SEEMA SENGUPTA
Indian foreign secretary Vikram Misri’s Dhaka visit came at a critical moment in the history of India-Bangladesh relationship. The imprisonment of a Hindu monk and reported persecution of minorities, triggering a downward spiral in an otherwise healthy association between the two neighbours, has set alarm bells ringing in India. Though tension has been intensifying, Md Touhid Hossain, adviser for foreign affairs to Bangladesh’s interim government, remains upbeat about overcoming the impasse in the relationship. “Establishing mutual communication and meeting each other is very important to overcome any such stalemate,” Hossain had asserted during a SAARC seminar in Dhaka.
When Hasina, Bangladesh’s longest-serving premier and daughter of the country’s founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was airlifted out of Dhaka for a safe asylum in India on 5 August, the world was left awestruck. While Bangladesh is used to witnessing political upheaval since its foundation days, who could have ever imagined that the same lady, known to be a champion of democracy, egalitarianism and justice, and who breathed life into the country’s once fragile economy, would suddenly become the youths’ greatest adversary? “This turmoil is unlikely to be for the last time,” Colonel Pradeep Saxena, a decorated Indian veteran of the 1971 war who was physically present in Dhaka during the 16 December surrender ceremony, had declared prophetically while discussing Bangladesh’s likely plunge into religious extremism. “That it has happened after a decade and a half of peace and political stability during which Bangladesh became an emerging producer of garments is worrisome,” lamented the retired Army Colonel.
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