The BNP’s Trojan Horse Politics

Ruhul Kabir Rizvi has sadly got his history wrong. The Trojan Horse of legend was a trick played on the people of Troy by the Greeks at a point where the Greeks, having besieged the Trojans for years and unable to vanquish them, settled on the nasty idea of concealing their soldiers inside a wooden horse, terming it as a gift for the Trojans, and sending it on.

The Greek soldiers inside the horse then unleashed havoc on the Trojans once they entered the city.

The senior joint secretary general of the BNP would now have us know that by permitting Indian trains to go through Bangladesh and on to their north-eastern states, the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is unwittingly bringing in a Trojan Horse which will eventually spell doom for Bangladesh. Rizvi appears to think that India and Bangladesh are sworn enemies and have been engaged in war against each other, which now has Delhi devise the trick of someday having its soldiers stop at a point in Bangladesh and emerging from those trains to set this country on the path to blood and fire.

That is thinking devoid of imagination. It is politics of the absurd. And Rizvi’s comments are clearly a hint of what the BNP has failed to do in all these years since it went out of power in October 2006.

Modern politics speaks of political parties going into reflective mode once they lose power. They are expected to analyse the reasons why the electorate turned their backs on them. And from such analyses it is expected that these parties will redefine their policies and recast them in ways which give them hope of returning to power at a point in future time.

The BNP has done nothing of the sort. That it sees danger in Bangladesh’s allowing Indian trains through Bangladesh territory is a sign that the party is not ready to embrace the realities which define modern diplomacy.

Its leaders have not observed the evolution in relations between states in Europe, in south east Asia and in the Americas, where cooperation on the principle of mutual as well as collective benefit has been the norm in our times. Bellicosity in diplomatic relations is a danger in this era, for the times demand an expansion of relations to levels where economies will matter.

In recent years, Bangladesh’s ties with India have been focused on the development of economic links between the two countries. Has that harmed Bangladesh?

But Rizvi surprises us with that Trojan Horse reference. He has not offered the country any explanation of what war the Indians have been waging against Bangladesh and why they now need the subterfuge of those trains passing through this land of the Bengalis to obliterate, if he is to be believed, the sovereignty of this country.

The BNP leader makes no reference to the history of India-Bangladesh relations as they developed during our War of Liberation in 1971 and expanded increasingly into wider areas of cooperation with the Awami League in power here in Dhaka and successive governments holding office in Delhi.

In its days in power, the BNP’s hostility toward India was an untrammelled truth. That the ULFA outfit found a safe home in Bangladesh, to the point of planning operations against Delhi, is part of recent history. The ten-truck scandal is not forgotten. The anti-India card has regularly been utilised by the BNP at every conceivable opportunity, which again is a sign that in its approach to foreign policy the party has remained trapped in the straitjacket it confined itself in long ago.

On a broader scale, the BNP has shaped hardly any response to what it might do, should it return to power, towards tackling the Rohingya issue. Its stance on relations with the West, with China, with Russia remains hazy or absent.

It is a situation that questions the sagacity of the party leadership. The BNP has not given the people of Bangladesh reason to believe that it will not tamper with or distort Bangladesh’s history again, that it acknowledges that its links with the 1971 Pakistani collaborators were a blunder.

The party has consistently drawn attention to what it calls the repressive policies of the Awami League government, but it is yet to inform the country what sort of a democratic society it means to construct in Bangladesh in future.

Politics is essentially a matter of taking a measured, long-term view of circumstances both at home and abroad. It is not to be pursued in anger, in a use of diatribe, in a release of emotions which can only expose the bankruptcy of the men and women engaging in such an unenlightened exhibition of it.

Rizvi feels that the policies of the Sheikh Hasina government will make our entire nation subservient to India. In what way might that happen? He goes further. He would like us to know that India consistently demonstrates a hostile attitude toward Bangladesh’s people.

That, again, is a deliberate distortion of history. No fact-checking here on Rizvi’s part. Of course there have been the issues Dhaka and Delhi have confronted over the years.

The Teesta water-sharing problem is one. But the determination of the two countries to stamp out terrorism, within each other’s territory and on a cross-border level, have had the people of the two countries turn a new page in bilateral ties. Trade deals have been to the benefit of both. At the regional and global level, Bangladesh and India have worked closely on issues which exercise people’s minds everywhere.

Indian support, moral and political and material, went a long way in helping us achieve freedom more than fifty years ago. Indian governments in these five decades-plus have worked with successive Bangladesh governments without giving our people any reason to think Delhi has dark designs on Dhaka.

In politics, playing to the gallery for a while may be all right. But for it to develop into a habit, for any political leader or political party, at a point becomes worrying. And it is a worry because the attitude is indicative of poor judgement, because it highlights the image of a political organisation happy to remain trapped in ideas which have never had much of an appeal.

The BNP’s senior joint secretary general and his colleagues need to focus on recasting their party in new light. Conspiracy theories do not enrich a party. Inventing horses, Trojan or real, and passing it off as wisdom is poor judgement.

Writer: Syed Badrul Ahsan, Senior Journalist, Historian and Researcher