NEW DELHI: Bangladesh’s statement of a rethink on Prime Minister Tarique Rahman’s India tour, linking Dhaka’s demands for the extradition of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, interestingly came the same month that the latter herself announced her intention of returning home in December. The official statement chose to overlook her specific comments while condemning the very press conference she held online from a remote location.
A day before the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) of Bangladesh ruled out Rahman’s India visit, a very senior bureaucrat, now leading a think tank in Dhaka, wrote in one of the country’s leading English dailies that relations with India “are currently at a point where there is a clear need to rethink the relationship from a new perspective”.
Admitting that “India's renewed interest is understandable”, given the two countries “are deeply interconnected because of geography, history and mutual interdependence”, M. Humayun Kabir, president of the Bangladesh Enterprise Institute and a former ambassador of Bangladesh to the United States, wrote in The Daily Star Sunday, “The departure now is that Bangladesh says it will no longer lean excessively on one particular partner for political or domestic reasons. Instead, it will work with everyone according to its own needs and interests.”
That is a sentiment raised by a section to put pressure on the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP)-led government, which completes six months in power and is facing criticisms at home over what another media report on Tuesday termed “Strong on optics, less so on delivery”. It pointed out, quoting analysts, among other alleged shortcomings, that the government “still had a long way to go to make people feel secure in terms of law and order and energy”. Some analysts, the report said, claimed that some of the Prime Minister’s efforts to project a people-centric government “were being undermined by the conduct of party colleagues”. (IANS)
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