Modi, Hasina & Didi: Teesta on their mind

Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed’s two-day India visit — to Santiniketan, Asansol and Kolkata — was an exercise in exceptional courtesy. At no point were the hosts, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, made uncomfortable by Bangladesh’s disappointment that the promise of “fair and equitable” sharing of waters from the Teesta river, which is politically perhaps the most important unresolved bilateral problem between the two neighbours, is no nearer a solution.

For Bangladesh and for West Bengal, a solution for sharing the Teesta waters is as much an international issue as it is a regional and, above all, a domestic problem. The stakes for India, however, have changed. For as long as West Bengal was a state where past ruling parties at the Centre had no targets for ejecting the party in power, negotiating issues of concern with Bangladesh was a relatively easier task. Ever since the BJP has made taking over West Bengal from the Trinamul Congress a part of its pan-India domination plans, the water-sharing issue, Rohingya refugees, illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, specially in Assam, have all become high-stakes issues of domestic political turf wars.

Intense as the pressure on Sheikh Hasina is to declare that a solution has been found on the sharing of Teesta waters, as a veteran at handling it over two terms in office, she was remarkably restrained during her visit. Evidently unfazed by the certainty that her principal opposition, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, would start a huge furore over her “failure” and her proximity to India, Sheikh Hasina talked about many things, but not Teesta. This is a position that she adopted after 2011, when Bangladesh’s interests had to yield place to Mamata Banerjee’s obduracy on the terms of the water-sharing deal.

The one thing that she did talk about was her overall vision for Bangladesh, which holds topmost priority, of driving the country to become a small but developed economy by 2041. The success of Bangladesh in moving rapidly up the Human Development Index rankings after starting out as one of the poorest countries in 1971, is a story that should make India squirm, if it chose to be sensitive about its lack of progress.

And Sheikh Hasina recalled the role of India and Indira Gandhi in Bangladesh’s liberation movement, and after the assassination of her father Sheikh Mujibur Rehman and much of her family. By separating bilateral relations from the immediate problems of water-sharing, she demonstrated that Bangladesh has other dreams and can afford to wait.

With elections coming up both in India and Bangladesh, the need to be seen working on finding a solution was important, but not urgent. Both sides appeared to have agreed that nothing could be done in haste, because whatever commitments are eventually arrived at, those would have to be implemented and that would have implications and consequences over a very long period. A water-sharing agreement would be a short-term solution, whereas it is being argued that a lasting fix should be on a management plan for shared waters between the two countries. In other words, India, meaning West Bengal, would need to propose a solution, which Bangladesh could then either accept or reject.

This alters the relationship between the two neighbours and the relative significance of the pending problems between them. It places the onus of finding a suitable formula for sharing the Teesta waters on India.

On its part, Bangladesh has delivered on most of the issues that were important for India, such as closing access to insurgents on the run from the Northeast and dealing with fundamentalist Islamist militants with cross-border links. In many ways, Bangladesh’s efforts, at considerable political cost to Sheikh Hasina, on dealing with Islamist fundamentalists has been a relief for India; its troubles have been largely confined to the western front.  

Of the remaining unfinished business with Bangladesh, almost all of it is a critical matter for India’s domestic politics. Besides water-sharing, the politics of illegal immigration in Assam is also a key issue for the BJP government in that state. Assam has initiated the process of identifying individuals who can stay and those whose claim to residence are being investigated under the amended National Register of Citizens. What happens in Assam is of concern for Bangladesh as the identity of the allegedly illegal migrants or non-citizens is described in political discourse as Muslims from across the border.

It is significant that Sheikh Hasina made the time to meet Mamata Banerjee separately and alone. On the face of it, Sheikh Hasina has effectively made West Bengal responsible for delivering the solution. While both the leaders did not reveal what had transpired at the meeting in Kolkata, it is understood that an exchange on political compulsions, including finding a solution on the sharing of Teesta waters and other matters, did take place.

The change in Mamata Banerjee’s status from a regional leader to a person of significance on the national political scene as a challenger to the BJP has clearly not been missed by Bangladesh. The time the two leaders spent together is an indication of the emerging political dynamics in India, where Mamata Banerjee has been busy spearheading the formation of a collective of regional parties, often described as a “federal front”, making her a frontrunner in the formation of a multi-party government at the Centre should the combined efforts of the emerging front succeed in ejecting the Narendra Modi-led BJP from power.