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It is barely a month since Sheikh Hasina resigned as Prime Minister of Bangladesh. The country has since experienced considerable flux, as the interim tries government settling in after the dramatic ejection of a powerful leader.
Amid reports of attacks on minorities, chief adviser to the interim government Muhammad Yunus told the nation in a recent televised address, that citizens of Bangladesh will not be discriminated against, based on their religion or political beliefs. Some civil society groups within Bangladesh have been urging foreign, especially Indian, media to refrain from exaggerating and sensationalising sporadic instances of such attacks, contending it could make religious minorities more vulnerable.
Our correspondent Kallol Bhattacherjee, who travelled to Dhaka to report on the evolving developments and political contours, reported on the Janmashtami festival being celebrated in crisis-hit Bangladesh. The lifting of the ban on the Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh, its student wing Islami Chhatra Shibir, and “all associated organizations” was another significant development last week.
Our colleague spoke to prominent political actors and policy experts whose views help us better appreciate expectations in the country. In an interview to The Hindu, Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, general secretary of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), said India should extradite former PM Hasina. “Now we need to restart relation with India at a fast pace. We always wanted a functional relationship with India,” he said, adding: “Unfortunately, there has been no direct communication from the Indian side so far.” Policy analyst Major General A.N.M. Muniruzzaman (Retd.), who heads the Bangladesh Institute of Peace and Security Studies (BIPSS), said India must engage with all sides in Bangladesh.
Just as the country grapples with major political shifts, it witnessed a grave human tragedy in a fire that began on August 25 in one of the largest tyre factories of Bangladesh. Located in the industrial township of Narayanganj near Dhaka, the Gazi auto tyre factory of Rupshi, owned by Golam Dastgir Gazi, chairman of the once powerful Gazi group, is well known in the area, writes Kallol Bhattacherjee in this spot report.
Neighbourhood matters
Polls in Sri Lanka: Three weeks ahead of Sri Lanka’s crucial election National Security Adviser Ajit K. Doval met prominent Presidential aspirants, apart from political leaders representing the island nation’s Tamil and Muslim minorities in Colombo.
As part of our pre-election ground reports from different parts of the island, we spoke to Sri Lanka’s Malaiyaha (hill country) Tamils, whose Indian ancestors were brought to the island by the British two centuries ago. What are their poll aspirations?
Ties with Pakistan: More than 60% of Indians and more than half of all Pakistanis surveyed believe the two countries cannot have friendly relations in this decade, says a new survey by the Centre for Policy Research (CPR)-C Voter that looks at the attitudes of Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis on a number of political, economic and foreign policy issues, Suhasini Haidar reports.
As far as Pakistan is concerned, the age of “uninterrupted dialogue” has ended, said External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar at a recent book launch, sharing New Delhi’s view of ties at the moment. The government also confirmed last week the receipt of an invitation from Pakistan for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Heads of Government meeting in Islamabad on October 15-16. However, the Ministry of External Affairs said it did not have a decision yet on whether India would participate and at what level that would be.
Top 5 stories we are reading this week:
1. Retired diplomat T.S. Tirumurti writes on India’s neighbourhood watch, past and present
2. Scholars from Pakistan and India Farhan Hanif Siddiqi and Ajay Gudavarthy co-write this piece on ‘A silent democratic backlash in South Asia’
3.Pavel Durov | The prophet of privacy by G. Sampath
4. War and peace: On India and a Russia-Ukraine peace initiative
5. The bus to Kyiv: Dinakar Peri on the takeaways from a journey from Poland to Ukraine
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