Editorial
Indian envoy’s arrogant assertions
and govt’s undignified silence
THE Indian high commissioner, Pinak Ranjan Chakravarty, seems to have embarked on a mission to vitiate further the already-strained relations between Bangladesh and India, making, at regular intervals, statements that are highly objectionable and seek to undermine the dignity and patriotic sentiments of the people in this country. In the past few weeks, he has tried to belittle water experts and environmentalists, and politicians for their opposition to the controversial Indian plan to construct a dam and a barrage on the upstream of the trans-boundary river Barak. Now, it seems, he has chosen the people of Bangladesh in general as the target of his diatribes.
According to media reports, Chakravarty alleged at a conference on ‘Bangladesh-India Economic Relations’ in the capital Dhaka on Monday that 80 per cent of the Bangladeshis seeking Indian visa ‘are touts and brokers.’ Such a remark tends to betray his inherent disdain and disregard for the dignity of the people in Bangladesh on the one hand and his estrangement from the ground reality on the other. The people in Bangladesh and India, especially West Bengal, share a long history that spans not just years but centuries. Many Bangladeshis have relatives in India and vice versa. A significant section of the Indian visa seekers are Bangladeshis planning to visit their relatives on the other side of the border. Yet another sizeable portion of the visa seekers are Bangladeshis who go to India for medical treatment, education and tourism. These people spend millions of dollars in India every year, contributing, in the process, to the growth of the Indian economy. These people mostly make up the long queue in front of the Indian High Commission every day, people whom Chakravarty has so disdainfully branded as ‘touts and brokers’.
Also, according to figures made available by the Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Bangladesh imported Indian products worth $3.375 billion in the 2007-08 fiscal. If informal trade is taken into account, Bangladesh provides India with a market worth some $5 billion dollars. With New Delhi evidently intent on maintaining the whopping trade imbalance with Dhaka, the least that Bangladesh expects is some sort of recognition, if not expression of gratitude, from India for its contribution to the Indian economy. Instead, as Chakravarty’s remark suggests, the Indian high commission in Dhaka seems to be too happy to denigrate Bangladesh and its people every now and then.
The Indian high commissioner was also quoted as claiming that some 25,000 of the Bangladeshis going to India with legal visas every year do not come back. It may be true that some Bangladeshis stay back in India even after expiry of their visas but it is also true that a good number of Indians reportedly also work in different sectors in Bangladesh, especially in readymade garment and information technology, without valid work permits. In fact, in an era of globalisation, such a phenomenon is almost universal and hardly surprising. What is surprising is that Chakravarty seemingly presumes that India is a lucrative destination for job-seekers, which it hardly is. Indeed, India has registered stupendous economic growth in recent years, at a rate comparable to only China’s. However, because of its skewed development model, India’s growth has been anything but distributive and has only widened the rich-poor, urban-rural divide. It is a matter of fact that while South Asia is home to half of the world’s poor, three-fourths of its poor population lives in India. Also, the Indian society remains incorrigibly segmented along caste and communal lines. Moreover, it is India where hundreds of poor farmers commit suicide every year upon failure to settle their debts with loan sharks and millions of female foetuses have been selectively aborted after pre-natal sex determination to avoid birth of girls since the 1970s. Indeed, the Bangladeshi society has its own share of misery which it has been trying overcome; still, we live in a far better social, economic, political and cultural milieu than our Indian counterparts.
However, while Chakravarty’s words and deeds defy diplomatic norms and minimum human decency, the Awami League-led government’s passive response to his obnoxious antics is equally, if not more, deplorable. Not only the government has been ignoring repeated demands of different sections of our society to ask the Indian government to recall Chakravarty, some ministers were found defending the errant diplomat for his offensive remarks only the other day. It is time that government realised that people voted it to power not to take affronts to the dignity of the country from foreign diplomats – Indian or else. The government should also realise that a diplomat like Chakravarty needs to be taken care of for the sake of improving the relationship between the two neighbouring peoples.
Killer painkiller
THAT eight children died of renal failure at Dhaka Shishu Hospital and Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University Hospital in the past two months after consuming adulterated Paracetamol syrup is indeed alarming. According to physicians and experts, a section of pharmaceutical companies are infusing toxic industrial chemicals into medicines, especially in Paracetamol syrup, says a report front-paged in New Age on Tuesday. A senior physician of Shishu Hospital said about 30 children were hospitalised with kidney failure in the past two months and five of them died. This prompted the hospital authorities to collect samples of the medicine that the patients were given for fever and send the samples to a laboratory. The laboratory eventually detected in the sample presence of Diethylene glycol, an industrial chemical unsuitable for human consumption.
