THE QUINTESSENTIAL NEIGHBOURS

Air Vice Marshal Mahmud Hussain (Retd)

he is served as High Commissioner of Bangladesh to Brunei Darussalam from November 2016 to September 2020 and served as the Chairman, Civil Aviation Authority of Bangladesh (CAAB).  Presently, he is working as the Distinguished Expert at Aviation and Aerospace University, Bangladesh (AAUB).

Neighbours matter a lot in the peaceful existence of a state. Having more than one neighbour is truly troubling as the state has to deal with each one of them separately. No matter how sincerely one tries to build up mutually convivial relationships, there will always be reasons to unravel the good intentions. In this matter, perhaps the citizens of the state play a more damaging role than their governments.

In recent times, the abduction of Nicolas Maduro, the Venezuelan President is a clear example of taking law into one’s own hand by the sheer logic of being a global power having the self-induced flexibility to act on its own. That the US is at liberty to do what fits its logic is not a valid argument by any account of syllogism. The incident also exposes the fragility of a system where the structural norms are reduced to elitist behaviour of the powerful.

The Maduro affair reached a farcical proportion as Maria Corina Machado handed over her Nobel Prize medal as a gift to US president Donald Trump. Machado received the Nobel Prize defeating Donald Trump as a fierce competitor in October 2025. She was awarded the prize for her struggle in promoting democracy in Venezuela. Machado was wooing Trump hoping that her unctuous gesture would placate him to support her to rein in power. 

All this happened at a time when Trump was thinking of taking over Greenland. The case of Greenland is even more egregious than of Venezuela. Greenland is a territory of the Kingdom of Denmark and semi-autonomous Arctic island. Yet Machado’s behaviour in the manner of putting her faith in the world’s most powerful President belies confidence in her own people. The tragedy of elitist politics is that it promotes the ambition of the powerfully rich class across countries as joining hands together ignoring the will of the common people. In the end, the consequence of the less powerful state is always disastrous.

Machado’s behaviour has further emboldened the US President’s resolve. To call upon an outsider and put faith in him in correcting one’s own house in order will always backfire. This is exactly what happened in case of Machado. In the end, Trump did not support Machado. Instead, he advanced his support to Delcy Rodriguez who happened to be the vice president under Maduro from 2018 to 2026. So, it appears that protecting democracy was not the main target for US President but something else. In this case, Venezuela’s oil and mineral resources.

Venezuela has the largest proven crude oil reserve in the world. It is estimated at 17% of the global total, or 300 billion barrels. US look-out was Venezuelan oil, Maduro was just an excuse. This was quite clear when in December 2025, the US began a maritime blockade of sanctioned oil or to shadow fleet tankers of Venezuela off the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. However, the US always put the blame that the targeted vessels were involved in drug trafficking.

The relationship between the US and Venezuela is indicative of a continuous struggle that a small state faces in the neighbourhood of a great power. Power does not only give confidence to its owner but it also puts others at the whims of the powerful. Therefore, the challenge of survival is more daunting for the less powerful. The co-existence of quintessential neighbours, one powerful and the other weak, rests on the principle of liberal norms.

Parallel lines can be drawn from the US and its neighbours to the South Asian countries, namely India and its neighbours. Great powers, in theory, at least are expected to demonstrate semblance of great sacrifice. But in recent times, that penchant on the part of great power leaders has receded. Great powers would like to see parochial individual benefit in every exchange of mutual dealing. The emphasis is on transactional relationship rather than olden day’s attitude of letting go some scrap of profit in the interest of promoting soft power image.

The latest loss of soft power by India was seen not in the political turf but on the cricket ground. Bangladesh was banned from T20 World Cup. The reason for staving off Bangladesh was very flimsy. The Kolkata Team of India hired a Bangladeshi bowler named Mustafizur Rahman to play in the Indian Premier League. The recruitment roused a lot of rowdyism in India. Political jealousy got the better of the sporting spirit. A former state legislator of Bharatiya Janata Party named Sangeet Som took the issue against Mostafizur Rahman to the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). What seemed even more strident on the part of Indians that others also joined in a chorus to drop Mustafizur as though he was an outcast from Bangladesh. Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) in a fit of defeat from public sentiment forced Kolkata to drop Mustafizur.

WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 20: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the media during a press briefing in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House on January 20, 2026 in Washington, DC. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was joined by President Trump days after the president threatened a 10% import tax on goods from eight European countries that have rallied around Denmark amid Trump's calls for the U.S. to take control of Greenland, a semi-autonomous Danish territory. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

The Indian government kept quiet and tried to defend by stating that BCCI’s decision did not behoove the government’s intervention into its business. In case of Bangladesh, the story was different. The government was prompt in taking action by declaring that it would not play the ICC T-20 World Cup on Indian soil because of security reasons. The fear of Bangladesh was exaggerated but not without a rationale. At least, the government of India should have been wary of the question of self-esteem to Bangladesh as things unfolded.

Reality came to a pungent end when ICC excluded Bangladesh from the World Cup and replaced it with Scotland. It must be remembered that ICC is headed by Mr Shah whose father Amit Shah is the Home Minister of India and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s right-hand man. The entire episode made for a very poor brinkmanship in the relations between India and Bangladesh.

