Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives: India’s Neighbourhood Strategy Under Strain

India’s declared “neighbourhood first” foreign policy doctrine, emphasising priority engagement with immediate South Asian neighbours over more distant strategic partnerships, has faced a series of significant tests in recent years as political upheaval, economic crisis, and shifting alignments have unfolded across Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives in rapid succession, each presenting India with a distinct version of the same underlying challenge: how does a regional power maintain influence in a neighbourhood where domestic political change can rapidly alter the strategic orientation of even long-standing partner governments?

Sri Lanka’s Debt Crisis and the Limits of Bilateral Support

Sri Lanka’s severe economic and debt crisis presented India with an opportunity to demonstrate neighbourhood solidarity through substantial financial assistance, including currency swap arrangements and fuel and food credit lines extended during the most acute phase of the crisis. India’s response was widely credited, including by Sri Lankan officials themselves, as more responsive and substantial than the assistance other major external actors provided in the crisis’s early months. This goodwill, however, has not translated into unambiguous long-term strategic alignment, as Sri Lanka continues to balance relationships with India, China, and other external partners according to its own calculation of immediate economic and political interest rather than according to a stable, predetermined alignment with any single power.

The Maldives Realignment

The Maldives presented a more direct test of India’s neighbourhood influence following a change in government that campaigned partly on a platform of reducing what it characterised as excessive Indian influence over Maldivian affairs, including calls for the withdrawal of Indian military personnel stationed in the country for maritime surveillance cooperation. The resulting diplomatic friction, while eventually managed through continued engagement, illustrated a structural vulnerability in India’s neighbourhood strategy: relationships built substantially around cooperation with a specific governing administration can become genuinely strained when domestic political change brings a less aligned government to power, a vulnerability that bilateral aid and infrastructure investment alone cannot fully insulate against.

Bangladesh’s Political Transition

Bangladesh’s significant recent political transition, following sustained domestic unrest and a change in government after an extended period of stable relations with India under the previous administration, has introduced genuine uncertainty into a bilateral relationship that had become one of India’s more successful neighbourhood partnerships in recent years, encompassing substantial trade, connectivity, and security cooperation. The durability of that cooperation under a transitional and subsequently elected new government remains an open question that will significantly shape India’s eastern neighbourhood strategy in the years ahead.

A neighbourhood policy built substantially on relationships with specific governments, rather than more durable institutional and economic interdependence that survives political transition, will always be vulnerable to exactly the kind of disruption India has experienced across multiple neighbours in rapid succession.

The Structural Lesson

Across all three cases, a common thread emerges: India’s neighbourhood influence, however substantial in absolute terms, faces a structural ceiling imposed by the reality that smaller neighbouring states retain genuine agency to recalibrate their external alignments in response to domestic political change, regional great-power competition, and their own calculation of immediate interest. A more resilient neighbourhood strategy would likely require deeper, more broadly distributed economic interdependence — trade, infrastructure, and people-to-people ties that persist across changes in government — rather than relationships disproportionately anchored to cooperation with whichever administration happens to be in power at a given moment.