dna edit: A failed opportunity

Three years after the India-Bangladesh Teesta river water sharing agreement fell through, leaving Delhi red-faced and Dhaka infuriated, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has finally spoken out on the issue.

She is almost entirely correct in blaming Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee for her obduracy in obstructing the deal. If her criticism has a flaw, it is that she is too generous in exonerating the Centre. Delhi may have been sincere, as she said, but good intentions count for little in foreign policy without the political nous to deliver on them. The UPA administration could have certainly handled the matter better, including Banerjee in the dialogue from the beginning and offering the necessary incentives to co-opt her.

The entire episode makes for a familiar story. The UPA’s second term saw a Dhaka more eager to improve relations with Delhi than at any time after the early 1970s. Yet, there is relatively little to show it five years later; the central issues remain unresolved. If Congress and the TMC botched the Teesta deal, the BJP, TMC and AGP all proved intransigent on the other big bilateral issue, the swapping of border enclaves. The common strand is a privileging of short-term politics over long-term gains and development. In the Teesta issue, for instance, a number of Indian security and water experts, many within West Bengal, have validated Dhaka’s complaints about the current water sharing arrangement being problematic. And when it comes to the border enclaves, the obstructing parties’ contention that the proposed India-Bangladesh Land Boundary Agreement would see India giving away more land than it received — 111 Indian enclaves consisting of 17,000 acres swapped for 51 Bangladeshi enclaves of about 7,000 acres — is rooted more in a blind sort of nationalism than any logic. That 17,000 acres is only notionally Indian land; Delhi has little control over it and the resultant confused nature of the border has caused both security problems for the state and humanitarian problems for the stateless inhabitants of the enclaves.

The headway India and Bangladesh have managed to make in some secondary issues shows the potential of the relationship. The first South Asian inter-country power grid commissioned last year allows India to supply 500 MW to energy-starved Bangladesh — an arrangement that has served as a foundation for a ‘power corridor’ through the latter that will allow the former to link its north-east and north-west.

Bangladesh also allowed India to transport heavy equipment through its territory for the Paltana power project in Tripura; in return, India has agreed to prove 100 MW of electricity to Bangladesh from the project.

And under Sheikh Hasina, Dhaka has done a fair bit to assuage Delhi’s security concerns about northeastern insurgent groups operating from Bangladeshi territory.

The new government in Delhi must show the intent and will to fulfil this potential. There are concrete advantages in it for India — from Bangladesh granting India a land corridor connecting West Bengal to the northeast in exchange for the Teesta deal being implemented to using Bangladesh as an economic gateway to southeast Asia. Certainly, the governments and people of Assam and West Bengal must be taken on board and their concerns such as illegal immigrants addressed. But by giving a little, whether it is by lowering non-tariff barriers to Bangladeshi goods or the land swaps, India will gain a great deal more.