Charity, so goes the idiom, begins at home. Similarly, India’s quest for status as a key international power must begin in its own neighbourhood. The success of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to ensure the presence of US President Barack Obama as the chief guest during India’s Republic Day celebrations, may have been hailed by the Indian media as a diplomatic coup of sorts, but it would have made far more strategic sense for India had the honour gone to Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. And there are a good many reasons for that.
During her stint as prime minister since 2009, Hasina has sought to transform Bangladesh’s relations with India with the help of some game-changing decisions, the foremost being the security cooperation which saw the handing over of the entire top leadership of ULFA to India and a total halt to cross-border insurgency on the eastern border.
Hasina’s government has not only allowed transit through Bangladesh’s territory to carry overhead equipment for a power plant in Tripura, thereby reducing the transportation cost and time, it has also allowed movement of food grains along the same route from mainland India to the north-eastern Indian states.
Hasina has displayed immense patience and showed no rancour over India’s failing on its two major foreign policy deliverables for the last three years -- signing a pact for sharing of Teesta river water and implementing the land boundary agreement signed way back in 1974.
This is, despite the growing pressure back home, not only from her belligerent critics and right-wing opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party and fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami, but also from some within Hasina’s Awami League party and people supporting her. She has not allowed the non-signing of the Teesta deal and non-implementation of the LBA to affect ties with India, especially in the security and energy sectors where things are really looking up.
Hasina has stuck to her stance and come out as a statesman when it came to Bangladesh’s relations with India after the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government under Modi came to power in May of last year. As someone who has stayed in Bangladesh for five and a half years, I know what the popular perception -- right or wrong -- of most Bangladeshis is about BJP and Modi.
Bangladesh’s Liberation War had brought Hasina’s father Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi together as close friends. Mujib’s assassination in August 1975 and Hasina’s spending several years in India in view of the severe threat to her life back home has brought her very close to India, particularly the then ruling Congress party.
Both the AL and Congress are by and large left-of-the-centre parties and the relationship between their top leaderships goes back to more than four decades. Despite all this, Hasina was one of the few world leaders to welcome BJP’s winning the Lok Sabha elections and reach out to Modi through two quick letters and a telephone call. She realised it is in Bangladesh’s interest to stick to the course of close relations with India irrespective of who is in power in New Delhi and not to allow any anti-India sentiment to grow in her country over the Teesta and LBA deals and vitiate ties with India.
This is a refreshing break in Bangladesh’s political climate where a healthy and democratic debate has been encouraged since Hasina came to power in January 2009 about the benefits of close relations with India, instead of sliding into the temptation of opting for the easy option of whipping up the shrill anti-India propaganda -- as would be natural with BNP -- that had dominated the discourse for nearly 40 years, particularly when the AL was not in power.
One may find umpteen loopholes in the manner in which the Hasina government is ruling Bangladesh and is approaching the issue of corruption, but her commitment to secularism and fighting religious extremism remains unflinching. No country can look forward to a better future unless it comes to terms with its hoary past.
And the Hasina government has rightly decided to take to its logical conclusion to the trial of those who had not only opposed the emergence of independent Bangladesh but are guilty of genocide and war crimes during its war of independence. Hasina has succeeded where her father failed (by granting amnesty to those who did not want a liberated Bangladesh). The fundamentalist elements in Bangladesh had received strong support, covert and overt, and were freely used to work as a bulwark against the Awami League.
If India can go ahead and sign the Teesta treaty and the LBA, it may find Hasina more forthcoming in joining more initiatives to take bilateral relations to newer heights. In fact, implementation of the LBA can show to India’s other neighbours how a long-festering boundary and territorial dispute -- which is a legacy of the colonial rule -- can be sorted out without recourse to war.
Hasina is also very keen about several new ideas that are on paper about harnessing the huge water resources encompassing India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan and road and rail connectivity between these countries that can be a game-changer, ridding South Asia of being a laggard in the development indices.
The foreign policy section of BJP’s election manifesto has given top priority to India’s relations with its South Asian neighbours and said the party-led government would not allow its foreign policy reflexes to be dictated by super power politics. From all points of view, the relations between India and Bangladesh have all the potential of being a model in South Asia and that makes a compelling case why Hasina should have been invited to be the chief guest at India’s Republic Day parade.
True, Hasina is not a star head of government or state like Obama, but the search for international power status is not helped by show and symbolism. The Madison Square Garden and Melbourne Cricket Ground were fine, but the real challenge lies in India’s own backyard.
