Indian Express : C. Raja Mohan
A few years ago, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh mused over having breakfast in New Delhi, lunch in Lahore and dinner in Kabul. That statement was a reflection of Dr Singh’s desire to transform the north-western parts of the subcontinent through active peace-making and the promotion of regional integration.
That project was scuppered by the deterioration of Indo-Pak relations after the 26/11 terror outrage in Mumbai. Although Indo-Pak ties are limping back towards a cold peace, the prospects for solid economic engagement among India, Pakistan and Afghanistan remain dim. The Pakistan army’s obsession with “strategic depth” in Afghanistan has meant the exclusion of mutually beneficial economic integration with Kabul and Delhi.
If his dream is unlikely to be realised in the northwest, Dr Singh has a big chance of making it work in the east. For his visit to Dhaka next week promises to be a game-changer not just for Indo-Bangla relations but for the entire eastern subcontinent.
The new commitment in Dhaka and Delhi to build a bilateral partnership allows us to imagine shared prosperity with our eastern land neighbours — Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar and China.
Much of the credit for creating the new strategic opportunity goes to Dhaka and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. If the former president of Bangladesh, Ziaur Rahman, had taken the initiative for founding the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation in the early 1980s, Hasina has lent concrete meaning to the idea of regionalism in the eastern subcontinent.
Sustained economic growth, expected to accelerate to about 8 per cent in the coming years, has transformed the regional and international perception of Bangladesh and has generated new levels of self-confidence in Dhaka. Recognising that Bangladesh could transform itself into an economic bridge within the subcontinent and between South Asia and the abutting regions further to the east, Dhaka has boldly played for high stakes.
Hasina understood that the key to Bangladesh’s emergence as an economic powerhouse lay in moving the relationship with India to a higher level by resolving all the outstanding bilateral problems that had accumulated ever since the partition of the subcontinent.
This is precisely what she offered when she came to Delhi in January 2010. Shedding the past political inhibitions in Dhaka about building a good neighbourly relationship with India, Hasina offered valuable counter cooperation and promised to restore connectivity between India and the north-eastern states through Bangladesh’s territory.
Delhi, in turn, agreed to move forward on the sharing of the Teesta and Feni river waters and open the Indian market for Bangladeshi textile exports. The two sides also agreed to resolve the many issues relating to their boundary, including the completion of the demarcation of their 4,090 km of border and resolving the question of small enclaves landlocked in each other’s territory. With all issues on the table, the two sides have worked hard during the last 18 months to negotiate the many agreements likely to be signed during Dr Singh’s September 6-7 visit to Dhaka.
While Hasina’s political courage set the stage, Delhi too broke from the tradition of episodic focus on neighbours other than Pakistan. Ending the neglect of Bangladesh and seizing the moment at hand, Delhi persisted with a sustained problem-solving approach in the negotiations with Dhaka.
Dr Singh and Hasina have an opportunity next week to look beyond their success on the bilateral front and outline a shared agenda for the future of the eastern subcontinent.
The bilateral issues that Delhi and Dhaka have addressed in the last 18 months — terrorism, trade, river water sharing, trans-border energy cooperation, boundary management, and transit — are also regional issues involving other neighbours, including Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar and China. The new thinking on bilateral issues, that Delhi and Dhaka have signalled, also provides a more enduring basis for regional and trans-regional cooperation.
Take, for example, the until now controversial question of transit between India and the north-eastern states. That Delhi and Dhaka will both benefit from restoring the trans-border connectivity that existed between India and East Pakistan until the 1965 war is not in doubt.
India gains better access to the Northeast and Bangladesh wins by charging transit fees. The restoration of transit for India is part of a wider framework that lets the natural economic complementarities between India’s Northeast and Bangladesh work themselves out.
Beyond the bilateral, Dhaka and Delhi have rightly chosen to frame the question of transit in the wider regional context of promoting cross-border connectivity through Indian territory, between Bangladesh on the one hand and Nepal and Bhutan on the other.
By throwing open their borders to easier movement of commercial traffic, the four countries will not only help integrate the eastern subcontinent, but also provide the basis for trans-regional connectivity with Myanmar and China. There are many institutions like the Asian Development Bank that have long been eager to promote connectivity within the eastern subcontinent, and between it and Southeast Asia. Beijing has ambitious plans for mega trans-border projects to link south-western China with Myanmar, Bangladesh, Nepal and eastern India.
Big ideas such as trans-Asian road and rail networks have stumbled amidst the absence of a modern cooperative relationship between India and Bangladesh. As he builds a mutually beneficial partnership with Bangladesh, Dr Singh will have a chance to muse in Dhaka over having breakfast in Delhi, lunch in Chittagong and dinner in Mandalay or Kunming.
Delhi and Dhaka are today in a position to demonstrate the real meaning of “strategic depth” — shared prosperity through trans-border connectivity and economic partnerships. If they succeed, Rawalpindi too might rethink its relations with India and Afghanistan, revisit its much touted concept of strategic depth, and restore the historic connectivity between Delhi, Lahore and Kabul.
The writer is a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, Delhi
(The views expressed above are the personal views of the author)
