PM meets Bangladesh’s Yunus amid strained ties, 1st since Sheikh Hasina’s ouster

NEW DELHI, APR 4 : Amid strained ties between India and Bangladesh, Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a meeting with Bangladesh’s chief adviser Muhammad Yunus in Thailand – the first since the ouster of the Sheikh Hasina regime last August. Sources said Bangladesh sought a meeting between Yunus and PM Modi on the sidelines of the BIMSTEC summit.

The two leaders engaged in a firm handshake before sitting down for bilateral talks, visuals showed. Modi and Yunus were also seen seated next to each other at the BIMSTEC leaders’ dinner on Thursday night, fuelling the buzz of a pull aside.

Last week, PM Modi wrote a letter to Yunus on the occasion of the National Day of Bangladesh, highlighting the significance of mutual sensitivity.

The meeting comes days after Yunus irked India after he referred to the landlocked situation of India’s northeast while asking China to expand its influence in the region. Yunus, during his visit to China, pitched Bangladesh as the only gateway to the Indian Ocean, drawing fire from the Assam Chief Minister and the Ministry of External Affairs.

“The seven states of the eastern part of India, called seven sisters they are landlocked. They have no way to reach out to the ocean. We are the only guardian of the ocean for all this region. So this could be an extension of the Chinese economy,” Yunus said during his four-day China visit.

Yunus’s remarks as well as his bid to project China as Bangladesh’s new partner further added to the tensions between New Delhi and Dhaka, which cultivated close ties under Sheikh Hasina. The fact that India has not heeded to Bangladesh’s repeated requests to extradite Hasina has added another layer of complications.

While Modi has not directly responded to Yunus’s remarks, the Prime Minister highlighted that India’s northeast “lies at the heart” of the BIMSTEC grouping.

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, while underscoring that the northeast was emerging as a connectivity hub, stressed that cooperation was an integrated outlook and not one subject to “cherry-picking”.

Another flashpoint between India and Bangladesh has been the attacks on Hindus, arrests of monks, and rampant vandalism of temples, including ISKCON, by radical Islamists in recent months.

Earlier this year, the government told Parliament that 23 Hindus have been killed and at least 152 Hindu temples were attacked in Bangladesh since August 5 last year.

-AFP