I edited a book titled “Bangladesh: Treading the Taliban Trail” in 2006. My first Boss in the National Security Council Secretariat, Government of India, and mentor, Satish Chandra, inaugurated the book.
A very select group of people attended the opening ceremony. It included Maj Gen Dipankar Banerjee, Jyotirmoy Chakraborty, M.P. Bezbaruah, Saraswati Prasad, Anil Sachan and the present National Security Adviser, Ajit Kumar Doval.
The book is a collection of profound chapters contributed by an array of distinguished personalities from diverse fields.
Among the authors is Mathew Aaron Rosenstein, my dissertation adviser at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, and Bertil Lintner, a renowned observer of South and Southeast Asia.
It also features Mahendra Ved, a senior journalist from The Times of India (at the time), and H.K. Deka, a former Director General of Police, Assam.
Salam Azad, a celebrated Bangladeshi author who fled Islamist persecution, and Lt. Gen. B.K. Bopanna, a 1971 war veteran and former General Officer Commanding of the 21 Mountain Division, also lend their insights to the volume.
Contributions include those from D.N. Bezboruah, then Editor of The Sentinel, and Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury, a prominent Think Tank leader.
The book further features B.B. Nandy, IPS, a former top Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW) official, as well as Director General of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police and National Security Adviser to Mauritius.
Renowned journalist and bestselling author Subir Bhaumik, Bangladesh liberation war veteran Haroon Habib, and former Indian High Commissioner to Bangladesh, I.P. Khosla, also share their perspectives, enriching this compendium with their expertise and experiences.
In 2006, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party-led four-party alliance, which included the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami and the Islami Oikyo Jote as constituents, was in the seat of power.
In my Introduction to the book, I wrote, “Bangladesh’s emergence as a haven for Islamist militants and consequent subterfuges has led to not only an about-face of its founding principles but also to a neighbourly intransigence that has not been encountered earlier.”
I highlighted how Bangladesh appears to engage India’s largest and closest neighbour in a manner that frames the latter as its anti-thesis.
Statements, pronouncements, and actions from Bangladesh’s officialdom and various elements have often been less than charitable toward the nation that played a pivotal role in its liberation in 1971.
Even the sacrifices of the Indian army during the war of liberation have been relegated to obscurity.
Secular Bangladeshi intellectuals who have attempted to set the record straight regarding the Indian army’s contributions have faced severe backlash.
These intellectuals have been pilloried, their works banned, and, on certain occasions, forced to leave the country out of fear, underscoring the challenging environment for those seeking to preserve historical accuracy.
Quoting from my 2006 edited collection in December 2024 has called up a rather curious feeling in me.
Why? Because the atmospherics that are presently governing the erstwhile East Pakistan are exactly (or perhaps even more pronounced) as it was when I edited “Bangladesh: Treading the Taliban Trail”.
My book was lapped up by many right-thinking observers of Bangladesh which as Matthew Aaron Rosenstein termed as the “Imperilled Democracy”.
Several reviews of the book were published.I clearly recall former Indian High Commissioner to Bangladesh, Deb Mukharji’s review in which he lauded the attempt.
Indeed, a year later in 2007, Mukharji invited me to be part of the Indian delegation for Track II Dialogue with Bangladesh.
But the plot was salvaged when Sheikh Hasina and her Awami league returned to power in January 2009. I still recall my jubilation when Subir Bhaumik called me up to inform me of the “great victory”.
It was a honeymoon period thereafter for both India and Bangladesh.
United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) terrorists who were billeted in Bangladesh and were carrying out violence in Assam with impunity from what was then the 109 Battalion of the ULFA and the 3rd Battalion of the NDFB were summarily picked up by security agencies loyal to Sheikh Hasina and were handed over to India.
I fractured my right leg while slithering in the 3 Mahar Regiment in Dima Hasao’s Hathikhali on the eve of the crackdown on the Indian terrorists in Bangladesh.
The severity of the multiple fractures necessitated a complicated surgery and implantation of metallic plates. I was bedridden for close to a month.
However, the student of national security in me was extremely excited about how the Indian terrorists were being picked up by the Detective Branch of the Bangladesh Police and the Rapid Action Battalion.
The Directorate General of Forces Intelligence of Bangladesh and the Bangladesh army which had active linkages with the Indian terrorists were not in the loop. Sheikh Hasina played her cards like an ace player.
I, on my part (and from my bedridden posture!), not only kept abreast of the developments but acted as a go-between the nodal person in the R&AW and the Assam Police’s Special Branch which was headed by the late Khagen Sarma.
Those were heady days, and Sheikh Hasina was the lady of the moment.
