India is the largest development partner of Bhutan. It has been providing assistance to Bhutan ever since the latter initiated planned development efforts in the early 1960s. Hydropower exports from Bhutan to India — aiming at a target of 10,000 MW of hydropower by 2020—have already overtaken tourism as the single largest contributor to the impressive recent growth in Bhutan’s GDP. India has constructed three substantial hydroelectric projects — Chukha, Kurichhu and Tala — which are a major source of revenue generation for Bhutan, and the country is developing additional hydroelectric projects, for which India would remain the main customer. From 2006, Bhutan’s exports to India have exceeded its imports from India, due to its growing exports of hydropower to its energy-starved southern neighbour.
Bhutan has other significant benefits from its relationship with India. It enjoys preferential trade and transit facilities that India does not accord to other states (bar Nepal). India finances nearly three-fifths of Bhutan’s budget, holds 61 per cent of Bhutan’s debt stock and has built crucial border roads and other major infrastructural facilities. India remains Bhutan’s most important trade partner, its products constituting over 70 per cent of Bhutan’s total imports, while Bhutan’s exports to India are close to 99 per cent of its total exports. India is also committed to the construction of the first rail link between our countries and to assisting Bhutan in information technology development and dissemination.
It is a relationship that has comfortably weathered Bhutan’s internal transition and its opening up to the wider world. In the words of a neutral and not-uncritical observer, the Canadian diplomat David Malone: ‘In spite of clear Indian dominance of its small Himalayan neighbour, the relationship has been a genuinely friendly, positive, and mutually respectful one, with India working hard to keep its own profile in Bhutan as low as possible and the Bhutanese mostly expressing appreciation for India’s contributions.’
The end of martial law in Bangladesh with the 2009 elections and the ushering in of a democratic government led by the Awami League opened up a window of opportunity for both sides to address issues of genuine mutual concern in a purposeful and focused manner that builds on our commonalities. It may be a cliché to speak of the multifaceted nature of relations between the two countries and the historical and traditional bonds of friendship the two countries share, but there is no doubt that the cliché is a cliché because it is true. It helps that Bangladesh, once again since 2009 under the leadership of Sheikh Hasina Wajed, daughter of Bangladesh’s pro-India founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, seems to understand that its own prospects for prosperity are closely tied to India’s.
Soon after coming to power, the government of Sheikh Hasina arrested and handed over a pair of wanted terrorists who had previously enjoyed sanctuary on Bangladeshi soil. The hostility of Bangladesh’s few, but vociferous, anti-Indian Islamist politicians has been curbed by firm governmental action. Discussions on sharing of river waters, dam construction and similar issues have taken place in the framework of a mutual determination not to harm each other’s interests. India’s decision to permit duty-free access to the exports of the least developed countries has benefited Bangladeshi trade with India, which has burgeoned dramatically, with Bangladesh’s exports to India crossing the $1-billion mark in a twelve-month period for the first time in 2012. Issues of road and rail connectivity are on the table, trade is being given a new impetus and both nations are cooperating on combating terrorism.
Most strikingly, a seemingly intractable territorial irritant — the existence of small enclaves of each country within the other’s borders — was settled during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Dhaka in September 2011 on terms that even Bangladeshis found generous on India’s part. It is a pity that parliamentary ratification of the land transfer (which requires a two-thirds majority in both Houses that the United Progressive Alliance government does not have) has not yet happened. It will require an effort to persuade the opposition parties to cooperate, but the effort is well worth making; otherwise the perception that ‘India does not deliver on its promises’ will gain ground. While one much-anticipated agreement on the sensitive issue of sharing the waters of the river Teesta fell through at the last minute (on which more later), other accords ranged from trade, transit and transportation to electricity and an end to shootings on the border.
Of even greater long-term significance is a $10-billion project to provide transit through Bangladesh to India’s north-eastern states, the so-called seven sisters, long the stepchildren of Indian development because of their geographical remoteness from India’s booming economy, to which they are connected only through a thin sliver of Indian territory north of Bangladesh. In 1947 the North-East had a higher per capita income than most of the rest of India, but it has languished since independence because Partition cut it off from the Indian heartland. Greater integration with India will be a huge asset to Bangladesh as well, helping to develop roads, railways and trade and lifting the country’s economic growth by an estimated 2 per cent additionally. While transit through Bangladesh would also have security benefits for India (it would simplify the military’s task of bringing supplies and reinforcements to combat insurgencies in the North-East and to shore up our border defences against China), the economic benefits have clearly been uppermost in both countries’ minds.
Both countries speak of their relations as (in the words of one Bangladeshi spokesman) ‘time-tested and based on shared history, culture, language, religion, traditions and values’. The two countries’ closer engagement has embraced areas as diverse as joint water resources management, land boundary demarcation, trade, power, connectivity, infrastructure development, cultural and educational exchange and poverty alleviation. While it may have been true that, for some years, Bangladesh was reluctant to sell natural gas to India for fear of being seen domestically as submitting to Indian ‘exploitation’, public opinion has shifted significantly. Polls conducted by both Bangladeshi and foreign researchers have confirmed that hostility towards India is now expressed only by a tiny minority and that regard for India, as well as support for its rise as a significant power, is a widespread sentiment. This is a welcome change, and augurs well for the future.
This is not to suggest that all is merely sweetness and light between the two countries. Bangladesh has, in the not-so-distant past, served as a haven for Islamist fanatic groups and even terrorists, and has provided a sanctuary for Indian insurgents in the North-East. It has also been a source of illegal migration into India — some 20 million Bangladeshis are reliably estimated to have slipped into the country over the last two decades and disappeared into the Indian woodwork — and of counterfeit currency, which is regularly infiltrated into India by ISI operatives through the porous borders with Bangladesh and Nepal in an attempt to undermine the Indian economy. There are also lingering issues of border management and transit-related questions as well as controversies over water-sharing. This last erupted in the headlines when the chief minister of the Indian state of Paschimbanga (West Bengal), Mamata Banerjee, an important coalition partner of the Manmohan Singh government, vetoed a proposed agreement in 2011 to share the waters of the river Teesta, claiming it would deprive her farmers of adequate water. This was widely seen as a setback for a relationship that was once again beginning to blossom after a long freeze. It is clear that cooperation on sharing the Teesta waters is indispensable for Sheikh Hasina to be able to claim that Bangladesh has gained from her friendship with India; and we must all help persuade the Paschimbanga leadership that these waters are not ‘ours’ to ‘give’, but a shared natural resource (as we accepted in the Indus waters treaty with Pakistan) which we should use responsibly and equitably.