[🇧🇩] Indo-Bangla Relation: India's Regional Ambition, Geopolitical Reality, and Strategic Options For Bangladesh

[Saif]

'India needs a clear security assurance from Bangladesh'

If Dhaka assures Delhi that it will address India's security concerns, this could serve as the foundation for a strong relationship.

www.thedailystar.net

'India needs a clear security assurance from Bangladesh'

The India-Bangladesh relationship experienced some strains in the aftermath of the Awami League's fall and Sheikh Hasina being sheltered in India. Prof Sreeradha Datta, a South Asian expert who teaches international affairs at the Hariyana-based OP Jindal Global University, shared her views on the future of Bangladesh-India relations with The Daily Star's Diplomatic Correspondent Porimol Palma.


How is India looking at Bangladesh after Bangladesh's recent political change?

Historically, we have supported the Awami League (AL). We perceive that there is a possibility of an Islamist party takeover in Bangladesh if the AL is not in power. However, that is not the current reality in Bangladesh. It is true that India has worked extensively with the AL, which has increased bilateral trade volume and has also benefited Bangladesh. However, India does not have any policy that would prevent it from collaborating with any other government in Bangladesh.
The relationship with a sovereign state must be based on equity. This principle has been repeatedly emphasised by the current leadership in Bangladesh. Nevertheless, claims that India was responsible for the recent floods in Bangladesh's southeastern region are unfounded. Additionally, some senior Indian leaders have made remarks that were unnecessary and did not benefit either side.

What should be the immediate steps to improve the relations?

I believe Dhaka and New Delhi are already in contact. I propose that both countries hold formal dialogue at the earliest opportunity to resolve any outstanding issues. India needs a clear assurance that there will be no anti-Indian activities originating from within Bangladesh. The core problem is that India believes only the AL can address its security concerns, which I consider a misguided perception. If Dhaka assures Delhi that it will address India's security concerns, this could serve as the foundation for a strong relationship. At the same time, the interim government can also communicate to India which issues it should urgently address regarding Bangladesh.

The interim government has not said anything that can create such a perceived threat for India. So, why is India worried about it?

There have been attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh recently, and we understand the reasons behind these incidents. However, many other events are occurring that are not receiving adequate attention. What we are observing is that the BNP seems to be becoming quite vocal. Although the BNP is separate from the interim government, it appears that the party is gaining strength. The interim government should have the authority to manage any aggressive rhetoric, as it conveys the wrong message. Some experts argue that religious fundamentalism is not a big factor in Bangladesh, and I share this belief.

Dhaka said the Indian media has exaggerated the events of attacks on minorities. What is Delhi's understanding?

I agree that there is a lot of disinformation. However, a perception has developed in India that Hindus in Bangladesh are coming under attack because Hasina is not in power. While we know that such incidents are not as prevalent as portrayed in the media, the general public has developed a negative perception. On August 15, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke about the persecution of Hindu minorities in Bangladesh, but he failed to mention that others were also killed. He could have addressed that point. It's important to understand that this matter is related to our domestic politics. What I'm saying is that a negative perception is being cultivated. Therefore, the leaderships should meet and issue a joint statement affirming that the relationship will be as it should be between two sovereign states.

Border killings and water issues have been thorns in the relationship. How do you see it?

Border killings can be stopped if the two countries work together. Even if the number of killings is low, they should not occur between two friendly nations. In 2010, we stated that we would establish an agreement for the basin-wide management of our transboundary rivers and address the problems of other rivers, if not the Teesta. Why has this not been implemented? India must resolve the water issue. Just as security is important for India, water is equally important for Bangladesh. Even if there had been an interim arrangement for water sharing, the typical anti-India sentiment would not be as strong as it is now. Given that the water-sharing issue has always been an emotional one for Bangladesh, India must do the right thing.

There is a perception that India benefited more from the agreements or MoUs signed during the AL regime. There is a discussion those may be reviewed.

It may not look good to India, but Bangladesh can certainly review those agreements. I know that many MoUs may not have been discussed in parliament. I believe that the connectivity projects implemented thus far benefit both countries. However, if Bangladesh wants to review any deal, such as the one concerning transit, it is entitled to do so. India has not acted in a non-transparent manner. In fact, I think it would be beneficial for the MoUs to be revisited. Doing so will clarify whether the MoUs are useful or not.

