The historic 30-year Ganga Water Sharing Treaty is set to expire on 12 December 2026. For the last three decades, the Treaty has operated uninterrupted, despite occasional strains in the diplomatic relationship between the two countries.

Unlike the relatively favourable political context of 1996, in which the Treaty was signed–when the Awami League had just returned to power in Bangladesh, and India’s United Front was keen to strengthen ties with Dhaka, giving both sides strong political incentives to resolve the long-standing dispute—the political circumstances surrounding the upcoming negotiations are now fundamentally different, unfolding in a far more polarised climate.

This shift has been driven largely by the political upheaval in Bangladesh following the collapse of Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League (AL) in late 2024 and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s (BNP) landslide victory in the February 2026 general elections. The return of the BNP has brought a far more nationalist and confrontational tone to water diplomacy, reflected in the party’s rallying cry during the elections: “Not Dilli, Not Pindi, No Other Country, Bangladesh Comes First.”

The party’s February 2026 election manifesto backed this stance by laying out a foreign policy centred on the principle of “Bangladesh Before All.” It also pledged that the new government would take immediate and effective steps to secure Bangladesh’s fair share of water from major transboundary rivers, particularly the Teesta and the Ganga.This aligns with the party’s history of dodging bilateral cooperation with India, specifically by withholding critical river flow data.

To understand this shift in water diplomacy, one must look at the domestic narrative that brought the BNP back to power. For years, the BNP’s core political strategy was built on a relentless accusation: that Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League was systematically “mortgaging” Bangladesh’s sovereign interests to satisfy its upstream neighbour. While sovereignty has long been a central theme in Bangladeshi political rhetoric, with the two major parties repeatedly accusing each other of compromising or “selling out” the country’s interests to India, the historic, though not unprecedented, collapse of the Awami League completely upended this symmetrical tug-of-war. Because the widespread public sentiment turned so fiercely against Sheikh Hasina, her ousting effectively validated the BNP’s long-standing narrative in the eyes of the public.

This deep-seated domestic friction is rooted in a fundamental ideological battle over who truly protects the legacy of the nation. While the 1971 Liberation War was undeniably a fight for absolute state sovereignty led by the Awami League, the two factions interpret the preservation of that independence in radically different ways. AL’s Bengali nationalism viewed sovereignty through the lens of the 1971 war; freedom from Pakistani military hegemony fought in the name of a Bengali cultural identity that it had always shared with India. Hasina’s regime saw friendly ties with New Delhi as a pillar of regional stability, not a “compromise of independence.” On the other side, BNP’s Bangladeshi nationalism viewed sovereignty through the lens of territoriality, defined by those within the borders, not the cultural affinities that lay beyond them. They argued that by becoming too close, too dependent, and too accommodating to New Delhi, the Awami League was slowly surrendering the very independence won in 1971.

Given that Bangladesh shares 54 rivers with India, disputes like Farakka and Ganga water-sharing
become deeply entangled with broader anxieties over dependence, control, and national sovereignty.
This rhetoric is driven by a zero-sum battle for domestic power, where any international water compromise is instantly weaponised by political rivals as a betrayal of national interests. In such a political climate, a middle-ground treaty becomes entirely unpalatable at home.

Now that the BNP has transitioned from opposition to governance under Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, it must also govern within the political expectations created by its own rhetoric in order to maintain domestic legitimacy. As party leaders have repeatedly declared, Bangladesh is “not seeking mercy from India”—they are demanding their “rightful share.”

If talks hit a wall, the BNP is highly likely to pull out its ultimate weapon: internationalising the dispute. India has always insisted on strict bilateralism, preferring to negotiate one-on-one where it holds natural upstream leverage. But during electoral campaigning, Tarique Rahman warned that if India ignores their demands, Bangladesh will take its water rights claims to international organisations.

This is not empty rhetoric; it is a proven BNP strategy. In 1976, party founder Ziaur Rahman raised the Farakka dispute at both the UN General Assembly and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in Colombo. Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia also used the same playbook: in her address to the UN’s 50th Anniversary session in 1995, directly accusing India of committing human rights violations through its upstream operations at Farakka, claiming the diversion was pushing millions of Bangladeshis toward poverty and destruction.

Recent developments like the approval of the Padma Barrage project, marketed as an alternative to India’s Farakka “death trap”, and the accession to the UNECE Water Convention show that the BNP is actively trying to build a multi-layered defence to survive its own hardline stance. The UNECE Water Convention accession allows Bangladesh to ground its water claims in internationally recognised legal terms, giving its demands a diplomatic legitimacy that goes beyond what bilateral negotiations alone can offer. Neither move resolves the underlying dispute, but both expand the BNP’s room for manoeuvre without requiring it to publicly soften its position.

By spending years turning every water dispute into a test of national sovereignty, the BNP has raised the domestic price of compromise to a point where no workable deal can be sold as anything other than defeat. Sovereignty rhetoric, once a powerful opposition weapon, has become a governing constraint. That said, they are far from passive prisoners—with enough room to act and shape narratives. The infrastructural investments and legal positioning it has pursued since returning to power represent an attempt to build genuine leverage without publicly softening its stance. The Treaty deadline will not just test Bangladesh’s negotiating position, it will also test whether the BNP can distinguish between the promises that win elections and the terms that keep rivers flowing.