In one fell swoop she had very deftly delivered and closed a very bitter chapter that was beleaguering India’s national security.
Right-thinking people in India’s security set-up including me were triumphant.
Many years later, in 2016, when I visited Dhaka for a Track II Dialogue, my interview with Bangladesh newspaper The Daily Star was titled “Thank you Bangladesh”.
But destiny changed as hastily as it has come to roost fortune for India and Bangladesh. Today, Bangladesh has come full circle.
The ominous development is almost akin to irregular lunar cycles. I still recall my mentor, Satish Chandra telling me in January 2006 when he inaugurated my Bangladesh book, “Jaideep, your next book on Bangladesh should be to research and unravel the reason for the great turn-around”.
Satish Chandra was referring to the fact that Bangladesh had shifted goalposts in 1975-just five years after it had been liberated from the sinister clutches of their western “slave riders”.
I never got to write a full-fledged book. But I did write a Manekshaw Paper for the Centre for Land Warfare Studies which was titled “Circle of Treason: Bangladesh Beyond the Threat of Illegal Migration” in 2013 and sundry other papers.
But Sheikh Hasina had returned and was well entrenched in the seat of power.
On one occasion she got important people from India who had aided the 1971 war effort (which included my uncle Jyoti Prasad Saikia, IAS) and publicly felicitated them in a grand ceremony in Dhaka.
Satish Chandra’s sage suggestion about unearthing the “great turn-around” had retreated into the recesses of my cerebellum.
I perhaps felt, in my immaturity, that Bangladesh, despite occasional hiccups, would always remain India’s friend and ally.
I, of course, observed that Sheikh Hasina’s Dhaka was attempting to balance India and China.
She had purchased two Ming-class submarines, the BNS Joyjatra and BNS Nobojatro from China. I had wondered as to what made Bangladesh do so.
It had no maritime concerns, certainly not against India which was its ally, and Myanmar was hardly a threat to its peripheral sea-faring overtures.
The purchase of the two boats had caught New Delhi by surprise. I remember delivering a lecture at the Delhi Policy Group where I mentioned the submarine acquisition.
I also remember an admiral who was in the audience writing it off, “Oh, they are outdated Diesel submarines”.
I also recall that I had countered by stating that it’s not a question of the boats being outdated or sophisticated.
It is about a friend and an ally acquiring submarines from India’s adversary, and without our knowledge.
If Bangladesh wanted to construct a triad, they could have easily purchased submarines from India.
Why China? The threat to India’s eastern seaboard was probably not uppermost in the admiral’s mind.
The sea trials that would be conducted by the two boats would have Chinese trainers and observers on board the submarines and docked as they are in the Kutubdia channel off the coast of Chittagong which is just about 790 nautical miles from India’s Eastern Naval HQs in Vishakapatnam, the Chinese “moles” inside the boats could well be monitoring Indian naval movement.
In any event, the student of national security in me was ill at ease.
I began the article by referring to the book “Bangladesh: Treading the Taliban Trail” that I edited in 2006.
A quirk of fate has brought the same circumstances back to the forefront of an adversarial positioning vis-a-vis India.
After the dramatic ouster of Sheikh Hasina from Dhaka, there is once again a systematic purging of every aspect that had characterised the Indo-Bangladesh relationship.
Lt Gen B.K. Bopanna, in his chapter titled “1971: A Sacrifice in Vain” for my book has written, “Former Indian envoy to Dhaka, Deb Mukharji has written that “by the end of the 1980s, there were instances of school children in Bangladesh believing that the marauders of 1971 were Indians-a conclusion derived from constant anti-India propaganda and the fact that history books only referred to the ‘allied’ forces assisting the freedom fighters without naming any country “.
Today, the Yunus regime puppeteered by the United States has gone a step further.
Not only is it systematically purging every sign of secularism and socialism, but it is galloping back to the pre-1971 era.
Md. Yunus might have been a young man in 1970-71.
But he would have certainly witnessed the rapes, killings and atrocities committed by the Pakistani army in the then East Pakistan.
What measures of conscience have led him to provide a carte blanche now to all Pakistanis desirous of entering Bangladesh?
What has led him to embark upon an abhorrence which seeks to erase Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman from Bangladesh’s currency notes?
Why is he turning a blind eye to the atrocities that are being committed on the Hindus in his land?
Has he and his cohorts forgotten all about the precious Indian armed forces blood that was spilt to save his kith and kin from rapacious Pakistan?
Most importantly, is he representing the sentiments of the whole of Bangladesh when he is doing what he is doing?
Or, is he merely bowing to the howls of the Neo-Razakars, or perhaps even their newfound chaperons who are hell-bent on establishing a military base in Saint Martin Island?
