Lesson that India’s ‘blockade’ of Bangladesh has for the region – Firstpost

The Bangladesh government, led by Chief Advisor Mohamed Yunus, took great pains to provoke India into halting transit facilities for the nation’s trade with Bhutan, Nepal and Myanmar. Though India has cited ‘congestion’ as the reason, the real reason seems to be Yunus’ provocative statement which was made by him in Beijing recently that in effect implied that his country could ‘blockade’ India’s ‘Seven Sisters’ of the northeast.

In Beijing, where he met Chinese President Xi Jinping, Yunus said that the seven northeastern states of India depended on Bangladesh for accessing the sea and, in turn, sea ports. The implication was that especially after the recent earthquake in common neighbour Myanmar, where even otherwise multiple militias are holding fort along the border, the northeastern states were, as per Yunus, cut off from the rest of India if Bangladesh effected a blockade along the seafront.

“The seven states of India in the eastern part of India are completely landlocked,” said the Bangladeshi chief advisor. “They have no way to reach the ocean. We (Bangladesh) are the only guardians of the ocean for the entire region (northeast India),” Yunus had said. If he was also seeking to visualise a vivisecting India in the northeast, he should be sadly mistaken – but he might have also implied it all the same.

Possibly, Dhaka did not expect New Delhi to react in such a strong way and stop the transit facility.

Russo-Indian parallel

Of course, the Indian decision does not seem to owe only to Yunus’ provocative statement pertaining to the ‘Seven Sisters’. In Beijing, he also invited India’s Chinese adversary to build an airbase in Lalmonirhat district in northern Bangladesh. He did not stop there. Yunus wanted Pakistan to be employed as the subcontractor for the project.

If it was China’s proposal, he did not mention it, then or later. All of it meant that the new dispensation in Bangladesh was giving a strategic foothold in Bangladesh against India. By implication, Bangladesh too was with the other two in their anti-India strategic endeavour.

Independent of the China-Pakistan angle now, there is another angle to Yunus’ proposal for the two to align against India. During the now-toppled regime of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh contracted a nuclear power plant. The civil works for the project were given to India, the latter having worked with Russia on nuclear power plants, including Kudankulam in southern Tamil Nadu.

The parallel is striking. But if Yunus thought that he had the nuclear power plant precedent to put India on the defensive in any argument over his China-Pakistan proposal, he should be mistaken. The nuclear deal did not have any component that threatened Bangladesh’s security and territorial integrity or that of any of its neighbours. But his proposal for a joint airbase directly threatens India and can also threaten Bhutan, Nepal and even Myanmar, depending on how their bilateral relations with China and, at times, Pakistan evolve in the coming years and decades.

Jaundiced eye

Yet, the Indian decision viz Bangladesh would have regional reactions (expressed or otherwise). Critics of India in countries like Nepal and Bhutan will draw a parallel between the present Indian decision viz Bangladesh and past ‘blockades’ of their respective countries by different political leaderships in New Delhi. They will see it all as a greater ‘Indian conspiracy’ involving the Indian state as an institution independent of the political leadership at the helm at a given time.

In 2015, for instance, an Indian blockade of the Nepal border led to severe shortages. The blockade was primarily driven by Madhesi ethnic groups protesting against the new constitution. The Nepalese government accused India in the matter of shortages of medicine, fuel and other essentials exacerbating the situation, a claim India denied.

This time, it is Modi 3.0 that is in power in India. However, on the occasion, the Nepali media especially went to town about an earlier blockade of 1989, when the late Rajiv Gandhi was in power. At the time, India allegedly imposed an economic blockade, leading to massive shortages, as Nepal is a landlocked country and had traditionally depended on guaranteed supplies of all goods from India.

The main dispute was over transit treaties, but the Nepali leadership alleged that it was also over Indian suspicions that their government was getting closer to China. India promptly denied the allegation, but every time that India is caught in a dispute of the kind, as now, there is this inevitable reference to 1989.

