The pact that wasn’t supposed to concern Delhi — and now does
For a country that has spent a decade cultivating the language of “neighbourhood first,” India finds itself confronting an uncomfortable arithmetic: of the seven nations that share its land borders, barely two or three could be called reliably friendly at this moment. Pakistan remains, by design and by history, adversarial. Ties with Bangladesh — once the anchor of India’s eastern flank and the subcontinent’s clearest post-1971 success story — have swung from warm to openly hostile to, at best, cautiously transactional in the space of two years. It is against this backdrop that news of Dhaka’s openness to the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement lands not as an isolated development, but as confirmation of a trend New Delhi has been reluctant to name plainly: the erosion of Indian primacy in its own neighbourhood.
The pact itself is not new in substance, only in shape. What began in September 2025 as a bilateral Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan — formalising decades of quiet military cooperation, including Pakistani training of Saudi forces — expanded on August 7 this year into a trilateral arrangement with Turkey, built around a NATO-style Article 5 pledge: an attack on one is an attack on all. Kuwait has since ratified its own expanded defence pact with Islamabad, Bahrain, and Jordan have expressed interest, and Egypt — already running joint special-forces drills with Pakistan — may not be far behind. None of this happened because of Bangladesh. But Dhaka’s public musings about joining are what should reorder India’s threat perception, because they suggest the pact’s gravitational pull now reaches beyond the Gulf and into South Asia itself.
Why Dhaka is looking west
It would be a mistake to read Bangladesh’s interest as ideological solidarity with Islamabad, or as a rejection of India. Two junior ministers in Dhaka’s government have been careful to frame this within a “Bangladesh First” doctrine — a phrase that has become the load-bearing wall of the country’s post-Hasina foreign policy, one built to signal that Dhaka answers to no single capital, Delhi or otherwise. Prime Minister Tarique Rahman’s expected visit to Riyadh, at Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s invitation, fits a pattern of Gulf states courting South Asian partners and vice versa: economic diversification, remittance security for millions of Bangladeshi workers in the Gulf, and defence-industrial access that a cash-strapped Dhaka simply cannot get from India.
But intentions do not erase consequences. A Bangladesh formally inside a Pakistan-anchored defence bloc — however loosely bound by “national interest” caveats — would represent a geopolitical inversion nobody in New Delhi could have imagined a decade ago, when Sheikh Hasina’s government was India’s most dependable regional partner, cracking down on anti-India insurgent networks and giving India transit and connectivity concessions that no other neighbour offered.
The Hasina shadow
That inversion has an origin story, and it is one India cannot fully escape blame for, even if the deeper responsibility lies in Dhaka. When Hasina fled to India in August 2024 amid a student-led uprising, New Delhi’s decision to grant her refuge was, at the time, defensible on humanitarian and strategic grounds. Two years on, it has calcified into the single largest irritant in the relationship. Bangladesh’s foreign ministry has formally sought her extradition — she has since been tried in absentia and sentenced to death by a special tribunal — and successive governments in Dhaka, first Muhammad Yunus’s interim administration and now Tarique Rahman’s elected one, have treated her continued presence on Indian soil, and her occasional political broadsides from it, as evidence of Indian interference rather than as due legal process.
The Yunus period was the low point: visa services suspended, India’s acting envoy summoned over Hasina’s remarks, and a steady drumbeat of accusations that New Delhi was failing its neighbourly obligations. Rahman’s government has been less overtly hostile but no less firm — conditioning his own visit to Delhi, ahead of the BRICS summit, on progress over the extradition question. Whether the legal basis for extradition exists — Bangladesh’s treaty with India arguably shields politically framed offences — the optics have hardened Bangladeshi public opinion against India at precisely the moment Dhaka is weighing its options in the Gulf.
Not a clean binary
Here editorial caution is warranted, because the temptation in Delhi’s commentariat is to read every Dhaka overture toward Riyadh, Ankara or Beijing as evidence of a fully anti-India tilt. That is too simple. New Delhi has not been passive: External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar’s visit for Khaleda Zia’s funeral, his meeting with Rahman, and India’s evident preference for engaging the BNP over Yunus’s interim setup all suggest a deliberate recalibration — betting on Rahman as a more workable, if not warmer, partner. A back-channel between India’s National Security Adviser andRahman, reportedly running since his own tenure as Bangladesh’s NSA, and a recent visit by India’s external intelligence chief to Dhaka, point to quiet stabilisation efforts running in parallel with the public friction.
Bangladesh’s own ministers, moreover, have taken care to describe their foreign policy as multi-aligned rather than anti-Indian — invoking sovereignty, non-interference and “friendly bilateral relations with… our neighbours” in the same breath as their openness to Mecca. That is not the language of a country burning bridges; it is the language of a smaller power hedging against overdependence on any single patron, India included. Analysts are similarly split on how seriously to take the pact’s implications: some see it anchoring Pakistan to three patrons — China, Turkey and now Saudi Arabia — in ways that structurally disadvantage India; others note Riyadh’s own deep economic stakes in India, and argue the pact’s real significance lies in what military technology and financing it eventually channels toward Islamabad, not in any explicit anti-India intent.
What New Delhi should do
The lesson for India is not to panic, nor to dismiss. It is to recognise that its neighbourhood strategy has for too long rested on the assumption of natural Indian primacy — cultural, historical, economic — rather than on the harder, continuous work of earning it. Bangladesh’s flirtation with the Mecca framework should be read as a symptom of a trust deficit India helped create and can still partly repair: through a calibrated approach to the extradition question, through economic and connectivity offers that outcompete what Riyadh or Beijing can provide, and through treating Dhaka’s elected government — whatever its domestic politics — as a partner to be persuaded rather than a client to be managed.
The subcontinent’s balance of power is shifting in slow, undramatic increments — a defence pact here, a stalled visit there, a funeral attended instead of ignored. None of it is irreversible. But none of it will reverse itself either. India’s neighbourhood policy needs less reassurance and more repair.
(The views expressed are personal. The author is Research Scholar, Manipur University, The author can be reached at alambenz95@gmail.com)
Sources & Footnotes
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