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NEIGHBOURS: BANGLADESH
The Bloody Gamble
Attacks by Bangladesh forces
along the border underscore India's need for urgent solutions
By Shishir Gupta and Harinder Baweja
At the best of times
the border between India and Bangladesh is laced with distrust and a kindling
of history, politics and migration-much of it illegal. This legacy, which
has its roots in pre-Independence India, is further complicated by the
meandering courses of numerous rivers and streams that force borders to
shift with silting and flooding. There is also a little-known phenomenon:
there are 111 Indian enclaves in Bangladesh, and 50 Bangladeshi enclaves
in India, all along this bizarre no-man's land that stretches 4,000 km.
Last week, a small stretch went to pieces as
Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) units-the equivalent of India's Border Security
Force
(BSF)-simply marched across to Pyrdiwah in Meghalaya in battalion strength,
laid a siege around the BSF post and dug in trenches. "Sorry,"
an officer told the 31 BSF men. "You will have to vacate. We have
orders from Dhaka."
Within a day, on April 18, a more chilling incident
took place 200 km to the west, at Boraibari, near Dhubri in Assam. A patrol
of 16 BSF soldiers was walking along the border when villagers from Bangladesh,
a little over 100 m away, called out to them. "Given the proximity
of the villages to the border, it is common for such pleasantries to be
exchanged," explains V.K. Gaur, BSF's inspector-general responsible
for Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur and the Nagaland frontier. That day, however,
it was a bait. The unsuspecting patrol was quickly surrounded by the civilians-the
BSF suspects a mingling of BDR personnel-and all 16 dragged into Bangladesh.
By April 19 evening, when the four-day fracas
died down, India officially counted 19 dead, among them four civilians,
and Bangladesh, two BDR soldiers.
What was the reason for such extreme provocation
between two self-professed friends? Adopting a US-China style climbdown
in the recent spy plane incident, both Indian and Bangladeshi officials
expressed "regret" and urged "utmost restraint". Prime
Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his counterpart Sheikh Hasina Wajed
went about their usual business minus rhetoric, letting officials talk
down the temperature. But can it get ugly again?
The answer to the second question is disturbingly
easy to answer: yes. These so-called "adverse possessions",
enclaves that are surrounded by either India or Bangladesh with only a
small strip connecting the parent nation, are prime candidates for similar
provocations, especially with the strong opposition within Bangladesh
to Hasina's Awami League Government.
And that leads directly to the first question.
Theories, all with varying degrees of plausibility, are being paraded,
with two gaining credence in Indian diplomatic and security circles. One
is that it's a retaliation against the arrest in Kathmandu of Pakistani
diplomat Mohammad Arshad Cheema, a known ISI operative, for long on India's
watch list and implicated in the hijacking of Indian Airlines' Flight
IC 814 from Kathmandu to Delhi in December 1999. Cheema was found with
large quantities of RDX explosive and ordered out of Nepal. Indian intelligence
agencies have for long suspected ISI's Bangladeshi counterpart of harbouring
anti-India sentiments. They suspect this agency, along with elements in
the BDR owing allegiance to opposition elements-like the Bangladesh Nationalist
Party (BNP) and hard-line anti-Hasina factions like the Jamaat-e-Islami
and Islamic Oikyo Jote-triggered the border incidents to irritate India
and thereby embarrass the openly pro-India Hasina. In a worse case scenario,
if retaliatory pogroms broke out against illegal Bangladeshi migrants
in India, it would be playing directly into the hardliners' hands.
If Hasina defended India, the Opposition would
shred the patriotic moral high ground she has used to hammer it with.
And if she defended the BDR action, then she would strain relatively firm
India-Bangladesh relations. Either way, Hasina loses. "It could either
be the independent handiwork of the BDR chief Major-General A.L.M. Fazlur
Rahman who has pro-Pak leanings and Jamaat-e-Islami contacts or could
be a ploy conceived by Khaleda Zia," says J.N. Dixit, a former Indian
foreign secretary. "What happened was not just a hiccup but a major
skirmish involving casualties. This has put Hasina on the defensive because
she can neither criticise her own forces nor apologise to India."
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