Testing
the Hot and Cold India, Bangladesh Relationship
By Wasbir Hussain
BANGLADESH
may not be Pakistan, but it is another South Asian neighbor with
whom India has an uneasy blow-hot-blow-cold relationship, despite
the extraordinary support extended during its fight for freedom
32 years ago.
And,
with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which has always
thrived on shrill anti-India rhetoric, leading the present coalition
Government in Dhaka, any move that may have even a slight bearing
on New Delhi is closely monitored, analyzed and dissected.
It
is against this backdrop that the Bangladesh Government's decision
on whether or not to grant political asylum to Anup Chetia alias
Golap Barua is keenly awaited. Chetia is the detained general
secretary of the outlawed Northeast Indian separatist group, the
United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA). New Delhi and Dhaka do
not have an extradition treaty in place yet, but India would expect
Bangladesh to hand over the ULFA leader to it once he is released
from jail.
Chetia
completed his six-year jail term at the high-security central
prison in Dhaka on Monday, August 25. Technically, he should have
been a free man that day. But, his detention has been extended
by another six months, as he failed to pay a fine of Bangladesh
Taka 10,000 ($172).
This
extension, in fact, has come as a breather to Premier Khaleda
Zia's BNP government as the Bangladesh High Court had, on August
23, ordered authorities in Dhaka to decide on Chetia's plea for
political asylum within four weeks. The Bangladesh High Court's
order came in response to a petition moved by the Bangladesh Society
for the Enforcement of Human Rights (BSFEHR), a frontline rights
group in that country, seeking the court's intervention on the
asylum pleas by Chetia and 21 others belonging to countries ranging
from Sri Lanka to South Africa.
Chetia,
now 52, was arrested by Bangladesh immigration and security officials
from downtown Dhaka's North Adabor locality on December 21, 1997.
The main charges against the Indian separatist leader was illegal
entry into Bangladesh, possession of two forged Bangladeshi passports
(No 0964185 and 0227883), possession of an unauthorized satellite
telephone and illegal possession of foreign currency of countries
as diverse as the US, UK, Switzerland, Thailand, Philippines,
Spain, Nepal, Bhutan, Belgium, Singapore and others.
Two
of Chetia's accomplices, Babul Sharma and Laxmi Prasad Goswami,
were also arrested along with Chetia the same day. Chetia had
earlier pleaded guilty on the charge of illegal entry into Bangladesh,
telling the court that he was fighting a 'freedom struggle' in
Assam and had to flee to that country to escape the Indian security
forces. The ULFA, formed in April 1979, is fighting for a 'sovereign,
socialist Assam' and is engaged in a bush-war against the Indian
state. New Delhi has declared the group an outlawed organization.
Dhaka is indeed in a Catch 22 situation.
Granting political asylum to Chetia, who still continues to be
the ULFA's General Secretary, would amount to openly facilitating
this Indian rebel group to establish a representative in Bangladesh
with Dhaka's consent. This would, once again, bring into sharp
focus New Delhi's authoritative claim that top ULFA leaders, including
the outfit's 'chief of staff', Paresh Barua, have been operating
out of Bangladesh, and that the rebel group from Assam was receiving
the backing of sections in the Bangladeshi intelligence community,
in collaboration with Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI).
On the other hand, refusal to grant political asylum to Chetia,
from the BNP's point of view, would go against the party's stated
position on the ULFA and 'human rights'.
As
Opposition leader in May 1998, within six months of Chetia's arrest,
Ms. Khaleda Zia had told this writer during an interview at the
BNP headquarters in Dhaka, that her party regarded the ULFA cadres
as 'freedom fighters', just as the Bangladeshi Mukti Bahini were
freedom fighters.
She
had then also expressed her gratitude to the people of Assam and
Meghalaya for sheltering the Mukti Bahini during the Bangladeshi
freedom struggle, indirectly implying that there was nothing wrong
in some ULFA men taking shelter inside Bangladesh. That, obviously,
may not be the BNP or Premier Zia's official position now, particularly
after 9/11, when the world has declared a 'global war' against
terror.
Moreover,
Dhaka's strong denials notwithstanding, international attention
is certainly focused on Bangladesh following western media reports
that the country has become a new hub of Islamist terrorist groups
and elements linked to Al Qaeda. Curiously enough, some of these
reports had said that the ULFA, too, had sent its representatives
to attend a meeting of radical Islamist outfits at a secret rendezvous
in Bangladesh last year. Charges of the BNP being soft on some
such forces or the ULFA attending such a meeting cannot be definitively
confirmed or refuted.
What
cannot be ignored, however, are the discussions in intelligence
circles of a local terror group, the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami
(HUJI), with an estimated strength of 2,000, currently active
in Bangladesh, with direct links with Al Qaeda. When New Delhi
raises its oft-repeated charge that Dhaka was not doing much to
halt Northeast Indian separatists from operating out of that country,
it touches a sympathetic cord among those who watch international
terrorism and cross-border insurgencies.
Considering
various aspects, Dhaka may finally reject Chetia's asylum plea,
but is unlikely to hand the ULFA leader over to India. What happens
then? In a conversation with this writer from Dhaka on August
29, Sigma Huda, secretary general of the BSFEHR, the rights group
that has taken up Chetia's case from the beginning (ULFA 'chairman'
Arabinda Rajkhowa had, in fact, thanked BSFEHR for taking up the
Chetia case through a letter dated February 4, 1998), said that
if the ULFA leader is denied asylum by Bangladesh, he has to be
given a chance to opt for asylum in another country.
"According
to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted by the United
Nations on December 10, 1948) and other conventions on political
asylum seekers and refugees, Dhaka is not supposed to send Chetia
back to the country of his origin and, instead, let him give names
of three other countries of his choice before negotiations on
those destinations could begin," Huda said. Bangladesh may
not grant asylum to Chetia, but could well cite existing UN provisions
to let him first try for shelter in a third country.
The ULFA too is expected to use all
resources at its command to try and prevent Chetia from falling
into the hands of Indian authorities. The outfit has faced some
major reverses in recent months in the wake of a sustained counter-insurgency
offensive by Indian security forces, and with the Royal Bhutan
Government mounting pressure for the ULFA to pull out its cadres
from at least nine well-entrenched camps inside the kingdom in
a peaceful manner or face 'military force.'
To
add to its woes is the recent sentencing of two detained ULFA
cadres to life imprisonment by a Guwahati court on charges of
being involved in the kidnapping and murder of well-known social
activist Sanjoy Ghose at the eastern Assam river-island of Majuli
in July 1997. The court, acting on submissions made after the
probe into the Ghose murder by the Central Bureau of Investigation,
India's apex criminal investigative agency, found 11 ULFA cadres
guilty of the crime.
Significantly,
this includes ULFA 'chief of staff' Paresh Barua, who Indian authorities
are convinced, is operating from within Bangladesh. Both Dhaka
and the ULFA may deny that the rebels were operating out of bases
inside Bangladesh. However, the Chetia case and the BNP-led Government's
handling of it in the days to come will once again inevitably
shift the spotlight on the issue of separatists from Northeast
India using Bangladesh as a secure staging arena for their campaigns
of terror.
The
writer is Associate Fellow, Institute for Conflict Management,
New Delhi; Consulting Editor, The Sentinel, Guwahati
