‘Bangladesh wants strong relations with India’, said interim government’s foreign advisor Tauheed Hussain

Bangladesh Foreign Affairs Adviser Tauheed Hossain on Monday said the interim government wants to see stronger people-to-people ties with India, something he said was lacking during the previous Sheikh Hasina government.

Speaking to the media, Hussain said, “It is possible to reduce public dissatisfaction towards India. I believe we need to take the right bilateral steps to address it.”

He said the “golden chapter” of Bangladesh-India relations was evident at the government level but it had not reached the general public. “We want to see strong people-to-people relations. The public should feel that Bangladesh and India have really good relations but unfortunately, this aspect has been lacking,” he said.

Criticism of Indian media

He criticized the Indian media’s reporting after the violence in Bangladesh, calling it an attempt to spread narrative. Regarding regional cooperation, Hussain said that he hopes that the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) can work as an alternative to the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC).

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However, he also said that BIMSTEC cannot be fully effective until peace is restored in Myanmar. He stressed that Bangladesh does not want to see BIMSTEC as an alternative to SAARC at the moment. Hussain said that Chief Advisor Muhammad Yunus is keen to revive SAARC as a regional forum. SAARC has not been very effective since 2016, as its biennial summit has not been held since the last summit in Kathmandu in 2014.

advocated for SAARC conference

The 2016 SAARC summit was scheduled to be held in Islamabad but after the terrorist attack on an Indian Army camp in Uri, Jammu and Kashmir on 18 September that year, India expressed its inability to attend the summit due to “prevailing circumstances”. The summit was cancelled after Bangladesh, Bhutan and Afghanistan also refused to attend the Islamabad summit. The regional grouping comprises Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

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BIMSTEC, or the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation, is a group of countries in South Asia and Southeast Asia – Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Bhutan and Nepal – that symbolise regional unity.