Bangladesh’s Junior Foreign Minister Humaiun Kobir’s comments on the ties between India and Bangladesh is bound to create ripples in foreign policy circles as the comments are seen as an attempt to recalibrate a time-tested friendship to a more transactional relationship, where Dhaka views New Delhi as equals. This is being seen as Dhaka’s attempt to rewrite the decades-old construct of the India-Bangladesh relationship amid the existing niggles over the presence of Sheikh Hasina and the hurdles that are stopping Tarique Rahman from visiting New Delhi even as India continues to push for normalisation of ties with steps like restarting tourist visas for Bangladeshis.
Rahman skipped the invite for the BRICS summit which he was invited to in the capacity of the Chair of the BIMSTEC While Bangladesh is yet to respond to India’s invite to Prime Minister Tarique Rahman for a bilateral visit. Bangladesh indicated that Dhaka wants Rahman’s first India visit to be framed primarily around the bilateral relationship rather than a multilateral gathering. But even as India and Bangladesh were discussing a bilateral visit in August in the backdrop of the invite from PM Modi, those plans fell through as Bangladesh fumed over former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina addressing an event in New Delhi. “In the past during the Awami League tenure, India-Bangladesh relations were described as a relationship between a husband and a wife by the then Foreign Minister. We don’t want a husband-wife relationship. We want a relationship based on mutual respect as it should be between two sovereign nations,” he added. Let us have business to business ties together. Politics will continue in its own way.
But business and what is due to the common man – giving that is our responsibility”.
Bangladesh said Tarique Rahman was not invited to the BRICS summit as PM of Bangladesh but as chair of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC). Speaking on the state of India-Bangladesh ties, Bangladesh’s National Parliament’s Speaker Hafiz Uddin Ahmad said, “Bangladesh has some reservations about India especially the decision to give shelter to former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and allowed her the opportunity to conduct politics from there which we don’t believe is how a friendly neighbour should behave”. After meeting Bangladesh’s Commerce Minister last month, Trivedi said, “Let us have people-to-people ties.
