Nitin A Gokhale
External Affairs Minister K. Natwar Singh’s three-day visit to Bangladesh over the weekend is the latest attempt by the two countries to repair a relationship that has reached a new low ever since Bangladesh was created in 1971.
The lowest point in recent times was the brutal murder of BSF Assistant Commander Jeevan Kumar at the hands of Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) in mid-April this year. In an eerie coincidence, 16 BSF personnel were brutally tortured, killed and paraded like pigs to slaughter exactly four years to date by the BDR after a similar border incident. One school of thought says rogue elements in the BDR, enraged at India’s decision to construct a border fence along major portions of the 4095 km of India-Bangladesh border thus impeding their income from smuggling, were behind Kumar’s murder. But hostilities in Bangladesh against India run much deeper than those triggered by some individuals for their pecuniary gains.
The impotence in the government in New Delhi is not limited to one party or coalition. In 2001 the NDA was in power; this time it is the UPA at the helm but curiously, on both occasions New Delhi’s response has been identical: lodge a routine protest with Dhaka and wait for time to heal the wounds. What’s worse, the present dispensation has gone ahead and told Bangladesh that it is willing to attend the SAARC summit at whatever time Dhaka feels convenient. Diplomacy at its best? Or plain and simple paralysis in the corridors of South Block? What drives India’s response to such pinpricks and insults from Bangladesh? We may never know but the fact remains that New Delhi has often treated its eastern borders much more casually than its western flank.
Nothing else can explain the lack of firmness in India’s policy towards Bangladesh. Despite a clutch of evidence that suggest that the establishment in Dhaka and especially the present regime under Prime Minister Khaleda Zia has hostile designs on India’s north eastern states, India has done precious little except make occasional noises. This despite the fact that:
• For over 15 years, India’s military establishment has talked about Bangladesh’s role in aiding and abetting militant groups from the north-east;
• For over a decade, India’s intelligence agencies have collected details about the role played by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in using Bangladesh as a base to foment trouble in the north-east;
• In 1998, the then Governor of Assam, a former army general, SK Sinha had articulated the long-held fear in Assam over unabated illegal migration from Bangladesh and its affect on the north-east.
India has time and again provided list of camps/shelters operated by Indian militant groups inside Bangladesh. On the very day that Jeevan Kumar was being tortured and killed, the Director General of Border Security Force RS Mooshahary was in Dhaka handing over a list of over 190 such camps to the BDR. Before that, in November 2004, an Indian delegation led by the Union Home Secretary had confronted Dhaka with a similar list. Dhaka however flatly denies their existence.
Scores of surrendering militants of various north eastern outfits such as United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), All Tripura Tigers Force (ATTF) or National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT) have documented the role of ISI in training and arming these outfits inside Bangladesh.
Simultaneously, it had started building other Islamic fundamentalist outfits in the region without letting its own operatives coming into the picture directly. On one of the rare occasions that some ISI sent its own men into Assam, they were caught in Guwahati in August 1999. The police also arrested twenty-seven other persons belonging to different Islamic militant groups. Nearly a year later, then Chief minister Prafulla Kumar Mahanta made a statement in the Assam Assembly detailing the extent of ISI’s penetration into Assam and its activities. The 16-page report identified the activities of the ISI mainly in the following areas:
• Promoting indiscriminate violence in the State by providing active support to local militant outfits.
• Creating new militant outfits along ethnic and communal lines by instigating ethnic and religious groups.
• Supply of explosives and sophisticated arms to various terrorist groups.
• Causing sabotage of oil pipelines and other installations, communication lines, railways and roads.
• Promoting fundamentalism and militancy among local Muslim youths by misleading them in the name of Jehad.
• Promoting communal tension between Hindu and Muslim citizens by way of false and highly inflammatory propaganda.
The Chief Minister’s Report further spoke of the ISI being involved in the provision of different passports for the ULFA Commander-in-Chief, Paresh Barua. Providing a facsimile of Paresh Barua’s passport, the report also revealed that the ULFA leader has been travelling to Karachi under the name of Kamaruddin Zaman Khan.
Finally, the report listed many new Islamic fundamentalist outfits that have come up in Assam in recent years.
This was in 2000. Since then, the Pakistani involvement has only grown in the north-east. Several incidents in the past five years and especially since May 2004 has only served to confirm the total control that
ISI exerts on north-east militant groups. This effort has been greatly boosted with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) assuming power in Dhaka in 2001. Dominated by policy-makers who advocate an anti-India line, Khaleda Zia’s government has been a silent abettor of the ULFA-NDFB-ATTF-NLFT-ISI nexus. Strangely, India has been squeamish about calling Bangladesh’s bluff, a fact which greatly irked MPs from the region as well as chief ministers.
In a memorandum to the then Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister LK Advani the North-East MPs’ Forum said in November 2003: “Across the party-lines, MPs from the region have developed a strong feeling that terrorism is North-east is not taken with due seriousness as in the western border of the country including that of J&K.” The memorandum was harsh on New Delhi’s dilly-dallying. “Being friendly with the countries bordering the North-east, we have tended to adopt an extra soft attitude, often underestimating the graveness of the situation,” it said.
In November last year, US Ambassador to India, David C. Mulford wrote identical letters to the Chief Ministers of Assam and Nagaland expressing his country’s sympathies for the victims of the bomb blasts that rocked Assam and Nagaland in October. On one level the letters were routine, part of normal condolences. But the hidden message in the missive was far more important. For the first time in recent decades, a top US official had deigned to comment upon insurgency in the north-east and more significantly offered the FBI’s expertise in identifying the culprits.
Why did it happen?
Simply because the US now believes that practitioners of Islamic terrorism have found a new home in Bangladesh and that they are being helped by Pakistan’s notorious Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to create trouble in India’s north-east by using indigenous militant groups taking shelter in Bangladesh.
India’s security-politico establishment has watched the rapid erosion of secular values in Bangladesh over the past decade with dismay. There is very little it can do about the changes inside Bangladesh but that the policy-makers in New Delhi have chosen to ignore the grave threats posed by Bangladesh to India’s national interests in the east is irritating and worrying. Often New Dehi has put forward the argument that Bangladesh is a trusted and valuable friend in the neighbourhood and that minor hitches should not be allowed to put a question mark on this relationship but Dhaka’s recent covert and overt actions against India do not support such assumption. Natwar Singh may have to be at his diplomatic best to bring a mid-course correction in the relationship between Dhaka and Delhi.
(The writer, Associate Editor of Tehelka—The People’s paper, has been a media practitioner in the north-east for the past 22 years)
