In recent years, anti-Indian sentiment has surfaced across South Asia with unsettling regularity. Indian diplomatic missions have been attacked in Bangladesh; slogans denouncing India have been raised in Kathmandu; while the press and government have tarred every untoward incident in Pakistan’s rebellious Baloch and Pashtun areas with familiar accusations of Indian interference.
These have not been isolated incidents, nor were they merely episodic outbursts triggered by specific events. They point to a deeper, older current in the political psychology of the subcontinent.
What feeds this feeling of anti-Indianism? Is it India’s much-criticised about “big brother” attitude towards its smaller neighbours? Is it the perceived senatorial aloofness of Indian diplomats posted to neighbouring capitals?Or is it something more structural, more psychological, and hence more enduring?
Pakistan offers the clearest historical lesson in this regard. Pakistan was not born merely out of the need to create a homeland for a few; it was born out of a desire to be separate from India.Fear of the larger neighbour, demographically, culturally, and civilisationally, became a defining element of Pakistan’s national psyche. From even before it was born, Pakistani politics revolved around accusations of being “pro-Indian,” a label synonymous with treachery.
Electoral battles, military interventions, and ideological campaigns were all shaped by this anxiety. Anti-Indianism became not just a foreign policy posture but a domestic political tool. Behind this rhetoric was the fear that the mainstream of ideas in the sub-continent – secularism, socialistic and liberal – may at some stage overtake the narrower nation construct of Pakistan.The name Pakistan, translated into English meaning ‘Land of the Pure’, itself was a marker of this fear – which tried otherise the rest of the sub-continent as somehow impure and hence a threat to the “purer ideals” that formed foundation stone of the new border nation.A similar dynamic played out in Bangladesh. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was repeatedly accused by his opponents of being “pro-Indian,” of acting in league with New Delhi, simply because he sought better trade relations and a peaceful coexistence with a neighbour Bangladesh could not wish away.
In the 1960s, he was subjected to a sham trail where he was accused of being an Indian agent. In 1975, his killers did not merely accuse him of being dictatorial but of “selling out to India”, despite there being no evidence of his having done so. In fact, witnesses to that era speak of how Mujib was drawing closer to China on the one hand and warmly embracing his former jailor Zulfikar Ali Bhutto on the other.The accusers were not just his opponents from outside his party but his own comrades in arms.
The smear campaign was never really about policy differences. It was always about carving out a separate identity and the fear that surrounded by a larger neighbour, that project may spectacularly fail.At the heart of this anxiety lies the fear of being subsumed by the larger cultural entity that is Indianness. India’s civilisational spread, through language, literature, cinema, music, and markets, does not stop at political borders.It seeps across them, often effortlessly.
For societies attempting to assert a distinct post-colonial or post-partition identity, this cultural permeability can be threatening.This tension is now playing out sharply in Bangladesh amid the current upheaval following the death of Osman Hadi.On the one hand, India is being blamed, without any credible evidence, for allegedly sheltering the perpetrators of the crime. Indian missions have been attacked in retaliation. On the other hand, Bangladeshi television channels speak incessantly of Indian “cultural, economic, and political aggression,” even though such aggression is conspicuously absent from daily life on the streets.More revealing, however, is the second stream of violence and rhetoric, directed not at India, but at Bangladesh’s own cultural foundations.Cultural organisations such as ‘Chhayanaut’, long-standing custodians of Bengali identity, have come under attack. Sufi shrines, representing a plural, syncretic strand of Islam deeply rooted in Bengali society, are being targeted.
Newspapers which were quite avowedly anti-Hasina but in favour of pluralism have been burnt down. These are not accidental choices of targets, they have been deliberately and carefully chosen.Bangladesh was founded on two abiding streams of consciousness. The first was a distinct Bengali cultural identity, inclusive, linguistic, and rooted in shared heritage, with a Muslim identity woven into it, which set it apart from India’s Bengal but yet in many ways it’s twin.The second was a pragmatic aspiration: to live in peace with neighbours, to coexist, to prioritise economic upliftment, social mobility, and a better life for its people.The current wave of demonstrations seeks to negate both. Closeness with India is portrayed as betrayal; India itself is branded the enemy and openly threatened by street demonstrators.Simultaneously, the very idea of being Bengali is under assault. For the new political actors emerging in this turbulence, Bengali-ness appears to be an inconvenience, an obstacle to the construction of their chosen narrower identity.In this context, India becomes a convenient antagonist. Anti-Indianism serves as a proxy, a mobilising slogan that masks a more fundamental project: the redefinition of national identity through separation: culturally, emotionally, and ideologically.The real culprit, therefore, is not India’s actions or attitudes alone. It is the desire to be defined as separate at all costs.However this constructed definitiveness collapses in everyday life.
A Pakistani may watch a Bollywood film in private even as public discourse condemns Indian culture. A Bangladeshi may read Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay or Sunil Gangopadhyay or watch a Bengali serial produced by Tollywood, while political rhetoric denounces cultural proximity to India and business interests deny Indian-made Bengali movie to be shown in Dhaka.These contradictions expose the fragility of constructed separateness. What is being attacked, ultimately, is the discomforting truth that identities in the subcontinent are intertwined. Language, culture, memory, and imagination do not recognise political borders.Anti-Indianism has emerged not as reaction to India’s power display, but a defence mechanism being constructed against cultural intimacy, which could open windows for people behind a border separated by barbed wires.