The report also says after Shishu Hospital informed the Directorate General of Health Services on July 16 of the test results and asked for necessary actions, its director general forwarded the letter to the drug administration for taking stringent measures against those pharmaceutical companies responsible for manufacturing adulterated syrup. Surprisingly, the drug administration director has denied receiving ‘any such letter from the DGHS’. This tends to indicate not only lack of coordination between different offices of the health sector but also total insensitivity of the government to public health.
Unless the government takes prompt steps to streamline the activities of different offices of this sector and simultaneously punishes the offenders, children will continue to fall victim to unethical practices of these unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies.
DISPUTE OVER MANAGING COMMON RIVERS
Bangladesh-India relations in the troubled water of political mistrust
As the debate over the controversial Indian plan to construct a dam at Tipaimukh and a barrage at Fulertal on the upstream of the trans-boundary river Barak rages on, New Age serialises in five parts a paper that Nurul Kabir presented at the India-Bangladesh dialogues of journalists at the Bangladesh Enterprise Institute in 2004. The last instalment will feature a postscript that will analyse the developments that followed
Though tiny, I know many things,
And my body is an endless eye,
Through which, unfortunately, I see everything.
Gloria Fuertes
I WOULD like to begin my humble deliberations before the august audience with an explicit confession: neither am I a great nationalist nor do I have any reason to be one in future, because nationalism eventually inspires exclusion — exclusion of the smaller communities, or in other words, the national minorities, from the dominating nation in a country, be its nationalism based on language, ethnicity or religion, or a mix of some of the ingredients in question. I have been taught, initially by my parents and later by my teachers, directly or indirectly, not to see differently the pains of a Bangladeshi child from those of an Irish one, miseries of a Bengali man from those of a Chakma one, agonies of a Muslim woman from those of a Hindu one, and so on and so forth. Nationalism, which has an inherent tendency to get jingoistic, usually blinds people with territorial, cultural, ethnic or religious parochialism, which, I believe, cannot be a cherished mission of human civilisation. Nationalism for me is, therefore, nothing but a kind of communalism, although I am aware of the fact that the nationalist movements have incontrovertibly played significant roles in the emancipation of populaces across the globe, and throughout the history of civilisations, from exploitation of various kinds — colonial and imperialistic. Apart from its positive role in history, nationalism, like religions, offers the emotionally illiterate politicians across the world an easy, but effective weapon to incite a community of people against another, resulting in miseries for, and sometimes massacre of, innocent lives of both the sides, for subjective political and economic gains of a few. Then, why should a right-minded person pursue crude nationalist agenda, instead of pursuing the ones that help people across the borders, and regardless of their racial or religious colours, make progress? So, no apology offered for not being a staunch nationalist.
I spend these apparently irrelevant words, in the beginning, with sincere hopes that our guests from India, Bangladesh’s closest neighbour in terms of territorial location, will not take positions plagued by national chauvinism while discussing various problems standing in the way of a mutually cooperative, friendly relation between the two peoples.
Before touching on the subject, I have another small point to make, which, I believe, is very important to have a fruitful dialogue between the cross-border journalists, who, in turn, and if willing, can contribute substantially to the ushering of friendly relations between the two countries. The point is, we need to acknowledge the fact, in the first place, that the relation between the two states is bad, if not bitter — contrary to what the politicians of the two countries frequently claim in their rhetorical diplomatic utterances. Besides, the relations between the two peoples are also getting worse every day — thanks especially to certain sections of the media that dance, to a varying degree though, to the tune of vested interests in the establishments of both the countries.
If we can show the courage of recognising these two facts of life, in the context of the present state of bilateral relations, only then, I believe, we can work out some programmes to improve the relations, which is important for the peace and stability of the South Asian region in general and the peoples of Bangladesh and India in particular.
The bone of contention
NOW, to begin with, let me outline the salient disputed issues, remaining unresolved between the two countries for decades, which appear to be hindering the sound growth of bilateral relations, especially on the part of Bangladesh. The issues are exchange of enclaves, exchange of areas within enclaves having adverse possession, demarcation of 6.5 kilometres of land boundary, demarcation of maritime boundary, ownership of Talpatty (New Moore) island in the Bay of Bengal, bridging the huge trade gap, and on top of that all, the management of waters of common rivers, including the Ganges.
