Bangladesh PM Hasina keen to meet Mamata in Delhi to end impasse on Teesta

Apart from meeting her host and counterpart Narendra Modi, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is also keen to meet West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee during her forthcoming tour to India, apparently to try once again to end the stalemate in the negotiation for an agreement on river Teesta.

With the parliamentary elections in Bangladesh likely to take place in December 2023, Hasina wants to have an early breakthrough in the negotiations with the Government of India for the deal on sharing of water of Teesta, so that her Awami League could project it as yet another feather in her cap in the run-up to polls.

Hasina will arrive in New Delhi on September 5 for a four-day visit. Though she is likely to visit Ajmer Sharif Dargah in Rajasthan during her visit to India, the itinerary of the Prime Minister of Bangladesh does not include a visit to Kolkata. But she is keen to meet the Chief Minister of West Bengal in New Delhi.

Banerjee received a letter from Hasina last month and, according to the sources, would soon decide whether she would travel from Kolkata to New Delhi for a meeting as she had done in April 2017, when the leader of the neighbouring country had paid a state visit to India. Dhaka is insisting on a meeting between Hasina and Banerjee in New Delhi.

Teesta is a river which originates in Sikkim and flows through West Bengal in India before entering Bangladesh. Though New Delhi and Dhaka had been close to signing an agreement for sharing of water of the river in 2011, it had been stalled due to objection from the West Bengal government led by Banerjee, who had argued that such a pact would result in water scarcity in the northern region of the state and hit the farmers hard.

The opposition Bangladesh National Party (BNP) turned the 11-year-long impasse over the negotiation for the deal into a political weapon to criticise the ruling Awami League in the neighbouring country.

Dhaka has been pressing New Delhi hard to ensure that the meeting between Hasina and Modi early next month leads to some progress towards ending the stalemate.

The issue was discussed during the ministerial meeting of India-Bangladesh Joint River Commission in New Delhi last Thursday. The delegation of Bangladesh Government requested “for conclusion of the long pending Teesta Water Sharing Treaty at an early date”. The delegation of the Government of India assured of its “utmost efforts in concluding the agreement”, according to a press-release issued in Dhaka.

A separate press-release issued by the Government of India in New Delhi on the meeting, however, had no reference to the stalled negotiation on sharing of water of river Teesta.

The text of an interim Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for sharing of water of another common river, Kushiyara, was finalized.

The ministerial meeting of the Joint River Commission was held after a long hiatus of 12 years. The MoU is likely to be signed during this visit.

After the meeting in New Delhi in April 2017, Hasina and Banerjee also met in West Bengal twice in the past five years, once during Hasina's visit to Vishwa Bharati in Shantiniketan in May 2018 and then again during her visit to Kolkata for inauguration of ‘Pink Ball’ cricket test match between the teams of the two countries.