Not by appeasement
http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=4&theme=&usrsess=1&id=95702
India had played a crucial role in the liberation of Bangladesh, but that did not guarantee upbeat Indo-Bangla relations. Instead, the history of their interface is a sad tale of Dhakas unmitigated hostility towards this country.
In the backdrop Mujibs assassination, General Ziaur Rehman, acting under the influence of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, deleted secularism from the constitution and lifted the ban on communal parties.
Pushing the Islamisation process further, HMS Ershad declared Islam as the state religion. He joined Pakistans low-intensity, proxy war against India by extending camping and training facilities to Ulfa and other insurgent groups of Northeast India. His Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) got successive batches of Ulfa cadres trained by the ISI in Pakistan.
Aggressive assertion of the countrys Muslim identity
distanced Bangladesh from India. It attracted a liberal flow of petro-dollars from West Asia, which promoted the mushrooming of mosques and madrasas and ensured rapid growth of Islamic radicalism in the country.
Participation of 5,000-odd Bangladeshi mujahideen in the ant-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s further radicalised Bangladeshi Muslims.
In 1991, the BNP came to power riding on the crest of a rabidly anti-India campaign, but the Narasimha Rao government gifted it the Tin Bigha corridor. In return, the Khaleda Zia regime dilly-dallied over taking back the 56,000 Chakma refugees from Tripura, engineered countrywide post-Babari backlash that drove panic-stricken Hindus in droves to India and stepped up support for the Northeast insurgents, permitting import of weapons to their bases in India from Southeast Asia through Bangladeshi territory.
The Awami League
government of Sheikh Hasina (1996-2001) took back the Chakma refugees and settled the contentious Ganga water-sharing issue with New Delhi, but rogue elements in Bangladeshs military-security establishment, continued to support the Northeast insurgents.
The rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the September 11 terrorist attacks on America and the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq have fuelled Islamic militancy in Bangladesh. A host of jihadi outfits, supported by the Jamaat, have since cropped up in the country.
They have launched coordinated terror operations for establishing a transnational Islamic state comprising Bangladesh, Muslim majority districts of West Bengal, Assam, Tripura and the Rohingiya Muslim-dominated Arakan state of Myanmar.
Bomb attacks by them have killed about 200 people. The gruesome grenade attacks on an Awami League rally last year and the
simultaneous explosions at 500 places last August have demonstrated the Islamists high potential to destabilise the region.
Instead of condemning the devastating Hindu-cleansing in Bangladesh in 2001, the NDA government assured the Khaleda Zia regime of New Delhis friendship and support in the hope of securing natural gas supplies, transit and trans-shipment facilities for Northeast India. While disappointing Delhi on these counts, Dhaka has brazenly reneged from the tripartite agreement that would enable India to transport gas from Myanmar via a pipeline through Bangladeshi territory. Propped up by the DGFI, the Ulfa, NDFB and the NLFT contingents in Bangladesh have lately stepped up attacks on targets in India.
Recurrent communal violence since 1947 has forced millions of Hindus to migrate from Bangladesh to India. Since the mid-1970s, pauperised, landless Muslims from rural
Bangladesh have been infiltrating India on a massive scale. No fewer than 20 million Bangladeshis have illegally migrated to India in the last three decades and the flow continues unabated.
This "demographic invasion" has changed the population structure and upset the communal balance in the border belts of Assam and West Bengal. Bangladeshi migrants in Assam decide the outcome of election in 56 of the total 120 Assembly constituencies. A similar situation prevails in West Bengal. No wonder, in the mid-1990s, Bangladeshi intellectuals, print media and a Cabinet minister had made a concerted bid for lebensraum for the countrys teeming millions in Indias Northeast region.
Infiltration, spillover of radical Islam and the proxy war by Bangladesh pose a serious threat to Indias sovereignty and national security, but Dhakas repeated denial of the existence of these problems has
foreclosed their peaceful solution.
New Delhis policy of appeasement has inevitably backfired and rendered negotiations intractable. On the sidelines of the upcoming Saarc summit, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh must do some plain speaking, leaving his hosts in no doubt that their intransigence may now trigger a tougher response.
(The author is a former Additional Secretary, Government of India.)
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