Month: February 2026

This is a valuable piece in Prothom Alo arguing that with India’s decline in power in Bangladesh, China is moving up. Also notes how foreign affairs are playing out on the campaign trail:

“Ahead of the election, the BNP and its closest rival, the Islamist Jamaat‑e‑Islami, have accused each other of courting foreign interests, with Jamaat alleging the BNP is too close to India, and the BNP pointing to Jamaat’s historic ties with Pakistan, India’s old enemy.

“Not Dilli, not Pindi, Bangladesh before everything,” Rahman, the BNP leader, told a recent rally, referring to New Delhi and Pakistan’s military headquarters in Rawalpindi.”

Plus US policy is making life easier for China:

“”China is steadily building its influence both in the open and behind the scenes, benefiting from the crisis in India-Bangladesh relations,” said Constantino Xavier, a senior fellow at New Delhi think tank Centre for Social and Economic Progress.

“China has also been able to capitalise on declining U.S. engagement and Trump’s tariff war, positioning itself as a more credible and predictable economic partner.””

This is a summary – from the August 1968 monthly political report from the Indian High Commission in Colombo – of disagreements within the Sri Lankan left over the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968. I had to google “Keuneman revisionist clique” – apparently it was what the pro-Moscow, electorally-inclined faction of the Communist Party of Sri Lanka was called by its left critics. For a really deep dive, this 1974 book by an “anti-revisionist” Sri Lankan Marxist regularly uses the term, while also highlighting “the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party alone warned against placing faith in the fraud of bourgeois parliamentary democracy” and lamenting how “Khrushchov [sic] usurped power by means of a palace revolution and embarked on the treacherous course of modern revisionism, abandoning the revolutionary principles of Marxism-Leninism.”