+ Bangladeshi newspapers published reports from their Kolkata correspondents that demands to punish Bangladesh were voiced by Indian speakers and some Bangladeshi expatriate non-Muslim delegates in an 'international' conference attended by a French journalist and briefly by Taslima Nasreen, the self-exiled Bangladeshi writer. The demands included economic blockade of Bangladesh by India, other (military?) forms of Indian pressure to be brought upon Bangladesh to accommodate 'two crore' fugitives of Bangladeshi origin in India in a chunk of territory to be ceded for that purpose. The coincidence of the three-pronged propaganda drives must be deliberate. +
28/01/2005 SAARC drifting on undercurrent of tension Sadeq Khan The thirteenth SAARC summit begins in right earnest after the next weekend in Dhaka. The trumpeted exuberance of the SAARC spirit, however, is giving way to sombre reflection, or 'soul-searching', as some newsmen noted from the remarks of Foreign Minister M. Morshed Khan. That change of mood is not just because of the tsunami disaster that killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions of people in three of the seven SAARC nations. That effectively displaced the SAARC summit as well. Our Foreign Minister described the outlook of the rescheduled summit as follows: 'Two decades have already passed and SAARC will step into the third decade with the Dhaka summit. Now we should start delivering the fruits of SAARC to the doorsteps of the common people. 'We should be business-oriented and put our heads together for implementation of the commitments made by the member-countries for the cause of the betterment of the common people in the region, rather than merely adopting a declaration. 'We must find out how we can reduce the present level of poverty to half within 2015 in line with the UN Millennium Development Goals, how to improve the standard of our goods for more trade, how to harmonise our customs and avoid double taxation among SAARC member-states.' These are modest and achievable socio-economic goals, particularly after the landmark agreement on differential terms of SAFTA that was signed in the outgoing round of the SAARC process under the chairmanship of Pakistan. Bangladesh takes over from Pakistan the chair for the next round of the SAARC process from this summit. All the indications are that we are in for a rough ride ahead. Even the agreed pace of SAFTA implementation has already slowed down. Only two of the four subsidiary agreements for SAFTA implementation are ready to be signed in the coming summit. The first one to be signed relates to promotion and protection of capital investment within the SAARC region. The second one is for mutual cooperation of SAARC nations in fiscal administration. But no one can tell when the relevant expert committees will be able to finalise the other two agreements, one on the establishment of a SAARC Arbitration Authority and the other on a mechanism to avoid double taxation. Meanwhile, the engine of bilateral negotiations between India and Pakistan, and also that of negotiations between India and Bangladesh, are both failing to pick up steam. Stalled civil war conditions in Sri Lanka as well as in Nepal have left them largely incapacitated, in the former case further dispirited by the tsunami disaster. The Maldives is still reeling from the tsunami. Other than on trade issues, Pakistan appears to be getting nowhere in its agenda of bilateral talks with India. Apart from the Kashmir dispute, it has now developed another serious difference with India over structural intervention and diversion of flows from a Sindh tributary upstream. Bilateral talks between Bangladesh and India on the water-sharing issue of Teesta and other common rivers are floundering too. In addition, India's mega-project of river-linking for a national water-grid to supply western and southern arid zones from eastern Himalayan rivers hangs as a Damocles? sword over the head of Bangladesh. On the matter of implementation of the Indira-Mujib pact for border delineation and return of enclaves, a long wait of thirty years has yielded nothing yet for Bangladesh. The issue of South Talpatti and marine boundary determination between India and Bangladesh has still not been addressed. And at the delineated borders, the Indian Border Security Force sentries from watch-towers or from behind the barbed wire fence are often shooting and killing frontier inhabitants of Bangladesh like game-birds in the name of deterring illegal cross-border traffic. On top of that, sporadic attempts to push in Bangla-speaking Indian residents into Bangladesh surreptitiously have been resumed by the BSF as a regular practice of late. Indeed, it is only in trade relations that Bangladesh is getting some satisfaction from India by patient and protracted negotiations. Of the seven SAARC countries, Bhutan is the only country, locked as it is within land boundaries and currency regime controlled by India, that remains happy in mountainous seclusion with its very thin population and ample resources. It is no wonder that India, as the core country of the SAARC region and as an aspirant for high status as a power centre in the evolving multi-polar world of tomorrow, will have its own peculiar game to play in the SAARC process. But a wary perception is dawning on its neighbours that perhaps that game will be played in hostile superiority rather than in benign cooperation. India seems to have a game plan that may degrade if not destabilise the smaller nation-states of South Asia by covert and overt exercise of Indian might in military, economic and mind-invasion sectors. Covert signals for Bangladesh are even more ominous. Psychological warfare waged against Bangladesh in the world media to brand it as a 'cocoon' of Islamic terror, appears to have been on hold over the last few months in anticipation of the SAARC summit camaraderie. It has been resumed with a bang ahead of the rescheduled Dhaka summit. Bangladesh has been stained with a question mark for harbouring what in media hype has become the 'Bangla Bhai' scare from Jagrata Janata's activity, as the cradle for 'the next Islamic revolution' in a craftily assembled dissertation by New Yorker Elija Grisold. Containing a string of hackneyed old stories of misinformation and disinformation and disproved allegations, the article was published in the Sunday Magazine of the New York Times on January 23, and circulated worldwide by the Press Trust of India under the title 'Fundamentalist groups gain strength in Bangladesh'. It was also put on the website by the Indian network New Kerala under the title 'Bangladesh