26/08/2024
Sudeep Chakravarti goes there. South Asia's finest columnist does not disappoint. No one tells it like he does.
"The foremost move surely needs to be the recall of India's High Commissioner to Bangladesh, Pranay Verma. Once the process of establishing initial contact with Bangladesh’s interim government is completed, it would be for the best if he left to make way for an envoy who would have the unenviable task to build trust over public distrust, public distress and, unequivocally in some cases, public disgust.
He’s now tainted in Bangladesh, the same as India’s foreign policy in this country; indeed, almost the entire region. High Commissioner Verma’s tenure witnessed enhanced bilateral trade and connectivity, built on the work of his predecessors and accrued in the cumulative way that public policy and diplomacy necessarily works. But the tenure is now exposed with him unalterably being the representative of an India that stood by the exceedingly muscular and supremely violent government of Sheikh Hasina and the entire despotic, numbingly corrupt, and wayward Awami League party infrastructure -- for the purpose of securing India’s national interest.
Even though India’s security, foreign policy, and ultra-rightwing ideological imperatives have in tandem run regional policy since 2014, as New Delhi’s man in Dhaka, Verma is the face of a discredited India. A new face -- outgoing, less cussed, more situationally aware -- won’t immediately mend ties but it will certainly be the first significant stitch in the torn bilateral fabric."
Readers will know that for close to two years, this column has consistently, and insistently, advocated the rewiring of India’s institutional thinking and approach to South Asia in general, and Bangladesh, Nepal, and Myanmar in particular, to lessen an attitude of...
