sweeping statutory notification granting India permanent operational authorisation to utilise the deepwater ports of Chittagong and Mongla.

Under this fiscal and logistical framework Indian commercial syndicates secured the right to offload international freight at these premier Bangladeshi ports and transship it across sovereign territory using a network of domestic roads, railways and inland waterways. This multi-modal corridor was designed to feed goods directly into Indian border hubs via highly specific transit routes. Sixteen distinct transport paths were rapidly operationalised to link critical border nodes, including the following:

• The Chittagong-Akhaura-Agartala highway axis

•The Mongla-Akhaura-Agartala transit corridor

• The Tamabil-Dawki northern border pipeline

• The Sheola-Sutarkandi and Bibirbazar-Simantapur eastern transit routes

By opening these specific channels, the administration effectively transformed the country's critical transport infrastructure into a low-tariff secondary transit zone for northeastern India without securing reciprocal geographic corridors through the Siliguri Corridor to landlocked regional states like Nepal or Bhutan.

The hydro-political interactions between Dhaka and New Delhi during this era offer a classic case study in asymmetric river basin diplomacy. During Sheikh Hasina's high-profile state visit to New Delhi in October 2019, domestic expectations were intensely focused on the long-delayed Teesta River water-sharing treaty, which is vital for the agricultural stability of northern Bangladesh. However, the actual diplomatic outcome entirely ignored the natural flow of this transboundary river. Instead of securing equitable upstream water releases, the Bangladeshi delegation agreed to India's urgent demands regarding the resources of the Feni River.

The resulting bilateral agreement legally bound Bangladesh to divert 1.82 cusecs of water from the Feni River directly to the Indian border state of Tripura. Crucially, this highly sensitive environmental treaty was executed in complete isolation from the National Parliament and without formal cabinet consensus, bypassing the standard constitutional checks that govern international treaties. The agreement provoked intense criticism from water management experts and civil society groups who pointed out the dangerous precedent of conceding sovereign water rights while the country's own major rivers faced severe upstream diversion.

Confronted by public outrage upon her return, Hasina dismissed critics during a national press briefing by framing the extraction as a basic humanitarian gesture for drinking water, wondering aloud why there was such an uproar over a minor volume of water taken from a major river system. This rhetorical deflection failed to obscure the strategic imbalance: Dhaka had surrendered vital resources from an international river while failing to extract a single binding signature on the Teesta or any other major transboundary watercourse.

The economic agreements signed over these fifteen and a half years institutionalised a deeply unequal trade relationship. Under the prevailing commercial frameworks, India secured the right to export 360 separate categories of manufactured goods and agricultural products to Bangladesh, with 135 of these commodities enjoying complete duty-free access. Conversely, while diplomatic communiqués highlighted that Bangladesh possessed reciprocal duty-free rights for 36 product categories on paper, persistent non-tariff barriers and stringent rules of origin enforced by Indian customs ensured that only a negligible volume of Bangladeshi manufactured goods ever entered the Indian domestic market.

This unequal regulatory framework generated an unprecedented trade deficit which reached 7160 million dollars between July 2023 and July 2024 alone. Macroeconomists specialising in South Asian trade classify this persistent imbalance as a rare and damaging anomaly in global trade relations, noting that the country was effectively converted into an unprotected captive market for Indian industrial conglomerates.

This structural extraction in the goods sector is closely mirrored by a massive outflow of capital through expatriate labour networks. During the 2020-21 fiscal year outward remittances sent by foreign professionals working within Bangladesh stood at 94 million dollars, a figure that climbed significantly to 115 million dollars during the 2021-22 fiscal cycle. Indian nationals overwhelmingly dominated this white-collar employment pipeline, occupying key managerial and technical positions across the ready-made garment, textile and information technology sectors.

According to official data released by the Bangladesh Bank, outbound remittances directly to India reached 44 million dollars in the 2023-24 fiscal year, making New Delhi the single largest beneficiary of external financial flow from the country. This systemic drain occurred at a time when the domestic economy was experiencing acute foreign exchange shortages, highlighting the severe financial contradictions embedded in the bilateral labour framework.

