India and China in South Asia: Bangladesh’s Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract

The twentieth-century world order has been shaken and is being reinterpreted in different terms. The rise of China has been instrumental in such reshaping, which does not only affect the current global world order but also the region of South Asia, which has its own rising power—India. What are the choices of South Asian nations under the circumstances? This article seeks to ask. In this context, I choose to study Bangladesh. Bangladesh, the youngest South Asian nation, started its journey with a foreign policy assumption of its geographic limitation; that Bangladesh is locked by India on three sides with a small border with Myanmar and a southward opening towards the Bay of Bengal has made Bangladeshi experts call it an ‘India-locked’ nation. Despite such a pessimistic undertone, Bangladesh has emerged in the second decade of the twenty-first century as a country to be reckoned with. While I argue that for Bangladesh both India and China are of paramount significance, one must not forget that for both the countries, Bangladesh holds strategic significance not only due to its locational reality but also an array of other reasons. This article thus seeks to explore Bangladesh’s strengths and challenges in responding to India and China’s policies towards it and thus contribute to the understanding of the strategies of small powers towards big powers in a region. Certainly, in the light of a looming Asian century, this article also plans to chart the changing landscape of the larger international politics and concludes how an emergent South Asia and a small power like Bangladesh can play an instrumental role in it.