A Series of Open Letters to Bangladeshi Premier Muhammad Yunus from An Indian Citizen, Part 3: Admit It, You have Spoilt Ties with India, Do Not Blame It on Us, Indian Journalists
By Yusha Rahman, New Age Islam
13 February 2026
Dear Mr. Muhammad Yunus,
If you are reading this, it is obvious you read my previous letters to know who I am, why I am writing to you and what these letters are about.
Also, as stated in my previous letters, I express solidarity with you in mourning and strongly condemning the lynching of your Hindu fellow citizen Dipu Chandra Das and your government having had arrested the perpetrators who happen to be Muslim extremists. As a secular humanist, I urge you to take prompt action in all such cases of violence based on religion, and in fact, take steps to prevent such hate crimes from occurring. I also register my protest against the demolition of a Hindu temple by your authorities without it being reconstructed elsewhere. I have no special affinity based on religion to Muslims who are not my fellow Indian citizens and I view them as regular human beings like I view foreign non-Muslims, and I have touched on why I think this is the correct Islamic theological position as well in my first letter in this series (though among foreigners, I do have an affinity to fellow South Asian people across religious lines, including Nepalese, Sri Lankan and Bhutanese Hindus and Buddhists), but given that Islamists often invoke a global pan-Muslim fraternity, I, like very many other Muslims, want to emphasize – such acts of intolerance ought not to be done in my name, as very many Hindu brothers and sisters have indeed also emphasized in the also worthy-of-condemnation cases of Hindu extremism! Also, given that the Hindus of what became Pakistan and Bangladesh were almost unanimously antagonistic to the idea of the partition of India in 1947 and other non-Muslims like Christians too did not largely have a role in the same (much as many of the non-Muslims, on staying back in the newly carved out countries, have indeed exhibited loyalty to their countries and contributed to their nation-building), and given that they were indeed part of India prior to the partition, we, Indians, do have an interest in the basic security and religious freedom enjoyed by non-Muslims in Pakistan and Bangladesh, a position affirmed by the Nehru-Liaqat Accord.
So, without further ado, citing instances when you have made decisions at the cost of your own fellow Bangladeshi citizens to appease foreign powers (all much before Mustafizur Rahman’s rather unfortunate and indeed condemnable IPL ouster, which was by our cricket board and not our government) –
1. You halted yarn imports from India via land ports, a decision that many garment exporters in your own country have termed as “suicidal”. The decision was taken by you despite vigorous opposition by leading business chambers in your country. Yarn imports via land ports was a win-win activity for Indian exporters and Bangladeshi garment makers. Your move to suspend yarn trade with India has been apparently done to enable more imports from Pakistan, though not as competitively priced as India's. Your move threatens the survival of MSMEs in Bangladesh, for whom these imports served as critical inputs for garment manufacturing. If this is not jeopardizing your own people’s interests to appease the Pakistani state, which refuses to apologise for the genocide in 1971 despite even your asking them to do so, what is it?! How are we, Indian journalists, to blame for this, since as per you, we are being the spoilers in Indo-Bangladeshi ties?!
2. During a high-level roundtable discussion on ‘sustainable infrastructure and energy’ at the President Hotel in Beijing, you urged the Chinese government to establish an economic foothold in Bangladesh, though the Chinese record at not hiring as many locals wherever they establish economic footholds and creating resentment there, whether in Africa, Southeast Asia or even Pakistan is well-documented, as is their debt trap diplomacy in several countries such as Djibouti, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Laos, the Maldives and Sri Lanka. But that is actually your prerogative. Fair enough. But what is completely unacceptable to us, Indians, is your seeking to do so by leveraging your country’s strategic position as the “only guardian of the ocean”, given the “landlocked” northeastern region of India. While Northeast India is indeed landlocked, as a Bengali, you very well know that West Bengal (an integral part of India with a glorious record in the Indian freedom struggle and putting India on the world map in the realm of cinema thanks to Satyajit Ray) is not landlocked. Nor is West Bengal India’s only coastal state, and as an educated Nobel Laureate, I am sure you know the geography of our own region South Asia well!
