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?Bangladesh President Mohammed Shahabuddin administers the oath of office to Bangladesh Nationalist Party Chairman Tarique Rahman as the new Prime Minister of the country during the latter’s swearing-in ceremony, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2026. Photo: PTI.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.Also read: In First Presser After BNP Landslide, Rahman Warns Against Nation Being Turned Into ‘Subservient State’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 treatment of its Muslim minority fed directly into that anger. Asked whether the feeling would ease if the new government successfully reset ties, he was emphatic. “It will take at least 20 years of good relationship for these underlying emotions to go away.”The youth gapBithi Akhtar, in her twenties and works at a coffee shop in upscale Gulshan and studies part-time, had her own reading of the election. “Gen Z really dislikes India,” she said. “The older generation likes them more.”She spent polling day moving between her neighbourhood and the city centre, watching the queues and sensing the mood. Quite a few young voters, she said, felt subtle pressure from their families to back the BNP. Even so, “a few of the votes did go to the weighing scale (Jamaat-e-Islami’s electoral symbol) as well”.Many Gen Z voters in her area, she added, would have chosen the NCP – the party organised by the youth leaders of the uprising – had a candidate been on the ballot. But the party’s footprint remains largely centred around Dhaka University. Without an NCP option locally, most votes in her neighbourhood went to the BNP, with the rest split among others. “If 60% went to BNP, maybe 40% went to the scales,” she quickly analysed.Her account reflected a mood that was clearly visible on campuses. But beyond university circles, the picture appeared more mixed.Survey data collected by Innovision Consulting in September 2025 showed that 72.2% of respondents said Bangladesh should maintain good relations with India, compared to 69% who said the same about Pakistan. Among university respondents, scepticism towards India was more pronounced. While most still favoured good ties, 15.1% of students said distance should be created from India, compared to 13.7% in the general household sample. Only eight percent of university respondents favoured distancing from Pakistan.The numbers suggested that scepticism towards Delhi was more visible on campuses than nationally, though this was still not the dominant view.Generational differences appeared elsewhere. Among voters over 60 years of age, BNP secured 48.6% support, compared to 26.5% for Jamaat-e-Islami. Among Gen Z voters aged 18 to 28, the gap narrowed considerably, with 34.3% backing BNP and 32.8% Jamaat. Jamaat-e-Islami leader Shafiqur Rahman, centre, addresses to the media after casting his vote at a polling station during national parliamentary election in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Thursday, Feb. 12, 2026. Photo: AP/PTI.Students were also significantly more likely to oppose the Awami League’s participation in the election, with 63% of university respondents saying the party should not be allowed to contest, compared to 43.69% in the household sample.On the eve of voting, a member of the polling team shared a breakdown on Facebook based on the September 2025 and January 2026 survey rounds. The analysis compared voters of similar age, gender, region and income to see how specific views were linked to vote preference.On foreign policy, the relationship with vote choice differed across parties. Those who wanted distance from India were more likely to vote for Jamaat. For BNP voters, attitudes towards India showed no clear effect.Views on Pakistan told a different story. Respondents who preferred distance from Pakistan were more likely to vote BNP. Those who supported maintaining or improving ties with Pakistan were more likely to vote for either BNP or Jamaat compared to those with no position. Speaking to The Wire after the results began to emerge, Mohammad Rubaiyath Sarwar, head of Innovision Consulting, said anti-India rhetoric during the campaign “did not turn the votes”. “And the BNP, as you may see, completely avoided that route”.Taken together, the data suggested that while a broad majority of voters supported stable relations with India, scepticism towards Delhi was more concentrated among younger respondents and more closely aligned with Jamaat’s support base than with BNP’s.Jamaat’s rise was evident not only in the emphatic victories secured by Islami Chhatra Shibir in student union elections across major universities, but also in the ground it gained in Dhaka division. The Islamist party won six of the 15 seats in Dhaka and ran close contests in five others in a division that had previously tended to swing almost entirely towards the party that won the general election.Distance from India, not necessarily a divorceA short distance away, in the gardens of the Faculty of Social Sciences, where Kamal sat on a bridge, a group of students perched on a bench beside a chai kiosk and offered a more layered account.Irteza Iraj, 21, studying sociology, and his friends Imtiaz Hossain and Faria Naushin Cindy, drew a distinction between the Indian state and Indian people that came up in nearly every conversation on campus that afternoon. “We don’t have any hatred for the people of India,” Imtiaz said. “We go to India for treatment, we go there to visit monuments. I have seen the Taj Mahal myself. But the specific people who are in government, because of them, the whole of India gets branded”.Irteza Iraj, 21, a sociology student, and his friends Imtiaz Hossain and Faria Naushin Cindy drew a distinction that surfaced repeatedly in conversations across campus that afternoon: the difference between the Indian state and