At the third foreign minister level talks between Bangladesh and India scheduled for September 20, Dhaka will press for a specific time frame from India to sign the Teesta agreement and ratify the land boundary agreement.
The meeting is considered significant because it will be the first official meeting between Foreign Minister AH Mahmood Ali and his Indian counterpart, Sushma Swaraj, a stalwart of the BJP, which assumed power in India in May.
The foreign minister will fly to New Delhi on September 18 and pay courtesy calls on Indian President Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi and meet other Indian officials during the visit.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her Indian counterpart will also meet on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York on September 27.
Foreign Secretary M Shahidul Haque and several other secretaries will accompany him. It is expected that they will meet with their counterparts on the sidelines of the foreign ministers’ meeting.
“We want to have the type of relationship in which a secretary can pick up the phone and talk to his counterpart if needed,” said an official of the foreign ministry.
The ministers will discuss a series of bilateral issues including basin management, border killings, trade, energy, connectivity, security, sub-regional cooperation, and people-to-people contacts.
“The Teesta water sharing agreement, land boundary agreement (LBA) ratification and implementation, and border killing issues will be raised at the meeting,” said a senior official of the foreign ministry.
Bangladesh has long waited for Teesta and LBA and will ask the Indian side to provide a time frame to deliver on its promises, he said.
Bangladesh and India were scheduled to sign the Teesta water sharing agreement in 2011 when former Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh visited Dhaka but it was not signed due to a strong resistance from West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
About holding Joint River Commission meeting, a foreign affairs ministry official said it would be held after the foreign minister level talks.
Both countries signed the land boundary agreement in 1974 and Dhaka ratified it the same year but India has not. The Indian government placed a bill to amend the constitution to pave the way for the ratification of the LBA but it has not been concluded. “From the Indian perspective, the major issue is security and Bangladesh has addressed it properly,” the official said.
“Bangladesh soil will not be used against any country and Dhaka wants similar assurances from New Delhi.”
Anxiety has been growing after media reports about a Trinamool Congress leader funding Jamaat-e-Islam efforts to destabilise the Bangladesh government surfaced recently. India’s West Bengal state is ruled by Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress party.