Given historical facts, it's surprising that some Indians argue that New Delhi should not distinguish between the BNP-Jamaat combine and the Awami league
As the alliance led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, backed by the fundamentalist Hefazat-e-Islam, continues its violent agitation against the Awami league Government, India must persist steadfastly in supporting Ms Sheikh Hasina. The need for this will be clear on recalling that the BNP-Jamaat-led Government had not only harboured and supported leaders of the United liberation Front of Asom and other secessionist organisations active in north-eastern India but also contemptuously dismissed India's requests to act against them. To cite just one example, the then Director General of the Bangladesh Rifles, Major General Mohammad Jahangir Alam Khan Choudhury, had said in Delhi on September 28, 2004, with reference to the list of insurgent camps in his country provided by the Border Security Force, “There is not a single camp in Bangladesh. We looked for the camps' locations given in the BSF list. Some of the addresses were of our cantonment area and out headquarters…Some addresses even pertained to the Bay of Bengal.”
The brazenness and untruth characterising the BDR chief's statement was typically reflective of his Government's arrogant hostility toward India. On September 7, Bangladesh's Foreign Minister M Morshed Khan, had in a speech in Dhaka, said, with reference to what he described as restrictions placed by India on imports from Bangladesh, that Dhaka, “Could end India's three billion dollar trade here by issuing an SRO (Statutory Regulatory Order) on all goods entering Bangladesh.”
Some of Mr Khan's statements were even more threatening and calculated to create tensions between the north-east Indian States and the rest of the country. “Bangladesh is India-locked. Delhi has also to remember that the seven north-eastern Indian States are Bangladesh locked.” If this was a stark attempt to intimidate by underlining north-eastern India's vulnerability to hostile moves by Bangladesh, particularly in the context of the latter's active promotion of insurgency in the region, an attempt to sow discord between north-east Indian states and the rest of the country came through clearly in his speech as reported by The Daily Star of September 8, 2004. According to the report, he “blasted the Central Bank of India [the Reserve BankIJ] for acting unilaterally against the interests of the common people of the north-eastern States [of India] by imposing non-tariff barriers, such as not allowing individual States to open letters of credit (lCs) without permission from Delhi.”
The outburst, which occurred in the presence of the Indian High Commissioner and other diplomats in Dhaka, suggested that the BNP-Jamaat coalition was fully involved in the implementation of the Pakistani Government's strategic doctrine of promoting regional insurgencies to Balkanise India and, failing in that, to weaken India to prevent it from playing an important role in Asia. Significantly, general-turned-President Ziaur Rahman had established the Directorate General of Forces' Intelligence, the Bangladeshi counterpart of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, on the lines of the ISI after a visit by the latter's then chief, Major General Ghulam Jilani Khan, in 1977. Until Ms Hasina's current tenure as Prime Minister, the DGFI had been Bangladesh Government's principal weapon for conducting subversion in India.
In keeping with the then Government's stance, Justic Joynul Abedin, a BNP loyalist who conducted the judicial inquiry into the notorious attack on Ms Hasina and other Awami league leaders on August 21, 2004, and whose report the BNP Government did not publish, had openly insinuated on October 2 that year that India was behind it, when the Harkat-ul-Jihadi-al-Islam and (allegedly) a section of the BNP were responsible. The surprise is that there are Indians who argue that New Delhi should not distinguish between the BNP-Jamaat combine and the Awami league!