Politics of culture
PM Hasina's visit to West Bengal
A country's foreign policy is often driven by the national imperatives of the party in power there. This was evident when Prime Ministers Narendra Modi, Sheikh Hasina and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee came together in Santiniketan on May 25. The very next day there was another convocation less than a 100km away where Sheikh Hasina was conferred an honorary D Litt degree by the Kazi Nazrul Islam University in Asansol.
Many analysts in India saw the Modi-Hasina meeting in Santiniketan as an informal summit of the same model as the Indian prime minister's boat rides with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in recent weeks. There was no boat ride in Santiniketan, but the lush greenery and serenity of Visva Bharati University provided the backdrop of the Modi-Hasina meeting. Although neither India nor Bangladesh went on record officially to term it as an informal summit, the talks were held without a structured agenda or format, meaning the two leaders were free to discuss any issue they chose.
No doubt, soft-power diplomacy and the celebration of close bonds of shared cultural heritage of India and Bangladesh were the overriding motives at the two separate convocations where the three leaders pointed to Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam, the national poet of Bangladesh, being the emblems of cultural affinity that transcend the political boundaries of the two countries, a message that will resonate on both sides of Bengal. However, a closer look would bring out the political undercurrents of the occasions. The Visva Bharati convocation was followed by a one-to-one meeting between the two prime ministers in Santiniketan for about an hour and after the Asansol convocation came an hour-long interaction between Hasina and Mamata in Kolkata.
For Sheikh Hasina, the visit to West Bengal was invested with more significance and a strong political statement for her constituency in Bangladesh in this election year. She used the opportunity to achieve mainly four objectives: first, to give a push to the pending issue of the Teesta river water-sharing deal hanging fire for the last seven years; second, to reach out to the international community on the issue of repatriation of Rohingya refugees, which has failed to take off even after five months of signing the deal with Myanmar; third, to dispel the perception among Bangladesh's civil society of the ruling Awami League's rightist tilt; and fourth, to secure an iteration of India's support for her government.
Bangladesh goes to fresh general elections likely at the end of this year and Sheikh Hasina seeks a third consecutive five-year shot at power. She went ahead with her visit knowing well Mamata Banerjee's resistance to the Teesta treaty. She needed to be seen making another attempt to persuade the West Bengal chief minister to drop her opposition to the sharing of Teesta waters. There was no official word from either side whether the Teesta issue figured in the separate Hasina-Modi and Hasina-Mamata talks. But the expectation in Dhaka was that even signs of a forward movement from Mamata on the Teesta deal would have given some relief to Sheikh Hasina.
The Rohingya repatriation has remained a sore patch in the Hasina government's foreign policy objectives. Even a start to the return of the refugees from Bangladesh to Myanmar's Rakhine province can lend some success to Dhaka's diplomatic drive on this front. The Hasina government is under fire from the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) for failing to secure the Teesta deal and ensure the Rohingyas' return.
Domestic politics in Bangladesh, particularly that concerning the coming elections, has often seen the Hasina dispensation to go soft on fundamentalist forces and make compromises with some Islamist groups as evidenced by the changes in school textbooks and the removal of a statue from High Court premises in Dhaka. It might have been a tactical move by the PM but it has created a sense of deep disquiet in the secular and non-communal sections of Bangladesh's civil society. That disquiet was compounded by a number of attacks on Hindus, their shrines and properties and killing of secular writers. Sheikh Hasina has used her trip to Visva Bharati and Asansol to refurbish her government's image vis-à-vis religious minorities. And the best way to do this was to turn to the cultural tool, so appealing to the Bengali psyche. Sheikh Hasina's audience at Visva Bharati included a galaxy of cultural personalities from Bangladesh including national professor Anisuzzaman, writer Selina Hossain and singers Rezwana Choudhury Bannya, Lily Islam, Aditi Mohsin, Sharmila Banerjee and theatre personality Ramendu Majumdar, all of whom accompanied her on the trip.
In her D Litt acceptance speech in Asansol, Sheikh Hasina mentioned how Kazi Nazrul spread the messages of both Islam and Hinduism by writing Hamd and Naat and composing Shyama sangeet and Vaishnava songs. She intended to reassure the progressive civil society in Bangladesh by dispelling perceptions about her government's tilt towards the political right.
India-Bangladesh ties are at an all-time high with cooperation intensifying in existing and new areas including defence, nuclear and space technology in the last four years. Prime Minister Modi mentioned that the two countries have also solved issues related to their land and sea boundaries. India-Bangladesh relations are clearly the best achievements of Modi's "neighbourhood first" policy, which has lost some of its sheen following strains in ties with Pakistan, China, Nepal and the Maldives. Besides, Sheikh Hasina received wholehearted support from Modi who assured that India would extend all assistance to help realise her vision of Bangladesh as a developed country by the year 2041.
The message Mamata Banerjee wanted to send by agreeing to engage with Hasina in Kolkata was her willingness to do away with the popular perception of being a mercurial politician who refuses to see India's larger foreign policy matrix. This change, if sustained, could be in keeping with her ambitions to play a more active role in India's national politics as she is one of the prime movers of the opposition parties' efforts to put up a united front against the Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party.
Pallab Bhattacharya is a special correspondent to The Daily Star.