How on earth is Bangladesh the only guardian of the Indian Ocean, an ocean named after India?! Indians in coastal states like Gujarat and Odisha still have traditional fairs and temples marking the historical voyages to other parts of the world like the Middle East and Southeast Asia, as you can see here, here, here and here. Indeed, the imprint of Indian culture, importantly including Indo-Islamic culture (as you can see here and here), historically on Southeast Asia has been huge and is still visible! In fact, the modern Indian state also enjoys warm ties with several Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian counterparts. Actually, the ocean is perhaps fairly named, given the huge impact India has had on the Indian Ocean region. The Indic cultural footprint in Japan too is all too evident, with the Japanese script having Indian influence, Japanese (other than Southeast Asian) people crossing the seas to study in ancient India’s Nalanda University, and several Japanese deities quite resembling Hindu deities, Hinduism and Buddhism having a great history of syncretism, which Islamist historiographies seek to completely deny, over-emphasising conflict, Islamist historiographies being as biased as many Hindutvaite ones. Also, quite a few Japanese politicians have supported India’s counter-offensive against Pakistani terrorists after the brutal Pahalgam attack, and the Japanese state has thanked the Indian parliament for continuing the practice of officially mourning the lives lost in Hiroshima for the last several decades. South Korean legends ascribe some of their kings’ ancestry to India, and from parts of Africa like Egypt to the Middle East to China to South Asia to Southeast Asia to South Korea and Japan, films from India have a fan following among ethnic natives of all these places in the Indian Ocean region.
Anyway, coming back to India’s access to the sea, the length of our country’s coastline is greater than the radius of our planet! Such a provocative statement to have trade via Indian seaports reduced was bound to antagonise us, Indians, leading our government to revoke a key transit facility for Bangladeshi exports via our territory. Again, how was this outrageous statement made by you the fault of us, Indian journalists?!
3. No rational Bangladeshi businessman/businesswoman would choose to import boulders only from Bhutan and not from India, given that India is closer to Bangladesh, and so, the transportation cost is lower. However, under your regime, they are being made to buy boulders only from Bhutan and not from India, obviously also annoying those of us, Indians, who are losing business because of this policy, and I assume, your own people who had good working arrangements with Indians to this end and are having to pay more. And yet again, how is this the Indian media’s fault? Just to be clear, we, Indians, have no antipathy to Bhutan (even if its happiness claims are grossly exaggerated, as can be seen here, here, here and here, and even though their government has been intolerant of their own Hindu and Christian fellow citizens, making most of them leave, which is a blot on their history, as you can see here, here, here and here). In fact, we, Indians, are grateful to the government of Bhutan for helping India combat Assamese secessionist terrorism that also took a toll on lives of innocent civilians, including Bengali civilians across religious lines, the roots of Assamese secessionism actually lying in resentment over illegal Bangladeshi infiltration.
4. You have joined the American high command by supporting the Rohingya militancy in Myanmar, rather than seeking to mediate and bring peaceful closure to this conflict there, despite your country having to bear the burden of the influx of Rohingya refugees, including radical Muslims among them exhibiting such tendencies even as refugees on your soil, as can be seen here and here. (I am certainly not stereotyping all or even most Rohingya Muslims as radicalised, and I feel for them at a humanitarian level the way I feel for any victims of mass murders, irrespective of faith or ethnicity, anywhere globally, I am glad that our Indian government, even under our current prime minister, has given them aid and I support the idea of punishing the Myanmarese military perpetrators of their genocide; that said, that some of the Rohingya Muslims are indeed radicalised and have targeted fellow Rohingyas, who are Hindus, when Rohingya Hindus have also suffered at Myanmarese military hands, is beyond debate.)
