NEW DELHI: Contestations in the Bay of Bengal have never been as fierce as they are today ever since the colonial powers fought one another in these waters.
One part of it is considered a gateway to heaven (swargdwar in Sanskrit); another is the world’s largest mangrove forests. It is the world’s largest bay (spread across 2,600,000 square kilometres) and has 11 major rivers from three countries flowing into it, and its proximity to some of the world’s most strategically vital transportation and communication lines makes the Bay of Bengal impossible to ignore or not covet.
For decades, some common consensus within India thought of the Bay of Bengal as its backyard, a zone where its power projection was supreme among the six littoral states, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and India, even though China’s relationships with the littoral states have been expanding and becoming increasingly more strategic since the 1980s.
Efforts to build deeper and less suspicion-inducing linkages like the 1997 BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation) have never attained the depth or width that they once promised. But the bay itself is more contested than ever.
Even before the fall of the Sheikh Hasina government, and her subsequent escape to India facing mobs in Dhaka, the conversation has turned to what happens in the Bay of Bengal next. Contestation between China, India, and the US cast a long shadow in the Hasina saga, with the erstwhile Prime Minister spending many years balancing Chinese and Indian interests. If armaments of all kinds flowed into the Bangladesh armed forces from China, energy cooperation including a major electricity purchase agreement was concluded with India. If Hasina raised eyebrows by buying Chinese submarines and allowing China to build the naval base BNS Sheikh Hasina in Bangladeshi waters, India won operational rights to the important Mongla port, the second largest in the country. In her last days as Prime Minister, Hasina also accused the United States of putting pressure on her to grant access to the strategic St. Martin’s Island to build an outpost there to counter growing Chinese presence. According to Hasina, she refused and thus precipitating a crisis. The US has vigorously denied having made any such demand.
Irrespective of the nature Hasina’s negotiations with the US, the fact is, the Bay of Bengal has rarely been so embattled since colonial powers, the English, the French, the Dutch and Portuguese jostled against one another in these waters. Not only are the Chinese heavily involved in the Bangladesh military, in building the base that was till now called BNS Sheikh Hasina, and the development of the Chattogram port (Bangladesh’s busiest and biggest), but the Chinese also have a definitive stake in Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port, and the Kyaukpyu port in Myanmar is critical to the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC).
The Chinese have also consistently caused concern among the Indians and the Americans, with their activities on Coco Islands off Yangon. As late as 2023, India raised serious concerns with Naypyidaw on suspected use of Coco Islands by the Chinese for surveillance of Indian missile launches and nuclear submarine movements. The junta in control of Myanmar was always favourable to the Chinese for the support, and cash, provided by Beijing through the time when most other government shunned the military dictators, and now, with the civil war in Myanmar having severely weakened the junta, fears have risen that the generals have no choice but to further do the Chinese Communist Party’s bidding.
Whether it is Chinese submarines surfacing in Sri Lankan waters or oceanographic vessels in Indian, Bangladeshi and Myanmarese maritime territory, the more entrenched the Chinese presence, the more threatening it seems to the American vision of a “free and open Indo-Pacific”. The kind of bullying skirmishes that Chinese ships are involved in, in the South China Sea has not happened in that scale in the Bay of Bengal, but many in America and India feel that it might be only a matter of time, and China’s perception of American and Indian weakness.
No doubt the Chinese see greater control on, or at least presence, in the Bay of Bengal mitigates some of their longstanding Malacca Dilemma. Ninety per cent of China’s trade, and energy supplies, moves through the sea, and almost all of it through the narrow Strait of Malacca, the critical shipping channel connecting the Indian and Pacific Oceans between the Malay Peninsula and the island of Sumatra, Indonesia. Choking of shipping lines through the 800-kilometre by 65-250-kilometre body of water is one of China’s biggest security concerns. It is an Achilles Heel that China has, and is struggling to fully overcome.
Its efforts to find alternative routes have taken the shape of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) which connects the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region to the port of Gwadar, and the CMEC. Both have an uncertain future despite billions of dollars of investment already poured in. In Pakistan, the CPEC has not only faced major graft and mismanagement for funds, but also violent pushback in the stretches that pass through the restive region of Balochistan where rebels have been continuously protesting against the Pakistani state and the project. As the civil war drags on in Myanmar, the CMEC project too is in volatile territory. In both countries it remains unclear how much control the local governments really have in enforcing further progress in the projects.
