When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh makes his much-awaited visit to Dhaka in early September, he needs to be alert to the polarised nature of Bangladesh politics. Through diplomatic initiatives led by Prime Minister Singh and his counterpart, Sheikh Hasina, the two economies have finally arrived at a point of coordination after nearly 50 years of bifurcation, particularly on trade and transport. But even as Prime Minister Hasina has gone out on a limb to improve relations with the giant neighbour, the challenge will be to carry along the entire Bangladeshi polity – and especially the sullen Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) of Begum Khaleda Zia – so that the advances made in trade, transit, development assistance and security cooperation are taken ahead beyond the present-day players.
In January 2010, a memorandum was signed between Dhaka and New Delhi. Under this, Bangladesh agreed to provide transit rights to India through its territory and also responded to security concerns to the satisfaction of India's national-security establishment (see 'Connectivity: the India-Bangladesh land bridge', February 2011). Now India needs to respond to what Dhaka desperately needs: the promise of adequate payment for transit through Bangladesh to reach the Indian Northeast, and the dropping of trade barriers so that the balance of trade – currently in New Delhi's favour – will correct itself. On the ground, beyond resolving the niggling border disputes, New Delhi must also put an end to the shootings at the frontier by the Border Security Force (BSF), which continue to kill innocent economic migrants and householders.
On the whole, the expected agreements between Dhaka and New Delhi are expected to push back the hostility that has kept commercial and infrastructural collaboration at bay since as far back as the 1965 India-Pakistan conflict. At that time, there was significant 'connectivity' between Indian and Bangladeshi (then East Pakistani) road, rail and river navigation. This hostility between what should theoretically have been the friendliest countries of Southasia (with the Indian support in the Liberation War of 1971) has been holding back progress not only in Bangladesh but in the Indian Northeast as well as West Bengal. It has also kept Nepal and Bhutan (and the Northeast) from accessing Bangladeshi ports, to provide healthy competition to those at Calcutta and Haldia. If New Delhi's political class can now look to India's long-term interests and rein in its sometimes rigid bureaucracy, and if Sheikh Hasina is successful in overriding kneejerk anti-Indianism – as looks likely – a new era of economic growth could well be in the offing in the Ganga-Brahmaputra (Padma-Jamuna) region.
Anti-Indianism