The issue, in the post-5 August conditions in Bangladesh, relates to how those currently holding power in Dhaka approach the country’s ties with Pakistan.
Muhammad Yunus, the leader of the interim Bangladesh government, has had what appears to have been friendly meeting with Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on a couple of occasions in recent months.
The impression is one of Dhaka moving closer to Islamabad even as its relations with India happen to be getting increasingly frayed.
Both Yunus and Sharif have voiced sentiments about a revival of the stalled SAARC process.
However, the crucial question here is one of whether SAARC can be brought back to life without India, a rising global power which can be ignored at risk to stability in the South Asian region.
Add to that the reaction that might come from Delhi over any move to reinvent the regional body without taking Delhi into consideration.
For Bangladesh, especially for those who recall the atrocities committed by the Pakistan army in 1971, memories of the arduous struggle of the Bengali guerrillas, brought together in the Mukti Bahini by the Mujibnagar government, remain as potent as they were fifty-three years ago.
In other words, Bangladesh’s people and its nationalist governments, particularly those led by the Awami League, have consistently been wary about developing ties with Islamabad owing to issues the Pakistani authorities have never been serious about addressing.
In recent days, the Yunus regime has made it possible for Pakistanis to be given easy access to travel to Bangladesh.
At the other end, the Pakistani diplomatic mission in Dhaka has made it known that Bangladeshis will be privy to easily obtained visas for Pakistan.
Meanwhile, trade between the two countries looks set to have a fresh beginning, with ships conveying goods from Chittagong to Karachi and vice versa.
While these are positive steps, there are the other and certainly more critical areas where questions abound about the future of Dhaka-Islamabad relations.
One will not forget that since the end of Bangladesh’s War of Liberation, successive governments in Pakistan have studiously stayed away from offering a public apology to Bangladesh over the genocide of Bengalis committed by Pakistan’s occupation army in 1971.
It is a fact that a number of Pakistani leaders, such as Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, General Ziaul Haq, Benazir Bhutto and General Pervez Musharraf, have visited Bangladesh on separate occasions, but none of them have taken any initiative to express contrition about the tragedy of 1971.
The currently imprisoned Imran Khan often, while in opposition, drew attention to the excesses committed by his country’s army in Bangladesh, but in power he said not a word about it.
Obviously, fears of a military backlash kept him from revealing his state of mind.
For their part, Bangladesh’s military rulers, General Ziaur Rahman and General Hussein Muhammad Ershad, visited Pakistan in their halcyon days. So did Begum Khaleda Zia.
Sheikh Hasina remains the Bangladesh leader who has not been to Pakistan either in or out of power.
In recent months, the Pakistan authorities did not make matters any easier.
Soon after the fall of the Sheikh Hasina government, Shehbaz Sharif, at a programme he shared with Pakistan’s army chief, General Asim Munir, sarcastically drew the attention of his audience to the violent change in Dhaka, making a pointed note that the man who had ‘broken up’ Pakistan, meaning Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was getting his comeuppance from the young people of Bangladesh.
This incident recalls the resolution adopted more than a decade ago by the Pakistan national assembly — Shehbaz Sharif’s brother Nawaz Sharif was in power at the time — condemning the trial and execution of some Bengali collaborators of the 1971 Pakistan army.
Those collaborators were hailed by the assembly as patriotic Pakistanis who had defended their country during the war.
The overtures of the Yunus regime and the Sharif administration to each other on an improvement of ties defy the realities which have underscored Bangladesh-Pakistan ties since 1971.
The issue of an apology not coming from Islamabad apart, there also remains the matter of a settlement of problems related to a sharing of assets and liabilities going back to pre-1971 Pakistan.
Prior to the war, Pakistan’s major foreign exchange earners were jute and tea, both produced in what at the time was East Pakistan.
While the government of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, in its brief tenure of three and a half years, was insistent that the issue be resolved, the post-August 1975 regimes in Bangladesh clearly shelved the idea. Silence on the issue has persisted.
Under the 1974 tripartite agreement between India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, the government of Bangladesh permitted the 195 senior Pakistani military officers it had planned to place on trial on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Bangladesh to go free on assurances by the Bhutto government that they would be tried by the Islamabad authorities.
A flaw in Bangladesh’s move to let the officers go free was its failure to have Pakistan’s verbal promise officially noted in the tripartite deal.
The consequences were predictable: none of the officers were tried in Pakistan and instead they resumed normal life, with some of them appointed to various high-level positions following their return from prisoner-of-war camps in India.
Pakistan of course accorded diplomatic recognition to Bangladesh in February 1974, a decision which enabled Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to travel to Lahore for a summit of Islamic nations called by the Pakistan government.
In June that year, Prime Minister Bhutto visited Bangladesh at the head of an eighty-member delegation for talks with Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman on outstanding issues between the two countries.
In the event, the Pakistanis were not serious, given that they were unwilling to discuss such critical issues as a division of assets and liabilities dating back to before the 1971 war.
The meeting ended in deep disappointment, with no joint statement or communique issued at the end of Bhutto’s visit.
In what was clearly a mood of undisguised happiness, Bhutto was quick to recognise the regime led by Khondokar Moshtaq Ahmed within hours of the assassination of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman on 15 August 1975.
He noted, in bizarre manner, that Pakistan recognised the ‘Islamic Republic of’ Bangladesh when no such move had been made, though there was a patent Islamic undertone to the violent coup in Bangladesh.
The Pakistani leader said he was despatching a consignment of rice and cloth to the people of Bangladesh as a friendly gesture. These moves were regarded with justified suspicion in Bangladesh.
Pakistani involvement in Bangladesh, with risk to the Dhaka’s security, was perceptible in the period between 2001 and 2006, when ISI operatives operated in Dhaka.
At the same time, such Indian insurgent outfits as ULFA found refuge in Bangladesh. In 2004, ten trucks carrying arms and ammunition were intercepted in Bangladesh.
The finger pointed to collusion between Dhaka and Islamabad. Circumstances changed, of course, once the Awami League rode back to power through the general election of December 2008.
But now, with parties like the Jamaat-e-Islami quietly placing its adherents in important positions and the Hizbut Tahrir, one of whose members is a radical student advisor in the government, openly advocating politics removed from secular ideals, it will be unwise to imagine that Pakistan has not been playing a role in an exacerbation of the crisis.
There have been incidents, in the Awami League period, of Dhaka expelling Pakistani diplomats who were alleged to have engaged in activities not commensurate with a promotion of proper bilateral relations.
The Pakistanis have for their part retaliated by ordering Bangladesh diplomats to leave Islamabad.
Any improvement in relations between the two countries, both of which have periodically suffered from a negation of democratic norms, will remain dependent on measures Islamabad is expected to take regarding an acknowledgement of the genocide committed by its soldiers in 1971.
Bangladesh’s people, its freedom fighters, its intellectuals, its civil society and its younger generation remain convinced that it is for Pakistan to make amends before it can expect a cooperative relationship with Bangladesh.
Yunus’ administration may demonstrate friendship for Shehbaz Sharif’s government. But it is history Bangladesh does not forget; it is history Pakistan cannot push under the rug.
