Kolkata, September 22 : India is in troubled geographical location, Union Home Minister P Chidambaram said today and stressed on the need for improving relations with neighbouring countries.
“We can choose our friends, but not our neighbours. We can make history but cannot unmake geography. Therefore we need to build on what we have,” he said at Bharat Chamber of Commerce.
“We have to build on good relations that we are able to forge (with neighbours) and need to work hard to improve relations in conditions which are not as good as we want them to be,” he said.
Referring to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s recent visit to Bangladesh, he said, it was a major effort to build relations with that country which was helped to find its feet in 1971.
It was in India’s national interest that it helped Bangladesh become a strong and prosperous country. “We cannot build a Berlin Wall between India and Bangladesh. We must build relations and help them build capacity. The starting point to this exercises is to find solutions to some long-festering issues.”
The Tinbigha problem was solved in a spirit of ‘give and take,’ and “We haven’t given or taken much. It required a certain amount of statesmanship to give a little and take a little,” Chidambaram said.
The problems of enclaves, land in adverse positions and undemarcated boundaries would also have to be solved in the spirit of give and take.
It took 51 years to solve the problem of undemarcated boundaries with Bangladesh, including Tinbigha ”With a little give and take, we have been able to find solutions to these problems and I compliment all the chief ministers of the bordering states for standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the Government of India in resolving the issues.”
Although the Teesta water-sharing and of access to India from Bangladesh remained to be resolved, “I am confident that given time, patience and some degree of statesmanship, these two problems will be solved.
“Never before in the last 40 years have we had a moment in our history where we can say with a degree of assurance that India and Bangladesh were poised to forge a very close relationship for mutual benefit,” he said.
India should seize the moment to forge a strong relation with Bangladesh. “Just as it has done with Bhutan and Sri Lanka before the beginning of the ethnic conflict and hopes to do with Nepal,” he added.
Maintaining that some problems like Tinbigha corridor should have been resolved long ago, he said “We had made up our mind that we will solve this problem. It was resolved in a few minutes. We said use the corridor 24 hours a day instead of 12 hours a day.”
–Agencies