Fish of Discord

The newly established Interim Government of Bangladesh has implemented a prohibition on exporting hilsa fish to India, a diplomatic decision that contradicts Sheikh Hasina's ‘Hilsa Diplomacy’. This prompts us to reconsider the diplomatic significance of Bengali hilsa in relation to the environmental, political, and cultural context. The hilsa population has been declining since the early 1900s, primarily due to anthropogenic alterations to the environment, such as the construction of river dams. Instead of prioritising conservative methods, the Indian government's fisheries department has given greater importance to hilsa hatcheries above the preservation of the species' natural habitat again and again. The post-Partition hostility, adversarial water politics, and trade restrictions ultimately intensified the political tensions surrounding hilsa fish between West Bengal and Bangladesh. This article contends that Sheikh Hasina's 'Hilsa Diplomacy', which combines fishery and cultural diplomacy to exert 'soft power', was a temporary solution to these unaddressed environmental concerns, hostile political events, and a longing for pre-Partition nostalgia. However, this approach failed to provide a sustainable solution to the declining hilsa population because it primarily focused on export-import issues instead of fostering a collaborative transregional approach to establish mutually agreed-upon fishery policy guidelines

BENGAL · Diplomacy · Fish · Fish <Actinopterygii> · Government (linguistics · Habitat · Interim · Politics · Population · Bangladesh Politics, Society, and Development · Coral and Marine Ecosystems Studies · Fish Ecology and Management Studies