Is West Bengal a stumbling block in optimising India-Bangladesh cooperation, especially on the security front?

The question came up for discussion at a recent Indo-Bangla conference in Delhi, organised by the the Institute of Social and Cultural Studies, where successive speakers from Dhaka alleged that Islamic hardliners from Bangladesh are taking shelter across the border.

The issue is grave. Behind the bonhomie there are many unresolved issues between the two countries. One of them is the Teesta water-sharing agreement that was proposed in 2011 by the former Manmohan Singh government without much homework, and is still pending.

After assuming power, the Narendra Modi government implemented the Land Boundary Agreement (2015) but failed to implement the Teesta water-sharing agreement.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee disagrees with the pact, and the reasons are now known. During a visit to Dhaka in February 2015, she asked Bangladesh Prime MInister Sheikh Hasina to keep faith. But since then two years have gone by and the decision apparently became a victim of Mamata’s deteriorating relationship with Delhi.

The material gain from the agreement is still unclear. A hydrological study initiated by the West Bengal government didn’t see the light of the day.

Sreeradha Dutta, Director of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, told the conference that the prevailing water flow in Teesta is lower than the assumptions made based on old data.

Nevertheless, Bangladesh wants the deal to be operationalised to control anti-India sentiments, which is legacy of the East Pakistan days and nurtured and fuelled in independent Bangladesh till Hasina came to power in 2009.

She changed the political paradigm from conflict (with India) to cooperation-led growth and prevented Bangladeshi territories from being used by anti-India actors, as had been the practice in the past. The immediate result of her action is evident in a drastic reduction in militancy in the North-East.

Such actions, coupled with the war crime trial that sent many (pro-Pakistan) collaborators in the 1971 genocide to gallows, and the regular exchange of information between the two neighbours on terrorism has upset staunch Islamic outfits such as the Jamaat-e-Islami (JMB) of Bangladesh.

Such forces are now out to dislodge the cooperation drive between the two nations, reminded MJ Akbar, Minister of State for External Affairs, at the conference. “Bangladesh is cornerstone of regional stability,” he said, adding that the shared prosperity depends on shared security.

“Terrorists have a vested interest in chaos, against all of us who have a vested interest in stability. The Holey Artisan (July 2016) attack (in Dhaka) was an attack on the economy of Bangladesh,” he said.

Syed Munir Khasru, Chairman of the Institute of Policy Advocacy and Governance, in Dhaka, pointed out that a number of masterminds behind the Holey Artisan attack were found to have taken refuge in India to plot terror attack in Bangladesh.

The 2014 Khagragarh blast in West Bengal was also linked to Bangladesh. The terrorists (from Bangladesh) had reportedly taken refuge in India to strike against Bangladesh. An accidental blast had blown the cover.

Shariar Kabir, a noted Bangladeshi intellectual and general secretary of the South Union People’s Union against Fundamentalism and Communalism, and Shyamal Dutta, editor of Bhorer Kagoj in Dhaka, accused the West Bengal government of going “soft on Islamists”.

Shyamal said JMB recruited activists from West Bengal to wage a war against the Hasina government. Sreeradha referred to the public protests by Islamists in Kolkata against war crime trials in Dhaka.

Union Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan expressed his dissatisfaction at the state of affairs in Bengal. He lauded Bangladesh’s cooperation in reaching energy supplies to the North-East.