How India Kept Power Flowing to Bangladesh Despite Political Turmoil

How India kept power supply flowing to support Bangladesh despite hostile new regime

New Delhi, May 19

The two countries had spent years constructing an energy partnership -- pipelines, power grids, joint infrastructure -- that had become load-bearing for Bangladesh's economy.

The concern was whether a sudden political realignment in Dhaka would put all of it at risk.

Through September 2024, as political communication between New Delhi and Dhaka entered a difficult phase and administrative processes, including visa normalisation, slowed, India's power exports to Bangladesh continued at virtually unchanged levels, the article in in Eurasia Review said.

It cites official data from India's National Load Despatch Centre on September 18, 2024, recording nearly 47.7 million units of electricity supplied to Bangladesh in a single day which showed how deep link between the two countries' energy systems held even as the political relationship navigated turbulence.

The article explains that the reason why this energy link did not break is that the "India-Bangladesh power relationship had, by 2024, moved well past the point where it depended on the goodwill of particular leaders or the warmth of any given diplomatic moment".

It was embedded in long-term agreements, technical coordination mechanisms between grid operators, and interconnected infrastructure whose suspension would have imposed immediate and serious costs on both sides.

"Bangladesh's factories, hospitals, and urban power networks had come to depend on imported Indian electricity as a baseline of supply. India's grid operators had corresponding obligations and commercial arrangements," the article noted.

It highlights that the system had its own momentum -- institutional, contractual, and operational -- that was not easily interrupted by political weather.

Bangladesh was already managing a fragile economic situation: foreign exchange reserves under pressure, fuel import costs elevated, and public confidence in institutions not yet fully restored after the political transition.

"An electricity disruption layered on top of all that -- darkening factories, extending urban load-shedding, amplifying public frustration at a moment of governmental fragility -- would have been deeply damaging. Instead, the power kept coming, industrial production held at workable levels, and the new administration was spared one crisis it did not need," the article said.

The article highlights that it goes to India's credit that chose not to use the potential leverage that Bangladesh's political transition created at that point.

"A country dependent on a neighbour for essential energy imports is, in principle, vulnerable to pressure from that neighbour during a period of internal weakness. India did not apply that pressure. It allowed institutional commitments to run their course, treating the energy relationship as something separate from the political complications that had arisen between the two governments. That restraint was itself a form of diplomacy -- quieter and more durable than anything that could have been communicated in a press statement," the article noted.

— IANS