A Bangladeshi soldier patrols a busy Dhaka street. (File picture)

Dhaka, Feb. 18: All of Dhaka is waiting with bated breath to hear what external affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee will say when he arrives here tomorrow, the first visit by a senior Indian leader since emergency was imposed in this country last month.

Mukherjee will meet army chief Lt Gen. Moyeen U. Ahmed, the real power behind the throne of chief adviser Fakhruddin Ahmed, and Ahmed himself, a prime minister of sorts in today’s Bangladesh, as well as the two women around whom politics revolves in this country: the BNP’s Khaleda Zia and Awami League’s Sheikh Hasina.

Unfortunately, Mukherjee is having to cut short his day-long visit by a couple of hours, to be back home because Congress president Sonia Gandhi has summoned a meeting to deal with the Uttar Pradesh crisis.

“The story of missed opportunities over the years probably best explains the growing political indifference between India and Bangladesh,” says a respected newspaper editor in Dhaka.

As news of Mukherjee’s truncated visit sweeps through the city over radio and TV, the old, familiar feelings of hurt and resentment, both real and imaginary, manifest themselves. “From nine hours, your foreign minister has now reduced his Dhaka visit to seven hours,” says a student at Dhaka University, one of the oldest breeding grounds of political activism in South Asia.

Considering that Mukherjee is a native Bengali speaker, and the “mother language day”, in memory of those students who in 1952 died protesting the imposition of Urdu by Pakistan against their native Bengali, is being observed in Bangladesh only two days later, “it would have been nice if the Indian leader had found more time to be in Dhaka”, the student adds.

Translated: Big Brother India has little interest in the wholly unique battle for Bangladesh, currently being waged against corruption and in favour of democracy, by the ordinary citizens of this country.

Indeed, all the signs in Dhaka are that the army-backed current dispensation is extremely keen to do business with Delhi. In fact, in anticipation of Mukherjee’s visit, army chief Ahmed had a meeting with India’s high commissioner Pinak Chakraborty today.

While details of the meeting are not known, it is believed that both sides sought to put ties back on the rails. One Bangladeshi source, who has been travelling back and forth between Delhi and Dhaka, meeting the leadership in both cities, called it “constructive engagement”.

There is talk of India importing 2 million pieces of Bangladeshi garments, duty-free, for which Dhaka has been clamouring for a while. As of Delhi extending a $150-million loan to Dhaka. It is said that in keeping with the new-found jargon of economic connectivity across South Asia, Bengal and Delhi are now working on the feasibility of connecting the electricity grids between the two countries, say between Murshidabad and Pabna in Bangladesh.

However, crucial to these economic leaps of faith is the extent to which India will openly deal with the army-backed rule in Bangladesh.

The pragmatist school of thought in Delhi is that the army, today, represents a “golden opportunity” to return bilateral ties to the rails. So that when the political parties fight an election some two years or so down the line, any progress so far would be a fait accompli.

Clearly, Mukherjee’s all-important meetings tomorrow will indicate the direction, even though he is ostensibly coming to deliver the Saarc summit letter of invitation to President Iajuddin.

Like everything else in Indo-Bangla relations, however, there is a catch here too: while the letter will first be handed over to Iajuddin, the Bangladesh President is going to tell Mukherjee to actually invite chief adviser Fakhruddin Ahmed to Saarc.

That’s when Mukherjee will pull the other letter out of his other pocket. This one will be addressed to Fakhruddin Ahmed, a respected economist and World Bank leader, cut in the same mould as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.