On 13 January, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina had just returned home from New Delhi to face a barrage of accusations that she had "sold out" to India over a raft of concessions on bilateral issues. The main opposition was denouncing the joint communiqué; the extreme right was marching on Dhaka's streets. And then into the fray jumped Virender Sehwag, captain of the touring Indian cricket team, raising nationalist hackles by describing his opponents as an "ordinary" side that lacked the quality to take 20 Indian Test wickets – that, too, in a pre-match press conference. While most cricket-loving Bangladeshis knew the remarks to be brutally accurate, they saw the delivery as loaded with a haughty derision that seems to be a regular feature of New Delhi's dealings with its smaller neighbours.
Then again, there is perhaps no good season for mutual concessions in Indo-Bangla relations, even without the damage that cricketers' insults can do. Prime Minister Hasina undertook a fierce political gamble when she headed to Delhi in the middle of last month. Besides mutually discussing security, movement of peoples and trade were the highlights of the visit. What stands out is that Bangladesh has granted India access to the key Mongla and Chittagong ports, on the country's coast. While Bangladesh has expressed its wish to grant similar access to Nepal and Bhutan, the joint communiqué that emerged from the summit gives no indication that India has agreed to grant those countries the transit they need to enjoy this concession. The issue of transit alone has cast a dark shadow over bilateral relations for much of the past decade, despite the fact that both countries stand to gain significantly from the resulting increase in trade and infrastructure development. While New Delhi has repeatedly indicated that progress on transit must precede progress on other outstanding bilateral issues, Bangladesh had held out thus far, knowing this was its strongest bargaining chip to extract concessions on issues such as water-sharing and trade.
New Delhi would have known well that the Bangladeshi prime minister would be expected to return with concrete and reciprocal concessions in exchange for the transit she granted. And yet, Prime Minister Hasina came merely with a clutch of vague assurances on the issues that top Bangladesh's agenda. The concessions she did bring back (among them a USD 1 billion line of credit and a 250-megawatt power purchase from India's national grid), while significant, were not nearly reciprocal to the transit facility to the ports. Some in Bangladesh see this as the typical apathy with which New Delhi treats Bangladeshi concerns, while others have underscored the need for pragmatism and unilateral gestures for a change in foreign relations in the neighbourhood.
The business lobby and economic think tanks have by and large lauded the transit agreement, and justifiably so, for the trade and employment it will likely generate in Bangladesh. But the praise is qualified with the observation that India needs to do more to remove barriers on Bangladeshi imports. And while the latest set of pacts will undoubtedly be welcomed if they translate into concrete investment and jobs, blogger and activist Asif Saleh, in a recent piece indicative of the public mood, warned that the onus will now be on New Delhi. "[I]f it does nothing to remove the threats of upstream dam projects," Saleh wrote, "or to stop the killing of civilians by Indian paramilitary forces at the border, while the trade imbalance between the country continues in India's favour and the security rhetoric continues to reflect Indian perceptions and prejudices and not Bangladeshi reality, there will be a heavy political price to pay."