India cannot allow its soil to be used for a campaign against Hasina. Giving her opponents a chance to malign her would have amounted to letting down a friend facing a crucial election

lord Alexander Carlile, advisor to the legal team of Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) leader and former Prime Minister, Begum Khaleda Zia, was sent back from the airport on arrival in India on July 11, 2018. The reason cited was that his intended activities in India — among other things, the holding of a Press conference to expose what he has been describing as the Bangladesh Government’s “unfair and unjust” approach to Begum Zia — were not covered by the scope of his business category visa. According to South Block, it would have unnecessarily dragged India into the internal political rivalries of Bangladesh where a parliamentary election is due at the year-end. Indeed, Bangladesh’s Government had reportedly conveyed to New Delhi that it did not want India’s soil to be used for holding the Press conference, which would constitute anti-Bangladesh activity. It also said it would not have allowed an anti-India Press conference to be held in Bangladesh.

Bangladesh had special reason to be sensitive about the press conference. A number of BNP leaders, including its vice president, the industrialist Abdul Awal Mintoo, its international affairs secretary, Humayun Kobir, and standing committee member, Amir Khasru Mahmud Chowdhury, had been doing the rounds of Delhi trying to win friends and influence important people and organisations on behalf of their party and the latter’s leaders. They had met Minister of State for External Affairs, MJ Akbar and visited the Vivekananda International Foundation, Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation and Observer Research Foundation.

With their party languishing in the wilderness of Bangladesh politics, their mission has been to enlist India’s support in the forthcoming parliamentary elections in their country or, least, get India not to support the Sheikh Hasina-lead Awami league. Their efforts have proceeded along two parallel lines. The first is to persuade Indian policy-makers into believing that the BNP is not hostile to India; the latter has nothing to worry about its return to power and should not put all its eggs in the Awami league’s basket. The second is to create a climate of opinion in India against the Awami league, accusing it of being dictatorial, persecuting Begum Zia and her son, Tareque Zia, unjustly and creating conditions in which the BNP could not participate in the forthcoming elections.

Pro-BNP elements in the Indian establishment argue that India should remain equidistant from it and the Awami league. They ignore that Sheikh Hasina has unfailingly been a friend of India. Apart from fulsomely acknowledging India’s role in Bangladesh’s liberation, she has ensured that Bangladesh’s soil was not used for anti-India activity, and reiterated, during her recent meeting with India’s Home Minister, Rajnath Singh, her assurance that Bangladesh will not allow its soil to be used for terrorist activity against any country. Besides, she has destroyed the camps that the BNP-led as well as military regimes had assisted in establishing in Bangladesh for North-East India’s secessionist insurgent groups like the United liberation Front of Asom, enabled these to operate from Bangladesh, and has handed over some of their important leaders to this country.

Besides helping them to set up camps, the BNP and military-led Governments had provided the rebels with arms and training. India’s requests for their closure were met with sarcasm. Thus, Major-General Mohammad Jahangir Alam Khan Chowdhuri, Director-General of the Bangladesh Rifles (now Bangladesh Border Guards), visiting India for talks with his counterpart in the Border Security Force (BSF), Ajay Raj Sharma, referred to the list of insurgent camps provided by the BSF and said in Delhi on September 28, 2004: “There is not a single [insurgent] camp in Bangladesh. We looked for camps’ locations given in the BSF’s list. Some of the addresses were of our cantonment area and our headquarters. Some of these addresses even pertained to the Bay of Bengal.”

That was when Bangladesh’s Prime Minister, Begum Khaleda Zia, pursued an intensely hostile course against India. Its Ministers used every opportunity to vilify, threaten and ridicule India. Thus, its Foreign Minister, Morshed Khan, stated while inaugurating an India-Bangladesh Dialogue of Young Journalists in Dhaka on September 7, 2004, “Bangladesh is India-locked. But Delhi has also to remember that the seven North-Eastern Indian States are Bangladesh-locked.” Further raising the pitch of his minatory statement, and referring to what he described as India’s restrictions on the import of goods from Bangladesh, he said he could “end India’s three billion dollar (sic) trade here by issuing a Statutory Regulating Order (SRO) on all Indian goods entering Bangladesh.”

Further, the BNP had orchestrated a subtle attempt to blame India for the grenade attack on a rally addressed by Sheikh Hasina in Dhaka on August 21, 2004, which killed 22 persons, including several senior Awami league leaders and injured over 200. At a press conference before submitting to the Bangladesh Government its report on the incident, Justice Joinul Abedin, who headed the commission of inquiry, said on October 2, 2004, that the attack was the work of foreign agents. Abedin, a BNP leader before becoming a judge and currently a prominent member of Begum Khaleda Zia’s legal defence team, told Khaled Mohiuddin of Bangladesh’s Bengali daily Prothom Alo on October 3, 2004, that it became foreign “the moment” one crossed the country’s “geographical boundary.” Asked whether one could assume that the report mentioned the foreign country that was the closest, he said, “I cannot answer this question of yours now.”

Except those headed by Sheikh Hasina, all Governments of Bangladesh since Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s murder in 1975, have been intensely hostile to India and pro-Pakistan. Almost immediately after consolidating his power following Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s assassination on August 15, 1975, Major-General-turned-dictator restructured and rechristened the toothless Directorate of Forces Intelligence as the Directorate-General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) which became virtually a clone of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate. The warmth characterising the visit by Major-General (subsequently lieutenant-General) Ghulam Jilani Khan, then ISI’s chief, in October, 1977, clearly showed where Zia-ur Rahman’s allegiance lay.

The ISI and the DGFI have collaborated since 1976 in training and arming the militant groups active in North-East India. Sheikh Hasina has done much to sanitise the DGFI and other intelligence agencies and clamped down hard on the Islamist terrorist organisations like the Harkar-ul-Jihad-al-Islami Bangladesh and Jaamatul Mujahideen Bangladesh. Allowing her opponents to malign her on Indian soil would have amounted to letting down a steadfast friend facing an election crucial to her and Bangladesh’s future.

(The writer is Consultant Editor, The Pioneer, and an author)