Tag: India

Shahidul Alam in conversation with Ranjit Hoskote at Goa LitFest

7:00 pm to 8:00 pm
Tuesday 20th December
Goa Literary Festival

My Journey as a Witness

Shahidul Alam in conversation with Ranjit Hoskote

Goa Arts and Literary Festival Dec 17-21

2011-11-25
The 2nd Goa Arts and Literary Festival is meant to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Goa’s liberation after 451 years of colonial rule. It will reflect on the idea of India as reflected through the perspective of cultures, communities and writers of the country. It is hosted by the International Centre Goa from December 17-21.
The festival will touch upon Diaspora, on the Goan and other Indian migrant communities across the world which retain different ideas about what being Indian means; North-East of India and its art, music and literature. The festival will celebrate music, painting and photography, poetry, journalism and publishing, debates, discussions and book-releases: from 17-21 December. Local, national and international delegates will be attending.
Exactly 50 years after the historic days when Indian troops conquered, and annexed Goa. It was another dramatic moment in history for this tiny territory. Each day of the Festival will recall 1961, featuring historians and witnesses to the sensational events as they occurred, as well as lectures, special book releases, and panel discussions about the Goan experience of the Estado da India, quite different from much of the rest of the subcontinent’s experience with the British Raj.
The 2011 Goa Arts and Literary Festival will celebrate creative excellence across India, with a special focus on Goa and its Diaspora. As with the inaugural edition, there will be prominent daily showcases for the best contemporary poetry from across India, and for the extraordinary writers and musicians of the North East.
Events such as this Festival will be held annually so that the quality of the Festival is enriched and enhanced every year by involving more and more people and their ideas and the image of Goa in people?s mind is of a more vibrant cultural and intellectual destination.
Participating Authors:
Aatish Taseer, Abhay Sardesai, Amitav Ghosh, Anand Patwardhan, Anjum Hasan, Aniruddha Sen Gupta, Bhalchandra Nemade,Bilal Tanweer,Charles Correa,Chiki Sarkar, C P Surendran, Cyril Almeida, Deborah Baker, Desmond L Kharmawphlang, Eunice de Souza, Fatima Bhutto, Gulzar, H M Naqvi, Jai Arjun Singh, Jeet Thayil, Jerry Pinto,Jonathan Shainin, Kiran Nagarkar, Kjell Eriksson, Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, Manohar Shetty, Mamang Dai, Meena Kandasamy, Mitra Phukan, Mohammed Hanif, Mridula Garg,M. T. Vasudevan Nair, Naresh Fernandes, Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee, Pablo Bartholomew, Pavan K Varma, Raghunath Mashelkar, Ranjit Hoskote, Robin Ngangom, S. Anand, Sadia Dehlvi, Saeed Akhtar Mirza, Samar Halarnkar, Sidharth Bhatia, Shahidul Alam, Shailaja Bajpai, Shehan Karunatilaka, Sheen Kaaf Nizam, Sivasankari, Sonia Faleiro, Sukrita Paul Kumar, Sunil Khilnani, U.R. Ananthamurthy, Urvashi Butalia,Temsula Ao,Teju Cole, Vishwas Patil, Zac O’Yeah
Participating Artists and Performers:
Dr. Alka Pande, Atul Dodiya, Durgabai Vyam, Gulam Mohd Sheikh, Himanshu Suri, Lou Majaw, Luis Gumby Pinto, Subhash Vyam,Dr. Subodh Kerkar, Suresh Jayaram, Suresh Jayaram, Vijay Iyer

Bangladesh war: The article that changed history


Share


By Mark Dummett BBC News

On 13 June 1971, an article in the UK’s Sunday Times exposed the brutality of Pakistan’s suppression of the Bangladeshi uprising. It forced the reporter’s family into hiding and changed history.

