(. ANALYSIS)
New Delhi, Feb 26 (.) When politics shifts along a frontier, it is rarely just about ideology. It is usually about presence – who shows up, who listens, and who fills the gaps left by a distant state.
The recent electoral advances of the Jamaat-e-Islami in parts of northern and western Bangladesh, especially near the long border with India, should be read less as a dramatic ideological turn and more as a reminder of how neglected regions reshape politics on their own terms.
The India-Bangladesh boundary runs past districts like Rangpur, Rajshahi and Khulna, areas that have long sat at the margins of national growth stories. These are not just cartographic edges; they are places where infrastructure is thin, public services are patchy, and young people often see migration – not opportunity as the main exit route.
On the Indian side, West Bengal and Assam wrestle with their own versions of the same pressures: jobs, citizenship debates, and anxieties about movement across a porous frontier. Politics, in such spaces, becomes intensely local even when its consequences are international.
Jamaat’s gains in these districts point to a familiar political pattern: where the state is thin on the ground and mainstream parties lose credibility, voters reward organisations that show up with services, discipline, and local presence. Clinics, schools, relief work, and tightly run local networks often matter more than slogans crafted in Dhaka.
For years, the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party have dominated national headlines, but dominance at the centre does not automatically translate into trust at the periphery.
For India, the reflex will be to read any rise of an Islamist party near the border through a security lens. Given the history of migration disputes, the NRC controversy in Assam, and periodic tensions in West Bengal, that instinct is understandable.
But alarmism would miss the more prosaic lesson. The electoral map does not suggest a sweeping transformation of the frontier. It suggests pockets of political dissatisfaction finding an outlet where governance feels remote and alternatives feel tangible.
Dhaka should be more concerned than defensive. Border districts are often treated as buffers rather than as citizens’ spaces – useful in security briefings, less urgent in development planning. Roads, healthcare, schools, and local jobs do more to stabilise a frontier than speeches about stability. If voters are drifting toward parties with strong grassroots machinery, it is also because everyday governance has not kept pace with everyday needs.
New Delhi, for its part, has invested heavily in improving relations with Bangladesh through trade, transit routes, and security cooperation. That framework remains sound. But it will endure only if both sides remember that borders are not managed solely by patrols and protocols. They are managed by livelihoods, trust in institutions, and the quiet belief that politics can still deliver.
The real message from these border districts is not ideological. It is administrative and economic. Ignore the edges for too long, and the edges will start writing their own political stories.
(By arrangement with The Statesman)
. XC RSA