Veteran politician Dinesh Trivedi’s crucial assignment as New Delhi’s man in Dhaka to improve recently fragile Indo-Bangladesh ties just got more challenging. He could be severely handicapped by the recent poll outcome in Assam and West Bengal, both bordering Bangladesh, further consolidating the BJP’s stranglehold on the north-eastern state and sweeping to power for the first time in the only remaining Opposition citadel in the East. Normally, this should not have disrupted tentative efforts by the Modi government and the newly elected BNP administration to make a fresh diplomatic start repairing a relationship badly damaged in the post-Hasina period. But the BJP victories in both states were largely fuelled by Hindu consolidation against large Muslim minorities, many of them considered Bangladeshi infiltrators.

BJP leaders’ remarks trigger diplomatic concerns

The problem was aggravated by the inflammatory anti-Bangladesh rhetoric spouted by the two top BJP leaders in Assam and Bengal, Himanta Biswa Sarma and Suvendu Adhikari, respectively. Sarma has already provoked the new Bangladesh government led by Atiqur Rehman by shooting his mouth off in recent weeks in an interview with the ABP news channel.

“We like it when India-Bangladesh relations are not good,” Sarma said during the interview. “Because when relations are good, the Indian government also does not want to push back [undocumented migrants]. Therefore, people of Assam feel good when there is a hostile atmosphere between India and Bangladesh…When there is a friendly atmosphere, all things become loose.”

Not surprisingly, the BNP government took public umbrage at the Assam chief minister’s incendiary remarks........

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