Nodding Acquaintance

Her refusal was justified through a peculiar interpretation of protocol. The Bangladeshis argued that since Vajpayee had visited them at the time Sheikh Hasina was in power, and because Khaleda had toured India in 1992 as PM, it was New Delhi’s turn to send its PM to meet Khaleda in Dhaka. Forgotten was the norm in international relations that interaction between two states is irrespective of who is the PM.

Bangladesh’s mood changed, though, after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Dhaka for the SAARC summit last November. They began to hint through diplomatic channels that their PM, as chairperson of SAARC, would want to come down to India. The hint practically turned into a request for a visit by the third week of February. Initially, there was debate in the government whether or not to heed her request. The reason: she had barely three months in power before a caretaker government took over in May to supervise the elections. Was it possible for her to address India’s concerns in that period?

New Delhi thought Khaleda’s keenness to visit India was guided by domestic and electoral compulsions. It could, for one, repair the image of her country, perceived as one gradually sliding into fundamentalism and extremism. Two, after last year’s vicious bomb attack on Hasina that impaired her hearing, and the simultaneous August 17 bomb blasts in 63 districts of the country (out of 64), it is believed she has lost some equity with the electorate. It had also made her vulnerable to lectures from the West, the most recent being that of then US assistant secretary of state, Christina Rocca, in January.

New Delhi viewed her desire to visit India as an attempt to leverage the Indian factor in the impending election. In Bangladesh, it is fashionable for parties out of power to blame India for all the ills plaguing it. Through her visit to New Delhi, she wanted to portray herself as one who had sought friendship with India when in power. This ought to have a certain resonance in the constituency generally perceived to be pro-liberation and liberal. Already, in February, she had visited Islamabad, catering to the vocal pro-Islamabad segment in her country. In other words, she is playing both cards, India and Pakistan, the hope being that it will erode some of the Awami League’s support base without alienating her own.

Khaleda’s attempt to mend fences has come against the backdrop, say sources, of her being "particularly nasty" towards India. She stymied, among other things, a trilateral gas deal with Myanmar, and held back linkages through waterways and railways; she turned a blind eye to activities inimical to India’s security interests; she even went slow on the Tata plans to invest in Bangladesh in the integrated steel, power and fertiliser sectors, one which would have diversified the country’s woefully limited export basket.

Even as recently as March 8, in a rally at the Government Mujib College ground in Companyganj (Noakhali), she said the arrests of Bangla Bhai and others would help expose the local (read Opposition) and foreign (read India) links of these terrorists. Last week’s visit of Khaleda was not because of a sudden change of heart. A successful visit, she perhaps calculated, would not only eat into the Awami League’s space but also ease Western pressure. She could claim she’d visited Delhi to clear the air, that things are normal now between the two countries.

India wasn’t oblivious of Khaleda’s ploy. There was a debate in New Delhi whether to accord her just an ‘official visit’ or a ‘working visit’—both of which, unlike the ‘state visit’, do not include ceremonial trappings such as a reception in Rashtrapati Bhavan, banquets and access to a wide array of the political spectrum. Manmohan, it is learnt, clinched the debate in favour of a state visit. As a diplomat said, "Most of the time you have talked to Musharraf even as he held a gun to your head. Why not talk to Khaleda as well?" Further, if the reigning impulse is to deal with whoever is in power, whether in Myanmar or Pakistan, there’s then good reason to stay engaged with Bangladesh, say sources.

At Hyderabad House, her restricted interaction with Manmohan and senior government functionaries, including water resources minister Saifuddin Soz and commerce minister Kamal Nath, began at 6.15 pm, and lasted about 30 minutes. Then followed the delegation-level talks. Manmohan presented a grand vision of how he saw the direction of relations going, keeping in mind the common destinies of both the countries. The talks broke up at 8.20 pm, with Khaleda informing all that Bangladesh was "willing to talk" on the Sealdah-Joydevpur train link. The Khaleda government hadn’t displayed any interest in this issue because talks on it were initiated at the time Hasina was in power. Barring this positive note, Khaleda, sources say, restricted herself to cataloguing the list of perennial Bangladesh grouses:

• Removal of non-tariff barriers, in the light of the large and growing trade deficit. The Indian side responded that in the last year Bangladeshi exports increased by 68 per cent.
  
• Improvement of facilities on the 90-km Banglabandha-Petropole transport corridor, which currently takes five hours to traverse. India is already committed to upgrading the infrastructure.
  
• Mooted the idea of taking up simultaneous, coordinated patrolling along the border, including riverine patrolling along a 150-km stretch. The Indian side said New Delhi was still awaiting a response to the modalities it had given Bangladeshis in 2003.
  
• India shouldn’t build a fence within 150 yards of the border as it violated a protocol that termed such structures as defensive. India says it’s part of border management, not a defensive structure.
  
• A definite timeframe for talks on the Teesta water-sharing arrangements.

Post-bilateral talks, both sides issued a joint press release, which isn’t the same as a joint communique. When the visit began, the expectation was three agreements would be signed: on trade, narcotics trafficking and protection of bilateral investments. In the end, only the first two were signed. Khaleda didn’t even grant an interview to the Indian media, so paranoid was she of negative publicity.