Ironically, you have also agreed to back the Chin rebels of Myanmar, when many of the Kukis (who see themselves as of the same ethnic stock as the Chin) in your own country too have indeed been rebelling against your country and some have even killed innocent Bangladeshi civilians! This is indeed similar to the Iranian and Iraqi states using Kurdish rebels on the other side or even the Pakistani and Iranian states doing so with Baloch rebels on the other side rather than uniting against a common foe. Given that your country’s successive governments have had a very poor track record with non-Bengali ethnic minorities (like the Khasis, Chakmas, Santhals and Kukis in your country, which those interested can read about here and here, as also the Bihari Muslim minority in your country– I am a Bihari Muslim myself and looking at the plight of Bihari Muslims in Bangladesh, I am so glad that my grandparents decided to stay back in India, and not migrate to what later became Bangladesh, and given the condition Pakistan is in, even to what remains of Pakistan after its partition in 1971) and Myanmar too having quite a pathetic track record with ethnic minorities, indeed, India has done much better with federalism and linguistic and cultural rights. What have your people got to gain by your escalating tensions with your neighbor Myanmar (which has indeed happened, as can be seen here and here)? And when you are supporting the Americans in backing Chin Christian rebels, doesn’t it possibly vindicate what Sheikh Hasina had said in that regard, and what my friend Omer said about your serving the American state at the expense of your own people?! And indeed, you are actually strengthening some elements that could potentially subsequently threaten the sovereignty of your own country Bangladesh as well.
Why could you not adopt the approach of the Indian government to promote rapprochement between Myanmar’s regime and ethnic minorities to promote genuine federalism in that neighboring country?
5. You yourself, heading the government of your country, had gifted a
Pakistani military advisor General Shahid Shamsad Mirza a book with parts of our Indian territory shown as part of yours. That is actually quite rich, for while I am not demanding the Indo-Bangladeshi relationship to be framed only through the lens of 1971, there would have been no Bangladeshi territory were it not for our Indian military intervention and RAW support (that India played a key role in saving your people from genocide is acknowledged even by Noam Chomsky but is something your regime, Sir, has disgracefully almost erased from your school textbooks!). Not only that, in the Land Boundary Agreement our prime minister signed for the exchange of enclaves between our two countries, India ended up giving Bangladesh more land – Bangladesh gave India about 7,110 acres while India gave Bangladesh 17,160 acres! Also, Northeast Indians are especially resentful of illegal migrants from your country, some extremists among them even lynching those suspected of being so! And if some Northeast Indians have issues with our country or even anti-India secessionist tendencies and some certainly do, it is clear that none of them is interested in being part of a country that is both Bengali-majority and Muslim-majority, and elements among them will undoubtedly resort to violence against your security personnel and civilians if ever made part of your country (elements among those sharing their ethnicities in your country are indeed already doing so!), more so when your track record with ethnic and linguistic minorities, as described above, has been so bad, though the truth is that you will never get an inch of our Indian territory, thanks to our Indian security forces. You gifted that Pakistani military advisor that book, despite our government having had lodged a strong protest after a certain student-adviser of yours, Mahfuz Alam, had made a social media post showing a map of Bangladesh that included parts of Northeast India. Your Bengali people have nothing to gain from antagonising Northeast Indians – whether those of them who are patriotic Indians loving the economic opportunities they enjoy in places like Delhi and Bangalore and the development work carried out in their region by our central government (details on that here and here) or even the secessionists wishing to carve out sovereign countries (the secessionists there are crystal clear they don’t want to be part of China either, despite being somewhat similar to the Chinese by ethnicity and having received Chinese state support for their militancy activities) – nor anything to gain by antagonising India to please a debt-ridden Pakistan, which, no offence intended against regular Pakistani civilians, as I mentioned in my previous letter, its own army chief has described as a dumper truck as compared to India being a Limousine. Again, how is this our (Indian journalists’) fault?!