Work of some projects under the Line of Credit remains suspended as Indian contractors are yet to restart working. Why?

I believe it is due to a lingering sense of fear. While we are not certain yet, the information we are receiving is somewhat unnerving. If the Bangladeshi authorities assure India that they have no security concerns, then things will proceed.

The interim government said it may take steps to bring back Sheikh Hasina for legal reasons. Will it create any friction in the relationship?

I believe there are various aspects to consider—both from legal and technical perspectives. Bangladesh needs to take these into account. Sheikh Hasina will not be extradited simply because Bangladesh wishes it. We cannot disregard India's relationship with the AL or Sheikh Hasina. Nevertheless, we would like to work with Bangladesh.

Our foreign adviser said India's relationship needs to be with the people of Bangladesh, not only with AL. What are your thoughts?

I agree 100 percent. India should work with whichever government is in office in Bangladesh. The problem arose with the government that was in power from 2001 to 2006, which soured relations. Later, we found that the AL was friendly towards India. In a multiparty system, any government can be elected to office. Why should India not work with it?

Sadly, it was the BNP that fostered anti-India sentiment in Bangladesh from 2001 to 2006. During the BNP-Jamaat regime, a large quantity of arms and ammunition, reportedly meant for the Indian separatist organisation ULFA (United Liberation Front of Assam), was seized in Chattogram in 2004.

The interim government wants to revitalise SAARC. What's your view?

SAARC is important for cooperation in South Asia, but Pakistan needs to change its behaviour. We have always said we are willing to work with Pakistan if it does so, but it hasn't.​

 

[Saif]

An astute strategic prism

THE sweeping protests in July-August that ousted Bangladesh’s prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s authoritarian rule, won the country an innovative brand — the ‘new’ Bangladesh minus the earlier steamroller governance. In the wake of that upheaval, which still rings throughout the country, two...

www.newagebd.net

An astute strategic prism
M Rashiduzzaman 07 October, 2024, 00:00

A student carrying the national flag takes part in a protest march as protesters on August 3 demanded justice for victims arrested and killed in the student-mass uprising. | Agence France-Presse/Munir uz Zaman

THE sweeping protests in July-August that ousted Bangladesh’s prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s authoritarian rule, won the country an innovative brand — the ‘new’ Bangladesh minus the earlier steamroller governance. In the wake of that upheaval, which still rings throughout the country, two hot-button disputes re-emerged from its not-so-hidden past: While Hasina’s sudden tumble ripples like a political earthquake in India, will New Delhi be a threat to Bangladesh’s future stability and sovereignty? Should Bangladesh reset its ideological and identity sensitivities as a bulwark against a future despotic menace? Both are existential questions. But Dr Muhammad Yunus is now busy navigating between the populist cry for a retribution against the perpetrators of the banished tyranny, responsible for wanton killings and repression, and the simmering demands for an early restoration of an elected democracy.

The post-Hasina leaders need an astute strategy to deal with the emerging Bangladesh-India encounters and the ideological contents for the country’s national integrity and sovereignty. Neither the strategic imperatives nor the ideological probes will take care of themselves — not in ‘new’ Bangladesh where Hasina’s earlier autocratic rule is more than a painful remembrance. Her swift collapse has severely jolted India, the persistent benefactor of the hegemonic leadership that rigged three consecutive elections boycotted by opposition parties. And the maximum number of Bangladeshis are more confident now, which is likely to pop up in their domestic and diplomatic aspirations.

