Since the 26 August 2017 influx of the Rohingya community into Bangladesh, particularly in the Cox’s Bazar district, the country has been subjected to phenomenal challenges. While the initial issues were to arrange food and accommodation for a community who had no other option but to flee their homeland, gradually the nature of challenges diversified. This article identifies the relationship between the local community and the Rohingya community in the Cox’s Bazar district in the aftermath of the influx. While doing so, it unfolds different types of tension and difficulties that emerged in the area due to the Rohingya influx. It concludes that the influx has fundamentally affected and altered the lives of the locals, which must be taken into consideration by the Government of Bangladesh in its plans for this region.
The twentieth-century world order has been shaken and is being reinterpreted in different terms. The rise of China has been instrumental in such reshaping, which does not only affect the current global world order but also the region of South Asia, which has its own rising power—India. What are the choices of South Asian nations under the circumstances? This article seeks to ask. In this context, I choose to study Bangladesh. Bangladesh, the youngest South Asian nation, started its journey with a foreign policy assumption of its geographic limitation; that Bangladesh is locked by India on three sides with a small border with Myanmar and a southward opening towards the Bay of Bengal has made Bangladeshi experts call it an ‘India-locked’ nation. Despite such a pessimistic undertone, Bangladesh has emerged in the second decade of the twenty-first century as a country to be reckoned with. While I argue that for Bangladesh both India and China are of paramount significance, one must not forget that for both the countries, Bangladesh holds strategic significance not only due to its locational reality but also an array of other reasons. This article thus seeks to explore Bangladesh’s strengths and challenges in responding to India and China’s policies towards it and thus contribute to the understanding of the strategies of small powers towards big powers in a region. Certainly, in the light of a looming Asian century, this article also plans to chart the changing landscape of the larger international politics and concludes how an emergent South Asia and a small power like Bangladesh can play an instrumental role in it.
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