Neighbours - Why India Should Worry

Surrounded By Turmoil, India Needs To Reinvent Its Neighbourhood First Policy, Lest China Takes Advantage And Extends Its Influence

- RAJ CHENGAPPA

IN South Asia, power has been increasingly flowing not from the barrel of a gun or the jackboot of an autocrat, but from its teeming masses. Just look around. In Myanmar, the Min Aung Hlaingled military junta, which had sacked the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in 2021, today faces a bloody civil war that has seen rebels take control of half its territory. In Sri Lanka, the powerful Rajapaksa brothers, Gotabaya and Mahinda, who as president and prime minister respectively had treated the island nation like a family fiefdom, fled to safety in 2022 after people revolted over high inflation and low incomes. Then, in 2023, the Pakistan army saw the unthinkable come to pass when mobs protesting the arrest of deposed prime minister Imran Khan stormed the Lahore corps commander's house and even attacked the army headquarters in Rawalpindi. And just last week, it was Sheikh Hasina, who, ironically, had just completed a record 20 years as the prime minister of Bangladesh (though not consecutively) and thought she was invincible. She faced the brunt of popular anger when what started as a minor student protest exploded into a full-scale people's insurrection that left Hasina only 45 minutes to board an army chopper and flee to India.