India's Relationship with Bangladesh Improves

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

India’s highly-charged quarrels with Pakistan have rarely eased up over the decades since partition in 1947. The two countries have fought a number of wars, the last a brief one in 1999. 

But political differences with Bangladesh have been less acute. After all, were it not for Delhi’s intervention and defeat of the Pakistani army in 1971, Bangladesh would never have achieved independence. 

The Bengalis of what was East Pakistan, though constituting more than half the population of the country, were treated as poor relations by Pakistan’s rulers, all of whom were in West Pakistan. 

They were under-represented in the military and bureaucracy, and received less government attention from far-off Islamabad, some 2,000 kilometres to the west, with India in between.

The politics of exclusion and the economics of inequality finally came to a head in a campaign for sovereignty, under Sheik Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League.

India provided massive aid to the country after its independence in the 1970s, when Congress Party leader Indira Gandhi was prime minister of India.

Things have changed since then, especially with the arrival of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rule in India. The BJP is a Hindu nationalist party and Bangladesh, while not perceived as a threat in the same manner as Pakistan, is nonetheless the third-largest Muslim country in the world.

One major issue has been illegal immigration from Bangladesh into the neighbouring Indian states of Assam, Tripura and West Bengal, whose people have feared becoming minorities in their own entities.

The BJP claimed that the Congress party when in power had done little about this for fear of losing the support of the Indian Muslim electorate.

After 2001, the BJP also tried to frame Bangladesh as a refuge for insurgent groups, including al-Qaeda and other Islamists, who wished to target India.

When the BJP won India’s election last year, the current Bangladeshi government was worried, because the ruling Awami League had been close to the rival Congress Party.

But in June Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Bangladesh in order to improve relations. He described terrorism as an “enemy of humanity” and praised the country’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina (the daughter of the country’s founder, Sheik Mujibur), for combating it at home.

They agreed to step up security ties, with Hasina saying both governments reiterated their commitment to a “zero-tolerance” policy on extremism.

Bangladesh has seen a spike in terrorism in recent years. Earlier this year, two atheist bloggers, Avijit Roy and Washiqur Rahman, were hacked to death in Dhaka, the capital, by Islamist radicals. 

The Jamaat-e-Islami Party retains significant pockets of support and has managed to instigate major strikes and violent protests across the country at times.

But Hasina has refused to be cowed by threats, barring religious parties from using Islam as a political tool. 

On her watch, the Supreme Court three years ago restored Bangladesh’s founding status as a secular rather than Islamic republic.