India needs to engage with Bangladesh much more proactively: Sudeep Chakravarti

This could be the rare Indian book told through crime because it reenacts the murder of two children in Delhi’s Ridge area, which shocked the country. Eventually, it was a senseless killing and we never quite understand why it happened. It is disturbing. We are living in an age when there is a lot of true crime on Netflix for example. The name Billa Ranga is even today, associated with terrible criminals. They were eventually hanged. But their story is the randomness of the violence that struck me.

You are absolutely right. It translates to the nation. I think one of the reasons why we were transfixed as teenagers at that time is they [the children] were people like us, middle-class kids, who were trying to get ahead in life, doing interesting things, aspiring to get into what was being built to us at that point of time, not in 2024, but back in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, as the symbol of brave new India emerged; and these bright young kids are brutally taken away from society. It horrified people, it shocked people because of the sheer brutality of it and the sheer senselessness of it. And it also, I think, came at a certain time in India’s dark arc, or Delhi’s dark arc.

That arc for me began with 1975, the beginning, the imposition of the Emergency, then the cessation of the Emergency, the Opposition coming into play, the fall of the Congress empire, the Gandhi empire, the generation of the Janata government, the strange goings-on, like the hard Hindu right, conservative right being a part of a coalition government with a left-of-centre coalition. Billa and Ranga emerged as hyphenated villains. And ironically their names continue to capture us to this day even though we tend to forget about Geeta and Sanjay. So, in a way, it was paying homage to people of my generation. Dreams that were taken away so brutally. It gave me an opportunity to talk about something that could be described as a true crime but interweave it with the socio-political environment and actually the mood of the moment.

You have researched the newspapers, and spoken to top-notch journalists. What were the events happening simultaneously as the crime took place? Atal Bihari Vajpayee goes on to address the protesters at the Delhi boat club and he is hit with stones. Would you just tell us about that?

Indeed. And, remarkably, most people do not realise that Vajpayee was a member of the Janata government. I spent months delving through archives looking through newspapers, clippings, and microfilmspools. To come to Vajpayee’s incident, it was remarkable that he took it upon himself because even then he was an affable guy. He wanted to speak and he wanted to calm things down. He saw his role as a diplomat, the chief diplomat for India, but also in a way a chief diplomat for the government.

You have written multiple books. One of your books, which I liked, was Red Sun about the Naxal movement. You have written books on the Northeast, on Bengal, and the Battle of Plassey. But your life’s journey has involved an amazing amount of travel. And you have spent the last three years in Bangladesh. You were there when Sheikh Hasina was deposed.

I have a great engagement with Bangladesh. When I was there in the early 90s, I was one of the few people who believed in the idea of South Asia. So, the magazine I was with at the time, India Today, let me travel all over South Asia. I have actually seen the transition of Bangladesh over the past 30 years—from a military dictatorship into a democracy. I interviewed Sheikh Hasina when she was the leader of the Opposition, a very different Sheikh Hasina then: she went from being a very sharp, approachable leader of the Opposition to an autocratic premier of a country where she lived in an ivory tower. I had the good fortune to travel across Bangladesh and even interview people who are considered to be hardcore ultra conservative Islamists like Ghulam Azam.

I’ve seen Bangladesh go from a conservative phase to a self-professedly liberal, secular phase, which became conservative in its own right because the Awami League became more and more autocratic and the leaders became more and more autocratic. So, you have the irony of a democracy becoming an autocracy over time. And Sheikh Hasina was a symbol of that. I think it is necessary to explore this.

At the same time, Bangladesh was doing so well on development indices.

It did. I always describe it to my students and also when I write to speak, as inequity. You have a situation where Bangladesh, like India, has tremendously positive growth. Its infrastructure has grown by leaps and bounds. It is a forward-looking country, economically, and socially, in many indices, including human resources. In many ways, it may be a more equitable society than India. And yet, because of the political command and control, you effectively have had for the last 10 years, an increasingly autocratic and self-isolating power structure.

Many institutions, political institutions, judicial institutions, and policing institutions in Bangladesh, were weakened on account of this autocracy. And Sheikh Hasina was at the apex. And so, the economic progress, unfortunately, because of nepotism and cronyism, you had growth at certain levels. But I would describe it as a comet: the comet was the growth invited to the growth party, but not the tail of the comet. There was a disconnect, so there was great resentment because there was inflation and corruption. Tens of billions of dollars are being taken away from Bangladesh by crony capitalism. So, Bangladesh was inherently weakened from within, by the autocracy, by the kleptocracy.

Since you were in Dhaka recently, were Hindus specifically targeted in the violence that unfolded?

I did not feel insecure, but maybe because I am trained as a journalist, so I don’t feel that way when I am out. I am just, sort of, personalising it to tell you that I did not feel insecure at any point in time, but that doesn’t mean that others did not. So, there were instances of Hindus being attacked. Also, like in East Pakistan’s [present day Bangladesh] history and Bangladesh’s history, minorities in general have been attacked from time to time. Whenever there has been a political dislocation, which has let loose the dogs of war, in anarchy, people who can leverage command and control, will always try to go and grab whatever power they possibly can.

So, this is a classic case of a repeat, if you will. It’s happened several times in Bangladesh’s existence. It happened in East Pakistan’s history when there was political anarchy and there have been political transitions, typically the minorities were attacked. They were attacked this time also because there was a power vacuum, but they were absolutely not attacked to the level at which the Indian media were dog-whistling. The whole episode was completely blown out of proportion and I imagine this is a mixture of misinformation riding on disinformation. I want to categorically state this.

