NEW DELHI: While India’s stock in the world has risen dramatically in recent years, its influence in the immediate neighbourhood has not kept up with its perceived clout in the world. Lately, India has been unable to show real leadership within South Asia or decisively shape events in the region, even as major powers raise India’s place within their global scheme of priorities and serenade the country. US President George W. Bush and France’s Jacques Chirac both recently visited India to sign major agreements. Other visitors included the prime ministers of Russia, Australia, Finland and China’s executive vice-foreign minister.

The US, France and Russia are eagerly waiting to sell nuclear plants and material to India, as well as billions of dollars worth of armaments. “India just cannot get a grip on her problems with her own immediate neighbours,” holds Muchkund Dubey, India’s former foreign secretary. “For some years now, India has neglected the rest of South Asia, barring Pakistan, and allowed problems to fester.”

This is especially the case with Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, where India has had a chance to demonstrate leadership. A great paradox is that India’s foreign policy makers, who for decades treated its smaller neighbours on the basis of an Indian version of the Monroe Doctrine, as a strategic backyard, now find India’s influence waning just outside its borders. The Achilles’ heel of India’s policy is now perceived as lying in the neighbourhood, where India is resented as the ‘Big Brother’.

Ironically, some of India’s worst neighbourhood problems arise from its growing relations with the world powers, in particular, the US. Recent events in Nepal are a case in point. After the usurpation of absolute power by King Gyanendra in February 2005, New Delhi tried to develop an independent line focused on the restoration of democracy.

It first reiterated the well-known twin pillar formula: Nepal needs both ‘constitutional monarchy’ and ‘multi-party democracy’. This was close to Washington’s policy and shared with it a sharp hostility to the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) whose insurgent activities the palace cites, among other things, to justify executive monarchy.

Like the US, India appealed to the king to start a dialogue with the political parties and restore the national legislature and the constitution. It also supplied armaments to him. The king refused to heed India’s advice.

“Things began changing late last year,” says Anand Swaroop Verma of the India-Nepal People’s Solidarity Forum. “The king became more intransigent and unpopular. And seven mainstream political parties and the Maoists, the two principal blocs of Nepal’s politics, started talking to each other.” Indian political parties, which have good relations with the Nepal’s parties, facilitated a major agreement between the two blocs last November. Under this, the Maoists agreed to renounce violence and work jointly with the seven parties to launch a peaceful movement to demand a new Constituent Assembly.

The Indian government threw its weight behind the November agreement. “This was a healthy change from its earlier visceral opposition to the Maoists”, says Verma. The earlier policy was unduly influenced by India’s security forces and by unreasonable fears about a developing link between Nepal’s Maoists and India’s own Naxalite guerrillas. The Naxalites are active in one-fourth of India’s territory but far away from the Nepal’s border. The US, meanwhile, has hardened its stance against the Maoists who are on the State Department’s ‘terrorist organisations’ watchlist since 2002.

Recently, US functionaries, including ambassador to Nepal James Moriarty and state department official Donald Camp, have spoken strongly against the Maoists and the November agreement. This confronts New Delhi with a challenge: how to dissuade Washington from pursuing a hard line, which will undermine the agreement and prolong the absolute monarchy.

“India has not risen to the task,” says a diplomatic source who insisted on anonymity. “It is so obsessed with the recent nuclear cooperation deal and its passage through the US Congress that it has not engaged the US on Nepal.” There is an urgent need to do so. The seven-party alliance and the Maoists have announced a non-violent general strike from April 6 demanding an end to the absolute monarchy. This is to coincide with the 16th anniversary of the transition to modern parliamentary democracy in Nepal, under sustained public pressure on the monarch.

Unless India asserts itself, US pressure on some of Nepal’s mainstream parties could lead to a breakdown of the agitation plan and split the coalition leading it. India faces another predicament vis-à-vis Bangladesh, relations with which have steadily deteriorated over four years. The two have several problems: the sharing of river waters and access to land enclaves in their territories, trade, tariff barriers, double taxation, and others.

The two neighbours’ border guards have repeatedly clashed in recent months. India accuses Bangladesh of encouraging illegal migration across the border. Bangladesh rebuts the charge. Recently, relations plummeted further when India charged Bangladesh with harbouring ‘terrorists’. In 2005, India cancelled its participation in a summit of the seven-nation South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) in Dhaka. Since then, India has tried to mend fences, but half-heartedly. Bangladesh Prime Minister Khaleda Zia recently visisted India.

“Although the two governments signed a declaration against terrorism and an agreement on transit, they failed to achieve a real breakthrough,” says Dubey. “There was no real reconciliation or a meeting of minds. This could have taken place only on the basis of a vision of mutual cooperation. The onus was on India to develop that vision. It failed the test.”

The Bangladesh Prime Minister had specifically requested India to grant duty-free access to Bangladeshi exports but India refused. India will risk very little by taking such a measure unilaterally. Its economy is big and strong enough to withstand competition from Bangladesh and absorb its exports. But old mindsets obsessed with “reciprocity” (between unequal nations) persist.

India could have lifted non-tariff barriers to Bangladeshi exports. For instance, leather products from that country must be sent more than 1,500 km away to Chennai for certification before being sold. “This is unnecessary and wantonly discourages imports,” says Dubey. —Dawn/IPS News Service

DHAKA: He is a shy, modest family man from a humble rural background. But Abul Khaer’s selfless dedication to his work recovering the bodies of ferry accident victims has made him a national hero in Bangladesh where hundreds of people die each year when overcrowded and badly designed boats capsize.

