Paradoxically, Bangladesh''s creeping estrangement from India is rooted in an attempt by its political leaders and elite to shield their secular heritage from the creeping Islamisation of their society. Over decades, millions of its workers have returned from the Middle East infected by the austere Sunni and Wahabi Islam they found practised there. The percolation of this imported Islam into Bangladeshi society has turned the Jamaat-i-Islami into a potent political force, and given rise to a still-small terrorist movement that is targeting communist, and other ''heretical'' elements.

The fear that these fundamentalists will succeed in enlisting Bangladeshi nationalism to overwhelm its secular polity is the main reason why every government in Dhaka has felt obliged, at least in public, to adopt a less than co-operative attitude to India. This was as true of the Awami League government under Sheikha Hasina as it is of the BNP government of Begam Zia. In 1997 the Awami League government agreed to close down the ULFA camps in Bangladesh, but after closing down around 50 of them, found that it could not go any further because of determined resistance from within the Bangladesh army. Since 2001 most of these camps have been reopened. Bangladeshi sources confirmed to me that the majority are permanent encampments whose presence is known to their government and security forces.

If cooperation with India is likely to be depicted as both a surrender of national sovereignty and a betrayal of Islam, then withholding it becomes one way of preventing the fusion of the two ideas. This accounts for the steady accumulation of unresolved issues.

Today six of these bedevil Indo-Bangladesh relations:

• ULFA''s camps inside Bangladesh''s borders;
• Illegal migration of millions of Bangladeshis to India in search of security or work;
• India''s decision to fence the border and the host of associated issues it has raised;
• Bangladesh''s non-tarriff barriers on imports from India;
• Bangladesh''s failure to implement its commitment to permit overland and riverine transit for Indian goods to and through its territory, and
• Its reluctance to harness the abundant river waters of the eastern region jointly with India to generate power, augment the irrigation potential and limit the damage done by floods.

On each of these, Indian proposals and requests are met with vague assurances but little follow up.

To give two current examples, India submitted a draft extradition treaty to Bangladesh more than a year ago. Such a treaty would enable India to ask for the extradition of ULFA leaders apprehended by the Bangladesh authorities, and Bangladesh to ask for the extradition of criminal gang bosses who operate from secure bases in Calcutta. But to date Bangladesh has neither signed it nor asked for a further discussion of its clauses. A rail link has also finally been established between Bangladesh and India and a trial run is scheduled for the near future. But it remains to be seen whether this will result in regular transit links between Bangladesh and India.

A striking feature of all these outstanding issues is that, in stark contrast to the Kashmir dispute with Pakistan, none of them involves a conflict of vital interests. Most are of the kind that arise between all countries that share a common border, and are resolved with little fanfare in other parts of the world. Their sheer ordinariness has promoted the belief among officials in Bangladesh, that they are at least partly a product of the prolonged neglect of Bangladesh by India. One visit by an Indian Prime Minister to Bangladesh, they point out, will resolve most if not all of these issues.

Many members of the intelligentsia also urge India to give preferential, or free, market access to Bangladeshi consumer goods. This will help Bangladesh to reduce its large trade deficit with India and make it easier for it to lift various non-tariff barriers to imports from India. In the longer run it will also create a strong businessmen''s lobby in favour of closer relations with India, which would act as a counterweight to the fundamentalist forces in the country.

Both suggestions make eminently good sense, but the improvement of relations is likely to prove short-lived if it is not accompanied by a fundamental shift in each country''s perception of the other. India needs to take the initiative in doing this.

By far the most important change is a genuine understanding of why Bangladesh feels so helpless and vulnerable in its relations with India. Significantly, this feeling does not arise from any perception of military threat: In all the discussions one has had over the years with Bangladeshis, not once has anyone voiced the fear that India will intervene militarily in Bangladesh to have its way. This is the best proof that Indians can ask for that Bangladeshis have not forgotten, and are not likely to forget, how they obtained their independence.

The feeling arises from the way in which its future is inextricably intertwined with that of India. All of its rivers flow out of India, and India is the natural market for most, if not all, of its products. Bangladesh is therefore affected by virtually every decision that India takes in fields as diverse as ecology, energy, and economic policy. But it has absolutely no capacity to modify them in order to minimise their impact upon its economy.

What is worse, it is not only India''s actions but its inaction that affects Bangladesh. One example will suffice to illustrate this. Nepal is not the only country that got cut off from its natural market when India adopted an autarchic model of economic development. Bangladesh suffered almost as badly. It is of course true that the umbilical chord was cut first by the Partition and the extreme hostility that erupted between Pakistan and India. But in 1971, when Bangladesh became free, its economy suffered a second severe blow, for it lost both its markets and sources of foodgrains and raw materials in West Pakistan. India could have cushioned the shock if it had given Bangladesh immediate, free access to its markets. But in the days of industrial licensing, import bans and sky-high tariffs, such largesse was unthinkable. India''s failure to perceive and respond to Bangladesh''s needs cost that country almost two decades of lost growth.

But to most Bangladeshis, it is Farakka that symbolises their inability to control their destiny. Bangladesh admittedly has a superabundance of water. But nearly all of it comes from a single three-month monsoon that regularly causes the Brahmaputra to flood a third of the country. To grow a second and third crop in order to feed its growing population, Bangladesh is critically dependent upon irrigation. It is therefore adversely affected by almost any hydel project on the Ganges or one of its tributaries, that reduces the flow of water in the river as it enters Bangladesh.

Farakka has halved the water available to Bangladesh from the Ganges, but what is even worse, India took the decision to build the barrage without first consulting Bangladesh, and overrode every one of its objections. What is to stop it from doing so again and again?

This fear was confirme last year when the Vajpayee government announced its ambitious river linking project without even a token discussion with Bangladesh, despite the fact that it involved building a link canal from the Brahmaputra to the Ganges and up to six dams and barrages on the tributaries of the former in Assam and NEFA.

The reactions to the project in Bangladesh show that if there is a single issue that could drive the two countries irrevocably apart, it is not trade, transit rights or access to markets. It is water.

The argument made by Indians that Bangladesh too stands to gain from projects that control floods and augment lean season flows in all rivers misses the basic cause of Bangladesh''s fear and resentment. This is it''s lack of control over its destiny. India can only reassure it on this score if it creates an institutional arrangement that gives Bangladesh a share in the decision making process. This requires a small surrender of sovereignty but the political and economic gains that will accrue from it will far outweigh the loss.

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* The author, a noted analyst and commentator, is a former editor of the Hindustan Times, The Economic Times and The Financial Express, and a former information adviser to the prime minister of India. He is the author of several books including, The Perilous Road to the Market: The Political Economy of Reform in Russia, India and China, and Kashmir 1947: The Origins of a Dispute, and a regular columnist with several leading publications.