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Dhaka: The breath that was collectively being held by New Delhi and Dhaka seems to have been released after Tarique Rahman’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party government officially took over the reins on the evening of February 17. While a quiet consensus exists on both sides of the border to pivot toward a healthier footing, the path forward is scattered with the debris of a revolution.

Eighteen months of upheaval have left a generation seething with resentment towards New Delhi, which they accuse of propping up Sheikh Hasina’s administration long after its welcome had expired. That sentiment now forms the domestic backdrop against which any outreach to Delhi will be judged.

A couple of days after around 60% of Bangladesh’s electorate cast their ballots, The Wire visited Dhaka University, where there was a palpable mood of renewal in the air. Young women in their finest jamdani sarees, flowers woven into their hair with wrists circled in marigold, and young men in bright panjabis dotted the campus grounds to mark Pahela Falgun, the first day of the month of Falgun in the Bengali calendar, celebrated across Bangladesh as the arrival of spring.

At the rows of flower stalls at Shahbagh Square, a stone’s throw from the university gates, young women posed against curtains of marigold garlands, trying to find the perfect social media backdrop.

Yet, despite the wash of yellow and orange across campus, the celebrations were noticeably thinner than in previous years.

“It’s basically the elections,” said Faria Naushin Cindy, a 21-year-old student, explaining that many students had travelled home to vote and had not yet returned. It was the final day of a four-day holiday declared for polling – a break that had briefly emptied Dhaka and turned its usually gridlocked roads into near-deserted stretches. 

Bangladesh went to the polls on February 12 in what most observers described as the first genuinely contested national election in more than a decade. The Awami League, which had dominated politics under Sheikh Hasina for over 15 years, was barred from contesting following its ban after last year’s uprising, a move that fundamentally reshaped the electoral field. Results announced on February 13 gave Tarique Rahman’s BNP more than 200 seats in the 300-member parliament. Jamaat-e-Islami recorded its strongest ever parliamentary showing, underscoring its emergence from political wilderness after its top leadership was executed by Hasina in domestic trials over atrocities in the 1971 liberation war.

For a generation that had watched successive elections produce predetermined outcomes, many travelled home specifically to cast a vote they believed would count.

But amidst the open-air festivities in front of the central library, the conversations on campus that afternoon turned quickly to a question that the poll result had made suddenly urgent – what would a BNP government, riding a wave of post-uprising anger, actually do about India?

Jahid, a 26-year-old computer science student who declined to give his full name, put it in terms of parity. “We expect the same treatment from India as from Nepal,” he said. “We are a free country.” His friend Shobhan, standing beside him, was more pointed in response. He said the relationship had never been one between equals, and that the previous government’s foreign minister had himself described it as a marriage to an Indian magazine. (Incidentally, the interview’s online version does not have the widely quoted line.)  “In a marriage, wife is perceived to be submissive and the husband is dominant,” Jahid said, completing the thought. “Why should we accept dominance?”

The specific grievances, when pressed, clustered around a few recurring themes. Water was one. Students spoke of being flooded during monsoons when upstream barriers opened, and of feeling that river-sharing negotiations had always tilted against Bangladesh. “During the rainy season, they drown us,” Shobhan said. “No country will accept that.”

There are also more symbolic gestures. He mentioned the annual message that the Indian Prime Minister gives on Vijay Divas, which is a source of much angst in Dhaka. It is seen as patronising as there is no mention of Bangladeshis – only of India’s victory. “Our blood boils,” he said.

The new dimension added is of cricket, which has become a source of discontent since Mustafizur Rahman, the Bangladeshi pace bowler, was dropped by his IPL franchise Kolkata Knight Riders at the BCCI’s behest. Bangladesh refused to travel to India to take part in the T-20 world cup and it almost led to Pakistan refusing to play India in Sri Lanka.

Kamal, a 24-year-old student from North South University who had come to Charukala for the Pahela Falgun celebrations, returned to the Mustafizur episode with more precision. For him it was not simply a sporting grievance. It stood for a pattern in which decisions affecting Bangladesh were made elsewhere and imposed without recourse. “They can do whatever they want and impose it on us,” he said. “We can’t do anything about it.”

He called the Bangladesh situation “helplessness,” and then paused. “Helplessness does not just remain helplessness,” he said. “It’s anger. Why is it happening in the first place?”

He said reports from India about the........

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