Time to bolster ties with Dhaka
India must play an honest broker on the Rohingya issue
Bangladesh may prove the most difficult balancing act of Indian diplomacy this year. The stakes for India go beyond just geographical proximity and international standing. Prime Minister Narendra Modi rightly seized a small opportunity to hold an “informal” summit with Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in West
Bengal this week. An increased degree of engagement between New Delhi and Dhaka is needed in the coming months.
The turnaround in Indo-bangladeshi relations is arguably India’s most important foreign policy accomplishment of the past five years. If the Northeast today is relatively peaceful and Pakistani-sponsored terrorist activity in mainland India is subdued, the overwhelming reason is that Bangladesh is no longer the haven for militants that it once was. India’s ambitious plans to build connectivity with the Northeast and Myanmar are feasible only because of Dhaka’s acquiescence to such plans.
The Sheikh Hasina government has been at the forefront of this changed relationship. But she faces a difficult year. Much of her conversation with Modi was about the domestic backlash over the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees who have been driven out of Myanmar into Bangladesh. Even with the jailing of her main political opponent, Khaleda Zia, she will face a difficult re-election. A close election in Bangladesh means violent street politics — and subsequent threats of sanctions by European importers of Bangladeshi textiles.
India needs to be quietly proactive if Bangladesh is to remain the anchor of its “neighbourhood first” policy. It should seek to bridge the gap between Bangladesh and Myanmar on the Rohingya issue. West Bengal’s argument that the Teesta needs to be subsumed in a larger water-sharing understanding covering the entire Ganga-brahmaputra delta region is not without merit and requires a larger engagement. Finally, India should underline to the rest of the world that Bangladesh, is a social and developmental success story in the region and, therefore, deserves to be given a fair amount of leeway.