Abdul Bari had run out of luck. Like thousands of other people in East Bengal, he had made the mistake – the fatal mistake – of running within sight of a Pakistani patrol. He was 24 years old, a slight man surrounded by soldiers. He was trembling because he was about to be shot.
So starts one of the most influential pieces of South Asian journalism of the past half century.
Written by Anthony Mascarenhas, a Pakistani reporter, and printed in the UK’s Sunday Times, it exposed for the first time the scale of the Pakistan army’s brutal campaign to suppress its breakaway eastern province in 1971.
Nobody knows exactly how many people were killed, but certainly a huge number of people lost their lives. Independent researchers think that between 300,000 and 500,000 died. The Bangladesh government puts the figure at three million. Continue reading “Bangladesh war: The article that changed history”

The Inheritance of Loss

THE FAMOUS FIVE (From left) Prashant Panjiar (kneeling), Prabuddha Das Gupta, Raghu Rai, Pablo Bartholomew and Shahidul Alam (Photo: LUCIDA)

The Open Magazine
Rosalyn D’Mello
29th October 2011

(12th August 2012 9:30 pm: Pablo just wrote to say that Prabuddha Das Gupta passed away a few hours ago, of a heart attack:?http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151185756965695&set=a.10150246107070695.369792.534985694&type=3&theater)

The story of India?s contemporary photography movement is ridden with egoistic tussles. It?s no wonder then that it has taken so long for the country to host an international photo festival
I am not a photographer. Never have been, never will be. For me, the world began with the word, a curse and a blessing. A curse because I will never know what it?s like to experience the world through a camera lens. A blessing because I enjoy being a ?fly on the wall?; because, unlike photography, the written word has the power to document both the visible and the subterranean. An image may ?speak a thousand words?, but sometimes you need a writer to read between the pixels. Continue reading “The Inheritance of Loss”

Delhi Photo Festival 2011

Subscribe to ShahidulNews


Share


The biennial Delhi Photo Festival 2011 is an initiative of the?India Habitat Centre &?Nazar Foundation to bring photography, the real democratic art form, into the public space, thereby creating awareness of photographic arts and initiating dialogue amongst its many practitioners and lovers.

Subcontinental drift

Subscribe to ShahidulNews


Share


By Salil Tripathi

Does the controversial book about Bangladesh?s war of liberation uncover new truths, or simply reverse old biases?

It is an article of faith in Bangladesh that three million people died in its war of independence in 1971. At that time, the population of the former East Pakistan (which became Bangladesh) was about 70 million people, which means nearly 4% of the population died in the war. The killings took place between 25 March, when Pakistani forces launched?Operation Searchlight, and mid-December, when Dhaka fell to the invading Indian Army and the Mukti Bahini forces (who was aiding whom depends on which narrative you read? India?s or Bangladesh?s). As per Bangladesh?s understanding of its history, the nation was a victim of genocide. Killing three million people over 267 days amounts to nearly 11,000 deaths a day. That would make it one of the most lethal conflicts of all time.
One of the most brutal conflicts in recent years has been in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the International Rescue Committee reported that 5.4 million people died between 1998 and 2008. A more thorough Canadian analysis now concludes that the actual figure is about half. At 5.4 million deaths, the daily death toll would be around 1,500; at 2.7 million, around 750. Was the 1971 war up to 15 times more lethal than the Congolese conflict?
A history of violence: A scene from the bloody conflicts of the 1971 Bangladesh war. Photo: Getty Images
A history of violence: A scene from the bloody conflicts of the 1971 Bangladesh war. Photo: Getty Images
It is an uncomfortable question. Many Bangladeshis feel that raising such a doubt undermines their suffering and belittles their identity. But a thorough, unbiased study, going as far as facts can take the analysis, would be an important contribution to our understanding of the subcontinent?s recent history.
Continue reading “Subcontinental drift”

New humility for the hegemon

Subscribe to ShahidulNews


Share


India and its near-abroad

Too slowly, India is realising that poor relations with its South Asian neighbours hold back its global ambitions