The financial liabilities imposed by the Hasina administration are nowhere more pronounced than in the energy sector, where long-term contracts locked the state into massive dollar-denominated financial obligations. In 2017, the regime finalised a highly controversial Power Purchase Agreement with Adani Power in New Delhi. Internal disclosures from senior technical officials within the Bangladesh Power Development Board indicate that the pricing mechanisms and capacity charges embedded in this contract force the state to pay an artificial premium of approximately 7 billion taka every single month regardless of actual electricity consumption or grid transmission constraints.

This financial burden is accompanied by severe ecological hazards, as demonstrated by the Rampal thermal power project located near the fragile periphery of the Sundarbans mangrove forest. Originally India's National Thermal Power Corporation sought to establish this 1320-megawatt coal-fired plant within the Indian state of Chhattisgarh. However, the Indian Environment Ministry's Green Panel issued an adverse Environmental Impact Assessment report explicitly warning that the project posed an unacceptable threat to the local ecosystem, leading to its cancellation on Indian soil.

Rather than abandoning the hazardous blueprint New Delhi successfully proposed relocating the entire project to Bangladesh, where environmental regulations were systematically relaxed. Hasina accepted this arrangement through a January 2010 memorandum of understanding. Despite years of intense domestic protests by environmental scientists and civic groups, the plant commenced commercial operations in late 2022. Since its inception the facility has suffered seven complete shutdowns driven by chronic technical faults, acute coal shortages and structural design flaws. Field evaluations around the Rampal site revealed a deeply insulated demographic enclave; the vast majority of the construction and technical workforce was populated by Indian nationals who minimised interaction with the local economy by importing everything from specialised heavy machinery to office furniture and daily groceries directly from India.

A parallel pattern of territorial alienation occurred within the industrial sector through targeted land allocations. During Narendra Modi’s high-profile visit to Dhaka in 2015, India proposed the creation of exclusive Indian economic zones within Bangladeshi territory. By 2017, during an invitation summit in New Delhi, the framework for transferring 1055 acres of prime industrial real estate in Mirsarai, Chittagong, to the Adani Group was negotiated with Dhaka, initially guaranteeing a 900-acre enclave.

This transfer was finalised in October 2019 when the Bangladesh Economic Zones Authority signed a memorandum of understanding with Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone, followed by a joint venture agreement in April 2022 that finalised the allocation of an additional 700 acres under highly concessional terms. It was only after the collapse of the regime that investigative journalism brought these massive land transfers to light, prompting the post-uprising interim government to rescind the allocations and bring the territory back under national economic control.

The ultimate manifestation of this sovereign compromise occurred within the national security apparatus, where the state's defence independence was systematically realigned. Following her highly contested and boycotted electoral transition in 2014, Hasina initiated deep defence cooperation protocols with India. National security analysts and opposition statesmen warned that entering into a binding defence framework with a dominant neighbour risked reducing Bangladesh to a protectorate status reminiscent of historical annexations like Sikkim or Hyderabad.

Ignoring these domestic warnings, the administration executed a series of defence agreements in absolute secrecy. This included a restrictive 500 million dollar line of credit dedicated exclusively to purchasing Indian-manufactured military hardware, an arrangement hidden from public view until Indian Foreign Secretary Vinay Mohan Kwatra disclosed it to journalists in New Delhi on September 6, 2022. The revelation confirmed that the nation's security procurement pipelines were tied to external defence industries without legislative oversight or military consensus.

Today leaders across major political organisations, including the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, Jamaat-e-Islami and the National Citizen Party, are demanding that every single treaty and memorandum generated during the Awami League era be laid before the National Parliament for audit. The argument is no longer just about economics but about restoring constitutional sovereignty. The long systemic neglect of Bangladesh's core interests cannot be justified under the guise of regional connectivity. Presenting these agreements for open legislative review is an indispensable step toward breaking an asymmetric dependency and realigning Dhaka's foreign policy on the basis of strict reciprocity and national dignity.