Eschewing huge salaries available for commercial dive work overseas, Khaer says he is happier serving his compatriots for just 74 dollars a month

UNMATCHED FEATS: The scene is etched in Abul Khaer’s mind: several thousand villagers line a desolate riverbank, their eyes following his every move as he prepares to plunge into the dark, swirling waters in search of the bodies of their loved ones.

A ferry with at least 100 passengers on board has gone down and the 38-year-old Khaer and an elite team of fire service divers have been called to the scene.

The boat is lying in 15 metres (50 feet) of water at the bottom of the mighty Padma river and currents five times their normal strength have prevented them from searching the sunken vessel — to the frustration of anguished relatives who have gathered to wait for news.

A day after it capsized the ferry is already silted up with tonnes of sand. With every hour the chance of recovering any bodies at all becomes slimmer.

Other divers have decided that the currents are too strong to go down in. The hopes of everyone in the crowd now rest with the slightly-built Khaer.

“Those anxious eyes are difficult to deny,” the quietly spoken diver and firefighter tells AFP, recalling the scene of last May’s tragedy near the town of Aricha in central Bangladesh.

“They expect that the diver with his magic diving suit and oxygen cylinder will somehow find their missing relative. People think we can do miracles but they don’t understand that we only have basic equipment and two bare hands to work with.”

For more than 15 years Khaer has dedicated himself to the sad but essential work of recovering bodies from capsized boats.

In doing so he has made himself a national hero on call for any emergency from fires and ferry disasters to talking down suicides.

Out of his working environment, however, the married father of 15-year-old twins is shy and reticent. His success, he says, is “all down to Allah”.

Colleagues see Khaer as nothing short of a miracle worker, though at Aricha even he was defeated by the forces of nature.

“This was the most difficult assignment of my life, I have never experienced anything like it,” he says. “These were killer currents, so strong they felt as if they were crushing my limbs and suffocating me.

“I was determined that I would rescue some bodies but when I tried to go inside the ferry I found it was already silted up. I felt one body near a window so I tied it to my rope. But as soon as I started swimming to the surface the currents hit me with all their force taking all the sensation from my arms and legs and knocking off my mask.”

Khaer, attached to a rescue boat by a rope, was swept hundreds of metres downstream and had to be hauled to safety. Only the rope and the fact that he managed to hang onto his oxygen cylinder saved his life.

Not deterred by the experience, he dived again the following day in a final attempt to attach a salvage rope to the vessel.

“He took the challenge. It was amazing,” reacalls fellow fire service diver Chand Mia. “After he dived I told my colleagues, ‘That is the end of Khaer’.

“I thought he would end up buried under the sands like all the others — but as usual he came back to tell us with a smile how he’d managed to tie a rope in not just one but two places.”

Ferries provide daily transport for an estimated 100,000 people in Bangladesh, mostly the rural poor who have no choice but to travel on the delta nation’s network of some 230 rivers.

Accidents claim hundreds of lives a year, mostly needless losses caused by the greed of profit-hungry ferry owners who overload boats or build extra cabins that make them unstable.

Boat owners deny the accusations but experts say the alterations cause ferries that would otherwise not sink to flip over within seconds of hitting rough weather.

After each fresh tragedy, inquiries are announced and new safety regulations promised.

But the accidents continue with predictable regularity as successive governments have found themselves powerless in the face of the powerful boat owners lobby.

Khaer’s selfless dedication and repeated willingness to risk his life has earned him the gratitude of thousands of families.

Always a strong swimmer as a child, he began his career in 1990 after a relative suggested he answer an advertisement for fire department divers, a rare opportunity for someone from a poor rural background.

With a few years experience under his belt, he was told, he could quit the low-paying fire service and earn big money as a commercial diver in one of the Gulf states.

But within months of completing basic diving and firefighter training Khaer had started to distinguish himself, quickly earning a reputation as a man who would take on any challenge no matter how daunting.

In the same year that he joined, he single-handedly saved the lives of 300 female workers in a factory fire by climbing to the fourth floor where they were trapped and breaking open the windows.

He also holds a national firefighting record for being able to climb 13.5 metres (45 feet) up a ladder in six seconds.

Khaer, however, is characteristically modest about his work.

“I have lost count of the number of bodies I have recovered but it is more than a thousand,” he says. “It gives the relatives a certain peace of mind if they can at least bury their dead.”

His colleagues have nothing but praise for his tenacity and mental and physical toughness

“He was absolutely resolved to dive at Aricha, but in the process he almost killed himself,” says Nurul Haq, Khaer’s trainer and assistant director of Dhaka fire brigade.

“We told him ‘don’t dive against such a strong current, your limbs will fail, your oxygen cylinder will be washed away and you could die at any moment.’”

“In diving, he is second to none. In firefighting too, he is the best the country has,” Haq says.

Despite being their country’s finest rescue workers, Khaer and his colleagues work in appalling conditions.

Bangladesh is one of the world’s poorest countries and scarce resources mean ageing equipment, no health insurance or overtime pay — and a monthly wage of just 74 dollars.

“Time and time again I have asked for better equipment but my bosses just say that there is no money for this,” says Khaer.

Khaer is philosophical about his meagre salary, which is on a par with junior police officers and other low-ranking public servants, and no longer has any ambition to be a commerical diver.

“I work so I can serve the people, and Allah has been kind to me in that I am still able to carry on. If I cared about the money I could make millions by charging for my services.”—AFP