The event took a complicated turn when Pakistan backed Bangladesh by banning its team from playing a fixture against India. The reason for reneging the match with India was to show solidarity with Bangladesh. Pakistan’s move came as a big blow to India. At the end, Pakistan agreed to play India on the ground that Bangladesh would face no financial penalty for refusing to play in India. However, Bangladesh’s exclusion from the World Cup stood its ground. It may be mentioned that as the cricket’s global governing body is an India-powered entity because most of the money comes from advertising and spectators’ fees from India because of its sheer size of population and insatiable popularity of the game.

It is felt that India could have easily avoided the pitfall by behaving more prudently. But Indian government seemed ambivalent in dealing with simple things concerning Bangladesh and turned them complex. A comparison with a past occurrence would be worthwhile in signifying the prudence of statesmanship-like qualities among politicians of neighbouring states.

India conducted Operation Brasstacks, the largest ever military exercise in South Asia that brought both India and Pakistan to a full-scale nuclear war. India had amassed 600,000 troops near the border. Indian Air Force and Navy had also joined in. It began in 1986 and ended in 1987. Brasstacks was described bigger than any NATO exercise and the biggest since World War II. The Indian Army Chief, General Sunderji’s strategy was to provoke Pakistan and then provide India with an excuse to attack Pakistan and take out its nuclear bomb facilities in a preventive strike. It was an audacious thinking by India. But at the end diplomacy intervened. 

That time it was the diplomacy of cricket. The love of cricket on both sides became a factor in defusing tensions. In February 1987, General Zia-ul-Haque, the then military President of Pakistan, flew himself on his own to watch a cricket match between India and Pakistan in Jaipur, and then met the Indian Premier Rajiv Gandhi in Delhi. Both leaders agreed to withdraw their troops from the border in phases to avoid a war. The war tension was wiped off by March 1987. Cricket showed Brasstacks the beacon to wish for peace. It was way back 40 years ago. But now the same cricket has been weaponized in South Asian geo-politics.

We began this article with US abduction of Nicolas Maduro and compared it with recent happenings in South Asia. India like the US is a regional power. While the US considers the whole of continental America its geo-political sacred precinct, many out-of-politics Indian citizenry are deluding themselves into same kind of premises. Otherwise, why should Indian frenzy to feed on disinformation and misinformation about Lalmonirhat, a small township in Bangladesh, be made into a subject of incendiary attacks.

The story of China constructing a military base at Lalmonirhat defies normal common sense. It is understood that proximity of Lalmonirhat to Shiliguri corridor, a narrow chicken neck, is strategically important. But to feel that it is only so for India, not for Bangladesh, is sort of taking logic to its extreme fallacy. Anyone with good understanding of geo-politics would see the rationale of Bangladesh not involving with India in any kind of strategic miscalculations about Shiliguri Corridor. Bangladesh is not Pakistan which has a nuclear power.

In South Asia, India is the only country which delimits all the regional neighbours__ Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. In addition, it shares with China 3,488 km of land border in the north. It is natural that India’s concern for even a minor border disturbance should ring a sense of irritation to its seat of power. This makes it imperative for India to be more thoughtful and sensitive toward its small neighbours. Mustafiz case could have been handled more intelligently. That simply needed a back channel intervention by the government. Once Mustafiz was dropped, it naturally hurt the self-esteem of Bangladesh. The same when Bangladesh declined to play in Indian soil, it must have hurt the self-esteem of India. In flailing one’s ego to others, one ends up being flailed.

The consequence of such behaviour is either loss of power or loss of prestige. In case of Maduro’s abduction, the US lost its prestige; in case of Mostafiz, India lost its power, albeit the soft one. 

The geography of the world sets the limit of the boundaries of states. States do rarely exist in isolation other than those spots that appear as islet in the map. Even a vast territory like Greenland is not an isolated community lying between the Arctic and the Atlantic Oceans. It is a part of Denmark and as such, its citizens claim themselves as the citizens of Denmark. From that point of view, Canada and the US are its closest neighbours. Nothing would be more traumatic for Greenlanders than to be always at the mercy of goodwill of the big neighbours. So, the existence of states is always dependent on an intuitive forcefulness. Most of the time, the intuition is driven by a desire to be treated as equal to others, no matter what the size and strength of its elements of power. 

In South Asia, a harmonious neighbourly relationship is dysfunctional. In the context of current geo-politics, persistence of such situation is debilitating for the regional stability and peace. We have witnessed how a pragmatic understanding of regional harmony has lit the path toward mutual collaboration. When Donald Trump revealed his desire to annex Greenland, European Union raised eyebrows in unison threatening to go against American trumpet of unfounded superiority. Such strong anti-US malevolence even touched countries deemed too close to US favours, including Britain and Germany.

European Union is a good example for South Asia, so is ASEAN. A long time has passed since the creation of SAARC, which could be used as a readymade vehicle for working together. The acronym did not mention of any specific areas of cooperation among South Asian countries. It kept the options clear and expansive. But the message war clear. Economic and bilateral trade were the venues through which states could approach each other harmoniously for the greater good of the South Asians. But one thing was missed out by its proponents. That is cultural cooperation, and sports is a part of culture. In that spirit, spilling animosity over cricket is an example of immaturity. It goes against the logic of harmonious neighbours.