For America, ensuring that China does not plant more of its flags across the Bay of Bengal is critical. America wants to keep the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) free and democratic, meaning outside of Chinese influence, but increasingly the question of how much security investment a resource-stretched America struggling with a debt burden and already supporting two war efforts in Israel and Ukraine, is willing to make in these waters remains to be seen. Ideally, America would like some of the heavy lifting to be done by its Asian partners. Formats of cooperation like the Quad, AUKUS and others is, in part, a pursuit of this goal.
But as the constant collisions between the Chinese and the Philippines with boats crashing frequently and the use of water cannons, China is relentless in pursuing its maritime goals and it perhaps senses more reluctance from the US in getting overinvolved in Asian waters at the moment.
From an Indian vantage point, all this is worrying. The old “string of pearls” theory of Chinese encirclement using India’s neighbours is playing out in real time. The removal of Hasina has made Bangladesh a question-mark for India. The recent engagement between Chinese officials and reinvigorated (with its ban lifted) Jamaat-e-Islami in Bangladesh is bad news for India. The Chinese will try to do in Bangladesh what has happened in Pakistan—despite its collapsing economy, deeply fractious polity and darkening shadow of countless Islamists groups, Pakistan receives support both from its “all-weather” friend, China, and, at the very least, the support from America has not shut down in any comprehensive manner.
It is now well-known that the US used Pakistan to supply weapons to Ukraine and that allowed Pakistan receive a life-saving International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout. If Bangladesh can manage the triple-game of keeping someone like Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus in front to ensure American investment comes in, while its Army continues to buy Chinese weapons, and the Islamists keep getting empowered, the loser in all of this would be India. Such a Bangladesh would also serve the purpose of keeping India tied down in its neighbourhood, hemmed in from all sides, and would slow down its geopolitical rise.
India’s push to vigorously develop the Andaman and Nicobar Island region is critical for countering the rising presence of the Chinese in the Bay of Bengal. With the St. Martin’s Island fiasco, no doubt Indian policymakers remember the frantic call India had to make to Moscow to send a flotilla of nuclear submarines to restrict the movement of the US 7th Fleet led by the USS Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal during the Bangladesh liberation war in 1971. The US ships were sent in support of Pakistan whereas India took the side of the Bangladeshi liberation army, the Mukti Bahini.
In ideal circumstances, India-US cooperation to counter rising Chinese ambitions in the Bay of Bengal would be helpful. But, for now, with Hasina still stuck in India and Western governments unwilling to give her asylum, the complexities are set to worsen.
The advantage that India has of course is geography. As the Mohamed Muizzu government in Maldives is realising, India is close by port of help and friend-in-need in a manner than China is, cannot, and does not wish to be. There is a tyranny of distance in geopolitics, which Bangladesh faces, dependent on India for countless things from FMCG goods and services to electricity. In fact, Bangladesh owes $800 million to the Indian conglomerate, the Adani Group for supply for electricity. While, for now, Adani has pledged to continue to supply uninterrupted power to Bangladesh, pressure on the group from lenders is growing. With the chaos in Bangladesh, several key garments manufacturers have moved their supply chains to India.
Sri Lanka too is in dire economic crisis and India has already provided a major cash bailout to the country, which has prevented its collapse. Therefore, it has significant leverage in that country, but even that has not prevented repeated Chinese appearance including of submarines in Sri Lankan maritime assets causing concern in New Delhi. China’s control of the strategic Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka remains a serious red flag for India.
In Myanmar, Chinese development of the Kyaukphyu Port is happening disturbingly (from India’s perspective) adjacent to India’s naval base INS Varsha, designed to house nuclear submarines and ballistic missile submarines. This has a direct implication on the efficacy of India’s nuclear triad and sea-based second-strike capability.
This Bay of Bengal ecosystem is set to undergo some serious turbulence and how far India can balance its interests in keeping out China, and cooperating with America while at the same time keeping it at an arm’s length too remains to be seen.
Hindol Sengupta is professor of international relations at O. P. Jindal Global University, and co-founder of the foreign policy platform Global Order.