I read your editorial (Dec 10th) on the Finance Minister's recent visit to New Delhi with interest. Earlier papers carried detailed report on his upbeat press interview that the Minister gave upon returning from Delhi. There seems little doubt that the Finance Minister and the Indian Prime Minister have good friendship that dates back to their respective tenures as Finance Minister in the early 1990s. Further, the Indian Prime Minister is a well- respected person who means well when he speaks of friendship with Bangladesh. However, let us not get carried away with this visit. In fact, this visit raises more questions than it answers. What Mr. Manmohan Singh has told the Finance Minister is what he also told our Foreign Minister very recently, that India means well , wants good-neighbourly relations and that our relations are very good. In fact, India has always been constant whereas we have not been so. Let us not forget that flare up of the Foreign Minister a couple of months ago that was widely reported in the national media. As the Indian position has been the same at the time of the flare up by the FM and during the recent visit of the Finance Minister, why then have the two leading Ministers of our Government given out contradictory signals with respect to our most important neighbour? The answer to this question is critical. I can venture a subjective one but I guess this question needs to be answered for sake of our future, for whether we like it or not, our destiny is inescapably tied with India. We have no clear policy vis-Ã -vis India and a great deal of what the government does with India is almost always a reactionary response.It is true India is at times a narrow- minded neighbour but then there is also no way to deny that India is emerging with each passing day into a power of world stature. Therefore for our own future we need to have an India policy based on realities and not on perceptions. The realities are that India is an emerging world power that has no interest in how we run our country. Its interests in Bangladesh are an assurance from our side that we are not assisting insurgencies in India's Northeast; a land transit with that part; use of Chittagong port and purchase our natural gas. We need to sit with India and sort out these issues for which we need first to clear in our minds any ill perceptions that we may have about India. The issues are serious but surmountable but we need to deal with these and evolve an India Policy first. Otherwise, we will have a Finance Minister speaking of India positively and a Foreign Minister negatively almost simultaneously that only shows lack of professionalism on our part.
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