PM's Dhaka trip

Signalling the growing importance of Bangladesh to India, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will take along five chief ministers to Dhaka when he travels there next week for one of his biggest foreign policy moves in the region. The chief ministers of West Bengal, Assam, Tripura, Meghalaya and Mizoram will accompany Singh, an event that is extremely rare in Indian politics. It is intended to signal to Bangladesh that India is ready to press the reset button on ties with its eastern neighbour. The visit is likely to see India and Bangladesh finally working out a comprehensive boundary agreement. This would be the logical implementation of the Indira-Mujib agreement of 1974, which could not be implemented since Mujib was assassinated in 1975. While its no secret that India’s ties with the Awami League is much more pleasant, Indian sources said they were going the extra mile to keep the opposition BNP on board. Bangladeshi opposition leader Begum Khaleda Zia will meet Singh, which Indians see as the first step in a continued engagement of all sides of political opinion in Bangladesh. Bangladeshi PM Sheikh Hasina addressed almost all of India’s security concerns in the past year, which made it easier for India to move faster on other areas. But the Indian concern is the sustainability of the new spring in bilateral ties. That will require a lot of political investment by India on the BNP and Jamaat front. The boundary defied a resolution all these years, which both sides resisted getting caught in the complexities of “enclaves” and “adverse possessions” fearing largescale migration, uprooting of people etc. But a joint survey of the affected areas over the past few months showed the affected people to be not more than 53,000.