The Indian government has ordered eastern and northeastern states to prevent ’Pakistan-trained militants’ from sneaking into the country via Bangladesh. A senior West Bengal government official disclosed that the Indian Home Ministry has warned border states in writing that Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) had set up new bases in Bangladesh for ’launching subversive operations in India’. The directive says the ISI regularly ’exported terrorism’ to India through Kashmir. But as Kashmir "is now under international glare because of India’s peace initiative", Pakistan is slipping militants into India through other routes especially through Bangladesh.
| Kind of an inconvenient supply line, isn't it? |
According to the directive, ISI had set up new camps along the India-Bangladesh border with the active support of Islamic parties constituting Bangladeshi Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia’s coalition government. It has identified radical religious parties including Jamaat-e-Islami and Islamic Oika Jote Party - allies of Begum Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party - as the ISI’s ’collaborators’. The directive claims that the camps are also being used to broadcast anti-India propaganda from clandestine radio stations to ’brainwash’ Indian Muslims in border states such as West Bengal, Assam, Tripura, Mizoram and Meghalaya. The official said that the West Bengal administration received the detailed memo about the ISI’s alleged new operations last week. He said the state government was investigating reports of Pakistani agencies recruiting Indians for training and indoctrination in Bangladesh. But Bangladeshi officials insist that the charges are baseless.
| "Nope. Nope. Never happened." |
But this is not the first time that India has accused the ISI of setting up bases in Bangladesh to launch anti-India operations with the help of the Bangladeshi administration. Earlier, it also complained to the Nepalese government that the ISI was doing the same from Nepali soil. Significantly, both the ISI and India’s spy agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), have a significant presence in Dhaka and have been accused by Bangladeshi nationalists of interfering in the country’s internal affairs. Last year, the arrest of more than 20 Bangladeshi soldiers and civilians on charges of spying for the RAW heightened tensions between India and Bangladesh. A Bangladesh government statement said that it had put its intelligence services on alert after an alleged spy for India revealed that the RAW had planted agents in several Bangladeshi defence installations. India’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party also accuses Bangladesh of systematically sending in millions of illegal migrants to India’s border region to boost Muslim numbers, paving the way for the region’s secession. |