Commentary The roller-coaster : Bangladesh-India relationship Mahmud ur Rahman Choudhury Indian warning of assassination plot The Indian foreign secretary Mr. Shiv Shankar Menon paid an unscheduled visit to Bangladesh on 12 April 2009. The Bangladesh foreign ministry officials stated that such a "short notice" visit was unprecedented but maintained that the trip was "just part of ongoing dialogue between friends, between neighbours". The visit went almost unnoticed in the Bangladesh media until the Indian Express on 18 April published a report claiming that the visit was prompted by a need to warn Bangladesh of an assassination threat against its prime minister, Sheikh Hasina. The Indian Express further claimed that Indian intelligence had picked up electronic communications between members of radical/ militant/ terrorist groups operating "in the neighbourhood" and that these intercepts pointed to the existence of a plot to target the "new Sheikh Hasina government". "That prompted India to go ahead and warn the Bangladesh top brass of the threat", the report contended. There are many explicit and implicit aspects to this Indian Express report. The Indian media has for long been propagating a perception and stoking its own paranoia that Bangladesh is awash with militancy and terrorism quite forgetting the fact that for the last one decade radical politics of the right or religion-based militancy and terrorism have never been able to take root in Bangladesh and have been tackled with draconian measures, reducing any organizational or structural integrity, these "militants" might have had, to impotence. Explicit in the Indian Express report is the fact that India is so concerned about Bangladesh that it is devoting its overstretched intelligence resources to finding out what is happening here, inspite of the reality that the highly inept and corrupt Indian "intelligence" and law-enforcement agencies have been able to do next to nothing about terrorist, militancy and separatist threats which are tearing India apart. As a matter of fact Indian intelligence agencies have a long history of incompetence if one considers the fact that two Indian prime ministers - Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv Gandhi - were assassinated without these intelligence agencies being able to get even a hint of these events happening. One could therefore, quite legitimately question the competence and acumen of the Indian intelligence in identifying threats of assassination against the prime minister of Bangladesh. This leads us to the implicit aspects of the Indian Express report. Implicit in the Express report is the fact that India will not look upon kindly to any government in Bangladesh which will not serve the Indian purpose of establishing a monopoly on South Asia and its considerable resources and markets - and this includes the maritime-boundary demarcation in the Bay of Bengal containing energy resources, the continuous building of barrages upstream, to divert waters of 54 major rivers passing through Bangladesh and transit through Bangladesh making passage of goods, from one part of India to another, easier. Any Bangladeshi government not seeing eye-to-eye with India on these issue is likely to be tarred with the brush of "islamist radicals" and that is why the Indian media and foreign policy campaign of drumming up the extremist/terrorist threat in Bangladesh. This is a stark warning that any Bangladeshi government inimical to Indian interests is likely to face "interventions" of various sorts and extents, physical and military encroachments included. As to how much of this threat is reality and how much bluff, is difficult to say particularly now when India is in the middle of an election which could lead to a change in government but like all things in international politics bluffs work, if the "target" is ready and willing to believe the bluffs and is unable to "call" them - Bangladesh is now in the unfortunate position of not being able to call these bluffs. Impacts of change of government in India on Bangladesh India is holding its elections but it will be a month before anyone can get to know the results - so vast is the country, so massive its electorate and so many its constituencies. Who forms the government in India is of concern to everyone including countries like USA, China and Russia, but smaller states of the South Asian region, including Bangladesh, are more than worried because the impact of the change is more direct and immediate. On the surface, politics in India and Bangladesh have many similarities: both are plagued with "dynastic" politics and with corruption, divisiveness, violence and conflict. A more striking similarity is that both polities are dominated by conglomerates/ coalitions of two major parties - in India, the Indian National Congress is a secular centrist party which led the Indian independence struggle and now heads a coalition called the United Progressive Alliance or UPA (comparable, in Bangladesh to the Awami League and its grand alliance); standing in opposition to the Congress and UPA is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a religious based nationalist party that fronts a loose coalition of parties dubbed the National Democratic Alliance or NDA (comparable, in Bangladesh to the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and its 4 party alliance). The linkages do not end here but go much deeper. In 1971, India led by Congress with Indira Gandhi as the Prime Minister actively supported the Bangladesh War of Liberation led by the Awami League with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as its undisputed leader. After that successful intervention which led to the independence of Bangladesh, India and Bangladesh signed a 25 year treaty of friendship. Since then, the Bangladesh Awami League and the Indian National Congress have a close, almost symbiotic relationship with each other; anytime both are in government in their respective states, "cooperation" between both countries increase exponentially. When the BJP is in government in India, such close relationships and cooperation are replaced with more formal inter-state interactions between Bangladesh and India. When the BNP is in government in Bangladesh and the BJP in India, relationships between India and Bangladesh take a frigid, often confrontational turn. Regardless of whether it is the BJP or the Congress in government, India would want a sympathetic, if not exactly a friendly government in Bangladesh and so, by all counts, calculations and probabilities, as far as India is concerned, the government of choice in Bangladesh is an Awami League government. Were it not for the peculiar coincidence that the Congress coalition was in government in India when elections in Bangladesh took place and now during Indian elections an Awami League government is in place in Bangladesh, Bangladesh could expect active interference, even interventions in its politics by the Indians which could lead to a severe destabilization of Bangladesh and the entire region, already riven by separatism, terrorism, conflict and violence of various types and magnitudes. |
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