Incongruous with India
IT'S Catch-22. One group cries wolf that our prime minister during her visit this month was trying to sell out this country to India. Another group defends the visit as necessary and successful. Through an avalanche of seminars, discussions, roundtables, speeches, talk shows, newspaper commentaries and editorials, this group is doing what amounts to selling India to this country.
Which formulates a dilemma for us. We are damned if we believe in one group, we are damned if we don't believe in the other. Suddenly, India seems to be on everyone's mind, and it's cutting us like a double-edged knife. One group makes us feel guilty if we love India. Another does it if we hate.
It's fine that forty years after we fought for our independence, India should loom so large in our mind. We fought because we wanted to have our own country, because we wanted to take our own decisions. Our involvement with India can be termed as divine acts of providence. First, India came forward to help us win our freedom in 1971. Second, it happens to be our neighbour.
Forty years later India is a more powerful country, a stronger player on the global stage. Naturally, it has become more difficult for us to take a decision on her. One group says we owe it big time to India for the birth of this country. Others tell us something radical: No matter what, we should worry about India's intentions towards our rightful existence. All of them make it sound like a tightrope walk; one wrong step could bring us disaster.
The editor of a leading daily thought he knew better. If we are crying wolf about India, he wrote, the wolf only existed in our minds. He, however, didn't write anything about those singing praise for India. May be, the thought of snake in the grass never crossed his mind.
Like that editor, Sigmund Freud also asked us to mind our minds. He created a new picture of mind and said that it was much like a sea, conscious being its surface, a few feet of upper waters. Then there are the vast black, unexplored depths of the unconscious, full of strange monsters.
These monsters are why everyone in this country doesn't feel the same way about India. Neither does everyone in India feel the same way about us. There are political groups in India, which are constantly critical of Bangladesh. Hindu fundamentalists regularly spew venom against us.
So, what is true for the goose is also true for the gander. The monsters exist on both sides of the border. As a matter of fact, they exist elsewhere in the world, the French against the Germans, the Mexicans against the Americans, the Georgians against the Russians, the Serbians against the Albanians, the Sinhalese against the Tamils, and the list goes on. Fear and hatred are why we don't live in a perfect world.
Then why are we making so much fuss about India? We should know that we can't ignore India for the same reason we can't ignore the Bay of Bengal. These are geographic fixes over which we have no control. And, we are going to have to handle one pretty much like the other. Swim and surf in fair weather, but clear the coast if the sea gets rough.
Therefore, what we need is diplomacy equivalent of weather forecast and disaster management. Foreign relation isn't something that should be the stuff of political incendiarism. Proposed by one political party and opposed by another, it can't be that simple. It demands a broad national consensus, loose ends of discord hanging nevertheless. A dignified nation should put up a united face to the world instead of fighting like insolent children.
It's sad that our best minds have locked horns on India. In my opinion both sides are guilty of overkill. One group went out of the way to criticise the prime minister's visit. Another bent over backward to support. Either way, it was an unfortunate spectacle of crass conscience. Both groups have handled India with extreme prejudice. Neither group has been very convincing to me.
National self-confidence shows in the attitude of leaders, writes Anne Applebaum in The Washington Post. The Chinese leaders draw their self-confidence from export wealth and they convey their patriotism by using national rhetoric. The Russian leaders derive their self-confidence from oil wealth, and they convey their patriotism by launching attacks on their neighbours.
What kind of patriotism did our leaders convey arguing over a foreign country? Perhaps the same kind as which they demonstrate in their drawing of self-confidence. Proud leaders build a proud country. Neither wealth nor pride, it's understandable our leaders have been incongruous with India. Ingratiating or irritating, they couldn't do better.
Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a columnist for The Daily Star.
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