Water at the centre
THE dispute over the management of the Ganges water is perhaps the most important factor behind the eroding Indo-Bangladesh relations. Given the stature and reputation of our knowledgeable guests from India, there could be no point in repeating the cliché about the importance of water in the growth of human civilisations. But what is very important to mention is the scarcity of water, in a land of water called Bangladesh, affecting hundreds of thousands of people, especially those in the country’s northern region, who have been the worst victims of desertification, deforestation, loss of agriculture, reduced fish catch, reduced navigability, reduced industrial production, etc — thanks to unilateral rationing of the Ganges flow by the Indian authorities to the lower riparian Bangladesh in the dry season. Reports have it that some two million people have already been displaced over the past two decades from their homeland in the affected region to other areas of the country for survival. Indian authorities, however, become ‘magnanimous’ during the monsoon and keep all the sluice gates of the Farakka Barrage wide open, flooding almost the entire Bangladesh!
It all began with Bangladesh entertaining, in good faith, an Indian proposal, made at a minister-level meeting in Dhaka in April 1975, that the feeder canal at Farakka should be run on a trial basis during that current period of low flow while continuing the discussion on the ways of ensuring equitable share of the Ganges water between the two countries. Notably, India completed the structure of the barrage in 1971 – when people of Bangladesh were engaged in a fierce armed clash with the occupation forces of Pakistan for national independence, while the feeder canal, which diverts water to the river Bhagirathi was completed in 1975.
The government of Bangladesh gave consent to a limited trial operation of the barrage, with discharges varying between 11,000 and 16,000 cusecs in a 10-day period from April 21 to May 31, 1975, with the remainder of the flow guaranteed to reach Bangladesh. But India continued to divert the Ganges waters at Farakka after the trial run, throughout the 1975-1976 dry season, in full capacity of the diversion, which is 40,000 cusecs, without renewing or negotiating a new agreement with Bangladesh. The breach of trust on the part of India created serious consequences in Bangladesh that included drying up of tributaries, salt poisoning of the vast Sundarban mangrove swamps in the Ganges delta, and setbacks to agriculture, fisheries, navigation, etc. One has to admit, Bangladesh has reasons to feel cheated.
Four more meetings were held between the two states between June 1975 and June 1976, with little results. In January 1976, Bangladesh lodged a formal protest against India with the General Assembly of the United Nations, which adopted a consensus statement, on November 26, 1976, calling upon the two countries to meet urgently at the ministerial level for negotiations, ‘with a view to arriving at a fair and expeditious settlement’.
The process of negotiations between the two governments resumed in December 1976. The contending sides reached an understanding on some vital issues in April 1977, which eventually culminated in the signing of the Ganges Waters Agreement in November 1977, initially for a period of five years, with an understanding that the agreement could be extended further by mutual consents, while the two sides would find out a long term solution to the problem of augmentation of the dry season flows of the Ganges.
Calculating the dry season availability of water at the Farakka point from the recorded flows of the Ganges between 1948 and 1973, on the basis of a 75 per cent availability, the shares of Bangladesh and India of the Ganges flows in the 10-day periods were fixed, which were, for the last 10-day leanest period of April being 34,500 and 20,500 cusec respectively out of 55,000 cusec availability during that period. It was also agreed on that in the event of any lower availability at Farakka, Bangladesh’s share should not fall below 80 per cent of the stated share during a particular period shown in a schedule annexed to the accord in question.
The five-year agreement expired in 1982 with no fresh proposal formulated over the period, while the two countries ‘agreed’ in October that year to make fresh moves to work out a solution ‘within the next 18 months’. The deadline was over with the task remaining unaccomplished.
In November 1985, a memorandum of understanding was signed on the sharing of the dry season flow throughout 1988. Since the lapse of the MoU in December 1988, no further accord was signed until December 1996. In the meantime, India granted Bangladesh only a portion of the flow of the Ganges, with no minimum flow guaranteed, and no special provisions for drought years.
In December 1996, a 30-year accord was signed between the two governments, outlining a flow regime under varying conditions. But it did not contain any guarantee clause for any minimum amount of water for Bangladesh, which was there in 1977 agreement, nor did it contain any provision of equal sharing of flows in the case of shortage of water, which was there in the 1982 and 1985 MoUs. Besides, the agreement did not take future hydrological parameters into account, ignoring the fact that the water flow at the Farakka point had declined drastically since 1988 – coinciding with the expiry of 1985 MoU – as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar of India started drawing water between 25,000 cusecs and 45,000 cusecs much ahead of the Farakka Barrage. Naturally, the 1996 accord attracted a considerable amount of scepticism about the workability of the agreement in Dhaka.
The critics proved right in a few months of the accord’s existence: water passing through Farakka dropped below the minimum provided in the treaty, prompting Bangladesh to request a review of the state of the watershed in the very first lean season in April 1997.
To be continued
Reprinted from Dynamics of Bangladesh-India Relations: Dialogue of Young Journalists Across the Border, UPL, 2005.
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