In this month of celebrations of Bangladesh’s emergence through a tortuous War of Liberation in 1971, we in our country recall and so do people in India recall the alliance, political as well as military, which forced the surrender of Pakistan’s occupation army in Dhaka.
Millions of Bengalis died in the genocide let loose by the state of Pakistan; tens of thousands of guerrillas of the Mukti Bahini waged a hard struggle in the hamlets and marshes of East Bengal to free their nation from the Pakistani stranglehold; it was a struggle in which thousands of Indian soldiers sacrificed themselves to help Bangladesh emerge into liberty.
Fifty-three years on, it is an entire gamut of relations between India and Bangladesh, which calls for a dispassionate assessment. In the aftermath of the end of Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League government in Bangladesh in early August this year, a noticeable and regrettable slide has tended to come into the relations between Dhaka and Delhi.
The situation has fundamentally been a consequence of the atrocities perpetrated on the minority Hindu community in Bangladesh, a condition which drew the ire of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his message of felicitations to Muhammad Yunus upon the latter’s taking charge of Bangladesh’s government as Chief Advisor.
PM Modi was worried about the plight of Bangladesh’s Hindus, and rightly too. Yunus’ response was to reassure him and Indians across the board that corrective measures were in place to ensure the safety and security of Hindu lives.
Unfortunately, the situation has worsened with the arrest and denial of bail to Chinmoy Das Prabhu, a spokesperson of the Hindu community accused of sedition in Bangladesh. Predictably, Das’ predicament led to repercussions in West Bengal, where Suvendu Adhikari, the BJP leader in the state, angrily sought to warn Bangladesh that no Indian product — and Dhaka is dependent on imports of Indian goods to a considerable extent — would be permitted to enter Bangladesh unless Das was released. Das remains in prison.
Adding to the crisis is the fact that no lawyer has had the courage, given the level of intimidation resorted to by lawyers with a clear anti-India bias working in them, to defend him in court. In the course of Das’ first appearance in court, a Muslim lawyer was killed in the resultant chaos, a tragedy the nature of which has not yet been spelt out.
In brief, the state of India-Bangladesh ties is at this point under a cloud, if not exactly in a state of the parlous. Lawmakers in India have raised the issue in the Lok Sabha a good number of times. Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar has spoken about it. India’s MEA has more than once drawn attention to the plight of Bangladesh’s Hindus.
Conditions have been exacerbated by the rise in anti-Indian feelings among Bangladeshis, a circumstance brought about by fundamentalist fringe elements in Dhaka.
Images of students of an educational institution stepping over the Indian flag as they enter the classroom have justifiably inflamed passions in India. At the other end, reports of attacks on Bangladesh’s diplomatic missions in such places as Tripura have caused uproar in Dhaka and other cities in Bangladesh.
With services suspended at the missions and with the Indian high commission suspending the issuance of visas to Bangladeshis in Dhaka, the situation has slipped from bad to worse.
And yet, in all this swift slide in Dhaka-Delhi relations, it is of the utmost importance that the two countries take the initiative in restoring a semblance of normalcy in their ties. To be sure, one does not expect, at this point, the warmth, which underscored the links between the BJP government in Delhi and the Awami League government in Dhaka.
But a good working relationship, indeed a proper one in line with diplomatic norms, is called for. Such a restoration is certainly not helped by fringe elements in Dhaka warning of a takeover of Kolkata in four days. These acts are as laughable as was the boast by Pakistanis during the 1965 and 1971 wars that the Pakistan army would capture Delhi and have the Pakistani flag fly atop the Red Fort.
Equally important is the need for statements of the kind recently made by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee — she asked Prime Minister Modi to call for a UN peace-keeping force in Bangladesh — to be avoided. In Dhaka, members of Yunus’ government ought not to speak out of turn and make statements that can raise the temperature in these fraught conditions.
Add to all that the frenzy with which the media in both India and Bangladesh have been handling the situation. Tempers have flared in a way unprecedented in the history of India-Bangladesh ties.
The bare truth is that Bangladesh and India have a historical requirement to maintain close ties in such crucial areas as trade relations, border security, neutralising threats of terrorism and a common approach in the international arena on issues pertaining to the South Asian region.
The links between the two countries are too deep, and their common heritage too profound to be ignored. It was this truth that was manifested through the visit to Dhaka of Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri.
Passions have cooled somewhat since the visit, but more needs to be done in the matter of handling the mistrust generated in Delhi and Dhaka in the months since the fall of Sheikh Hasina’s government.
Where Bangladesh is concerned, the need for the Yunus administration is to ensure that a roadmap to elections is quickly outlined, for the good reason that foreign governments, Indian as well as others, tend to deal with elected governments and on a definitely serious and more comfortable basis.
On such issues as the state of the Hindu and other minority communities, human rights and political tolerance and accountability in the country, Dhaka has a huge need to convince the global community that the ongoing anarchy in the country will be dealt with through the toughness demanded by the situation.
In this month of Bangladesh’s wartime victory in 1971, it is imperative for Dhaka-Delhi ties to be reasserted and reinforced in light of history. One sure path to that move will be through keeping open channels of communication, the first step toward which has been taken by the Indian Foreign Secretary on behalf of his government.
Bangladesh will be expected to reciprocate. India and Bangladesh need each other, despite every provocation to drive a wedge in their ties.
In this month, it would be for Indians and Bangladeshis to recall the political, moral and military support provided by the Indian government led by Indira Gandhi to the cause of Bengali freedom.
It would also be right for them to remember the warmth in ties that Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Mrs Gandhi set in motion through their spontaneity of cooperation in the early 1970. History, heritage and diplomacy bind the two nations together.
(Syed Badrul Ahsan, a Bangladeshi political and diplomatic analyst, is the author of biographies of Bangladesh’s founder Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the country’s wartime prime minister Tajuddin Ahmad).