Jul 30th 2011 | from the print edition of the Economist

NO ONE loves a huge neighbour. For all that, India?s relations with the countries that ring it are abysmal. Of the eight with which it shares a land or maritime boundary, only two can be said to be happy with India: tiny Maldives, where India has the only foreign embassy and dispenses much largesse, and Bhutan, which has a policy of being happy about everything. Among its other South Asian neighbours, the world?s biggest democracy is incredible mainly because of its amazing ability to generate wariness and resentment.
Until recently it operated a shoot-to-kill policy towards migrant workers and cattle rustlers along its long border with Bangladesh. Over the years it has meddled madly in Nepal?s internal affairs. In Myanmar India snuggles up to the country?s thuggish dictators, leaving the beleaguered opposition to wonder what happened to India?s championing of democracy. Relations with Sri Lanka are conflicted. It treats China with more respect, but feuds with it about its border.
As for Pakistan, relations are defined by their animosity. One former Indian diplomat likened reconciling the two nuclear-tipped powers to treating two patients whose only disease is an allergy to each other. The observation underscores the fact that it takes two to have bad relations, and to be fair to India plenty of problems press in on it?many of them with their roots in India?s bloody partition in 1947. Pakistan has used a long-running territorial dispute over Kashmir as a reason to launch wars. It also exports terrorism to India, sometimes with the connivance of parts of the Pakistani state. India thinks Bangladesh also harbours India-hating terrorists.
With the notable exception of India?s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, who has heroically persisted in dialogue with Pakistan in the face of provocations and domestic resistance, India?s dealings with its neighbours are mostly driven by arrogance and neglect. It has shared shockingly little of its economic dynamism and new-found prosperity with those around it. Just 5% of South Asia?s trade is within the region.

Too little and too late, the neglect is starting to be replaced by engagement (see?article). This week Sonia Gandhi, dynastic leader of India?s ruling Congress Party, visited Bangladesh?a first. And on July 27th India?s foreign minister hosted his Pakistani counterpart, the first such meeting in a year. He promised a ?comprehensive, serious and sustained? dialogue.
A new regional engagement is prodded by two things. China?s rapid and increasingly assertive rise challenges India?s own regional dominance. As a foundation for its rise, China pursued a vigorous ?smile diplomacy? towards its neighbours that stands in contrast to slothful Indian energies. The smile has sometimes turned to snarl of late (see?Banyan). Even so, China?s engagement with its neighbours has allowed it both to prosper and to spread influence.

interactive map displays the various territorial claims of India, Pakistan and China from each country’s perspective

Second, dynamic India can hardly soar globally while mired in its own backyard. Promoting regional prosperity is surely the best way to persuade neighbours that its own rise is more of an opportunity than a threat. Yet India lacks any kind of vision. A region-wide energy market using northern neighbours? hydropower would transform South Asian economies. Vision, too, could go a long way to restoring ties that history has cut asunder, such as those between Karachi and Mumbai, once sister commercial cities but now as good as on different planets; and Kolkata and its huge former hinterland in Bangladesh. Without development and deeper integration, other resentments will be hard to soothe. It falls on the huge unloved neighbour to make the running.
BBC Documentary on Sino-Indian Rivalry and Bangladesh


http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/docarchive/docarchive_20100630-1227a.mp3

Connectivity: The India-Bangladesh land bridge

Subscribe to ShahidulNews


Share


Himal Magazine

February?2011

By?Kanak Mani Dixit

Can a formal bilateral communiqu? be a ?game changer?, foretell a ?paradigm shift?, in a Southasian relationship? If India and Bangladesh manage to follow through on promises to open up their economies for transit and trade as set out in a memorandum of January 2010, a new era could dawn across the land borders of Southasia. The challenges are bureaucratic inertia in New Delhi and ultra-nationalist politics in Dhaka.
The political partition of the Subcontinent in 1947 did not have to lead to economic partition, but that is ultimately what happened. This did not take place right away, and many had believed that the borders of India and Pakistan?s eastern and western flanks were demarcations that would allow for the movement of people and commerce. It was as late as the India-Pakistan war of 1965 that the veins and capillaries of trade were strangulated. In the east, in what was to become Bangladesh just a few years later, the river ferries and barges that connected Kolkata with the deltaic region, and as far up as Assam, were terminated. The metre-gauge railway lines now stopped at the frontier, and through-traffic of buses and trucks came to a halt. The latest act of separation was for India to put up an elaborate barbed-wire fence along much of the 4000 km border, a project that is nearly complete. Today, what mainly passes under these wires are Bangladeshi migrants seeking survival in the faraway metropolises of India ? and contraband.

