The surprise caller sounded worried. He was a childhood friend with Bangladeshi roots who had lived for 60 or 70 years in England, from where he was calling. Although not an Awami League loyalist, he was concerned about reports from Dhaka after Sheikh Hasina’s fall suggesting that Bangladesh would be renamed ‘Republic of East Pakistan’.
That troubled him because he understood that the subcontinent’s struggle for stable survival is between rationalism and religious fanaticism. Tahawwur Rana’s surrender might deal a blow to Pakistani jihadis but thanks to Delhi’s ham-handedness, India’s secular option in Bangladesh appears to have dwindled to a single woman in hiding. Perhaps this would not have happened if India itself had not neglected secularism for a tilt that recalls Pakistan’s bias and encourages hotheads and extremists in Bangladesh.
Prejudice feeds on prejudice. The complexity of relations between India and Bangladesh defies any formulation in the Peace of Westphalia. Being at war with its own past, Bangladesh turns to yesterday’s battles whenever it feels cornered. There were rumours once about Ziaur Rahman replacing the national anthem, “Amar Sonar Bangla”, with Shahnaz Rahmatullah’s stirring “Prothom Bangladesh”. His successor, Hussain Muhammad Ershad, talked of giving the military a constitutional role in governance as in Indonesia.
Such rumours betrayed a desperate urge to forge a new Bangladeshi identity that distanced the independent republic from undivided Bengal. Zia indicated the rationale when he amended the Constitution to call his fellow citizens Bangladeshis instead of Bengalis. “If we want to achieve national development and progress we must speak of Bangladeshi [not Bengali] nationalism,” he declared. The terminological hair-splitting matches the verbal one-upmanship of Indian politicians who pretend to have upgraded ‘Look East’ to ‘Act East’, make a fetish of ‘Neighbourhood First’ and treat concepts like ‘atmanirbhar’, ‘viksit’ and ‘swachh’ as their personal invention.
It is tempting to trace the fear of overlapping identities to Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s 1971 comment that if language was the only criterion, “Muslim Bangla” (as he called East Pakistan) should rejoin West Bengal whereas if religion was the issue, the province’s only future was in Pakistan. Whether a Bengali Muslim is first a Bengali or a Muslim is still a moot point with some and explains the posturing of Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Muslim lad in Mymensingh who had not ventured beyond Bengal mentioning dates which he had never set eyes (or teeth!) on when asked to name his favourite fruit.
There could be a particular reason for this obsession. Tathagata Roy, the Bharatiya Janata Party politician, quotes Rafiuddin Ahmed, a renowned dental pioneer who happened to be a Bengali Muslim and who served in B.C. Roy’s cabinet, as writing in his book, The Bengal Muslims 1871-1906: A Quest for Identity, that “a dominant feature of the 19th century Islamisation was the attempted rejection of virtually all that was Bengali in the life of a Muslim as being incompatible with the ideas and principles of Islam.” A Bangladeshi politician once confessed that his choice of ancestor lay between Arab pirate and Namasudra convert. Moreover, ever since ‘Ekushey February’, Bangladeshis have scornedWest Bengal’s submissiveness which, they said, had left the linguistic battle to Tamils.
Muhammad Yunus might gloat on being the “only guardian of the ocean” but a nominated functionary cannot seriously expect a hard-headed realist like Xi Jinping to treat India’s “landlocked” Northeast as “an extension of the Chinese economy” to be looted and plundered. However, there is nothing in the game of diplomatic tit for tat forbidding Yunus to try to practise a little clumsy blackmail on Narendra Modi while pandering to Xi’s sense of importance. India needs infinite patience to cope with such pranksters; also, a willingness not to take advantage of the insecurity that underlies their folie de grandeur.
What Muchkund Dubey, one of India’s most perceptive diplomatists, who was foreign secretary and also high commissioner to Bangladesh, called the “small-neighbour-big-neighbour syndrome” in a speech to the Dacca Rotary Club would have been a daunting obstacle to close cooperation even without being hedged in with formidable personal and psychological obstacles. It isn’t easy to separate the wheat of genuine grievances from the chaff of official propaganda but one cannot disagree with Humphry House’s view that India’s most exalted officers of State are no more than what the East India Company called “Writers”, whence the still extant Writers’ Buildings. When House came to Calcutta to teach in 1936, the merest trifle was “decided in a special office in Lord Sinha Road”. If things have changed, it is probably because the bureaucratic hierarchy in the world’s largest democracy, the universal Vishwaguru of our fond imagination, ordains that the Lord Sinha Road outfit report to Higher Authority in New Delhi where all major decisions are taken. The media isn’t exempt from the rigours of officialdom.
There may be some truth in Yunus’s ingenious explanation of attacks on Bangladeshi Hindus but it’s also true, as Dubey pointed out in the same speech, that Dhaka keeps such a close watch on everything that happens in India that “whatever step is taken is regarded either as a deliberate, pre-planned and conscious effort by India to dominate or having thepotential of assuming a form of domination.” Plans for a portrait of Fazlul Haq in Calcutta’s legislative assembly caused a flutter in Bangladeshi dovecotes where Epar Bangla Opar Bangla opponents saw it as a reminder of the grim vision of Yeats’s “The Second Coming” — “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” And not only in India. In spite of his impeccable pre-Independence family credentials, the Workers Party of Bangladesh president, Rashed Khan Menon, was viewed with some reserve in certain circles because close association with Hindus had made him squeamish about beef. So anxious has Delhi been to avoid giving offence that there was not a word of disapproval when Sheikh Mujibur Rahman discarded one democratic norm after another on the road to Baksal (Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League) authoritarianism.
It’s a good sign therefore that Yunus went to some trouble to seek a meeting with Modi. That Modi responded, however belatedly and tepidly, was also welcome. No doubt the panoply of a full-dress airport reception, flags and outriders, residence in Rashtrapati Bhavan and a presidential banquet would have flattered Dhaka but even an informal exchange on the sidelines of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation in Bangkok sent an appropriate message to the seven BIMSTEC countries and created an opening for more substantive interaction.
Curtailing that interaction in any way would be like cutting one’s nose to spite one’s face. India needs Bangladesh for trade, transit, raw materials, cultural ballast and security. Pakistani ships using Chittagong port, Yunus’s meetings with Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, or a concert in Dhaka by a well-known Pakistani singer, Rahat Fateh Ali Khan, are normal variants of the export transhipment through India that has just been rudely stopped. Would India prefer the other variant of an influx into Colombo airport of thousands of Pakistani troops in mufti who changed into uniform before flying to Dhaka when Yahya Khan ordered Operation Searchlight?
With Pakistan on its western flank, India cannot afford the additional irritant of a ‘Republic of East Pakistan’ in the east. Time is not on anyone’s side. As Dubey warned, bilateral relations “cannot remain stagnant for long without getting worse”. Adapting Mahua Moitra, just because India is hurtling towards Hindutva, doesn’t mean that the sane world must convert to nibbling dhokla and chanting ‘Jai Shri Ram’.
