Sub-continent treadmill

Indrani Bagchi

The South China Sea is several seas away from us. The NSG membership will happen some time after we (the people and government) have stopped hyperventilating about it.

Instead, look closer home. India’s immediate neighborhood remains on its treadmill: furiously running through myriad crises, without actually getting anywhere. Can India get beyond firefighting as a foreign policy goal in its backyard?

KP Oli in Kathmandu is fighting to save his seat, even as Nepal’s only charismatic leader, Prachanda waits impatiently to become Nepal’s 39^thprime minister. For the second time in a few months, Oli has played his extreme-nationalist card, blaming India for his predicament. He has a full-blown Madhesi crisis on his hands, he has barely moved on earthquake reconstruction, the economy needs help, tourism is struggling, but he’s busy laying the fault at India’s doorstep.

Chinese diplomats have been rushing around Kathmandu trying to save him, even though almost six months after Oli trumpeted a China partnership, most of the deliverables are still promises. In May the Chinese prevailed on Prachanda to back Oli to maintain the anti-India phalanx. In fact, this is India’s growing challenge in Nepal – unchecked anti-India rants at the official level, through media, by the political leadership, which has a strong trickle-down effect. It gives China an open field to operate in. While India may be able to scotch the odd campaign, China merely has to stoke the embers.

India needs a new playbook in Nepal – it involves, among other things, delivering a single message. Nepal’s leaders and people have deep and close bonds with Indians across the social and political spectrum. They should not be hearing different things and believe they can play the Indian system. Second, while reciprocity is not India’s gig in Nepal and a small country always has the advantage when dealing with a big one, some truths need to be aired to Nepalese power.

On Thursday, PM Narendra Modi and Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh inaugurated a container terminal at Petrapole, adding another brick to a growing relationship between India and Bangladesh. India has invested in this relationship and it is paying dividends – Bangladesh will soon become a lower middle income country and India will cheer. Across sectors, India and Bangladesh are learning to work together, not seamlessly, but getting better at it. Bangladesh is now India’s entry into southeast Asia.

But the July 1 terror attack in Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka exposed a huge potential danger that could impact India’s strategic plans for its northeast and its Act East policy. Islamist terror groups have existed in Bangladesh for long. Jamaat-e-Islami and its “Shibir” cadres have joined JMB and Ansarullah Bangla and Hizbut Tahrir to create a toxic terror mix. Add to this two new trends – one, of Bangladesh’s young sons running away from home to become terrorists; and second, logging on to ISIS’ “virtual planners” to carry out terror attacks and broadcast their brutality. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross writes Shafi Armar (aka Yusuf al-Hindi), current head of Ansar-ut Tawhid, ISIS’s South Asian arm  “may have been involved in the early July assault on the Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka. ISIL claimed the Dhaka attack while it was still in progress, the first time the group has done so, suggesting that ISIL may have been aware of the attack before it occurred.”

Sheikh Hasina is right when she says the terror ecosystem is local, and intended to destabilize her government. What she has not bargained for is how quickly local groups tap into global jihad currents, or for that matter, how countries like Pakistan ca use them. That's where India comes in. Unlike Pakistan, there is no official support to these groups, which makes it easier for India to offer help and cooperation in counter-terrorism and intelligence.

But India needs to help Bangladesh to help itself. It won’t be in India’s interest if Bangladesh’s woeful lack of capacity ends up scaring away investors and foreigners. Japan here is an important partner for both India and Bangladesh. But if Japanese citizens are massacred as they were that night, there could be hiccups that would have larger implications. As India and Bangladesh work out a transit and connectivity network with Nepal and Bhutan, the prospect of jihadi swamps in Bangladesh spilling over into these countries could derail sub-regional prosperity and security.

Bangladesh wants a sovereign plan to tackle this menace. India should support it, build capacity, but stay out of the limelight. Unlike in Nepal, Bangladesh is learning to enjoy a more proactive development partner in India. But there remains a simmering whiff of anti-Indianism mixed with nationalist pride, which makes it difficult for India to rush in, guns blazing. India has to find ways to reach beyond this conundrum.

The real neighborhood challenge comes from an ever deepening China-Pakistan relationship. Andrew Small, author of a deep study of the China-Pakistan axis says he has noticed a much greater political consonance between these two countries in recent years. India should abandon the “Indian rate of progress” as it builds up Chahbahar in Iran, which would be the best counter to Gwadar.

Pakistan is in the midst of its season of discontent on India. It's good the Indian government has not deteriorated into a war of words with Islamabad, leaving Rajnath Singh to say stuff at his level. But it is a fact that two years on, India under the Modi government is still floundering in the same Pak-China swamp. The “neighborhood first” policy promised a new approach. Instead, we continue to play yesterday’s game.

July 22, 2016. The Times of India

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