China ties were again alleged to be the reason when India withdrew fuel subsidies to Bhutan in 2013, leading to massive shortages of cooking gas and kerosene in the other Himalayan state. It also impacted the outcome of parliamentary polls in that country. In subsequent years, there were complaints that Bhutan had blocked irrigation waters for India, but Thimphu denied it.

In the case of the Maldives in the south, discredited former President Abdulla Yameen’s camp had taken offence to the Indian immigration declaring the leader of the ruling parliamentary group, persona non grata, when he arrived in Chennai to visit his ailing mother in a local hospital.

The Yameen camp was even more upset when New Delhi criticised the president for declaring an emergency and acting against the independence of the judiciary when the Supreme Court freed self-exiled former President Mohammed Nasheed through a unanimous verdict posted on the court’s website.

Yameen’s estranged aide and current President Mohamed Muizzu began on the former’s ‘India Out’ campaign plank but seems to have come around to accepting certain ground realities that are unique to the region – and more so, New Delhi’s genuine interest in ensuring growth-for-all in the immediate neighbourhood. Yet, the transformation was not without hiccups, and there is no knowing how long and how far the Muizzu government’s passivity will remain and grow.

Defensive on the domestic front

However, the immediate reaction, if any, will be felt in southern Sri Lanka, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi undertook a very successful three-day visit this very month. Such criticism can put the host government of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake on the defensive on the domestic front.

Peculiar to the Sri Lankan situation, more than major political parties, peripheral sections of the centre-left and centre-right parties and leaders are the ones who have always been critical of an India that they have not known – or, an India whom they have trained themselves to view only through a jaundiced eye.

In power in Colombo is a centre-left coalition led by the once-violent Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), or People’s Liberation Front, that fought an insurgent war for two long years in the 1987-89 period. The scale of the insurgency and the counter-insurgency can be measured by the high number of JVP cadres who lost their lives. Unconfirmed yet independent assessments put the figure variously between 60,000 and 100,000 youth of both genders in the reproductive age group.

The JVP at the time was protesting violently against India’s involvement in finding a negotiated settlement to the ethnic issue in the island nation and more so to the induction of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF), 1987. More to the point, the JVP and other critics of India – of which there were/are many – assumed that New Delhi under Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had pressured President JR Jayewardene (JRJ) to accept the trilaterally negotiated Indo-Sri Lanka Accord and, more so, the IPKF that was specifically sought by the Colombo dispensation.

‘India has changed’

Today, when it’s all history, JVP General Secretary and party ideologue-in-chief Tilvin Silva too has said as much. ‘India has changed,’ he told a public rally in an interior village in the Sinhala South while referring to the seven MoUs signed during Prime Minister Modi’s visit. He said that they all had to move with the times and not live in the past.

Encouraging words, not only because Tilvin too is supportive of the initiatives of President Dissanayake, who too was in his league on ideological matters, say, until the other day. Tilvin’s comments coming, as they do, after a near-similar expression of confidence in India by another top party ideologue and transport minister, Bimal Rathnayake, mean that the top leadership is looking into the future and is not living in their own past.

However, this may trigger problems for the government. After letting his sidekicks flag the issue, feebly but still on record, the SJB Leader of the Opposition, Sajith Premadasa, too, wants the Indian MoUs placed before Parliament – for obvious national discourse and debate on the larger India relations. Already, politically weak dissenters like one-time JVP deserter Wimal Weerawansa and centre-right critics, including Patali Champika Ranawaka and right-right, Rear Admiral Sarath Weerasekara, have criticised the Dissanayake government for ‘surrendering the nation’s sovereignty’ without even knowing what they are talking about.

However, a relatively recent breakaway faction of the JVP, namely, calling itself the Frontline Socialist Party (FSP), is more specific in its criticism of much of India than the incumbent Sri Lankan leadership – though all of them are theoretical still. They were the ones who began demanding that the government seek prior parliamentary approval before signing the India MoUs. Since Modi’s visit, they want it placed before Parliament.

After talking in general terms against the bilateral MoU on defence cooperation, about which they demand details, the FSP has zeroed in on energy cooperation. Possibly smelling the current Indian difficulties with Bangladesh, and even otherwise, the party has drawn a parallel to India’s bilateral power pacts with Bangladesh and Nepal. The party claims that even when they can generate the electricity required for their use, they are being forced to purchase electricity from India under the past pacts.

