New Delhi has shared a rather tense relationship with Bangladesh’s Opposition leader, Khaleda Zia. Her visit to India later this month will be carefully analysed

Begum Khaleda Zia, leader of the Opposition in Bangladesh and also leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, will visit India from October 28. It will be interesting to recall India's relationship with Bangladesh during her last (and second) tenure as Bangladesh's Prime Minister. In an article in the September 2012 issue of Strategic Analysis, published by the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi, Ms Zia identified the major issues agitating “the public mind in Bangladesh”, as “the sharing of the waters of our common rivers, killing of unarmed people in the border areas and the resolutions of our boundary issues, which is one of the legacies of our colonised past. We must, at the same time, take into account the security concerns on both sides of our border and ensure that none shall be allowed to use our territories against the interest of the other. Seeking solutions to these burning questions has to be a matter of top priority.”

One can hardly be blamed for taking the last bit of the last sentence with a tablespoon of salt. Sheikh Hasina, the present Prime Minister of Bangladesh, has handed over virtually every important leader of the banned United Liberation Front of Asom and destroyed their camps in Bangladesh. As leader of the Opposition in Bangladesh from 1996 to 2001, Ms Zia had described the secessionist rebels from North-East India as freedom-fighters who deserved to be supported.

Not surprisingly, therefore, Ms Zia had supported them with renewed vigour after her second coming as Prime Minister in 2001. Her Government had not only encouraged them to set up camps and bases in Bangladesh but also helped with arms, training and funds. ULFA leaders thrived openly in Dhaka. Indian allegations about their existence were dismissed with scathing contempt. To cite an example, visiting India for talks with the Director-General of the Border Security Force, Ajay Raj Sharma, the Director-General of Bangladesh Rifles, Major General Mohammad Jahangir Alam Khan Chowdhury, had said on September 28, 2004, “There is not a single camp in Bangladesh. We had looked at camps' locations given in the BSF list. Some of the addresses were of our cantonment area and our headquarters...Some addresses even pertained to the Bay of Bengal.”

Major General Khan Chowdhury's comments during the same visit were even more scalding on the issue of illegal migration from Bangladesh. He had said, “Why should people come from Bangladesh to India? Your economic condition is not better than Bangladesh's. There are 50,000 Indians in Bangladesh who have entered illegally”. He had added that had India's economy been better than Bangladesh's, “You would not have gone for work in the Middle East.”

The Major-General's was not an isolated, minatory comment atypical of the Bangladesh Government's general approach toward India during Ms Zia's second innings. Inaugurating, as chief guest, the ‘Indo-Bangladesh dialogue of young journalists’, organised by the Bangladesh Enterprise Institute, on September 7, 2004, the country's then Foreign Minister, Mr Mohammad Morshed Khan, referred to what he called the restrictions imposed by India on imports from Bangladesh. He had then said that Dhaka could end India's $3 billion dollars trade with his country by issuing a Statutory Regulatory Order) on all Indian goods entering Bangladesh.”

Some of his other statements during the occasion were even more menacing and calculated to create tension between the States of North-Eastern India and the rest of the country. “Bangladesh”, he had said, “is India-locked. Delhi has also to remember that the seven North-Eastern Indian States are Bangladesh-locked.” Not content with the attempt to intimidate India implicit in the statement's underscoring of the vulnerability of these States, he had proceeded to try to sow discord between them and the rest of India. According to a report in the Daily Star of September 11, 2004, he had “blasted the Central Bank of India (the Reserve Bank?) for acting unilaterally against the common people of the North-Eastern States (of India) by imposing non-tariff barriers, such as not allowing individual States to open letters of credit without permission from Delhi.”

Why has Ms Zia chosen to accept at this juncture New Delhi's invitation to visit India? Perhaps the visit will provide some answers.