Indian envoy's arrogant assertions and govt's undignified silence THE Indian high commissioner, Pinak Ranjan Chakravarty, seems to have embarked on a mission to vitiate further the already-strained relations between Bangladesh and India, making, at regular intervals, statements that are highly objectionable and seek to undermine the dignity and patriotic sentiments of the people in this country. In the past few weeks, he has tried to belittle water experts and environmentalists, and politicians for their opposition to the controversial Indian plan to construct a dam and a barrage on the upstream of the trans-boundary river Barak. Now, it seems, he has chosen the people of Bangladesh in general as the target of his diatribes. Many Bangladeshis have relatives in India and vice versa. A significant section of the Indian visa seekers are Bangladeshis planning to visit their relatives on the other side of the border. Yet another sizeable portion of the visa seekers are Bangladeshis who go to India for medical treatment, education and tourism. These people spend millions of dollars in India every year, contributing, in the process, to the growth of the Indian economy. These people mostly make up the long queue in front of the Indian High Commission every day, people whom Chakravarty has so disdainfully branded as 'touts and brokers'. In fact, in an era of globalisation, such a phenomenon is almost universal and hardly surprising. What is surprising is that Chakravarty seemingly presumes that India is a lucrative destination for job-seekers, which it hardly is. Indeed, India has registered stupendous economic growth in recent years, at a rate comparable to only China's. However, because of its skewed development model, India's growth has been anything but distributive and has only widened the rich-poor, urban-rural divide. It is a matter of fact that while South Asia is home to half of the world's poor, three-fourths of its poor population lives in India. Also, the Indian society remains incorrigibly segmented along caste and communal lines. Moreover, it is India where hundreds of poor farmers commit suicide every year upon failure to settle their debts with loan sharks and millions of female foetuses have been selectively aborted after pre-natal sex determination to avoid birth of girls since the 1970s. Indeed, the Bangladeshi society has its own share of misery which it has been trying overcome; still, we live in a far better social, economic, political and cultural milieu than our Indian counterparts.
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