6. I saved this for the last, but it is certainly not the least but the most outrageous for any humanist. You allowed anti-India Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorists from Pakistan to rally in Dhaka (and those deluding themselves about the Lashkar and Jaish not being terror outfits should read this). Again, how is that our, Indian journalists’, fault? And how does promoting radical Islam and antagonizing India help your people? In fact, quite the contrary, and the ISI’s good terrorist-bad terrorist game has devastated Pakistan itself, as this Pakistani commentator has rightly pointed out. Doesn’t this again prove Omer’s claim that you are pandering to a foreign power (the ISI) at the expense of your own people? And then, you not only released an Al Qaeda terrorist Jasimuddin Rahmani who supported killing atheist bloggers, has very clearly incited terrorism and has gone on to declare armed jihad against India, even declaring that he would hoist an Islamist flag over Delhi, for which he faced no punitive action from your government. But the deterioration in Indo-Bangladeshi ties is all the fault of us, Indians, right?!
…
Much as I condemn the ouster of a Bangladeshi cricketer from the IPL, that really pales into insignificance given your anti-India conduct. And if your charge against the Indian government is that it is not extraditing Hasina, well, for all her flaws (and you or the late Khaleda Zia never fared much better at democratic credentials with your own people - more on that subsequently), she stood by India when it came to helping check Islamistand Northeast Indian secessionist insurgent threats, and she was overall very good in her track record with your non-Muslim minorities (as can be seen here, here, here and here) for which the Indian state officially has a locus standi under the Nehru-Liaqat Accord. I am not a spokesperson of the Indian government, but as I see it as an Indian citizen, given that we have undemocratic leaders across India’s neighborhood, the Indian government cannot disincentivize them from standing by India by extraditing Hasina.
When you had all the time to do things like those mentioned in the above pointers provoking India and Myanmar, have you done a lot of good for your own Bangladeshi people? Quite the contrary. You actually undid your predecessors’ good work in the domain of public health, for which your country was justifiably lauded globally. Your failure at controlling high inflation rates is also noteworthy. You accused my fellow patriotic Indian friend Omer Ghazi of making an unsubstantiated claim that you were undermining your own people’s interests to appease foreign powers, but the above six points clearly demonstrate that his statement was well-founded. What is unsubstantiated is your claim that the Indian state is destabilising Bangladesh, when it is actually your own regime that has been doing so, as discussed in my next letter! Far from destabilizing Bangladesh, back in 2003-2004, when the then BNP government of Bangladesh was not at all very India-friendly (I sincerely hope that the new one voted to power is), our incidentally then also BJP government actually helped successfully crack down on a Bengali Hindu extremist outfit, the Banga Sena, which was seeking to disintegrate Bangladesh, nor did anyone of consequence in India in more recent times oppose the arrests by your regime of some Hindu mobsters in Bangladesh over the unlawful murder of lawyer Saiful Islam Alif. (To be clear, I am not a BJP-supporter, nor a supporter of minority religious right-wing political parties in India like the AIMIM, AIUDF or Akali Dal.) Much as I do agree with left-liberals that majority extremism has the potential of extinguishing democracy that minority extremism does not, poles feed off each other and minority extremism, to my mind, is actually more illogical (something that applies also to extremism by some of us, Indian Muslims, unfortunately sometimes fanned by some Indian Muslim politicians, as much as it does to extremism by some Bangladeshi Hindus, though Hindu extremism in Bangladesh may well be at a much smaller scale than Muslim extremism in our country), given that minorities come more in contact with the majority to get a more nuanced understanding of the latter not being a monolith than the vice versa, and minority extremism also undermines the narrative of insecurity felt by law-abiding members of the concerned minority community, nor can minorities anywhere achieve anything by dehumanising and resorting to generalized hate speech or violence against the members of the majority community.
I want better ties between our two countries but wish to set the record straight for future commentators as to who should be blamed for the same if our ties unfortunately do not improve.
Anyhow, my next and last letter in this series is about how you have destabilized and undermined democracy in your own country, something that you have falsely accused us, Indians, of.
…
The author is a journalist and fact-checker hailing from Patna, India. She would like to thank her friend Karmanye Thadani, president of the Citizens’ Foundation for Policy Solutions (CFPS), a Delhi-based thinktank, for his inputs, and though these letters are penned in the first person, it would not be a stretch to actually acknowledge him as a co-author.
New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism