Indo-Bangla border a new Berlin Wall
Sadeq Khan
The Holiday wishes its valued readers, patrons and well-wishers a
happy Eid Mubarak. Due to the Eid festival and vacation , the next
issue of The Holiday will be published on September 9.
In an unscheduled debate on August 18 in the National Assembly sitting
without the presence of the Opposition, the Treasury Bench members
themselves raised a big hue and cry about the failures of the
government, particularly of four senior ministers and a state
minister. The finance minister was targeted for share market scam,
banking liquidity crisis, for frequent faux pas, and for interfering
in road repair contracts. The communications minister was targeted for
dismal conditions of highways leading to disruption of road
communication with the capital from western and northern parts for
weeks together, and for tragic road accidents claiming many precious
lives.
The commerce minister was targeted for his failure to rein in
spiralling food and commodity prices in Ramzan and his own share of
habitual faux pas embarrassing other ruling party leaders in the eyes
of the suffering citizenry. The state minister for power was likewise
targeted, in the absence of the Prime Minister and the powerful
Adviser for Power, was targeted for frequent power failures. In
addition, the shipping minister was criticised, not for his
ministerial duties, but his exertion of undue influence as a transport
union leader for liberal issuance of driving licenses to ill-trained
helpers of drivers. He has been blatantly advocating that as long as
illiterate drivers could read road signs, identify a cow or a goat and
follow traffic directions, they should be issued licenses as there was
a shortage of licensed drivers of motor vehicles in this country. Such
liberal (illegal?) issuance of licenses to trainee drivers has been
cited by the media and civil society activists as a major factor
causing fatal road accidents.
In his defence in parliament, the Communications Minister spoke at
length under Rule 300 of parliamentary procedure. He said that in
1996, total length of roads maintained in the country was 15,600
kilometres. In 2010, the roads and highways increased to 21040 km. For
repair and maintenance, a world standard of budgetary requirement has
been worked out and approved by the World Bank. By that standard, the
requirement in 2008-09 budget was Taka 4205 crore. But the finance
ministry allocated only Taka 651 crore. Likewise, the demand for 2009
- 10 fiscal year was Taka 4,404 crore, but the allocation was Taka 610
crore only. In 2010 - 11 fiscal year, the demand for repair and
maintenance of roads and highways was Taka 4,745 crore. The
allocation was only Taka 668 crore. In the current fiscal the demand
is Taka 5,100 crore. The allocation is only Taka 690 crore, and that
also has been released only the previous day (August 17) with
sub-divided work allocations and other conditions attached.
In other words, the Communications Minister squarely blamed the
Finance Minister for the collapse of the roads and highways network
under heavy rains (highest in the last 15 years) on account of gross
under-financing of the road repair budget for years together. Suranjit
Sengupta lent qualified support to the Communications Minister's
demand that the conditions attached to this year's release letter of
funds for road repairs be withdrawn. He said the Finance Minister has
no jurisdiction over work allocations.
Repercussions
The debate had its repercussions in the media orchestration and in the
civil society. As such, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on August 24
scolded his party leaders and parliamentarians on the floor of the
House that they should not lend ammunition to "enemy" hands (the
Opposition) by harping on a few failures of her government. Side by
side, there are instances of immense successes too.
Some India-friendly members of the "civil society", mostly teachers,
students, newspaper columnists and cultural activists, including,
strangely, the government-appointed Chairman of the National Human
Rights Commission and the Secretary of the Communist Party of
Bangladesh, gathered at the Shaheed Minar on the same day (August 24)
as the Prime Minister was answering questions in the parliament, to
single out the Communications Minister and demand his dismissal from
the cabinet by August 31. Otherwise they resolved that they would
undertake a sit-down strike at the Shaheed Minar on the Eid-day.
Some say the real reason for their singling out the Communications
Minister, who is also known to be China-friendly, not the finance
minister or any other minister, is not the traffic road accidents they
talked about, but because his revelations about the "standard" costs
of road maintenance, not to speak of extra costs from soft soil and
active delta conditions in our country, has demolished the myth being
spun by the India-friendly lobby in the government and the civil
society about the huge benefits the country could gain from road
connectivity with India under Indian transit plan. At least a
memorandum of understanding was expected to be signed during Indian
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's return official visit in Dhaka
scheduled September 6.
Now the Finance Minister, an old advocate of the Indian transit plan,
has admitted in a meeting with the FBCCI on August 24 that it is not
possible for Bangladesh to grant transit facility to India under the
present conditions of infrastructural handicap. The government's own
inter-ministerial core committee on transit has in the meantime
recommended that under no circumstance road transit can be given to
India at our current stage of infrastructure.
