The other side What does India want?

Ever since 1971, Bangladesh has been actively bending over backwards to thank, satisfy, and service India’s needs. The narrative of self-sacrificial Indian magnanimity that India very often likes to frame its stories of our bilateral relationship with them in, is utterly insulting, greatly demeaning, untrue, and heavily outdated.

It is now very much a mutually beneficial relationship where we provide to India in direct and indirect ways, much more than what it provides to us, and it’s been the case for many years. We have paid off our debt to India for 1971 a long time ago. The price we continue to pay for an ally in the fight for our freedom long won can’t be perpetual servitude.

The undercurrent of anti-Indian sentiments within Bangladesh isn’t the sum of all fears of our Muslim ruling class against what they feel is sanctimonious superiority of a majority Hindu nation imposing their will on us at any time they wish. It stems from the perceived lack of balance and respect in our relation with our most prominent neighbour.

I accept that some of the anti-Indianism stems in part from fear whipped up by true, disruptive, evil forces within our country wishing division and strife for political gain paid for by zero political capital and resulting from Cold War era alignments, but in truth it is more clear than any time in our history that a majority of this boiling cauldron of emotions within the people of Bangladesh is from the people recognising that Bangladesh always ends up with a bad bargain with anything we negotiate with India on, and the way our people are treated in general.

Tell me what other set of nations, in this modern world, claiming to have a special relationship, based on a long shared cultural heritage with each other, still kill and torture each others citizens on their borders regularly? Even in this dubious exchange, India has gotten away by doing far more to our citizens than we have theirs.

Lip service by India in recognising Bangladesh’s contribution to the Indian economy and our high priority in their list of neighbourly concerns, while flattering, never really materialises in anything of substance for us. It doesn’t even hold enough goodwill to stop torture and killing in the border zone of our brothers and sisters by their soldiers, let alone progress in other matters.

I recognise that we do, shamelessly, at times benefit from the minuscule, slowly activating financial aid here or a token gesture there, but nothing concrete has happened in our “special relationship” for more than a decade now.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s gestures to India are always welcoming (despite home-grown criticism against it), and I couldn’t agree more with her and our government’s overtures to New Delhi over the past decade because they are our largest neighbours with diplomatic clout worldwide, but when was the last time that India gave us a reason to cheer for it? Entertainment and cricket don’t count.

“Friendship to all and malice to none” is truly an honourable foreign policy punchline from our side, but India has yet to deliver on its promises to us that won’t make that punchline look like it’s forcibly abused constantly.

A diplomatic relationship is anything but a one-way street. The imbalances will always exist and in a relationship forged from blood and war, paranoia is a true enemy to lasting peace, so why isn’t India doing more? Why does India’s inability to deliver promises made to the Bangladeshi people four decades ago still linger in the cabinet behind excuses of internal political processes? We know India can deliver, yet it doesn’t.

The moderate secular voices and apologists of the post 1971 “special relationship” in Bangladesh and India continue to press for more substantial exchanges between the nations as there is always the fear that festering wounds not closed will be reason for unnecessary amputation.

To keep asking us to give and give, and not giving anything in return is horrendously unfair, and people in Bangladesh are fed up with it. India knows this and chooses not to act. This ambivalence is what makes even the moderates angry in the country to not even take into account those with a deep suspicion of India’s motives towards Bangladesh.

So as Sushma Swaraj visits Bangladesh, she must enunciate clearly what India wants and what it’s willing to do to get them. We must tell her in no unequivocal terms that Prime Minister Modi’s government must now deliver on the promises made.

There has to be an end to pending issues clouding the future of this relationship. India has to positively and proactively move on issues such as Teesta and the Land Boundary Agreement, and deliver where the Congress-led government miserably failed.

Any attempts by Swaraj to avoid contentious issues and moves to make progress on inadequate infrastructural cooperation must be met with persistent demands from our side to first make progress on matters that truly affect our friendship in reality. The rejection of a visa waiver program by the Ministry of Home Affairs in India is not an encouraging sign, so Swaraj must enlighten us as to why that has happened.

Concern about illegal migration or national security of India is not a valid excuse because it is a separate issue. The new visa regime would have allowed for more people-to-people contact and that could have worked greatly to India’s benefit in addressing our people’s fears about India’s intentions and allaying their own fears too.

Why has India bracketed the Bangladeshi people in the same box as Pakistan and China? If it is serious about increasing cooperation and believes in friendship with us, India must learn to recognise the value of a friend and act like it, and not let fear cloud its judgment as clearly it is not clouding our own PM’s goodwill and judgment on working with them.

We can only hope that India recognises that it is time for them to act in earnest towards Bangladesh and ease our relationship with them, failing which, both our nations stand to lose a great deal more than convenient travel regulations. We have done the best we could for decades, and now it is on India to show us that this relationship truly matters to them.