Geopolitics, however, does not give Bangladesh easy choices in dealing with its big and powerful neighbour that surrounds the country from three sides. But India’s enormous size and its military as well as economic prowess have not yet offered an unrestrained diplomatic advantage over Bangladesh, still blistering against its ousted autocrat, now sheltered in India. New Delhi’s old political ties to the Awami League and its remnants scattered across the band evoke deep suspicion in Bangladesh. Not long ago, the Guardian, the British newspaper, disparaged India’s strategy of putting all its diplomatic eggs in the basket of one leader (Hasina) and one party (Awami League) as a ‘myopic’ venture. India hopes for Bangladesh’s ‘eternal obligation’ to yield to New Delhi’s wishes because of its overt and covert help towards the 1971 struggle for independence. Narendra Modi’s brazen anti-Muslim policy is humiliating to the Bangladeshi Muslims although the Hasina government did not raise an eyebrow against India’s Hindutva zealots. It will be a thorn in the future Indo-Bangladesh relations. New Delhi tries to handcuff Dhaka’s domestic and foreign policies on grounds of the (Bengali) Hindu minority’s alleged insecurity in Bangladesh while the Indian media continue to smear Bangladesh’s current interim regime for its apparent capitulation to the Islamic militants and their leaders. Badruddin Umar, a senior socio-political commentator in Dhaka, recently pointed out that the Indian intellectual community has been mostly silent about the unprecedented protests that recently dislodged a dictatorship after an enormous loss of lives and destruction of infrastructures.

Hasina’s rapid plunge on August 5 dramatised India’s loss in Bangladesh, but India’s popularity faltered with the bulk of Bangladeshis, not long after the 1971 independence. As New Delhi became the enabler of the Hasina-led single party (the Awami League) juggernaut, India’s unpopularity spiralled in Bangladesh throughout the last decade. India will be a threat to Bangladesh’s internal politics and stability if New Delhi tries for a ‘regime change’ by rehabilitating and regrouping Hasina and her Awami League. She has settled in a virtual exile in India, but scores of AL leaders have also fled to India and the whispering reminiscences of the 1971 Indian military intervention stoke up anxiety in Bangladesh. The Bangladeshis itch for Hasina’s extradition to face a domestic or international trial for the hundreds of students and ordinary citizens deliberately killed or wounded by the politicised police, security forces and the AL-hired goons during the tumultuous civil unrest in July-August. China, New Delhi’s archrival, may now extract more geopolitical advantages from the post-Hasina regime; it will not be welcome to India and the western rivals vying for influence in the region.

The storm of protests that evicted the Hasina government changed the country’s political calculus. The secular Bengali nationalism that gained an unprecedented ascendancy against the earlier Pakistani Muslim nationalism exhausted its political traction since 1971. Secularism and Bengali nationalism provided an ideological cover for Hasina’s long tyrannical rule. She also postured her regime as a thundering protection against Islamic orthodoxy in Bangladesh. Those appeals, exclusionary in their substances, merit a reset although it is not yet certain if Yunus’s cabinet is ready to step into emotionally charged identity debates.

The western-style secularism has failed to take roots in most Muslim countries, including Bangladesh, mainly because the social, political and religious interactions in the Muslim-majority countries are not identical with those of the European and North American nation-states. The stringent secular rhetoric that indeed equated conventional Islamic expressions with hardline fundamentalism hastened the country’s political polarisation. The Muslim political inheritances of the colonial Bengal, the 1947 partition and former East Pakistan connect with what is independent Bangladesh today. Not surprisingly, the Bangladesh government exiled in India in 1971 did not have enough time to deliberate on the details of the expected country’s ideological and identity configuration. Even though their political and historical contexts did not match, Bengali nationalism sauteed in Rabindranath Tagore’s patriotic song as the national anthem became a convenient choice blessed by India at those critical hours. Later in Bangladesh, the ‘pro-liberation forces’ and their ‘cult of patriotic fervour’, a vocabulary borrowed from (the late) Ashok Mitra, a West Bengali leftist intellectual, denied the Muslim inspiration’s space in the country’s chronicle. But those ideological postures effectively helped the Awami League to consolidate its authority multiple times — by Hasina in recent years, but also by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman at the dawn of Bangladesh.

Muslim distinctiveness, not a religious extremism, is a security asset for Bangladesh’s sovereignty, independence and integrity. Once AK Fazlul Haque, in the 1940s, called upon the people not to apologise for being Muslims. The liberal perception of the Islamic groups as the ‘enemy’ of Bangladesh sovereignty is a dangerous appellation that undermines national harmony. The Islamic parties stand for the curse of the liberal intellectuals and politicians — the stance goes beyond the right-wing parties’ controversial resistance to the 1971 breakup of Pakistan.

