Sunanda K. Datta-Ray | B’desh, India must bury the past, make a new beginning
It would be great if reports of Bangladesh’s readiness to buy rice from India indicate a return to normal cooperation in the new year. That the news was bracketed in the Bangladesh Chronicle with the decision to purchase liquefied natural gas from the United States was an equally welcome sign of Dhaka’s return to pragmatism.
No relationship can be assessed in today’s interlinked but multi-polar world without taking into account international security concerns. The fatal shooting in Canada of a Sikh activist, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, may have no bearing on India-Bangladesh relations, but can that be said also of the mysterious Nikhil Gupta whom the Czech Republic extradited to the United States, where he is held at the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn, having pleaded not guilty to hiring a hitman to murder another Khalistan activist, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, an American citizen? In the background looms the reported refusal by Sheikh Hasina, the Bangladesh Prime Minister who quit on August 5 in the face of mounting protests and fled to India, to allow a base on the tiny coral lump of St Martin’s Island in the Bay of Bengal 9 km south of Cox’s Bazar. Is that when her troubles really began?
History, geography, language and culture link India and Bangladesh too closely for them to be anything but close friends and firm partners in the great adventure of leading 1.6 billion South Asians with a shared past to the prosperity of a common future which the octogenarian chief adviser of Bangladesh’s interim government, Muhammad Yunus, probably appreciates.
When someone called India a close neighbour, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and rural banker deftly pointed out that India was Bangladesh’s “only” neighbour.
No other country is contiguous with Bangladesh. Myanmar, Bhutan and all-powerful and ever watchful China are nearby but India alone is adjoining. Their 4,096-km land border is the fifth longest in the world. Bangladesh’s only other next-door neighbour is the Bay of Bengal.
Mr Yunus may also have a point when he says that the recent attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh are “more political than communal”. His point is that Hindus, who now comprise only eight per cent of Bangladesh’s population (it was 10 per cent in the 2011 census, but many have sought safety in India since then) are popularly identified with the Awami League and Sheikh Hasina. If they are attacked, it’s not because they are Hindus but because they are seen as followers of a detested politician and champions of a hated political organisation. So completely has the wheel turned that without mentioning anything about the Awami League’s historic role as Bangladesh’s party of independence, he accuses it of trampling on human rights, murdering thousands of protesters, imposing a fascist dictatorship on a long-suffering populace, and looting the exchequer of billions of dollars.
However, the only specific corruption case disclosed is over Bangladesh’s $12.65 billion deal with Russia for the Rooppur Nuclear Power plant which also involved Sheikh Hasina’s niece, Tulip Siddiq. She is a British subject, elected member of Britain’s House of Commons for fashionable Hampstead and was a junior member of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government until she was forced to quit earlier this week. Tulip, Sheikh Hasina herself and the former Prime Minister’s son, Sajeeb Wajed Joy, who also lives in Britain, are accused of embezzling more than $5 billion.
This narrative denies the Awami Party and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman any role in gaining East Pakistan’s independence and minimises the part that India played in the 1971 liberation war. Rumours about renaming Bangladesh the “Republic of East Pakistan” may suggest that some Bangladeshis are having second thoughts about whether independence was a good thing.
In a recent article, Abdullah al-Ahsan, a Chicago-based academic with formidable credentials, claimed that “fascism was rooted in the DNA of the Awami League”. Prof. al-Ahsan admits that he “used to consider the Bangladesh Nationalist Party a rational political institution because of its founder and former President Gen. Zia-ur Rahman’s role in Bangladesh’s history.” Gen. Zia had actually broadcast the independence proclamation, but purportedly on Mujib’s orders. Prof. al-Ahsan has now expanded his thesis to argue that he “found the same virus in the BNP” as in the Awami League. Ironically, the BNP secretary-general, Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, appears to agree. “The biggest problem in Bangladesh is that we speak about democracy but do not practice it,” he wrote recently.
These shifts cannot be dismissed as matters of internal Bangladeshi interest. More than any other two South Asian countries, India and Bangladesh interact at many levels. Security is not the least of them. Even a casual look at the region’s map explains the strategic importance of the Siliguri Corridor, also called the Chicken’s Neck, a stretch of land around West Bengal’s Siliguri town, which is about 20-22 km wide at its narrowest point, and is the only link between the seven states of north-east India and the rest of the country. With Chinese Tibet looming above, no Indian planner can overlook the possibility of a Chinese military advance of less than 130 km, cutting off the virtually defenceless kingdom of Bhutan, parts of West Bengal and all of Northeast India, an area containing almost 50 million people.
It’s in the context of this danger that Mr Yunus’s stated hope of reviving the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation acquires additional significance. The Saarc was set up largely because of Zia-ur Rahman’s belief that the region needs a counterweight to India. But counterweights cut both ways, as Sri Lanka’s astute President, the late J.R. Jayewardene, made abundantly clear at the inaugural in Dhaka on December 8, 1985. “India”, he said then, “the largest in every way, larger than all the rest of us combined, can by deeds and words create the confidence among us so necessary to make a beginning”.
If India must respect the region’s collective weight, India can also expect the other seven Saarc members (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) to exercise dignified restraint in handling contentious geopolitical issues. History cannot be rewritten to erase the past and promote offensive innovations that recall the anguish of millions of innocent people. Nor should the vindictive actions against yesterday’s leaders keep alive memories of hatred and enmity. The past needs a decent burial.
Even without the St. Martin’s dispute, which may or may not lie at the bottom of the crisis, the United States was reported in September 2022 to have as many as 171,736 active-duty American troops stationed across 178 countries.
Does a world with a single superpower need more?
