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Journalism of Courage
Efforts to get Bangladesh to pay more attention to North-East insurgent camps in its territory drew much the same response from Dhaka, which repeated its assurance but refused to acknowledge the presence of any such terrorist infrastructure on its soil.
In the first high-level interaction between the two countries since the devastating October 2 blasts in the North-East that left over 60 people dead, visiting Bangladesh Foreign Minister Morshed Khan assured India that it was committed ‘‘not to allow the use of its territory for activities prejudicial to Indian interests’’.
Unlike Myanmar where the administration does not deny the presence of such camps, Bangladesh refuses to share the Indian assessment and, in fact, maintains that the list of 193 camps provided by New Delhi did not exist. Some of them, it says, are BDR camps while the rest could not be found.
Though Khan was here as a special envoy of Bangladesh Prime Minister Khalida Zia to invite Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for the SAARC Summit in January next year, External Affairs Minister K. Natwar Singh did raise issues of better border management in the context of insurgency in the North-East. Khan later called on the PM and handed over the invitation on behalf of Zia.
However, sources said, the issue of insurgent camps will be taken up in an elaborate manner during foreign office consultations between both countries later this month. Given that Khan was here in the SAARC context, bilateral discussions did not go into much detail. India added that it would continue to engage Dhaka on these issues at various levels to resolve the problem.
Even on the upcoming SAARC summit, India was apparently expecting Khan to bring along with him a draft of the declaration but he conveyed that the document was still under preparation. As a result, both sides ended up discussing the status of the implementation of the decisions taken at the Islamabad Summit, with Dhaka asking New Delhi for any additional inputs for the draft.
For his part, Khan conveyed Zia’s appreciation to the Prime Minister for the Rs 100-crore flood relief in the form of goods and rehabilitation material to be sourced from India. Khan also met Commerce Minister Kamal Nath today and discussed the Bangladesh participation in the International Trade Fair later this month.
