Bangladesh wants good relations with India, but so far there is no visible step suggesting India wants the same kind of relationship, National Parliament speaker Hafiz Uddin Ahmed has said.
He said Bangladesh’s prime minister, Tareque Rahman, has still not been invited to the BRICS summit with the proper dignity befitting a prime minister. He also said relations between India and Bangladesh should be based on equal dignity and mutual respect.
The speaker made the comments while responding to reporters’ questions at Bhola Circuit House on Monday (September 14) morning.
Hafiz Uddin Ahmed said: “They still haven’t invited our prime minister as a prime minister, with proper dignity.”
He also expressed displeasure over India giving shelter to Bangladesh’s former prime minister and allowing her to conduct politics from there, calling it not genuinely neighbourly behaviour.
The speaker said: “We need to maintain good relations with India. But so far there’s no sign they want good relations either. Only some back-and-forth talk is happening at the diplomatic level between the two countries.”
Saying Bangladesh wants a genuinely neighbourly and equally dignified relationship with India, he said ties between the two countries must be based on mutual dignity as sovereign states.
Noting that Bangladesh-India relations were once described as a “husband-wife relationship” under the past Awami League government, Hafiz Uddin Ahmed said: “We don’t want that husband-wife relationship. We want the kind of relationship that should exist between two sovereign states, based on equal dignity.”
He said Bangladesh wants to maintain friendly relations with all states.
The speaker also praised various initiatives and reform activities under the current government. He said Prime Minister Tareque Rahman formed the government with broad popularity and a parliamentary majority. Though the government is only seven months old, he said, it will take time to steer the country out of the various crises of the past 17 years.
On reform activities, he said both the government and the opposition are committed to implementing the July Charter. If parliament reaches consensus on the reform proposals, the necessary legal and constitutional amendments can be made quickly, he said.