This is not about the recent ouster of Sheikh Hasina, till the other day the Iron Lady on the Padma. As turmoil continues in Bangladesh, following her hurried departure and installation of an interim government headed by Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, it is about the shared history of New Delhi and Dhaka, and how it impacts their relationship today. The narrative is tricky, tortuous and fraught with controversy, especially as it comes from a Hindu Bengali refugee scion whose forefathers belonged to Dhaka, then in India and now Bangladesh’s capital.
Consider the evolved psyche of a Bangladeshi senior citizen born on August 1, 1947, in British India. If he had been in India, his passport, Aadhaar and PAN today would call him an Indian, even if born in Dhaka, Chittagong or Barisal. But on August 14, 1947, when 13 days old, he became a Pakistani national.
Just 24 years later, in 1971, his nationality again changed to the new country of Bangladesh, then secular, liberal and egalitarian, led by an enlightened Bengal Renaissance-type figure who protested against atrocities by his overbearing, abusive co-religionists. That citizen, born Indian, who became a citizen of Urdu-speaking Pakistan, got a new identity as a Bengali first, Muslim second, in a country founded on its language identity. Bangladesh was South Asia’s first “linguistic” nation in 1971, unlike Pakistan and Nepal, the former an Islamic republic, the latter a Hindu monarchy.
This change of id.