Five citizens of Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka have demanded that India desist from interfering in the countries’ internal affairs.
Over the decades, intervention by New Delhi’s political, bureaucratic and intelligence operatives in Colombo, Dhaka and Kathmandu, contributed to the unending political instability and empowered autocratic regimes, the citizens said in a statement on Friday.
India’s interference weakens the neighbouring countries’ democracies, compromises their socio-economic advancement and is detrimental to India’s own interest by affecting stability in South Asia as a whole.
New Delhi sought to guide Dhaka’s politics for its own purposes such as diverting river waters as the upper riparian state, accessing Indian Northeast through Bangladesh territory, and using Bangladesh as a sizeable market for Indian goods.
New Delhi actively worked to prop up the autocratic regime of Sheikh Hasina over the last decade and received political and economic concessions in return, the citizens said in the statement.
The statement noted instances of Indian interference in Sri Lanka and Nepal.
As has happened in the case of Bangladesh, these interventionist plans ultimately fall apart, but New Delhi will move from one folly to the next.
New Delhi also seems to fear Chinese involvement in each of the countries, as if there were a coordinated plan at play to encircle India, the statement said.
New Delhi must accept the sovereign right of each neighbour to deal with Beijing on its own accord, much as New Delhi does.
‘We find it incongruous that China has become India’s largest trading partner even as New Delhi seeks to prevent the neighbours’ links with Beijing,’ the statement said.
‘We recognise that the Maldives and Bhutan too suffer from New Delhi’s efforts to be the decisive player in their internal and external affairs.’
The hostility between Islamabad and New Delhi has been distressing and constant, and it impacts not only the societies and economies of South Asia’s two largest countries but also holds hostage the agenda of upliftment across all our countries, the statement said.
‘New Delhi can contribute to stable polities and long-lasting peace in South Asia by abandoning its overt and covert interference in the internal affairs of its neighbours,’ said the statement.
India should be supportive of the democratic aspirations of South Asia’s people and let them build their individual paths to the future.’
Signatories to the statement are Firdous Azim, a member of Naripokkho, a women’s rights organsiation based in Dhaka, Kanak Mani Dixit, writer and founding editor ‘Himal Southasian’ in Kathmandu, Lakshman Gunasekara, journalist and social activist based in Colombo, Manzoor Hasan, Centre for Peace and Justice of BRAC University in Dhaka and Sushil Pyakurel, former commissioner of National Human Rights Commission of Kathmandu.
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