As Prime Minister Narendra Modi leaves for Dhaka on his first foreign visit after the Covid-19 pandemic, he termed Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as a statesman whose vision went beyond the narrow confines of physical borders and social division.
In a special op-ed for The Daily Star titled ‘Imagining a different South Asia with Bangabandhu’, PM Modi writes: “A sovereign, self-confident Bangladesh, at peace with its neighbours, bearing friendship to all and malice towards none, was rising fast from the ashes of a painful war. If this had continued, perhaps India and Bangladesh could have achieved many decades ago some of the accomplishments that we were able to reach only recently.”
“It was this rare combination of deep-seated belief in his own ideals, and yet the openness of mind to accept a different opinion, that made Bangabandhu one of the greatest statesmen of our times. It endeared Bangabandhu to the people of India as well. In him, we saw a tall leader whose vision went beyond the narrow confines of physical borders and social divisions,” wrote PM Modi for The Daily Star.
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, known as the architect of Bangladesh’s independence, was killed along with most of his family members at his home in 1975. His daughters, Sheikh Rehana and Sheikh Hasina, the incumbent Prime Minister of Bangladesh, survived because they were living abroad at that time.
“That is why we join our Bangladeshi sisters and brothers in celebrating Bangabandhu’s memory in this very special Mujib Borsho,” he added.
The Prime Minister further said that India would have overcome the complications of history with the 2015 Land Boundary Agreement much earlier if Bangabandhu had been at the helm longer. “We could have built a closely integrated economic region, with deeply interlinked value-chains spanning food processing to light industry, electronics and technology products to advanced materials. We could have created inter-governmental structures to maximise the economic, scientific and strategic benefits of a community of hundreds of millions of people,” he said.
India and Bangladesh have made good progress in connectivity, says the PM, referring to plans like Bangladeshi barges travelling all the way to Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh.
“Cargo from Bangladesh can move to Nepal and Bhutan through India. We are in the process of implementing a similar arrangement for Indian cargo to reach India’s North Eastern States through Bangladesh. We are making concerted efforts to operationalise our inland waterways, which will allow Bangladesh barges to reach all the way to Varanasi and Sahibganj in India.”
He talks about the completion of projects like the India-Bangladesh Friendship Pipeline and the Akhaura-Agartala rail link.
Had Bangabandhu been alive today, both countries could have set up mechanisms to share meteorological, maritime and geological data, joined maritime capacities and developed a vast multimodal connectivity network of roads, he said.
“This is the ‘ShonaliAdhyaya’ that we may have been living in had it not been for that tragic Friday morning of August 1975. The assassination of the Father of Bangladesh deprived the region of the destiny that could and should have been ours to share,” PM Modi wrote for The Daily Star.
