Kathmandu: Citizens of Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, in the context of momentous changes in Bangladesh, have demanded that India should desist from interfering in polities of respective countries.
Over the decades, intervention by New Delhi’s political, bureaucratic and intelligence operatives in Colombo, Dhaka and Kathmandu, has contributed to the unending political instability in our countries and has empowered autocratic regimes, said Firdous Azim, Professor of English and Member of Naripokkho (Dhaka), Kanak Mani Dixit, Writer and Founding Editor of ‘Himal Southasian’ (Kathmandu), Lakshman Gunasekara, Journalist and Social Activist (Colombo), Manzoor Hasan, Centre for Peace and Justice, BRAC University (Dhaka) and Sushil Pyakurel, Former Commissioner of National Human Rights Commission (Kathmandu) by issuing a joint statement on Friday.
They have said that India’s interference weakens the neighbouring democracies and contradicts the Panchsheel principle of peaceful coexistence once advocated by India and belies the Narendra Modi government’s much-publicised ‘Neighbourhood First’ policy.
Stating that since 1971, New Delhi has sought to guide Dhaka’s politics for its own purposes they have said that New Delhi actively worked to prop up the autocratic regime of Sheikh Hasina over the last decade and received political and economic concessions in return.
“New Delhi’s interventionism in Sri Lanka peaked with the deployment of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) in the late 1980s, meant first and foremost to protect India’s ‘national interest’ amidst the Tamil insurgency,” they have said. “Before and since the time of the IPKF, Sri Lanka has had to repeatedly wrestle with New Delhi’s encroachment in its politics. In addition, lately New Delhi authorities have been actively pushing Indian business conglomerates onto the island.”
With regard to Nepal, they have mentioned that India once intervened in Nepal’s politics through proactive politicians and diplomats but now it does so also through intelligence agencies and Hindutva activists of the RSS. “New Delhi has lately been engaged in manufacturing consent within Nepal’s polity in order to maintain control over Nepal’s water resources,” the statement reads. “A significant coercive action was the blockade imposed on Nepal in 2015, even as the country was reeling from an earthquake, following the promulgation of the Constitution that was not to New Delhi’s liking.”
Stating that in Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka there are politicians and political parties that put self-interest before national needs and have been receptive to New Delhi’s interventionist moves, they have said that the inability of Indian policymakers to appreciate the fact that such interference creates layers of animosity against India is perplexing. “As has happened in the case of Bangladesh, these interventionist plans ultimately fall apart, but New Delhi will move from one folly to the next.”
They have stated that some of New Delhi’s sense of vulnerability with regard to these three countries is based on geography: Sri Lanka’s strategic positioning south of the peninsula, Nepal’s placement along the Himalayan range, and Bangladesh’s location between the mainland and the Northeast. “None of these factors would be seen as problematic, however, if New Delhi’s policymakers understood that our societies wish only the best for India, its government and people. Much of the public acrimony directed at India is but a reaction to New Delhi’s interference in internal affairs.”
In the statement, they have asked New Delhi to accept the right of each neighbour to deal with China independently. “New Delhi also seems to fear Chinese involvement in each of our countries, as if there were a coordinated plan at play to encircle India. To begin with, New Delhi must accept the sovereign right of each neighbour to deal with Beijing on its own accord, much as New Delhi does,” the statement mentions. “We find it incongruous that China has become India’s largest trading partner even as New Delhi seeks to prevent the neighbours’ links with Beijing. We insist that Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka are not and should not be in the sphere of influence of China, India or any other power, and that the alarm in New Delhi is misplaced.”
Apart from these three countries, the statement says, the Maldives and Bhutan also suffer from New Delhi’s efforts to be the decisive player in their internal and external affairs. “New Delhi can contribute to stable polities and long-lasting peace in South Asia by abandoning its overt and covert interference in the internal affairs of its neighbors. India should be supportive of the democratic aspirations of South Asia’s peoples and let them build their individual paths to the future.”
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