Sunanda K. Datta-Ray | Keep close eye on Dhaka amid China, Pak games

It cuts both ways. As Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladesh government’s chief adviser, put it, India is not his country’s closest neighbour, it’s the only neighbour since it surrounds Bangladesh entirely. Geographical intimacy justifies Mr Yunus’ other comment, which a local advocate, Prabir Ranjan Halder, president of the Bangladesh National Hindu Grand Alliance, a grouping of 23 Hindu religious organisations formed in 2006, quoted recently. “You are a citizen, and so am I; the rights you have are the same rights I possess”, Mr Yunus assured Hindus. “If we can establish this”, was Mr Halder’s postscript, “we will become a global example”. It’s an ideal that seems elusive even in far more intrinsically egalitarian countries like Britain or the United States of America.

Nevertheless, it’s the only model for South Asian nations, India most emphatically included.

It is tempting to blame the obstacle to realising this secular label on the Jamaat-e-Islami loyalties that inspired Dhaka University’s Dr Shahiduzzaman to recommend that the only way of averting Indian hegemony is through a nuclear pact with Pakistan (Bangladesh’s “most reliable and trustworthy security ally”), with Pakistani Ghauri missiles in northern Bangladesh. That is an obvious over-simplification. Even without the inevitable big-country-small-country syndrome, a multitude of social, cultural and economic impulses shape responses. Many years ago -- long before the jackboot of majoritarianism became the hallmark of India’s identity -- the late Dawa Tsering, Bhutan’s first foreign minister and, globally, the longest serving one, noted how South Asia’s smaller countries were secretly relieved when Pakistan, too, acquired a nuclear capability.

The crassness of Indian politicians has made matters infinitely worse since then. No goodwill can possibly survive statements like Amit Shah’s reported threat in Jharkhand to “hang every Bangladeshi infiltrator upside down to give them a lesson” if the BJP wins power in the state.

Adapting Clive’s infamous outburst about the wealth of the Murshidabad palace, one cannot but be astonished at the moderation of Dhaka’s “serious reservations, deep hurt, and extreme displeasure” over the home minister’s remarks, which a Bangladeshi spokesman termed as “highly deplorable”.

The interim Dhaka regime’s foreign affairs adviser, Mohammed Touhid Hossain, a retired diplomat himself, says that he would like to maintain “working relations” with New Delhi on the basis of mutual respect by removing tensions between the two neighbours, adding that it is necessary to admit the problem if it is to be resolved. “We must recognise that there is a kind of tension in our relations with India at the moment. We can resolve the problem and maintain working relations with them on the basis of mutual respect.” Sheikh Hasina Wajed is a symptom of this disorientation, not the cause of it. The keys to a resolution, Mr Hossain says, are “mutual respect” and “fairness”.

No such caveats are allowed to inhibit relations with China, whose foreign minister, Wang Yi, warmly embraced Dr Yunus, “an old friend of the Chinese people”, in New York last month. The promise is of stronger strategic relations with more commercial, economic and technological content, Chinese investment in Bangladesh’s solar panel sector, cooperation between corporate entities, the relocation of Chinese factories in Bangladesh, and Bangladesh benefiting from Beijing’s policy of zero tariff access to goods from Least Developed Countries. While Wang Yi invited more students from Bangladesh, the political dimension of the relationship was stressed by a Chinese Red Cross team visiting Bangladesh to treat students and others who were injured during the uprising against Sheikh Hasina.

Wang Yi laboured the point. “We have full confidence in you that you will live up to the expectations of the people,” he told Dr Yunus, expressing the conviction that the latter would unite the country. The Nobel laureate responded by praising China’s “amazing” efforts to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and promising Chinese companies a share of the preferential market access to rich nations that Bangladesh enjoys. “We will love to collaborate with Chinese companies. We have a lot of scope to work together,” he said. The partnership would open “a new chapter” in bilateral ties.

Against that, Dr Yunus’ “we want good relations with India and other neighbouring countries, but these relations should be on the basis of fairness and equality”, sounds distinctly cool as well as conditional.

Clearly, Sheikh Hasina’s exit was essential for the rapprochement with China and the promise of one with Pakistan. That need not mean that India’s role was deliberately reduced to facilitate these ties. But it is in the nature of East Bengal Muslim thinking at the mass level to associate much that is untoward with Hindu machinations. The strategy can well serve a totally non-communal purpose like the illegal acquisition of a neighbour’s property or the elimination of a business competitor. With divisions blurred, the same action, both communal and mercenary, can also hold India-Bangladesh friendship hostage to local events.

It is anyone’s guess how many of the allegations against Sheikh Hasina that Mohammad Tajul Islam, the International Crimes Tribunal’s chief prosecutor, trots out can be substantiated. She and her Awami League may be accused of ruling the country with an iron fist for 15 years and of overseeing “massacres” but no election that excludes Bangladesh’s party of independence can ever be truly representative.

As for India’s special interest, 53 years ago when the flood of stricken humanity was flooding West Bengal, about 95 per cent of the refugees were Hindu. Some months later, when they were being forced at bayonet point into trucks to take them back, I asked a grizzled old Hindu peasant from Noakhali how he regarded himself. “Call me an Indian resident in Bangladesh”, he replied without a moment’s hesitation. That’s why I am convinced that for all Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s destructive posturing, his fast-track citizenship for minorities stranded abroad serves a true humanitarian purpose.