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India, Bangladesh to resolve dispute over enclaves |
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Making a forward movement in settling the border issue, India and Bangladesh on August 1 decided to send a joint team of officials to the disputed enclaves and adverse positions. The intention of sending the team of the Joint Working Group on the boundary issue to those places is to enable them to get a firsthand view of the situation. The decision was taken when Minister of State for External Affairs E. Ahamed met Bangladesh Prime Minister Khaleda Zia and Foreign Ministers Morshed Khan in Dhaka on the sidelines of the SAARC Ministerial Meeting.
Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran announced in Dhaka that the Water Resources Ministers of the two countries will jointly visit riverine areas later this month and following a meeting of the Joint Working Group on the border issue teams from the two countries would visit enclaves and areas of adverse position (where Bangladeshis lived on Indian territories and Indians live on Bangladeshi area). He said India had offered a package to Bangladesh to end their differences over delineating 6.5 kilometres of the border.
Ahamed during his meeting with Begum Khaleda Zia sought access for goods from North East India to the modernized Chittagong port . Begum Zia directed her officials to hold an early technical session to operationlise the Sealdah-Joypora rail link, which would provide a connection between Kolkata and Dhaka.
Meanwhile, it has been made mandatory for Indian truck operators and traders to get passport and visa while taking export cargo to Bangladesh. At present, Indian traders were allowed to take trucks into Bangladesh up to 1.5 km at certain trade points without any passport or visa under a bilateral agreement between the two countries. The industrial chambers have condemned the order saying that it would be impractical to implement it and it would adversely affect the trade with the neighbouring country. Rather, the Government could introduce smart cards at the border point to check unauthorized crossing of unwanted people, said FICCI in a statement.
Secretary (Home Management) in the Union Home Ministry B.S. Lalli who was sent to Assam in the wake of Press reports of land grabbing by Bangladeshis on the border, had tripartite meeting with the State Government officials and the leaders of the All Assam Students Union (AASU) in Guwahati and promised to make the Indo-Bangladesh border impregnable by the year end. He said the process for granting approval to the State government’s proposal for raising two battalions to guard the border would be expedited. He however, refused to commit anything on the AASU’s two other demands – electrification of border fence and shoot-at-sight orders against infiltrators from across the border.
To check “moles” active on the South Assam side of the international border with Bangladesh, the authorities have asked Dhaka to remove cell phone towers from areas adjacent to the boundary because these towers are helping anti-national elements on the Indian side to use Bangladeshi sim cards and pass on vital information to the cadres across the border.
Jamaat clout on Begum Zia Government
Pakistan’s intelligence agencies are steadily converting the strategically located Bangladesh into a new regional hub for terrorist operations in India and South-East Asia. And in this game, the Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) which is a key ally in the Khaleda Zia Government is of great help. It may be recalled that during the 1971 liberation war, the pro-Pakistani Jamaat-e-Islami had opposed the independence movement and fought on the side of Pakistani forces to stop the dismemberment of Pakistan.
Selig S. Harrison, a former South Asia Bureau Chief of Washington Post and now Director of the Asian Programme at the Centre for International Policy has said in an article that in the last election, the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) struck a Faustian bargain with the Jamaat-e-Islami five years ago to win power. In return for votes in Parliament needed to form a coalition government, Prime Minister Khaleda Zia looked the other way as the Jamaat has systematically filled sensitive civil service, police, intelligence and military posts with its sympathizers, who have in turn looked the other way as Jamaat-sponsored guerilla squads patterned after the Taliban have operated with increasing impunity in many rural and urban areas. To the dismay of her business supporters, the Prime Minister gave the coveted post of Industries Minister to Matiur Rahman Nizami, a high-ranking Jamaat official who has helped promote the growth of a Jammat economic empire that embraces banking, insurance, trucking, pharmaceutical manufacturing, department stores, newspapers and TV stations. A study last year by a leading Bangladeshi economist showed that the “fundamentalist sector of the economy” earns annual profits of some $1.2 billion. Now the BNP-Jamaat alliance is rigging the next national elections, scheduled for January, to prevent the return of the opposition Awami League to power. Voter lists are being manipulated, and the supposedly neutral caretaker government and the commission that will run the election are being turned into puppets.
With some 15,000 hard-core fighters operating out of 19 known base camps, guerrilla groups sponsored by the Jamaat and its allies were able to paralyze the country last Aug. 17 by staging 459 closely synchronized explosions in all but one of the country’s administrative districts. When the key leaders of these groups were captured, they were kept by the police in a comfortable apartment, where they were free to receive visitors. A cartoon in the Daily Star of Dhaka on July 24 showed them lounging on a rug, conducting classes in bomb-making
The bitterness of Bangladeshi politics is often attributed to a personal vendetta between two strong women, Prime Minister Zia and Awami League leader Sheikh Hasina Wajed. But the roots of the current struggle go back to 1971, when Bengali East Pakistan, led by the Awami League, broke away from Punjabi-dominated West Pakistan to form the nation of Bangladesh. The Jammat, which originated in the western wing, opposed the independence movement and fought side by side with Pakistani forces against both fellow Bengalis and the Indian troops who intervened in the decisive final phase of the conflict. For Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, especially the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the legacy of the independence war has been a built-in network of agents within the Jamaat and its affiliates who can be utilized to harass India along its 2,500-mile border with Bangladesh. In addition to supporting tribal separatist groups in northeast India, the ISI uses Bangladesh as a base for helping Islamic extremists inside India.
Selig Harrison says, what makes future prospects in Bangladesh especially alarming is that the Jamaat and its allies appear to be penetrating the higher ranks of the armed forces. Among many examples, informed journalists in Dhaka attribute Jamaat sympathies to Maj. Gen. Mohammed Aminul Karim, recently appointed as Military Secretary to President Lajuddin Ahmed, and to Brig. Gen. A.T.M. Amin, Director of the Armed Forces Intelligence Anti-Terrorism Bureau. The respected journalists in question cannot write freely about the Jamaat without facing death threats or assassination attempts.
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