The High Ground India Does Not Occupy
John Mearsheimer’s “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics” is an unsentimental book.
The world, this American political scientist and international relations scholar writes, is too large for any state to become a global hegemony.
What states can pursue, and what they reliably do pursue, is regional dominance. India wants that role in South Asia.
Size, wealth and military strength make the ambition intelligible. However, they do not make the accompanying lectures convincing.
Since the fall of India’s most trusted ally on the region Sheikh Hasina, a familiar script took hold in New Delhi and in much of the Indian press.
Bangladesh, it was said, had slipped into the hands of fundamentalists. Hindus were being hunted daily.
The country was becoming a cautionary tale that India, as the region’s natural tutor in democracy and pluralism, was obliged to recite. The problem is not that India has interests next door.
The problem is that it has spent two years reciting a story the international record does not support, and in doing so has made itself look smaller, not larger.
Begin with terrorism, the charge most freely made. The Institute for Economics and Peace’s Global Terrorism Index 2026, built on 2025 data, places India 13th in the world with a score of 6.428.
Bangladesh is 42nd, with a score of 2.286. Attacks in Bangladesh fell away in the reporting year.
India improved too, attacks down 43 percent, yet it remains among the more heavily affected states on earth.
A viewer of Indian television would not guess this. The screen and the index have parted company.
Press freedom is no Indian triumph either. Reporters Without Borders’ 2026 World Press Freedom Index ranks Bangladesh 152nd and India 157th. Both are in the “very serious” category. Neither government should preen.
India dropped six places in a year of judicial pressure, concentrated ownership and newsrooms that have learned which way the wind blows. Globally Indian media has been recognized as Godi media.
And India became the epicenter of global misinformation and disinformation. Bangladesh’s rank is still poor.
Journalists have been detained; the culture of intimidation did not vanish with one election.
What the ranking does not permit is the claim that India is the region’s schoolmaster of free speech.
Under Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, the new government has said it will protect freedom of expression. Words of that kind are merely rhetoric’s until tested.
They are still more credible than a lecture from a country that now sits five places below its neighbor.
Religious freedom is the most emotionally charged file, and the one on which Indian coverage has been most relentless.
There is no single official index, so one has to read across Pew, USCIRF and Open Doors.
Pew’s latest comparable figures show both countries with high government restrictions and very high social hostilities. India’s social-hostilities score is worse.
However, let’s overlook the Pew report since it is based on 2023 data. Let’s explore some recent reports.
USCIRF’s 2026 report recommended that Washington designate India a Country of Particular Concern for the seventh continuous year, the gravest category it uses.
On 26 August 2026 the commission said conditions “continue to deteriorate as violence and incitement are frequently used to target religious minority communities,” and that the BJP has enforced policies aligned with the RSS’s Hindutva project.
Bangladesh was not recommended for CPC or the Special Watch List. USCIRF noted the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom and recorded communal attacks that are real, ugly and unfinished.
It did not place them in India’s class. Open Doors’ World Watch List 2026 ranks India 12th with a score of 84 and under the category “extreme.”
Bangladesh is 33rd with a score of 71. Life of the minority communities are far better in Bangladesh than India, the report shows.
None of this is a claim that Bangladesh is a finished liberal idyll. After 2024 there were attacks on minority homes, businesses and places of worship.
Local councils have documented them. Fear does not disappear because an index moves a few places.
The point is narrower and harder for Delhi to answer: the campaign to present Bangladesh as a collapsing theocracy, and India as its shocked moral guardian, does not survive contact with the same organizations India quotes when they are convenient.
The Mahabharata remains the right parable, and not only because it is read more widely in India than anywhere else.
Krishna can speak to Arjuna of dharma because he stands where instruction is possible. Shakuni, who loaded the dice, cannot.
Ambition for regional primacy is not a sin. It is the ordinary business of states. Population and GDP do not confer the right to define a neighbor’s soul.
A country that wishes to set the tone in South Asia would spend less time inventing a Bangladesh that the data refuse to recognize, and more time on the mobs, the laws and the compliant studios that independent monitors keep describing at home.
(The writer is a Political Analyst and Columnist)