In my Asian Survey, November 1994, article, ‘The Liberals and the Religious Right in Bangladesh’, I observed that the right-left controversy eventually destabilised peace and democracy in Bangladesh while, globally, that time-worn dichotomy gradually yielded to a more pragmatic and multilateral view of life. The feisty Muslim consciousness, however, survived through their populist roots. Partly, the liberal-secular clash emanates from the liberal establishment’s ‘blind spot’ about religion. Anyone who appeals to Islamic values endures the relegation as a maulabadi (fundamentalist/fanatic), enemy of Bangladesh independence scratching for zealotry. The Awami League and its liberal allies abused this epithet as a political capital against the so-called religious right. But the country’s strategic future and its democratic development call for participation of all groups including the Islamists in the political process.

Majority of the liberal leaders, their outfits and the cohorts did not raise a hell against the New Delhi-supported authoritarian regime for the last 15 years. Hasina’s ultimate downfall came from the swelling anti-job quota roil that transformed into a fearsome coalition against her long dictatorship. The widening political upheaval involved diverse elements — the opposition-blessed protesters, right-wing Islamic campaigners and the ordinary citizens who came out of their hiding plus a handful of human rights non-governmental organisations. The courageous student coordinators from both sides of the ideological scale blasted through death and destruction conducted by the police and the armed partisans. But it was an effective example of a strategic partnership between the right and the left to exorcise a merciless autocracy that consistently denied democracy, fair election and a peaceful political transition in Bangladesh.

M Rashiduzzaman is a retired academic based in the United States. He occasionally, writes on Bangladesh politics, history and Muslim identity.​

 

[Saif]

In past, ISI was operating from the soil of BD. R&AW carried out operations to neutralize it. BD must assure that such activities do not happen from BD soil. If it happens, India shall be forced to carry out operations in BD and violate its Sovereignty which will spoil India-BD Relations.

We never allowed RAW to carry out operations inside BD soil. Care to explain why has India been arming and training Shanti Bahini (UPDF/JSS) to carryout subversive activities within Bangladesh? Shanti Bahini has bases in Tripura and Mizoram.

 

[Krishna with Flute]

We never allowed RAW to carry out operations inside BD soil. Care to explain why has India been arming and training Shanti Bahini (UPDF/JSS) to carryout subversive activities within Bangladesh? Shanti Bahini has bases in Tripura and Mizoram.

Shani wahini was a Bengali freedom fighter organization of Oppressed Bengali people. We helped and armed them to fight against the brutal killing and rapes of Pakistani army and help them to liberate BD from bloody claws if Pakistani army. It is documented story and nobody denies that.

Second point,

No country allows (except some rogue states) foreign intelligence agency to operate from their soil willingly. It is done covertly.

 

[Saif]

Shani wahini was a Bengali freedom fighter organization of Oppressed Bengali people. We helped and armed them to fight against the brutal killing and rapes of Pakistani army and help them to liberate BD from bloody claws if Pakistani army. It is documented story and nobody denies that.

Second point,

No country allows (except some rogue states) foreign intelligence agency to operate from their soil willingly. It is done covertly.

My friend, you seriously need some quality education on the history of Bangladesh. Shanti Bahini was a terrorist organization formed by Manobendra Larma of Chakma tribe. This terrorist outfit was formed to fight against the government of Bangladesh to create Jumma Land---an independent state for the tribal people in Chittagong Hill Tracts. Shanti Bahini was formed in the 70s.

 

[Krishna with Flute]

My friend, you seriously need some quality education on the history of Bangladesh. Shanti Bahini was a terrorist organization formed by Manobendra Larma of Chakma tribe. This terrorist outfit was formed to fight against the government of Bangladesh to create Jumma Land---an independent state for the tribal people in Chittagong Hill Tracts. Shanti Bahini was formed in the 70s.

Ok. My Mistake, I misunderstood it with Mukti Bahini.

 

[Saif]

বাংলাদেশীরা ভারতে না যাওয়ায় বিলিয়ন ডলার ক্ষতি হয়েছে (ভারতীয় পর্যটন মন্ত্রণালয়)​

 

[Saif]

I found the video interesting so posting it here. Enjoy!!!

Trump is set to reignite India's powerful presence in Bangladesh, say Indian experts!