Indian people.Faria argued that the anger had not emerged overnight. For years, she said, the Awami League had leaned on its relationship with New Delhi and used it as political cover, while ordinary Bangladeshis saw little return. “The previous government was in our midst for so long,” she said. “That is why we have seen a difference between how we see India and how we see other foreign countries.”Irteza pushed the argument further back in time. He spoke of what he described as cultural domination, of Indian media and cultural exports saturating Bangladeshi space while the relationship remained structurally unequal. “They wanted to dominate us,” he said.At the same time, he insisted that anger towards India did not translate into sympathy for Pakistan. “In the same way we have a lot of hatred towards India, we have a lot of hatred towards Pakistan,” he said, before qualifying it. “But we know that India had come to support us earlier. Indira Gandhi helped us a lot. It’s just that they are dominating us now.”Also read: Interview | Intelligence Agencies Across South Asia Must Stop Dictating Foreign Policy: BNP LeaderThreaded through these conversations was a death, and what it had come to signify.Sharif Osman Bin Hadi, a cultural activist murdered on the Dhaka University campus in the weeks before the election, had become a symbol. His face appeared in graffiti across Dhaka and beyond, and countless social media account“He was not as well known before his death,” Irteza said. “But, he was glorified a lot afterwards. We all know about him”. Across a small road in front of the garden, the walls around the main staircase to the faculty building had a large mural of Hadi against a red sunburst, while black banners bearing his name hung from the entrance.People offer funeral prayers for leading Bangladeshi activist Sharif Osman Hadi, who died from gunshot wounds sustained in an attack in Dhaka earlier this month, outside the nation’s Parliament complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Saturday, Dec. 20, 2025. Photo: AP Photo/Mahmud Hossain Opu.What had given the murder its political charge was a claim, circulating on social media and never conclusively refuted, that the perpetrators had fled to India. “We should blame India for this,” said one student in the group. Imtiaz was more careful. “We don’t know whether it is true or not.” Irteza said he believed external forces had engineered the killing to destabilise the election. Whether or not that reading was correct, the murder had added another layer of grievance to a campus already covered in anti-India graffiti.While that votes for the Jamaat had gone from young people was acknowledged by the students, they were at pains to explain that it was not ideological.“Both parties are old. Corruption is old in both,” he said. “But what do people want? They want to find something new.” There was also a sense of class difference toward Jamaat voters as a whole. “They are totally biased,” he said, describing how Jamaat representatives had allegedly distributed money to poor voters in exchange for their ballots. “Religion plays a big role here,” Faria said. “Ninety percent of the people in Bangladesh are Muslims. They manipulate the majority.”Patterns in power“This is not 18 months,” said M. Humayun Kabir, a former Bangladeshi ambassador to the United States, when asked about the anti-India sentiment now visible across campus walls and in voter behaviour. “It has basically been building up over the last 15 years.” Debapriya Bhattacharya, a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for Policy Dialogue who led the interim government’s white paper committee on the economy, put it more starkly. “Bangladesh’s general people have never been so anti-Indian – never before in history,” he said. “There must have been something wrong with the earlier relationship with Sheikh Hasina, otherwise why has the whole country gone against it.”While Bangladesh’s political memory is anchored in Hasina’s final 15 years, India’s baggage predates that period. When Khaleda Zia’s BNP first assumed office in 1991, New Delhi had already concluded that, given the party’s alliance with Islamist conservatives and its persistent anti-Indian rhetoric, it was in for a difficult phase.Bangladesh was soon viewed in New Delhi as a rear base for armed groups operating in India’s northeast. During those years, India also shifted course on Myanmar, opening channels with the military junta. By 1995, New Delhi had launched Operation Golden Bird in coordination with Myanmar to intercept an arms consignment bound for insurgents. The more Dhaka leaned away from India, the more New Delhi deepened its reliance on Yangon.The BNP’s second tenure from 2001 to 2006 was worse. In April 2001, the Bangladesh Rifles killed 16 Indian soldiers in the Rowmari sector. Indian dossiers from that period alleged that Bangladesh’s intelligence service maintained links with Pakistan’s ISI and facilitated arms flows for Indian insurgents. In April 2004, police and coast guard intercepted a consignment of ten truckloads of weapons at the Chittagong port, including rocket launchers, grenades, and automatic weapons, allegedly destined for insurgent groups in India’s northeast. The incident remains seared in Indian institutional memory as evidence of the BNP-Jamaat government’s complicity. Tarique Rahman, then an influential figure as the prime minister’s son, was viewed by Indian intelligence as part of the inner circle, though his direct role in policy decisions remained unclear.The contrast with Awami League rule was sharp. Sheikh Hasina’s first tenure from 1996 to 2001 delivered the Ganga Water Treaty and the Chittagong Hill Tracts accord, outcomes India had long sought but had not secured under the BNP. For the Indian security establishment, a pattern appeared confirmed. Cooperation advanced under Awami League