fast becoming a Talibanised state'. In Pakistan, a newspaper called Daily Times quoted the story to suggest that 'a former Bangladeshi Taliban militant is out to transform Bangladesh into a Taliban state'. In Bangladesh, daily Prothom Alo reproduced the whole article under a front page spread in its January 25 issue. Amongst the many questionable 'expert' opinions quoted, the article also refers to confidential reports of the Indian Secret Service. The government of Bangladesh in a verbal rejoinder on January 25 termed the article 'unfortunate, one-sided and politically motivated', since Bangladesh is known for its long history of 'democratic' spirit and religious 'tolerance'. The picture of religious 'zeal' leading to violent conflicts in one village is but an isolated case, 'one in some ninety thousand villages'. A number of Bangladeshi newspapers on the same day orchestrated a story of what local police say was possibly a violent conflict over material interests coloured as a political confrontation in the same village. It has resulted, according to the police, in the unsubstantiated complaint of an attempt on the life of a Union Council chairman, the death of one of his associates by gunfire, and the death by beating of three Jagrata Janata activists in the hands of his supporters. A large crowd of Jagrata Janata supporters in the village gathered thereafter to pelt the police with brickbats for 'inaction' in prosecuting the killers of the three Jagrata Janata men. The police in turn arrested and prosecuted sixty-six of them under Sections 143/353/332 and 34 of CrPc for breach of order. On the same day, Bangladeshi newspapers published reports from their Kolkata correspondents that demands to punish Bangladesh were voiced by Indian speakers and some Bangladeshi expatriate non-Muslim delegates in an 'international' conference attended by a French journalist and briefly by Taslima Nasreen, the self-exiled Bangladeshi writer. The demands included economic blockade of Bangladesh by India, other (military?) forms of Indian pressure to be brought upon Bangladesh to accommodate 'two crore' fugitives of Bangladeshi origin in India in a chunk of territory to be ceded for that purpose. The coincidence of the three-pronged propaganda drives must be deliberate. Personally I had an unsettling experience due to the undercurrent of tension in Indo-Bangla relations. In the third week of January, I was invited to an Indo-Bangladesh dialogue for what was projected in the media as 'second-track diplomacy' sponsored by the Centre for Policy Dialogue and financed by the Ford Foundation. My wife on her own decided to have a tourist trip to North-west India and we planned to spend Eid-ul-Azha holidays together in New Delhi after the conference. I applied for my visa on January 13, as the validity of my earlier visa to visit Delhi for the same purpose had expired. My agent was told that three days would be required for clearance of the visa as my profession was given as 'journalism'. On the 16th, the clearance did not come. My wife left for India on the 17th, as did other delegates to the conference in Delhi. The sponsors changed my ticket to travel on the following day as they said the High Commission officials had assured them that clearance would be expedited. Professor Rehman Sobhan, the principal sponsor, phoned me from Delhi for two consecutive days and told me that the matter had been taken up at the top level of the Indian Foreign Office, and I need not worry about the visa. On the morning of the 19th however, he phoned me to say that the labyrinth of India bureaucracy had frustrated all his attempts to get me to Delhi even for the concluding session of the dialogue the next day, but he was kind enough to add that the ticket his office had provided would remain at my disposal if I would avail myself of it later to meet my wife in Delhi. But as I was preparing to go myself for the visa to the India High Commission, which I thought was being delayed, not denied, my attention was drawn in the Press Club to a report dated January 18 despatched by BSS in Delhi and published in several dailies in Dhaka on January 19. It said: Senior Bangladeshi columnist and chairman of the Press Institute of Bangladesh (PIB), Sadeq Khan, has been denied Indian visa, Indian External Affairs Ministry spokesman Navej Sama said today while replying to questions during a news briefing. Asked whether Khan was denied visa as reported by the Bangladesh press, Sama said that Sadeq Khan had been denied a visa. When asked the reason, Sama would say nothing more than 'his antecedents are not good'. Sadeq Khan, who was scheduled to take part in the ongoing talks here between the two neighbouring countries titled 'Indo-Bangladesh Dialogue,' could not go to attend it. The dialogue, hosted by the India International Centre (ICC), remained closed to the press apart from the concluding session set for tomorrow. Sama also said that India was in favour of 'free movement of journalists in the neighbouring countries including Bangladesh'. He said, 'Bangladesh has been denying visas to Indian journalists. Very recently some very senior Indian journalists have been denied Bangladeshi visas.' Before the publication of the above despatch, no news had in fact appeared in the Bangladesh press at all about the delay or denial of my visa application by the Indian High Commission, whose officials were correct and polite in their dealings. Being a septuagenarian veteran who had participated in the language movement and the Liberation War and the democracy movement against the Ershad regime, apart from my journalistic and cultural involvement, I remain proud of my antecedents, unruffled by the black mark publicly given me by the Indian Foreign Office spokesman. The Bangladesh Foreign Ministry, on its part, dismissed the comments of the Indian Foreign office spokesman, terming them 'sweeping and regrettable'. Foreign ministry records show that some 200 Indian journalists visited Bangladesh in 2004 and 116 in 2003. This year, the foreign ministry has already received 82 applications from Indian journalists wishing to cover the upcoming 13th SAARC Summit in Dhaka during February 6-7. Dhaka, however, has not yet received the particulars of the 40 Indian journalists scheduled to accompany Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Let us hope the matter will end there. http://www.weeklyholiday.net/front.html#4 __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Meet the all-new My Yahoo! - Try it today! http://my.yahoo.com ------------------------ Yahoo! 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