Munni Saha, a gutsy television journalist from Bangladesh who earlier headed ATN News was a few days back caught at Dhaka’s Karavan Bazaar by a mob of Jamaat-I-Islami Bangladesh supporter and accused of supporting the “murder of student demonstrators” in July this year.
The murder charge was hogwash. Her real “crime” was perhaps the fact that she is a well known secular voice in the South Asian nation of 160 million.
The popular and straight talking TV personality had earlier placed leaders from Gen Ershad to Begum Zia to Sheikh Hasina on the mat with her questions.
Her potential ability to embarrass the current regime was obviously too high to be ignored.
The principal PR problem of the ruling dispensation in Dhaka is that the government formed by micro-finance entrepreneur-turned-politician Muhammad Yunus has mostly ministers drawn from or affiliated to the Jamaat, a party which supported and whose members were complicit in the 1971 genocide by the Pakistan army when millions of ordinary Bangladeshis were killed and hundreds of thousands of their women raped.
Ultimately the police has placed Munni under a form of house arrest.
To defame her, a news story was also planted earlier this week about her having Taka 174 crore in her bank. The journalist in question probably does not even Tk 1.74 lakh in her bank from where she has been drawing money for the last one year to run a YouTube channel which has as yet not earned any money for her.
Saha is not alone in this predicament. Hundreds of journalists, Awami League leaders and minority community prominent faces have had various kinds of charges slapped on them and have been either shut up in jails or are under threat of being taken away in midnight raids.
The most famous of those in prison of course is the former ISKCON monk Chinmoy Krishna Das who has been arrested for allegedly insulting Bangladesh’s flag by being present at a rally where someone had tied a saffron flag above the nation’s green and red flag.
Possibly his real “crime” is that he has been organising the minorities in the country in massive demonstrations against attacks on the their places of worship and their homes.
Bangladesh has never seen such large peaceful demonstrations by its hitherto docile minority community.
Buddhist tribals in the Chittagong Hills had run a guerrilla insurgency in the 1980s and 1990s in the face of large-scale land grab by plainsmen farmers backed by the Bangladesh army, but that had never been a mass movement and most ordinary hill-people had remained peaceful.
But this time round whole tribal villages have been burnt down, more than a thousand minority homes have been attacked and scores of places of religious worship ranging from temples to Sufi shrines have faced aggression according to Bangladeshi media reports which have otherwise been quite reticent in reporting on the chaos that has struck that country like a whirlwind since the forcible change of regime in August.
India’s foreign secretary Vikram Misri is visiting Dhaka on Monday and will probably pass on New Delhi’s stern message that India expects Dhaka to walk the talk on protecting minority rights and to contain the surge of “extremist rhetoric, increasing incidents of violence and provocation”.
Of course provocations have come from both sides of the border. While extremist elements in Bangladesh were the first to attack and burn India’s cultural centre in Dhaka and paint a flag of India and Israel on a road leading to a top engineering school asking people to walk over them, a mob in Agartala too attacked Bangladesh’s visa office there while demonstrators burnt the green-and-red flag of our neighbour.
There has also been chatter in the Bangladesh media with quotes from Islamist leaders on how Bangladesh is prepared to face any “Indian aggression”, even though there have been absolutely no signs of India weighing on any form of military action anywhere in the neighbourhood.
Bangladesh as a country itself is in a mess with skyrocketing inflation (in double digits), raging unemployment (youth unemployment now stands at over 15%), breakdown of law and order, besides flourishing extortion and protection rackets.
It seems Bangladesh’s Jamaat which dominates the Yunus regime is trying to paint India as that country’s enemy, a sure way to swing popular angst away from the new regime for its failures.
In classic neo-Nazi style, the Jamaatis have also defined their Jew — the minorities: Hindus, Christians, Buddhist tribals, Sufis and Shia Islamic sects.
Unfortunately, the Yunus regime pretends nothing is happening. Attacks are excused as “exuberance”, “sporadic” or as “attacks on Hasina supporters”.
While these have to be surely tackled, India too needs to remember that most people in Bangladesh are her friends.
A recent Voice of America poll in that country found that the majority of Bangladeshis —0 some 53.6% to be precise — were favourably disposed towards India. Which is near the percentage of people in Europe favourably disposed towards the USA.
Despite the regime change and the shrill rhetoric on both sides, that India still has friends in Dhaka among common people is good news for us.
It has more importantly business interests which need to protected. Dhaka too needs to realise that these are links without which Bangladesh too would find it difficult to exist economically.
Much of the electricity which lights up Dhaka and other cities in Bangladesh comes from Farakka power project, Tripura’s gas -based power plant and Adani group’s much reviled coal fired plant in Jharkhand.
Similarly, large amounts of the polyester and cotton yarn which Bangladesh’s garment factories need come from India, not to mention the potatoes, onions, sugar and meat that ordinary citizens consume daily.
India needs Bangladesh to cart goods to the Northeast at reasonable costs and has invested large amounts to be able to do so and needs to use these facilities.
It will pay both sides to ratchet down the tall talk, to give protection to the weak within their boundaries and to talk like neighbours with each other and not at each other to get the benefits of being ‘Good Neighbours’.
Hopefully, that is the ultimate messaging that Misri will deliver to his counterpart and that is the voice of reason which Prof Yunus will listen to. But then there many imponderables which can of course scuttle the best of intentions on both sides.
The writer is former head of PTI’s eastern region network
