After being deferred twice in the past few months, Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is in India this week. This visit, Hasina’s first state visit in seven years, has been long in the making and New Delhi is hoping to showcase it as an important part of its neighborhood policy. Breaking protocol, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi went to the airport to receive Hasina personally, thereby underscoring the importance New Delhi is attaching to the visit. Since coming to office in May 2014, the Modi government has made the immediate neighborhood a top priority. Despite the failure of its initial outreach to Pakistan, India’s engagement with other neighbors like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh have been more productive. [thediplomat.com]
New Delhi and Dhaka are set to sign an umbrella agreement to increase defense cooperation during Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s four-day visit to India, which begins Friday.
All deals would be struck maintaining the friendly terms between the two countries, and there will be nothing detrimental to the interests of Bangladesh in the agreement, Hasina said Wednesday in Dhaka.
But many security experts, diplomats and others in Bangladesh think the proposed agreement would not benefit Bangladesh and could even go against the country’s interests.
“Bangladesh does not need a defense pact with India, or for that matter with any other country, because it does not face any threat of external aggression from any of its neighbors,” Serajul Islam, a former Bangladeshi diplomat, told VOA. “With China, a sworn enemy of India, Bangladesh has been in defense-related cooperation for decades. If Bangladesh signs such a defense pact [with India], it would be viewed by Beijing as a deal directed against it.” [voanews.com]
Comment:
Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina has no qualms about meeting the butcher of Gujrat, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi even though he had avoided arranging her visit until after critical state elections were complete. Modi could not accept to be seen welcoming the head of a major Muslim country while running a vicious electoral campaign against India’s own Muslim population.
Modi’s prudence paid off, with the BJP winning a landslide victory in India’s most populous state of Utter Pradesh, also known as ‘UP’, home to 200 million, by running an overtly anti-Muslim campaign, nominating not a single Muslim candidate despite the sizeable Muslim minority within the state. In particular, Modi turned to the services of Yogi Adityanath, an extremist Hindu politician, who is also the ‘Mahant’ (head priest) of the Gorakhnath Math, a Hindu temple, and the founder of the Hindu militant youth wing “Hindu Yuva Vahini”, known to engage in so-called ‘communal violence’ against Muslims and Christians. In reward for his campaigning efforts, Yogi Adityanath has now been made the UP Chief Minister.
After crushing the War of Independence of 1857, British colonialists, employing their well-known divide and rule policy, initiated a decades-long project of artificially creating a non-Muslim ‘Hindu’ nation that could stand against their former Muslim rulers. It was the natural culmination of this policy that led to the 1947 partition, with Hindu India set against Muslim Pakistan and, later, Muslim Bangladesh. Through sustained British manipulation, the term ‘Hindu’ changed from a geographical identifier to a religious one. And the so-called Hindu non-Muslim changed from a simple peace-loving citizen under Islamic rule to a religious fascist bent on worldly domination.
Sheikh Hasina has not only betrayed the Muslims in India, but is also betraying the Muslims in Bangladesh as well. Her overtly secular Awami League has a long history of subservience to India, and these latest defence agreements are but a continuation of that. Sheikh Hasina has no need to turn to India when it is in China’s interest to invest in Bangladesh to avert it from Indian hegemony. India is itself a major arms importer, incapable of indigenously supporting its own military requirements, let alone the requirements of a state like Bangladesh.
Furthermore, Bangladesh is more than capable of establishing its own highly advanced domestic military industrial base. Bengal was the industrial centre of South Asia when under Mughal rule; and this is the reason that the East India Company began its imperial project from Bengal. The Muslims of Bengal still carry within them the capacity for industrial greatness but the continued domination of the disbelieving Western colonialists has resulted in this industrial aptitude being restricted at the most to light industry, such as garment production.
The Muslim Ummah previously were the owners of the most advanced military technology in the world. Britain’s Industrial Revolution only took place after Britain’s contact with India, and after British rule of India commenced. When the British defeated Tippu Sultan (raheemullah), they were able to recover rocket technology, which they transported to Britain and reverse engineered in order to learn for themselves how to construct such weapons. It is this that led to the development of Britain’s indigenous rocket industry, which ultimately resulted in the powerful military rockets used in the next century, and even the rockets that took man to the Moon. Muslims are fully capable of realising such technology again.
However, all this requires sincere and capable leadership that is not continuously subservient to foreign interests, whether British, American, or Chinese or Hindu Indian. Muslims need to recall their own history, and remember their duty to their Creator. It is only the Islamic ideology that can create such a leadership. Then the world will witness the rise of a new power, and will see the Muslims of Bengal returning to lead the world industrially, inshaAllah, under the re-established righteous Khilafah State on the method of the Prophet ﷺ.
Faiq Najah