ABC Religion & Ethics
Mohshin Habib, Christine Jubb, Henri Pallard, and Zakir Morshed
Posted
Updated
Tue 6 Apr 2021, 9:01am
A Rohingya boy at the Balukhali refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, after a fire destroyed thousands of shelters, killed fifteen people, and left 400 residents missing. (Photo by K.M. Asad / LightRocket via Getty Images)
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Bangladesh has accommodated more than a million Rohingya refugees at a significant cost to its economy. Nevertheless, it now finds itself subject to international condemnation for relocating some Rohingyas to Bhasan Char a silt island built up through tidal activity over the last twenty years. Even so, Bangladesh has now relocated 14,032 Rohingyas to Bashan Char in an orderly manner. The UN Resident Coordinator in Bangladesh, Mia Seppo, has recognised the Bangladesh government’s investment of USD$350 million to build infrastructure on Bhasan Char, which provides better facilities and infrastructure than those ava
Sarmila Bose,
(Hurst, 2011).
The creation of Bangladesh was a missed opportunity for India to reverse the British partition of Bengal. It was an error of judgement due to India’s tendency to think in terms of how to damage Pakistan, rather than what might benefit India.
At the end of the 1971 war, Pakistan was in disarray and the Indian army was in control of the territory of East Pakistan. Had Indira Gandhi annexed it as the new state of East Bengal within the Union of India and offered Sheikh Mujib the chief ministership, evidence suggests he would have accepted. He had few options. India has responded with an iron fist to any secessionist tendencies within the boundaries it was bequeathed by the British, holding large swathes of territory under military occupation, without Constitutional protections. By 1975 Indira Gandhi had annexed Sikkim and broken the ‘Lion of Kashmir’, Sheikh Abdullah, who agreed to be chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir.