The Hindu Business Line : The failure of India’s Bangladesh policy

“Both India and Bangladesh continue the fiction that while India and Pakistan are known to be enemies, India and Bangladesh enjoy friendly relations — or rather would do if some few irritants were removed.

G. Srinivasan

A diplomat’s diary always makes interesting reading.

And if the envoy is a man steeped in history with a sense of balance strengthened by dispassionate analytical acumen, the resultant autobiography is bound to whet one’s interest, even as it might provoke the players portrayed in the book.

The Jamdani Revolution by former Foreign Secretary Mr Krishnan Srinivasan provides vignettes on politics, personalities and civil society in Bangladesh during 1989-1992 when the author was India’s High Commissioner to Bangladesh.

The tome (the title of which is reminiscent of the famous Jamdani saree of Bengal) covers the first and only time so far in the annals of the South Asian sub-continent that a military-backed authoritarian regime had been dismantled by a relatively bloodless civil society uprising, ricocheting similar such revolutions as velvet, orange and rose revolutions.

Strained relations

India might have played a key role in the liberation of Bangladesh from East Pakistan but subsequent strained bilateral relations even till date is not inexplicable.

“Both India and Bangladesh continue the fiction that while India and Pakistan are known to be enemies, India and Bangladesh enjoy friendly relations — or rather would do if few irritants were removed,” the envoy notes, adding that in fact the relationship is complicated by, and indeed rooted in, domestic tensions.

Battle for minds

Perceptively Mr Krishnan contends that it is nothing less than a post-Partition battle for men’s minds.

Neither the events of 1947 nor 1971 have resolved this matter in East Bengal. The protagonists are Indian secularism on the one hand and Pakistani conformism on the other.

Porous border

The envoy rightly cautions that Bangladesh with its large and destitute population is a time bomb in the north-east of India, which is tribal, under-populated, under-developed and seething with various forms of discontent. Stability and economic progress in Bangladesh are essential if millions are not to cross the borders as illegal immigrants.

Hence it behoves India to be supportive to Bangladesh’s economic and political progress, the author opines, adding that “I have seen little of that; too much of my time has passed bewailing New Delhi’s insensitivity or indifference… the political will and attention span have been lacking in New Delhi even when the bureaucracy has been wiling to give a shove in the right direction.”

Poor foreign policy

For envoys the customary frustrations with the headquarters and the degree to which the Indian envoy is compelled to improvise in the absence of instructions, Mr Krishnan candidly chronicles his own experience as he was getting frustrated at the Dhaka assignment when the External Affairs Ministry and the PMO appeared to be “knee-deep in the morass they have created for themselves in Sri Lanka, quite apart from Nepal where the problems of trade and transit seem intractable.”

He chides the establishment for paying lip-service to democracy particularly when on the Chinese oppression of its student democracy movement (Tiananmen Square) nothing condemnatory has been stated with the obvious intention of pulling some bilateral chestnuts out of the fire. “Winning China’s respect will not come about by abandoning principle and exercising such self-restraint,” the author avers.

The irritants

Throughout his three-year span chronicled in a weekly format, the three issues that crop up frequently relate to the Chakma refugees, the Tin Bigha corridor and the releases to Bangladesh of the waters of the river Ganga at Farakka.

Of these, the lease of a corridor of land connecting Bangladesh with its two biggest enclaves in India was a long-standing obligation of the Indian government and the question of the releases of Ganga waters in the dry season had been a matter controversy from Pakistani times and the quest for a ‘permanent’ solution had remained elusive.

While the author does not believe that the resolution of one or all of these three concerns would transform the Indo-Bangladeshi relationship into one of cooperation and amity, he is not convinced that the best way of attending to such problems was to pigeonhole them. He squarely blames the Indian politicians for harping on the Bangladeshi government’s alleged support to insurgents, on which there is little concrete evidence that can stand scrutiny in court.

Better understanding needed

The author observes point-blank that the Indian government has tended to allow the hard-liners and Hindu chauvinists to set the agenda for its policy towards Bangladesh when a more rational approach would have been to come to some understanding on Dhaka’s agenda in order to bestow some stability on whichever regime is in power and to work for strong cultural and economic changes with Bangladesh.

The book is peppered with idiosyncrasies of Bangladeshi leaders ranging from the military leader and former President Ershad, Awami League leader Hasina and BNP leader Khaleda Zia and also that of late Prime Ministers of India Chandra Sekhar, Rajiv Gandhi, Narashima Rao and former President R. Venkataraman.

The fact that a diplomat post-retirement has come out clean on the acts of omission and commission in his assignments and has, in the process, thrown some refreshing light on the conduct of the dramatis personae involved makes the forthcoming book an instructive and interesting reading for discerning people.

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