Likewise, the Sri Lankan government has signed an MoU for the Indian public sector NTPC to set up a solar power plant in eastern Sampur but has since disconnected the existing solar energy suppliers from the national grid. The FSP smells a rat and claims, without evidence, that the decision was aimed at helping India’s NTPC.

However, none of those demanding the India MoUs to be publicised, barring the SJB and Premadasa, are politico-electoral heavyweights in any sense of the term. For instance, even though the FSP competed with the JVP – both of them after hiding their faces – for the success of the mass Aragalaya protests at the height of the 2022 economic crisis, the party continued to remain a ‘wash-out’ in last year’s parliamentary elections when it headed a new front. Against this, the people of Sri Lanka voted the JVP-led NPP to power.

Early referendum

Incidentally, no known leader of the multiple parties, trade unions and left groups that compose the ruling NPP alliance under the JVP leadership has commented on the India MoUs. The positive side is that none of them commented against it, either. Loosely put, the NPP combine in Parliament comprises roughly 100 members belonging to the JVP and 69 from the other groups, taking the total past the two-thirds mark in a House of 225.

Incidentally, NPP leader and Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya has since talked about preparing for a new constitution ‘only after the LG and PC polls’. It sounds positive from a popular perception, considering that before and after his election as president, Dissanayake declared that he was going to take up the promised constitution-remaking issue only in his third year in office, after stabilising the economy.

Right now, the government leadership is facing the nation-wide local government (LG) elections, which are as crucial for the survival and growth of the ruling coalition as the presidential poll and the parliamentary elections last year – both of which they won. There are then the Provincial Council (PC) elections, which, like the local government polls, were delayed by successive predecessors – the latter despite a Supreme Court fiat.

All sides will now be looking at the outcome of the local government polls, which are being staggered after the courts accepted contestations to the Election Commission’s decision to reject the nomination forms of multiple groups in many local bodies, citing technical reasons. Yet, at the end of it all, the LG poll results will be construed as an early referendum on the Dissanayake government.

So will the PC polls, likely to be held before the year is out. If nothing else, the Dissanayake leadership has to pull all poll pressures behind if it has to begin governing in the true sense of the term, without poll-time public pressures. It is here that the Indian MoU and the larger India relations could be flagged as a success or failure post-polls even if India has not been an election issue proper, now or ever.

Next in the line?

In context, nothing explains the ‘predicament’ of India-baiters in each of the neighbouring nations better than the reported internal discourse within the Sri Lankan Government of Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike on the night of 16 December 1971, when the Pakistan army surrendered to the Indian troops, bringing the ‘Bangladesh War’ to a successful closure. At the end of night-long discussions, in which the Prime Minister too was said to be present, a senior member of the grouping knocked at the doors of an Indian High Commission official, almost at the crack of dawn.

And his message from the internal discussions? ‘Will India target Sri Lanka for vivisection like Pakistan next?’ India did not, for sure, but internal events and developments a decade and more later led to precisely as much. Barring the humanitarian ‘Operation Garland’ food-and-medicine drop, it was all at the instance of the elected Sri Lankan government of the day.

Of course, preceding them was the Indian aid, assistance and arms training for militant Tamil youth to defend themselves and their women and property against the marauding Sinhala-Buddhist majoritarian mobs across capital Colombo – that too under the direct supervision of incumbent ministers when the JRJ leadership and the security forces pretended to be oblivious to it all – that is where the latter were not colluding and collaborating in the anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983.

Yes, the JVP was one of those parties that demanded the IPKF’s exit, but they were not the marauders. Today, they are changed men, but not all of them from that period have changed. In the guise of opinion-makers like strategist thinkers (former security forces commanders, academics and editorial writers), they continue to harbour those unfounded anathemas towards India – and not all of them are pro-China or pro-Sri Lanka, either. But the India-baiters of the time have had their day, which has elongated this far, by years and decades!

The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.