A map showing India's 'chicken neck' that connects the country to the Northeastern region (AT Photo)
Guwahati, Dec. 27: There has been a long cherished dream of the leaders of erstwhile East Pakistan and now Bangladesh to make inroads into the strategic land link connecting the Northeast with the rest of the country. This can lead to severing the entire north-eastern region - rich with resources from the rest of the country. This was the warning issued by former Assam Governor Lt Gen SK Sinha way back in 1998 in a report to the President of India.
Giving a detailed account of the moves of erstwhile East Pakistan and Bangladesh in this regard, Lt Gen Sinha revealed that when the demand for partition of the country was raised, Moinul Haque Choudhury, a private secretary of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, had assured him that he would present Assam to Jinnah on a silver platter. That prompted Jinnah, the first Prime Minister of Pakistan, to declare confidently that Assam was in his pocket. But the move was foiled because of the strong stand taken by the leaders like Gopinath Bardoloi.
Lt Gen Sinha revealed that the failure to get Assam remained a cause of resentment for the leaders of Pakistan. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in his book Myths of Independence, wrote: "It would be wrong to think that Kashmir is the only dispute that divides India and Pakistan. One of the least, but as important as the Kashmir dispute, are Assam and some other districts of India adjacent to East Pakistan. Pakistan has very good claim over these areas."
Even a pro-India leader and first Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in his book Eastern Pakistan: Its Population and Economics wrote: "Eastern Pakistan must have sufficient land for its expansion and Assam has abundance of mineral resources, forests, coal, petroleum, etc. Eastern Pakistan must include Assam to be financially and economically strong."
Even after the liberation of Bangladesh, leading intellectuals have been making a case for living space. Sadeq Khan, a former diplomat, demanded in 1991 that in the first decade of the 21st century, Bangladesh would face a serious problem of living space. A natural flow of population from Bangladesh is very much on the cards and will not be retainable by barbed wire fences.
Abdul Momin, a former foreign secretary and Bangladesh's first ambassador to China, also said that due to population growth, Bangladesh would face a suffocating density of population. He also called for borderless competitive trade of labour.
The views of the leaders of erstwhile East Pakistan and Bangladesh have a common thread running through them. "No matter how friendly our relations with Bangladesh, we can ill afford to ignore the dangers of demographic invasion from that country," Lt Gen Sinha added in his report.
- By R Dutta Choudhury
