Ghosts of the past
April 30, 2001
It is still not quite clear why it happened at all. Pyrdiwah village was, after all, under Indian occupation since the 1971 Indo-Pak war which had helped Sheikh Mujibur Rehman's Awami League turn East Pakistan into Bangladesh. With the same Awami League in power, the bloody border clashes between Bangladesh and its benefactor make no sense.
It began with an inexplicable incursion and occupation by the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) of Pyrdiwah. The apparently surprised Indian and Bangladeshi governments held talks, blamed the incident on "local adventurism," withdrew the BDR and India's Border Security Force (BSF) led the villagers back to. There the matter should have ended.
But, reports the Indian weekly Outlook, the BSF decided to teach the Bangladeshis a lesson for their "audacity." So it invaded Boraibari village, and suffered 16 dead and two captured against three BDR casualties. This naturally sent the temperatures soaring in both countries. However, a phone-call by premier Sheikh Hasina to her Indian counterpart promising an investigation and the expression of mutual regrets again defused the situation.
Then the BDR returned the BSF corpses and the Indians went berserk-claiming that the dead had been tortured, shot at close range, strangulated, mutilated and even burnt. While Bangladesh has denied the charge and attributed the state of the corpses to their lying in paddy fields for three days, Outlook quotes an escaped BSF soldier that they were lynched by Bangladeshi villagers and BDR men.
Amid public protests against each other in both countries, India is baying for blood. It first wanted the BDR chief Maj General Fazlur Rehman, sacked. Bangladesh demurred, saying this will only bring in another general. India is now insisting that, if Bangladesh wishes to "restore friendship and mutual confidence," it must fulfil the promise of punishing the culprits severely. This may not be easy for Sheikh Hasina.
The incident has caught India in a bind. As the budding regional power with global ambitions, it is stung by the humiliation handed down by a small neighbour -- and, to rub salt in the wound, one it had so triumphantly helped to create. It is, thus, roaring to redeem lost prestige. But it cannot, simultaneously, afford to add another disgruntled neighbour to its already resentful periphery. Particularly ironic would be for India to be seen as bullying the friendly Awami League government.
It desperately needs a face-saver. In a replay of the "Kargil caper," it has already absolved Sheikh Hasina's government of any wrongdoing and zeroed in on the BDR. Alongside the customary finger-wagging at Pakistan's ISI, India press too has targeted "rogue elements" in the Bangladesh military, particularly "loose cannons" like Maj General Fazlur Rehman, for "pursuing an agenda" to damage Indo-Bangladesh relations to the electoral benefit of Begum Khalida Zia who is "no friend of India" and would look good standing up to it on the Pyrdiwah withdrawal.
Having made the loaded distinction, and trotted out the coup-ridden past of Bangladesh, India's official media flashed the unconfirmed news that Sheikh Hasina could make a fence-mending stopover in New Delhi in mid-May on her way back from Brussels. The stopover could be dicey for the Bangladeshi premier.
Facing a tough electoral battle this year, her government is already "accused" of being "pro-India" (a "charge" it rebuts by labelling the BNP-led opposition alliance as "pro-Pakistan") and following a "subservient foreign policy." She cannot afford to be seen as caving in to Indian bluster.
Domestic compulsions suggest that she must stand tall against a bullying neighbour which, after all, failed to ratify a border agreement signed in 1974 with her father Sheikh Mujib, the founder of Bangladesh (perhaps because this would entail returning to Bangladesh 111 disputed enclaves, against 51 India could receive in return). But Sheikh Hasina and her party lack the credentials and the inclination to offend India.
Thus, a face saving suits both India and the Awami League government. Possibly, therefore, the right noises will be made by both sides if Sheikh Hasina makes the New Delhi stopover. But so somber is the mood in Bangladesh that its impact on her electoral fortunes may not be good. For India, more hurtful, and bewildering, than the border fiasco is the anti-India sentiment it has triggered in Bangladesh. How could they do this to us, is the most asked question, after we sacrificed 2500 lives and did so much more for their liberation?
Indeed, there seems no earthly reason for this being so. One analyst appearing on Doordarshan TV reminded the Indians that Bangladesh was a part of Pakistan for 25 years and many people there, though not the majority she hastily added, retain an affinity with it. This pro-Pakistan feeling permeates all segments of Bangladeshi society, including the bureaucracy, military and politicians.
This only confirms the impression carried back by Pakistani visitors to Bangladesh and so vociferously expressed when Pakistani cricket team pays in Dhaka. The wounds of 1971 have not healed, the anger still simmers. But pervading through it all is a feeling of fraternity. For the two-nation theorists, the explanation is obvious and only reaffirms their belief in a religious underpinning to Muslim separatism in India.
But those who dispute this belief, and those who explain the partition of India on the centrifugal forces that have dominated the peripheries of the sub-continent through history, may find it hard to explain the lingering affinity that still binds Pakistanis and Bangladeshis across the river of blood that separated them. Also, the animosity against India they share -- when Bangladesh owes so much to India and their ties are unblighted by a festering sore like Kashmir. Even the old water dispute has supposedly been solved by Sheikh Hasina's government.
However, this mix of continuing Pak-Bangladesh affinity and shared antipathy for India also rekindles painful memories -- how easily the parting could have been averted! It supports also the view that not all who voted for Sheikh Mujib's Awami League had wanted separation. The history of our follies, the insensitivity to East Pakistan's growing sense of exclusion and the power-lust of the military junta and political opportunists in both wings, is being retold by the Hamoodur Rehman report.
Yet, how much have we learnt from the manifest lessons of history? The politicians did worse than their counterparts of the first decade after independence, and the military is back in power. While it aims to do good, the economic and administrative success of the Ayub Khan experience is witness to its institutional limitations and the irreplaceability of the political process.
That the water issue simmered until Sindh was on the verge of eruption is a case in point. By the time the chief executive intervened to give Sindh some extra water, the campaign led by sworn enemies of yesteryears, the MQM and Jeay Sindh Qaumi Mahaz, had already gathered pace. Despite the administrative exertions, there was a complete strike in Sindh on their call.
While their coming together need not in itself be a cause for worry, their hardening positions should certainly be -- particularly when space is being created for them by the inability of the PPP to jettison its tainted past and the absence of a demonstrated success by alternate leadership.
Yes, Sindh's outrage was ignited by water-shortage which is a natural phenomenon. But so was the 1970 cyclone in East Pakistan. And, what of Karachi's woes? When perceptions upstage reality, each added straw becomes critical. As with the Awami League, it will be scant satisfaction that those who voted for the hardliners did not support their extremist prescriptions.
With a shrinking national pie, debt and defence have left little for development. Thus, despite there being supposedly non-political governments, tensions between the provinces and Islamabad over resource-sharing are already increasing. Unless the economy takes a dramatic upturn, which cannot happen in the near-term, these tensions could play straight into the hands of those whose self-interest is at cross purposes with national interest.
Throw in Indian malevolence, an inimical regional scenario and an ambivalent international scene and the challenge seems in many ways more intimidating than it was in 1970-71. But the situation was not hopeless then, and it is certainly not lost now. The question is: have we the wisdom to avoid past mistakes and give everyone a stake in Pakistan's well being?
The author is a freelance columnist