CALCUTTA, 22 February 2005 — A major test for India-Bangladesh relations is on the cards. On Feb. 25, Golap Baruah alias Anup Chetia will be released from a Dhaka jail. New Delhi is dying to get Chetia extradited. But will Dhaka oblige?
Very unlikely. Chetia is one of India’s most wanted men. One of the founders and general secretary of the banned United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), Chetia was arrested in Dhaka with a fake passport and satellite telephone in 1997.
India has been demanding his deportation for eight years. But Dhaka refuses to deliver the ULFA chief on one ground or the other.
There is every likelihood that Chetia will go scot-free after his release —like Sanjit Deb Burman, another top separatist leader from India’s insurgency-wracked northeast, who was jailed in Bangladesh. He vanished after his release, much to India’s disappointment.
India-Bangladesh relations, already plagued by long-standing mistrust of each other’s intentions, is now in tatters after New Delhi’s refusal to attend a South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit in Dhaka from Feb. 6 to 8. India cited the law and order situation in Bangladesh to stay away.
Bilateral ties nosedived during Bharatiya Janata Party rule when New Delhi looked at its Muslim neighbor through a sectarian prism. The return of the Congress party to power in New Delhi in mid-2004 was cautiously welcomed by Dhaka. Expectations rose last month when India’s Home Minister Shivraj Patil vehemently criticized BJP members of Parliament for giving a communal color to illegal migration from Bangladesh. Much to everybody’s surprise, Dhaka even signed a tripartite agreement between India, Myanmar and Bangladesh for laying a pipeline through Bangladesh for transporting natural gas from Myanmar to eastern India.
But it’s back to square one after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s refusal to fly to Dhaka for the seven-nation SAARC summit. Although India cited developments in Bangladesh and Nepal to stay away, Dhaka took it as an insult. Dhaka is now unlikely to hand over Chetia. And it just might renege on the gas pipeline pledge.
Foreign policy and strategic affairs experts say that the bitterness and distrust marring India-Bangladesh relations is mutual. One of Dhaka’s biggest grouse is that Indian paramilitary forces kill Bangladeshis civilians like “birds and rabbits” if they strayed by mistake into Indian territory. The cold-blooded killings have figured at foreign minister-level talks but to no avail.
“Clearly, New Delhi’s objective is to terrorize and intimidate Bangladeshis into submission by any means,” said retired Maj. Gen. Syed Ibrahim, who heads Dhaka’s Center for Strategic and Peace Studies.
Aside from India’s sheer size and nuclear, military and economic muscle, Bangladesh’s fears are compounded by geography: India’s borders encircle it on the east, north and west. According to Gen. Ibrahim, the ratio of Indian and Bangladeshi security forces deployed along the 4,000-km border is 2.5:1, and the overwhelming numerical superiority seems to have given India’s Border Security Force the license to gun down dozens of innocent Bangladeshis every year while ignoring earnest appeals to halt the killings.
India accuses Bangladesh of harboring northeastern rebels and helping Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) spies to penetrate the border area for subversive operations. Dhaka’s cordial relations with Pakistan is unacceptable to New Delhi.
Two years ago, Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf paid a long visit to Bangladesh much to India’s disconcert. And if Indian newspapers — which often run anti-Bangladesh propaganda fed them by security agencies — are to be believed, Gen. Musharraf used his visit to forge covert military ties with Bangladesh and authorize the ISI to operate from Bangladeshi soil and attack targets in India.
But a more balanced commentator, like former Indian Foreign Secretary J.N. Dixit who died recently, wrote: “India looms large as a threat and Bangladesh has, therefore, started cultivating Musharraf to counterbalance it.”
Dhaka insists that BJP used extremists like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad to turn ordinary Indians against Bangladeshis. According to Dhaka, BJP had a game plan for rebuilding the “subcontinental India” that existed during British colonial rule by annexing territories from the Khyber Pass to Chittagong.
Even doves in the Bangladeshi establishment believe that relations with New Delhi can be normalized only if India sheds its belligerence, domineering attitude and big-brotherly arrogance and tries to understand Bangladeshi concerns.
The crux of the problem, according to neutral observers, is that India prides itself on helping give birth to Bangladesh — and expects eternal gratitude. “There is no doubt that New Delhi is neglecting Bangladesh because of its obsession with Pakistan,” said analyst Rajat Ray of the Indian Bengali daily Anand Bazar Patrika. “Indian foreign policy is becoming increasingly Pakistan-centric at the cost of neighbors like Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. “Even Afghanistan seems to matter more to India these days than Bangladesh,” Rajat said.
Security experts like Gen. Ibrahim say that New Delhi expects Bangladesh simply to fall in line without question. Two potential weapons in New Delhi’s arsenal, he believes, are India’s control over the River Ganges flowing into Bangladesh and the ability to restart tribal insurgency in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, which claimed an estimated 25,000 lives until 1997.
“India helped the rebels with cash, guns and training from 1975 to 1997 when the Bangladesh government signed a peace treaty with the insurgents,” he said. “India has the resources — and the inclination — to kick-start a rebellion all over again.”