'India's new Berlin Wall'
A framework agreement on the transit issue, projected to be the main
purpose of the Indian Prime Minister's visit, appears to have been
relegated essentially to a statement of intent and mutual interest in
the Indian transit plan. Another issue, that of "fortress India's
fatal stranglehold around Bangladesh borders" has come into focus, not
because Bangladesh government pressed for it, but as result of the
international media's attention to child-bride Felani's killing in
Indian BSF fire on the barbed wire fences at the border. The
prestigious Foreign Policy journal of the USA is the latest addition
of outcry over Felani's death in the global media under a general
coverage of the "World's Most Dangerous Borders", the journal has
separately covered "an account of India's new Berlin Wall with
Bangladesh. After Felani's that account entitled Fortress India it
goes on to comment:
"In India, the 25-year-old border fence — finally expected to be
completed next year at a cost of $1.2 billion — is celebrated as a
panacea for a whole range of national neuroses: Islamist terrorism,
illegal immigrants stealing Indian jobs, the refugee crisis that could
ensue should a climate catastrophe ravage South Asia. But for
Bangladeshis, the fence has come to embody the irrational fears of a
neighbour that is jealously guarding its newfound wealth even as their
own country remains mired in poverty. The barrier is a physical
reminder of just how much has come between two once-friendly countries
with a common history and culture — and how much blood one side is
willing to shed to keep them apart.
"Situated on a delta and crisscrossed by 54 rivers, Bangladesh factors
prominently in nearly every worst-case climate-change scenario. The
1-meter sea-level rise predicted by some widely used scientific models
would submerge almost 20 per cent of the country. The slow creep of
seawater into Bangladesh's rivers caused by global-warming-induced
flooding, upriver dams in India, and reduced glacial melt from the
Himalayas is already turning much of the country's fertile land into
saline desert, upending its precarious agricultural economy. Studies
commissioned by the U.S. Defence Department and almost a dozen other
security agencies warn that if Bangladesh is hit by the kind of
Hurricane Katrina-grade storm that climate change is likely to make
more frequent, it would be a "threat multiplier," sending ripples of
instability across the globe: new opportunities for terrorist
networks, conflicts over basic human essentials like access to food
and water, and of course millions of refugees. And it's no secret
where the uprooted Bangladeshis would go first. Bangladesh shares a
border with only two countries: the democratic republic of India and
the military dictatorship of Burma. Which would you choose?
"India began erecting a fence, complete with well-armed guards, in
1986. After the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won
national elections in 1998, the programme was ramped up to placate
anti-Muslim sentiment among the party faithful. The fence grew longer
and the killings more frequent. After years of complaints from
Bangladeshi politicians, India made promises on several occasions to
switch to non-lethal weaponry, but has rarely followed through on
them.
By next year, every available crossing point between India and
Bangladesh will have been blocked off by the fence. But while
tightened security has made the border more dangerous, it hasn't
actually made it much more secure. More than 100 border villages
operate as illicit transit points through which thousands of migrants
pass daily. Each of these villages has a "lineman" — what would be
called a coyote on the U.S.-Mexican border — who facilitates the
smuggling, paying border guards from both notoriously corrupt
countries to look the other way when people pass through.
"The rise of global Islamist militancy in recent years has worsened
the xenophobic streak in India's already dicey relations with its
Muslim neighbours, and Indian politicians have been quick to
capitalize on it. By 2009, Indian Home Minister P. Chidambaram was
declaring that Bangladeshis have "no business to come to India." The
opposition BJP isn't rolling out the welcome mat either: Tathagata
Roy, the party's leader in the Bangladesh-bordering state of West
Bengal, has called for lining the border with anti-personnel mines.
Felani's death
"Felani's death, however, galvanised Bangladesh. Graphic photos of her
dead body made the front pages of newspapers across the country, and
political parties posted her picture with the caption "Stop Border
Killing!"
"The shooting seemed to have given India pause as well. In March, New
Delhi once again agreed to strip its border guards of live ammunition,
and for once actually did it. For the first month in almost a decade,
Indian troops didn't kill anyone on the border. But by April the
Indian soldiers had reloaded, shooting a Bangladeshi cattle trader and
three others in separate incidents. It was a bleak reminder that while
the fence itself may be a flimsy thing, the tensions that make it into
a killing zone are remarkably durable."
Can Bangladesh hope that this time around the Hasina-Manmohan summit
in Dhaka will do something at least to put on end to killing at the
border by bullets or by beatings?
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