There should not be any confusion about that. By then, the interim government was in power. They were neighbourhood watches being kept in Dhaka when instances of temples were attacked, some Hindu businesses were attacked, and some shops were burned. Nobody is denying this. But you had Hindu organisations in Bangladesh beseeching Hindu organisations in India saying, will you please let us be Hindus in Bangladesh because we are quite alright, thank you very much. We do not need your help. That is number one. Number two, I have seen, and Bangladesh has seen that it is not a perfect situation and it is not safe for anybody, including the Hindus.

Neither is Bangladesh entirely safe right now because of this vulnerable situation, this transitional situation for Muslims of Bangladesh too. Because anarchy affects everybody. The true stories that have not been played up, amped up as much in the Indian media, for obvious reasons perhaps, is that you had Jamaat people, neighbourhood watches, and standing guard. It happened in 1984 in Delhi, where neighbourhood watches to protect Sikh families.

Some of the disturbing images included Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s and Rabindranath Tagore’s statues being brought down. Tagore’s “Amar Sonar Bangla” is the national anthem. Do you think all of that will change in the future? Do you think they might even have a new national anthem?

I don’t think they would have a new national anthem, because there has been a pushback. All across Bangladesh, people gathered on the streets to sing Amar Sonar... Cultural activists, and sculptors, pooled resources, and they went and with their own hands, fixed as many statues as they could of Tagore. Bangladesh has a very fond space for him.

The Bangladesh story is, of course, eternal, since you are a Bengali and you have written a book called The Bengalis.

I have survived both Bengals—Bengalis in India and overseas, and I’ve also survived Bengalis in Bangladesh. And the book contains all of them.

Soon after the events in Bangladesh, which all of us in India followed, we saw this protest coming out in Kolkata. Indeed, in the beginning, there was some superficial commentary that Bengalis, this side, got instigated by the protests, but it has obviously taken a life of its own. Do you think that what hashappened in India is entirely different?

No. I think the outrage or the atrocity in Arjun Hospital in Kolkata happened around the time that the protest movement and the killings had peaked in Bangladesh. And the hasty departure of Sheikh Hasina coincided with that. So, I think the public mood in Bangladesh did spill over, I think, inspirational, if you will, to Kolkata, and to other parts of Bengal and in many ways, across India, because there was outrage. But I think it has taken on a life of its own. But it was for different reasons altogether. That actually brings us back to the loop of a fallen city where we are outraged over crimes against women.

And, of course, that was Geeta and Sanjay, a boy, too. But repeatedly, we have Nirbhaya here. We have Tilottama in Kolkata. We seem to be outraged over these grotesque atrocities being perpetrated. And it is 45 years since Geeta and Sanjay Chopra’s death several years since Nirbhaya, and several years since a Netflix series on Nirbhaya, and so many unspoken and unheralded atrocities across India. It is just a shame and a tragedy that the criminal justice system of India, in all these decades, has not been able to keep pace with the needs of security of the women and children and the citizenry of India. I mean, that is a tragic deficit. And I don’t know how we can overcome this.

Bangladesh and Bengal: How different are they?

Very similar, and yet very different. I cooked up a term for it. I call it “Banglasphere”. That is my definition of wherever Bengalis live. So Bangladesh is part of Banglasphere, and so is West Bengal. But I think this. They are very distinct entities. Many people in West Bengal either do not get or do not wish to acknowledge that Bengalis in Bangladesh are Bengalis too. That you have an entity, you have a Bangladeshi life of its own, that you have the fact that the country is called Bangladesh, the land of the Bengalis.

Where is the better Bengali literature coming out of? Is Bangladesh vibrant?

Bangladesh considers itself to be a repository of Bengali culture, of the Bengali language. You have the Bangla Academy in Dhaka. You have high-quality literature coming out of Bangladesh. There is a peculiarity in Bangladeshi literature. They love the short story form. So, there is a lot of the writing that comes out of Bangladesh, in terms of fictional writing, there’s a lot of poetry, like in West Bengal, but there is a remarkable volume of short stories.

Tell us about this demand to get Sheikh Hasina back.

Right now, I think there is going to be a kind of diplomatic chess game going on where because India gave shelter to Sheikh Hasina as a great friend and ally, which is all well and fine, but you do need to keep in mind the repercussions of that. I might use the fact that Sheik Hasina continues to be in India as a diplomatic lever to gain diplomatic concessions for Bangladesh, which is, I think, quite the right thing to do because many extant issues were dampened during her premiership: for instance, the sharing of river water. 54 rivers from India flow into Bangladesh. It is not just the Ganga and the Brahmaputra: 52 other rivers also decant into Bangladesh. We need to sort that out.

There needs to be a river water commission, like the Mekong River Commission between India, Bangladesh, and Nepal. That needs to happen. It was completely stalled. Mamata Banerjee needs to get her act together and not stall an agreement over the Teesta to save her vote bank in north Bengal. I think the stakes are too high right now. And for national interest, India needs to be engaging with Bangladesh much more proactively than it has been.

To my mind, they’ve been treating Bangladesh like many other countries of South Asia. And I’ve written this and spoken about it frequently as a zamindari. India is the zamindar and South Asia is the zamindari. There has been, even with outreach and with regional outreach, a tendency to overreach as well. And I think it is no coincidence that you have had senior officials of the Ministry of External Affairs make damage control visits to the Maldives, make damage control visits to Nepal.

Damage control visits to Bangladesh. I am sure they will get down to it.

That needs to happen.