Dhaka walks a tightrope on ties with India

Ex-Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat

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PRIME Minister Narendra Modi has deferred his visit to Dhaka after the Bangladesh government cancelled all public programmes associated with the birth centenary celebrations of ‘Bangabandhu’ Sheikh Mujibur Rahman on March 17. This has, for the time being, deferred the likely security and political issues both governments would have faced due to large-scale protests in that country from February 28 onwards for cancelling the invitation to him The demonstrators criticised Dhaka’s stand that the Delhi riots were India’s ‘internal matter’.

Although the protests were led by the Islamic parties, the ‘Left’ students were found agitating separately. The Socialist Students Front (Marxist) staged demonstrations on March 3 in Dhaka University campus criticising the ‘Hindu extremist’ attacks on CAA and NRC protesters. They were critical of the Indian government for asking a Bangladesh student at Visva Bharati to leave the country for posting photos of anti-CAA protests on Facebook. They condemned the ‘fascist’ Awami League government for showing a ‘submissive’ attitude by inviting the Indian Prime Minister for the March 17 function. The Dhaka University Central Students’ Union (DUCSU) also asked the Awami League government not to ‘insult’ Bangabandhu by inviting the Indian PM but that they ‘would salute a secular person’ like former Indian President Pranab Mukherjee.

On March 1, Foreign Secretary Masud Bin Momen announced the Bangladesh government’s stand that the Delhi violence was India’s ‘domestic issue’. This was before our Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla’s visit. Yet, Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen told Shringla that ‘Dhaka expects New Delhi to understand his country’s concerns about the recent developments in India over the amended citizenship Act and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam.’ Momen also aired concerns over the killings of Bangladeshis by the Border Security Force (BSF) and said these did not go with ‘friendship’.

Bangladesh is exercising great restraint despite widespread domestic criticism, unlike other Islamic nations who are openly expressing their differences with Indian policies on Kashmir, CAA and NRC. Unfortunately, our ruling party has not helped them by showing a similar restraint in their political rhetoric against Bangladeshis on electoral considerations. Even the ministers in our Cabinet have been targeting Bangladesh nationals and insulting them as ‘termites’ in India. A few years ago, a senior minister had officially asked the BSF to ‘starve Bangladesh’ of its beef going from India.

We should not underestimate the vortex of Bangladesh’s internal politics which could turn even against a powerful leader like Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who had won a landslide victory in the December 2018/January 2019 polls by winning 288 parliamentary seats out of 300. True, Hasina had announced on January 20 that CAA and NRC were an ‘internal exercise’ of India but she also added that “it was not necessary”. Dhaka had also shown its mild displeasure by cancelling the visits of Foreign Minister Abdul Momen and Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan to India at that time.

Hasina’s present win came after years of struggles and sacrifices against religious obscurantism, intolerance and anti-India feelings in her country. The common accusation by her opponents, even during her father’s era, was ‘subservience’ to India. The ‘killer Majors’ wiped out almost the entire Mujibur Rahman family on August 15, 1975, for ‘being too subservient’ to India. She was allowed to return to Bangladesh only in 1981 when elected as President of the Awami League (AL). However, she was frequently jailed till 1986. She became the Prime Minister for the first time in 1996. That was the first time Bangladesh tried to correct its anti-India policies and restrain its intelligence agency — the Director General of Force Intelligence (DGFI) — from cooperating with Pakistan’s ISI in destabilising India. Till then, India was wedged by the ISI-DGFI nutcracker.

In 2000 and 2004, she escaped assassination plots. The first was when a lethal explosive device was detected in Gopalganj where she was addressing a rally. Ten militants of the Harkat-ul-Jihad-e-Islami (HuJI) were sentenced to death in 2017. HuJI was formed in 1989 after Osama bin Laden had met South Asian militants in Afghanistan to destabilise their countries. The Bangladesh branch of HuJI-B, which was responsible for many terror incidents in India in collaboration with our own ‘Indian Mujahideen’, was founded by Mufti Hannan in 1992.

On August 21, 2004, an anti-terrorism rally organised by AL in Dhaka was subjected to a shower of 13 grenades killing 24. Hasina’s bulletproof vehicle was fired upon. Some elements from the opposition Bangladesh National Party (BNP) wanted to wipe out AL leadership using HuJI. Tarique Rehman, BNP leader Khaleda Zia’s son, were among 38 sentenced in 2018.

Prime Minister Hasina’s most difficult endeavour was to purge pro-Pakistani and pro-Jihadi elements from the DGFI. This she did during her second and third terms as PM (2009-14 and 2014-19). On May 15, 2014, she warned the DGFI while addressing the top military brass to stop ‘politicking’ and become professional to safeguard national sovereignty. In that process, she also suppressed terrorism against India from Bangladesh, stopped our Northeast rebels from using her country as a sanctuary, extradited those wanted by us without fuss and stopped illicit arms movement across Bangladesh borders meant for destabilising India.

However, storm clouds are rising. Christine Fair had flagged the fragility of the situation in January 2018 through her piece, ‘Political Islam and Islamic terrorism in Bangladesh’. A well-researched paper by Cambridge.org of June 2019, ‘Islamisation by secular ruling parties: The case of Bangladesh’, says that three conditions acting in conjunction could ‘drive secular rulers to Islamic public policy’. They are the ‘rise of Islamic social movements; second fierce political competition; and third (semi) authoritarian rule.’ The authors claim that these three factors ‘have interacted to produce a top-down process of state-led Islamisation in Bangladesh.’ They fear that ‘AL’s Islamisation measures may strengthen orthodox Islamic forces in the long term… and strengthen radical Islamist forces through divide-and-rule tactics.’

The question before the top BJP leadership should be whether India should embarrass Prime Minister Hasina’s leadership any more by insulting Bangladeshis to win Indian elections?