Muhammad Yunus Is Singing Pakistan's Tune

Bangladesh government caretaker, Muhammad Yunus seems to fancy himself as a leader of international status, just because he has had the backing of the Democratic establishment in the United States.

- JOYEETA BASU

So much so that he is now trying to decide the future of the Indian subcontinent, by literally offering India's Northeast to China—that is the only way to interpret the statement he made during his China visit. "The seven states of India, the eastern part of India, are called the Seven Sisters. They are a landlocked region of India. They have no way to reach out to the ocean. We (Bangladesh) are the only guardian of the ocean for this region," he said. It is not known from which geography book Yunus has been taking his lessons that he thinks India's Northeast—which he initially misidentified as a country—is landlocked and does not have any access to the sea. Also what made him arrogate himself as the "guardian of the ocean" when his country has a coastline of a mere 710 km, and the ocean is named after India, which has thousands of kilometres of coastline along that "ocean"? Also, no state in India is landlocked because they have full access to the whole country's coastline, with innumerable ports, giving even the remotest corner of the country full access to the sea. It's just a matter of connectivity—building infrastructure to ensure ease of access. With the focus that the current government is giving on connectivity, this is true even for the Northeast, which has witnessed major infrastructure boom in the last ten years.

Yunus cannot rewrite geopolitics by erasing India from the Indian subcontinent.