“I think the Indian press and Indians have been very unfair to him and he deserves better,” says Prof Sreeradha Dutta, who teaches and researches on international relations at Jindal Global University.
Prof Dutta was referring to the Bangladesh Chief Interim Adviser Mohammad Yunus, who generally gets a bad press in India for reasons ranging from playing down the attacks on Hindu minorities to courting China and Pakistan.
In a conversation on The Gist, Prof Dutta says Yunus is naive and inexperienced when it comes to politics. There is no doubt the interim administration has done things that have annoyed Delhi, but she does not believe any outside power is pushing Yunus in a certain direction.
“Talking about inviting China to Lalmonirhat which is so close to India’s chicken’s neck (Siliguri Corridor), was totally insensitive, I get that,” she said, “but we’ve seen that across the board with every Bangladeshi leader even Sheikh Hasina.”
The difference was that Hasina always sought balance in such relations, ensuring India’s interests were not put at risk.
There is the larger question as to whether an interim administration can take weighty foreign policy decisions, such as the Rohingya Corridor. The army stepped in and said no, and the decision was quickly rolled back.
“The Chief Adviser taking a decision like that did not go down well,” Prof Dutta, “decisions like this have to be done through consensus,” but as she underscored, this is an internal matter for Bangladesh.
She faulted India’s “indifference” to Bangladesh, saying brief meetings on the sidelines of multilateral events, do not do justice to what is an important relationship. While India has reason to feel hostile to the forces that topped Sheikh Hasina, recent trade measures against that country do not augur well for the larger relationship.
Prof Dutta points to how civil society in Bangladesh responded to the attacks on Hindus and other minorities. They were response and showed concern. She also lauds the fact that Hindus took out a mass rally through Dhaka, which was not stopped or otherwise interfered with.
Tune in for more in this conversation with Prof Sreeradha Dutta of Jindal Global University. She is also a senior fellow at the National University of Singapore.