alt
Photo credit: Sworup Nhasiju
This half-century of distancing between what was previously one continuous region has resulted in incalculable loss of economic vitality, most of it hidden under nationalist bombast. Bangladesh lost a huge market and source of investment, even as the heretofore natural movement of people in search of livelihood suddenly came to be termed ?illegal migration?. Bangladeshis were wounded by the unilateral construction of the Farakka Barrage on the Ganga/Padma, a mere 10 km upstream from the border, which deepened the anti-Indian insularity of Dhaka?s new nationalist establishment. Forced to chart its own course, Bangladesh concentrated on developing its own soil and society, uniquely building mega-NGOs such as Proshika, BRAC and Grameen, developing a healthy domestic industrial sector such as in garment manufacture, and learning to deal with disastrous floods and cyclones.
In India, the lack of contact and commerce led increasingly to an evaporation of empathy for Bangladesh, which became an alien state rather than a Bangla-speaking sister Southasian society. The opinion-makers of mainland India wilfully ignored the interests of the Indian Northeast, which they see as an appendage with no more than four percent of the national population. The seven states of the Northeast, meanwhile, became weakened economically with the denial of access to Bangladesh?s market and the proximate ports on the Bay of Bengal. Mainland India, of course, could easily afford to maintain its strategic and administrative control through the ?chicken?s neck? of the Siliguri corridor, but few considered the economic opportunities lost to the Northeast over five decades.
Distrust and xenophobia in Bangladesh, the imperial aloofness of New Delhi, and the Northeast?s lack of agency delivered a status quo in disequilibrium in the northeastern quadrant of Southasia that has lasted decades. Unexpectedly, there is a hint of change. A relatively little-remarked-upon memorandum between the prime ministers of Bangladesh and India holds out the possibility of erasing the anti-historical legacy of closed borders and rigid economies.

Continue reading “Connectivity: The India-Bangladesh land bridge”

Shiv Viswanathan?s Letter to the PM

Subscribe to ShahidulNews



Share



POSTED AT DECEMBER 30, 2010 // ARTICLES
The email id to send messages to Dr. Binayak Sen on his birthday on 4th January 2011 is drkkgupta61@yahoo.com. The fax number to send him his birthday messages is 92- 771- 2886313. The telephone number is 91- 771-2886027.
Citizens for Peace and Justice

This open letter by SHIV VISWANATHAN, Eminent Social Scientist, has been circulated by Communalism Combat:

Dear Professor Manmohan Singh,
I hope you don?t mind the temerity of this letter. It is written as one scholar to another, one citizen to another. I know you are a PM and people like me may not be influential. However some things must be said and said clearly.
I was aghast to find that Doctor Binayak Sen has been given a life term for sedition. Let me put it simply. I think it is an appalling act of injustice and a betrayal of an ethical vision.
The point I wish to make is simple. We do not have to agree with Binayak Sen, anymore than we have to agree with Mahaswta Devi or Arundhati Roy or Baba Amte. But these have been voices of conscience. These are people who have care and healed, given a voice to the voiceless. They represent the essential goodness of our society. They are Indians and outstanding Indians and no nation state can negate that. I admit that such people are not easy people. They irritate, they agonize over things we take for granted or ignore. They take the ethical to the very core of our lives. Let us be clear. It is not Sen?s ideology that threatens us. It is his ethics, his sense of goodness. We have arrested him because we have arrested that very sense of justice in ourselves.

Social activists taking out protest rally at Raj Bhawan in Bhopal on Saturday to extend support to activist Binayak Sen, who was sentenced to life by a Chattisgarh court. Photo: A.M.Faruqui/The Hindu