governments. Under the BNP, relations deteriorated.In this image made from a video, supporters of the ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina clash with the police in Gopalganj, Bangladesh, Wednesday, July 16, 2025. Photo: AP/PTI.The first moves of a new equationNow, there are signs of recalibration. The man at the centre of it is not the figure Indian intelligence tracked two decades ago. Tarique Rahman left Bangladesh in 2008 in his early forties, spent seventeen years in London, and returned in December 2025 at the age of 60 after nearly two decades in a functioning democracy.Indian policymakers, speaking privately, say they have noted the shift. His public remarks since returning have been measured, focused on economic development and regional cooperation. He has avoided the anti-India rhetoric that marked earlier BNP campaigns and has said Bangladesh must work with its neighbours.In contrast to the cold shoulder shown to the interim Yunus government, New Delhi has moved quickly to signal warmth to Rahman. External affairs minister S. Jaishankar attended Khaleda Zia’s funeral as a special envoy. A congratulatory phone call followed soon after the results. The Lok Sabha Speaker was present at the swearing in ceremony, bearing an invitation to New Delhi.A supporter with a painting of Tarique Rahman, the son of former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia and chairman of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), waits to present him near the party office in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Thursday, Feb. 12, 2026. Photo: AP/PTISreeradha Datta, a professor at OP Jindal University and the only Indian national to register as a foreign election observer, spent polling day moving between Gulshan, Baridhara, Bashundhara and the airport area in northern Dhaka. “Lots of women voters everywhere, children playing in school fields,” she recalled. “When parents bring children out to vote, that’s always a marker that there’s no anxiety or fear.”On the central question of whether BNP’s victory offered an opening, she was unequivocal. “This is a great moment for India to find a new engagement,” Datta said. “Both sides should let go of the past and find ways to work together.”She pointed to India’s current engagement with Sri Lankan president A.K. Dissanayake, whose party had once been sharply anti-India. “But look, we are working together. And I think from the day Tarique Rahman has returned, he has made it very objective about India and has said openly, we are the neighbours, we have to work with them,” she said.With Bangladesh’s economy under strain, she added, “India could be a great partner”. Trade restrictions that have tightened steadily over the past eighteen months may be now due for reversal. Bhattacharya framed it as a test of India’s own ambitions. “India wants to play a global role, but history will tell us that you cannot play a global role without regional legitimacy,” he said. “You have to be really truthful to your ‘Neighborhood First’ policy. It is time for introspection for Indian policymakers.”He added that any repair would require clarity from India. “India has to look at Bangladesh by decoupling from the Hasina factor,” he said. Sheikh Hasina remains in Delhi, and as long as she continues to make political statements from there, her presence will act as a recurring irritant. “She may stay as long as the host country pleases,” he said, “but it should not become a variable in our relationship.”Kabir argued that the initiative now rests largely with New Delhi. He suggested the template of 2001, when national security advisor Brajesh Mishra had visited Dhaka shortly after the new government took office. A senior-level visit, followed by visible steps – easing visa restrictions, restoring rail and bus links, and eventually a substantive agreement on Ganges water sharing – could build a ladder of confidence. “Each one can build up on the other,” he said.He was clear about the constraint facing Tarique Rahman. “BNP is coming to power against the backdrop of the July uprising, where the message from the younger generation is that Bangladesh should stand up against any kind of domination, stand for its dignity, and run the relationship based on equality,” he said. “Even if Tarique Rahman wants to make an outreach to India, he will have to do it taking into account the aspirations of the people of Bangladesh.”It was the same tension Faria and her fellow Dhaka students had articulated from the other side of the South Asian megapolis. The incoming government would need to manage the collaboration it required from India while first managing the anger at home.Kabir thought a positive shift was possible, but conditionally. “If both governments start a carefully calibrated movement to give a positive message and show some actions,” he said, “the situation could ease up.” Then he added: “I acknowledge the fact that there’s a strong anti-India sentiment. The younger generation was very clear on that point. Keeping that fact in mind, one should try to make a calibrated dance together to move forward.”In the days after the elections, discussions at Dhaka University and among policy analysts in the capital and talking heads on television channels returned to the same tension. The new government will need India for economic collaboration, connectivity and regional stability. But it would also need to satisfy a generation that had overthrown a government they believed had spent 15 years subordinating Bangladesh’s interests to Delhi’s, and who had made clear they would not accept a return to that arrangement.Whether Tarique Rahman could manage both simultaneously, or whether one would have to give, was the question no one on either side of the border had been able to answer. The students weren’t waiting to find out. The graffiti was already on the walls.