Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s four-day official visit to India, will be underscored by serious concerns which will challenge Delhi-Dhaka ties.
Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s four-day official visit to India, which begins today, will be underscored by some very serious concerns on her government’s part regarding issues which challenge the fundamentals of Delhi-Dhaka ties. The Bangladesh leader’s personal equation with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has always been strong and indeed has become increasingly reinforced since 2014, when her government was re-elected to office in Dhaka and Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party stormed to power in Delhi. The two leaders have in the course of the last five years met on a number of occasions in Dhaka, Delhi, Kolkata and on the sidelines of global conferences outside the subcontinent.
But, of course, both leaders have had an acute understanding of the priorities which have consistently shaped their approach to domestic politics. On the bilateral level, it has been quite a different story, as policy makers in the two countries cannot but acknowledge only too well. Given that sort of a reality, Sheikh Hasina’s prime emphasis on her Delhi visit will be to seek greater Indian support in freeing Bangladesh of the burden it has had to bear of providing shelter to the Rohingya refugees from Myanmar. The public perception in Dhaka is that for all its profession of friendship and cooperation with Bangladesh the Indian leadership has been unable to comprehend the depth of Dhaka’s dilemma vis-à-vis the Rohingyas. Indeed, Bangladeshis have been surprised that the three countries with which the government has sought to deepen its links --- and they are India, China and Russia --- have not quite responded to Bangladesh’s concerns with the seriousness which such worries deserved.
For Sheikh Hasina, therefore, the pressure will be there to extract from the Indian side a more concrete response to how Delhi means to apply increased pressure on the Myanmar regime to have the Rohingyas go back home with full guarantees of security. The Rohingya issue apart, the stalemate which has developed over the Teesta water-sharing issue is a major challenge for the Bangladesh leader as she and her team press Prime Minister Modi and his aides on the new steps Delhi plans to take toward a resolution of the issue. Bangladeshis have not forgotten that a deal on the Teesta was scuttled at the last minute by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee when she opted out of a delegation led by then Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Dhaka in 2011.
They have remembered too Modi’s enthusiastic assurance to Bangladesh, when his party came to power in 2014, about the Teesta issue getting resolved during the tenures of the governments in Delhi and Dhaka. In the five years that have elapsed since then, Ms. Banerjee’s refusal to agree with the union government on a Delhi-Dhaka deal on the Teesta has stymied any chances of a settlement of the problem. Meanwhile, the Modi and Hasina governments have been returned to office in new elections, which ought to be a reason for the two prime ministers to initiate a fresh approach to the issue. Sheikh Hasina will likely want Narendra Modi to exercise his influence on Mamata Banerjee and convince her to give her consent to a deal with Dhaka.
In historical terms, cooperation between Dhaka and Delhi has generally thrown up positive results. Back in 1972, Indira Gandhi and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman inked a 25-year agreement of friendship and cooperation between their two countries. In 1974, they concluded a land boundary agreement, to which Indian lawmakers assented decades later when the BJP under Modi assumed power. It is also to be recalled that during her first term in office, Sheikh Hasina and then Indian Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda reached an agreement on a sharing of the waters of the Ganges in 1996. In these past many years, agreements in a number of other areas, notably clamping down on cross-border terrorism and promoting bilateral trade, have been an added impetus to India-Bangladesh ties. Cooperation in the cultural field, particularly through interaction between Bangladesh and the Indian states of West Bengal, Assam and Tripura, has been well pronounced.
The Bangladesh leader’s visit to Delhi should lead to a deepening of ties, a pointer to which is clearly the intention of the two governments to initial a series of memoranda of understanding (MoUs) related to various sectors of cooperation. But one issue which Bangladesh could well raise, and for good reason, is the ramifications Dhaka feels are likely to follow in the wake of the recent citizenship exercise through the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam. Dhaka will not be receptive to any efforts by the Indian authorities to push back people from Assam on the ground that they are Bengalis who have illegally settled in India. Moreover, recent warnings from the ruling BJP of similar NRC methods being applied to Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal have not gone down well in Bangladesh. It is an uncomfortable thought for Sheikh Hasina. Prime Minister Modi will feel equally uncomfortable trying to reassure her that Bangladesh has little reason to be worried by the NRC.
Summits, apart from the pomp and glamour that come with them, are serious business. In Dhaka, people expect their Prime Minister to come back home from her talks with the Indian leadership with substantive results. Fingers are being kept crossed.
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Syed Badrul Ahsan is a Senior Journalist and Commentator on South Asian affairs based in Dhaka. Ahsans entry into full time journalism came about through ...
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