Acknowledge uprising, Yunus's key advisor tells India

DHAKA: India should unequivocally recognise the July-August uprising, which toppled prime minister Sheikh Hasina's regime, to start bilateral ties afresh, a key aide of Bangladesh's interim government said on Wednesday.

In a Facebook post, Mahfuj Alam -- considered a de facto minister in the interim government and a key leader of Bangladesh's Anti-Discrimination Students Movement -- noted that the Indian establishment tried to portray the uprising as something militant, anti-Hindu, and an Islamist takeover and asked India to change the Post '75 playbook and realise the new Bangladesh realities.

"This (recognition) is the first thing to start with. Bypassing the July uprising, the foundation of new Bangladesh will be detrimental to the relationship of both (the) countries.

"Indophiles, or Indian allies in this part of Bengal were thinking that things were going to cool down and bypassing the July uprising and the fascist's atrocities would not cost them anything, Alam wrote.

It was Alam's organisation that that led widespread protests against Hasina's Awami League-led government over a controversial job quota system starting mid-July resulting in toppling the five-term prime minister. Three days after Hasina fled to India on August 5, Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel laureate, took over as the chief adviser of the interim government.

The tension between the two neighbours simmering since August 5 aggravated further with the arrest of the Hindu monk Chinmoy Krishna Das last week.

"It's a wrong idea. People are watching everything!" said Alam, whom Yunus introduced to former US president Bill Clinton as the brain behind the whole revolution and amazingly planned July-August mass upheaval at a function of Clinton Global Initiative in New York in September.

Alam's Facebook statement headlined 'On India and its relationship with Bangladesh' said the Indian establishment tried to portray the uprising as something militant, anti-Hindu, and an Islamist takeover. But their propaganda and provocation are failing.

"India should change the Post '75 playbook and realise the new Bangladesh realities," he wrote in an apparent reference to the August 15, 1975 military coup that had toppled the post independence Awami League government of the country's founding leader Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

The putsch killed the leader, deposed premier Hasina's father, along with most of his family members.

Alam, considered by many as the main ideologue of the interim government, said the current Bangladesh scenario is not like a post-75-like situation as the July uprising was about a democratic, generational, and responsible struggle.

And, this struggle will continue for a long period, he added.

Alam's comments came as Dhaka-Delhi relations witness a major strain with India expressing concerns over exposure of Bangladesh's Hindu community to fright, a notion which Bangladesh vehemently opposed.