Sen is a man with courage, a professional doctor with the conviction that healing has to go beyond medicine, that the body cannot heal when the body politics is ill. He is a reminder that health, politics and ethics go together. Another man who said it but a bit differently was Mohan Das Gandhi.
Sen is a reminder of the deeper travails of our society. We hate the poor for their poverty. Worse, we hate those who fight for the poor. Somehow it has become fashion to condemn human rights, to treat activists as fifth columnist, to regard them as fronts for terrorists groups.
A human rights activist has the courage to point out the humus of terror is injustice. Oddly and predictably people who fight injustice are condemned as terrorists. A human rights activist often has to defend a man he disagrees with, keeping both the activist and the disagreement alive.
The sadness of our state is that its categories have become numb and lifeless. Categories like the nation state, the idea of security, our sense of territoriality lack a recognition of generosity, the courage, the challenge to categories that dissenters make. Yet the risk the dissenter takes is preferable to the silence that exonerates violence torture, injustice or genocide. Mr.Binayak Sen should be in your cabinet Mr.Singh, or a member of your development councils, not in jail. A life giving career cannot be met with a life sentence. Think of your own angst and silent suffering after 1984. You are an honest man, a sensitive man and a gentle man. Think of the slow indifference to justice then.
The word Naxal or Maoist sins less than it is sinned against. It is a term that black-boxes a variety of reactions to violence and injustice. Some of them seek to meet violence with violence, some seek to engage with the roots of violence. Others sympathise quietly with victims of injustice. When was empathy a crime? It is a strange world where to call a man a naxal sympathizer condemns him as much as the Naxal activist. The word Naxals is also applied to tribals who fight for justice or the activists who fight along with the tribals. To condemn all is to condemn a large part of India. If fighting for justice or caring for an old man is sedition, then the seditious need a param vir chakra, as warriors against injustice, not a life sentence. To punish Sen is not just bad law, it is an act of cowardice. It is odd that it is Sen who believes in the law at the very moment the law condemns him. Both radicalism and the rule of law are human creations and both demand critical scrutiny. It is time for a conversation. A society where those who fight for decency are attacked cannot be a decent society. You are a decent man and a thinker. All I ask is that you think about the case of Binayak Sen. Invite him for tea listen to him. It will not tarnish you or the rule of law. It might show you the yawning gap between law and justice.
Think of it, Mr.Prime Minister that ours is a society that spends more on defending the Raja, Radia and Kalmadi than Binayak Sen. The law works for the first three who corrupt the core of our system but fails for Binayak Sen who upholds some of its finest values. Tell me Mr.Singh how long can a society remain sane without confronting such ironies?
Let me frame it in a different way. Today?s sedition might be tomorrow?s axiomatics. We often define as sedition what we can?t understand or can?t stand. It challenges our sense of security, the security of categories. It might be easier to understand Sen?s work within a framework, a spectrum of thought.
Begin with the Arjun Sengupta report on the informal Economy. It shows how we have sinned against the life world of hawkers, traders, scavengers, trades which constitute 70% of our economy. Then think of Jairam Ramesh claiming forests are not as renewable as we think and that tribes and forests have a connectivity that we must understand. That shakes up the na?ve theory of growth. Then think of Mahasweta showing how tribes have been converted to bonded labour, how mining has corroded our country. Then place Binayak Sen in that spectrum as a doctor and a human rights activist. It is the Chattisgarh bureaucracy that sounds tyrannical and unreasonable. One realizes sedition has become a stick to beat down dissent or to even erase concern for the downtrodden.
To impose a life sentence on Sen is to freeze our own lives of possibility. It is time not just to release Binayak Sen but to honour him and the ideals he worked for. Our democracy for all its bumbling can still rise to the occasion
Shiv Viswanathan
Related links:
Flawed evidence and charges: The Hindu
The evil within: The Statesman
The case of the good doctor: Himal
GOD’S OWN (article by Joshy Joseph)

Statement on the Binayak Sen Judgement

Subscribe to ShahidulNews



Share


Posted by Radical Notes

December 31, 2010 at 8:44 am in India

Sanhati

We are deeply anguished by the convictions and sentences of Dr. Binayak Sen, Piyush Guha, and Narayan Sanyal by the additional district and sessions judge of Raipur for sedition. We also note that in a separate case, Asit Sengupta was convicted and sentenced to eight years imprisonment for his work as magazine editor and publisher. Sanhati strongly condemns their convictions and sentences.
Convicting Dr. Sen of sedition and treason against the country, when he has devoted his life to service for the poorest citizens of India, yet again illustrates the disdain of the state towards its citizens and democracy. The real crime of Dr. Sen in the eyes of the government has been his protest against the state-sponsored vigilante force of Salwa Judum, and his efforts to bring to light the atrocities committed by this vigilante army on the indigeneous population of Chattisgarh. The state has attempted to make an example of Dr. Sen to all dissenting against its policies or protesting repression. Nevertheless, the state will fail in its attempt to create a fear psychosis among political and social activists; its efforts will only lead to the strengthening of resistance against state repression.
The charge made out by the prosecution against Dr. Sen was that he was responsible for passing letters from Narayan Sanyal lodged to Piyush Guha. Examination of witnesses and evidence presented by the defence demonstrated that the meetings in prison between Dr. Sen and Narayan Sanyal, the jailed Maoist leader, followed all legal norms and were based on the capacity of Dr. Sen as a physician and a human rights activist. When the accusations against Dr. Sen could not be supported by evidence in court, the government brought up other trumped-up charges and falsified evidence, much of which was glaring in its absurdity. That the court chose to overlook all this, has exposed the nature of our judicial system to the entire world.
It is necessary at this juncture to also mention that numerous undertrial political and social activists are today incarcerated in various prisons in India or languishing in jail for prolonged periods without trial, charged under various draconian state or central laws. These laws, and various draconian provisions of the criminal penal code, are being used to clamp down upon resistance movements against various anti-people policies pursued by the Indian state. The charges against Dr. Binayak Sen, and the travesty of justice in the name of his trial, have brought this hard truth to the fore.
We strongly condemn the convictions and sentences against Binayak Sen, Piyush Guha, Narayan Sanyal, and Asit Sengupta. We demand that the injustice meted out to them in the name of dispensing justice be rectified immediately. We also demand that the state immediately stops the systematic usage of various draconian laws and charges of sedition against activists to silence all voices of dissent.

WikiLeaks cables: Bangladesh Gas

Subscribe to ShahidulNews



Share


US nudged Bangladesh to allocate gas blocks

BS Reporter / New Delhi December 25, 2010, 0:15 IST

Every time India would ask Bangladesh for rights to explore gas, Dhaka would say the country had to first find if there was gas available at offshore locations. For the last one year, the issue hasn?t even been mentioned in discussions with Bangladesh, top petroleum ministry officials said. But India?s loss has been the US gain and it managed to walk away with the prize.
WikiLeaks tapes released late last night revealed how US-based ConocoPhillips was selected from a field of seven bidders and awarded two offshore blocks for exploring gas in 2009. The company was awarded a production sharing contract, with a provision to export the gas in the form of liquefied natural gas in the untapped areas of the Bay of Bengal. The bidders had agreed to stay away from disputed waters in the Bay of Bengal, something US Ambassador to Bangladesh, James Moriarty mentioned in his cables sent in July 2009. Conoco got the contract in October 2009.
Moriarty met Bangladesh Prime Minister Hasina Wajed?s energy adviser, Tawfiq Elahi Chowdhury, and got him to assure that ConocoPhillips would be awarded two of the uncontested blocks and Chevron given permission to go ahead with the first of the three compressors necessary to improve flow in Bangladesh?s main gas pipeline. Within three months, the Bangladesh government complied.
Defending themselves against the charge that they had allowed the US to have an advantage by not being proactive themselves, Indian Petroleum Ministry officials said Indian finds of gas had reduced the pressure to secure gas from Bangladesh.
WikiLeaks tapes also revealed that Moriarty urged Chowdhury to approve plans by British company Global Coal Management (GCM) to begin open-cast coal mining in the country?s Phulbari area. In the cable, Moriarty quoted Chowdhury saying the coal mine was ?politically sensitive in the light of the impoverished, historically oppressed tribal community residing on the land?.
The energy advisor, however, agreed to build support for the project through the parliamentary process, Moriarty said in the cable.
In a cable posted by WikiLeaks that was sent in July last year, Moriarty said he had urged Chowdhury to authorise coal mining, adding ?open-pit mining seemed the best way forward?. Later on in the cable, Moriarty said, ?Asia Energy, the company behind the Phulbari project, has 60 per cent US investment. Asia Energy officials told the ambassador they were cautiously optimistic that the project would win government approval in the coming months.?
The ?Phulbari killings? as they are known took the lives of three boys in 2006 when police fired at a demonstration near the mine site. Asia Energy?s shares had crashed in the international market as a result and the company had to undergo a brand change, including a name changing.
In the WikiLeaks cables, Moriarty?s conversations with Indian ambassador Pinaki Ranjan Chakravatry, by contrast, revealed no discussions of a commercial nature, only a general approval by India of the change in government in Bangladesh and US endorsement of a joint South Asian task force on counterterrorism.
India?s high commissioner in Dhaka obligingly told the US ambassador that while India would ?prefer a primarily bilateral engagement?, Bangladesh might want a regional force for political reasons ? allegations that she was too close to India.
Chakravarty spoke of Bangladesh?s keenness to ?invest heavily in Bangladesh?s moribund railway system? including reconnecting the Bangladeshi railroad system to Agartala in Tripura. He said Indian companies would be interested in setting up power plants in Bangladesh, though the price of electricity ?is still under negotiation?. The US takeaway from the conversation is that regional counter-terrorism cooperation would help US assets enormously. Much of the rest is yet to become a reality