JYOTI MALHOTRA
Column in `The Daily Star', Bangladesh
March 2007
The world’s largest democracy, India, is shedding its distaste for military regimes.
New Delhi’s newly pragmatic turn has been confirmed with off-the-record praise for the Army-backed political revolution currently sweeping Bangladesh. For the record, Dhaka now follows Yangon (or Naypitaw, as Myanmar’s new capital in the back of the Burmese beyond is called) in India’s list of military calling cards.
Indeed, concern for whether General Pervez Musharraf will don his uniform or campaign in civvies when elections are held in Pakistan sometime later this year, is already wearing thin.
The old morality mantra in South Block -- where the Prime Minister’s Office as well as the ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defence are located – has been replaced with a spanking, new realism. It asks not whether high-sounding principles are good for your country, but what this country can do in the promotion of your national interest.
Presiding over this shift in both policy and national temperament is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, even when he defers to Sonia Gandhi’s political instinct for the poor. Since the prime minister’s instinct is much more right-wing, he seems much more comfortable with the George Bush Republican model that declares, lets do business tonight.
Bangladesh is a classic case in point. When the Army in Dhaka took control of the rapidly deteriorating political situation in January, New Delhi reacted predictably by hoping that the people would be allowed to exercise their democratic right in a free and fair election as soon as possible.
Barely a month later, as Foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee prepared to go to Dhaka, New Delhi signalled to Fakhruddin Ahmed’s Army-backed new caretaker government that it was prepared to invite Ahmed – and not President Iajuddin – to the SAARC summit in Delhi in April, even if he wasn’t an elected leader.
Mukherjee’s flying visit in February was notable for one other thing. He may not have formally met Bangladesh army chief Lt Gen. Moyeen U. Ahmed, but a couple of generals in uniform made it a point to attend every official meeting.
Indeed, it was India’s high commissioner to Dhaka Pinak Chakraborty’s meeting with the army chief, one day before the foreign minister’s visit, that set the stage for the expression of the new pragmatism. It was at this meeting that the train service from Kolkata to Dhaka was finalised – a train that will now make its first journey on April 14, Bengali new year.
Diplomats on both sides recalled that the train service has been on the cards only for 15 years, since 1992, and that even the so-called, pro-India Awami League party of Sheikh Hasina, in power from 1996-2001, had not been able to swing this popular, cross-border measure.
Over the weeks, as contact between the Indian government and Dhaka’s military headquarters grew and grew -- on the sidelines of the public cleansing of Bangladesh’s public life, that has touched a new high last week with the arrest of none other than Tarique Rahman, son of former PM Khaleda Zia and considered to be the most powerful man in Bangladesh until the army took over two months ago -- the generals began to speak a language that New Delhi had been waiting and waiting to hear.
For a start, they said, terrorism and insurgency was a bad thing, and insurgent groups – whether or not they were anti-India and had taken refuge in Bangladesh’s northern areas – could not be good for the country.
Secondly, since the character of any country was judged by the treatment of its minorities, Bangladesh had a duty and responsibility to protect its rapidly diminishing Hindu population, who had stayed loyal despite two partitions of the mother country. All Bangladesh’s minorities, they said, had a right to live securely.
They Army-backed caretaker government also sought to push the relationship with New Delhi to a totally new trajectory, pointing out that a political fillip was needed. The Kolkata-Dhaka railway line could lead the way, while trade, Manmohan Singh’s chosen diplomatic manifesto, could make way for the flag.
In fact, India has already promised it will look at selling power to Bangladesh from its eastern grid – a matter as simple as reconnecting electricity stations and grid exchanges, for eg between Murshidabad and Pabna, a few kms afar, but a world apart.
We are a unique army, the Bangladesh generals said to New Delhi again and again, we are not like Myanmar or Thailand. We are here to stay. We are not here to ape the politicians. We will clean up the system, however long it takes.
It’s a message New Delhi seems to have clearly bought. In the wake of the decision to run the cross-border train service, the Indian government has even invited the Bangladesh army chief to visit India.
Clearly, too, India’s pragmatism takes strength from the army-backed political revolution currently sweeping Bangladesh. If the army can sweep such a strong broom at home, goes the argument, it can surely help weed out anti-Indian criminal and terrorist elements that have made Bangladesh their home.
Still, the pragmatism has been in the making for a while, and cuts across ideological belief. It was the previous BJP government that knocked the bottom out of India’s non-aligned urge, a concept now as flat as yesterday’s coffee and as out of date as the Cold War. Former PM A B Vajpayee’s man-of-all-seasons Brajesh Mishra believed it was in India’s national interest to move on and make peace, whether with Pakistan or China.
Bangladesh was a prize that eluded the BJP, but the time may now have come for the Congress to establish a new deal with Dhaka. Mukherjee’s visit was intended to break the ice, to signal that bridges can be built – not only over the Rangchannar – that New Delhi would go the extra mile to do business with anyone who wanted to do business with it.
What is more, this new thinking also throws up brand new opportunities for political friendships. For one, its cuts the long accumulated slack between India and Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League. Those who remember the tumult of 1971 point out that Indira Gandhi also supported Mujibur Rahman in the hope that India would have a permanent friend in Dhaka.
And while this may have been generally true, New Delhi feels it is also time to get rid of the unnecessary antagonism this perception has evoked in Khaleda’s BNP. Significantly, it also seems as if the BNP itself may be turning, with an influential section now believing that the party hostility with India should transform itself into some sort of partnership with Delhi.
Perhaps the Indian pragmatism takes heart from India’s newfound partnership with America. But even as the world’s strongest power is increasingly bloodied in the Middle East, New Delhi feels that it ought to take responsibility at least for its own neighbourhood.
The Indian intervention in favour of the people’s revolution last April in Nepal, and against the monarchy, is a case in point. In Myanmar, New Delhi swings in favour of the military junta – and against Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru’s close friend Aung San – because Naypitaw promises help with insurgency and terrorism.
In Bangladesh, India believes, if the army can now broker a domestic, political peace as well as usher in a new bilateral partnership, then so be it.
ENDS
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment