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03/31/2025
CASI Deep Dive: Avinash Paliwal on India’s “Near East” and How History is Rhyming in Bangladesh https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/iit/rohan-venkat-avinash-paliwal-interview-2025
Toward the end of "India’s Near East: A New History" (Hurst, 2024), Avinash Paliwal noted that India’s “over-investment” in Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina could lead to trouble, given her growing unpopularity. “Hasina,” wrote Paliwal, a Reader in International Relations at SOAS University of London, “could well experience a groundswell of protests going forward.” As events would have it, by August 2024, Hasina had fled the country, taking refuge in India, after millions took to the streets in what would become known as the July revolution. Meanwhile, New Delhi’s Bangladesh policy—heavily dependent on Hasina’s iron hand—would have to be rebuilt from scratch.
Paliwal’s book—his second following 2017’s "My Enemy’s Enemy: India in Afghanistan from the Soviet Invasion to the US Withdrawal"—proffers a new analytical framing, which he calls India’s “Near East,” i.e. the neighboring nations of Bangladesh and Myanmar, but also the Indian states that are collectively known as the “northeast.” Why mix the domestic and international? “This book argues that India’s domestic state-building is inextricably connected to its international diplomacy,” writes Paliwal, particularly in a region that was “once administratively united under colonialism.”
Understanding the trajectories of the northeast states and India’s struggle at nation-building in what was once seen as the periphery of the Raj, the book argues, would be impossible without factoring in New Delhi’s engagement with Dhaka and Yangon or Naypyidaw. And India’s relations with both Bangladesh and Myanmar have been heavily influenced by the state’s aims in the northeast.
CASI Managing Editor Rohan Venkat spoke to Avinash Paliwal about the “near east” framing, what history can tell us about how India is reacting to Bangladesh and Myanmar today, how the US and China fit into the region and why “connectivity” alone is not the answer to the myriad issues facing the region.
