The UPA government should take full responsibility for the wrong timing of President Mukherjee’s visit to Bangladesh. Like many other instances of incompetence of this government, the Presidential visit might also go on record as ill-timed, ill-prepared and causing grave embarrassment both for India and Bangladesh. For the last one month the protests in Dhaka were going on in what is known as the Shahbag event. In the first few weeks it was a massive demonstration of the Bangladesh people’s anger at the collaborators and conspirators of the 1971 ravaging of the country when it was seeking to assert its own cultural nationalism from subjugation to Pakistan’s irredentism, going scot free for forty years after the liberation. While the liberation of 1971 brought a secular and liberal constitution, within five years the Islamists provoked a coup that decimated the liberation’s father figure and most of his family members in a display of barbarism typical of extremist Islamist violence. Only Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s daughter Hasina who happened to be then in India hence escaped. The military rulers, who followed Sheikh Mujibur declared the new nation as Islamic and removed the ban on the Jamat-e-Islami that had led the series of murders and rape with the help of the Pakistani army during the liberation struggle. Despite the return of civilian rule in Bangladesh, the Islamists remained powerful as they aligned with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) under the leadership of Begum Khalida Zia, the widow of the first military ruler who was assassinated by the second one. Her government was a coalition with the Islamist parties. The Jamait and other fundamentalists fully exploited their power in government not only to protect the perpetrators of murder and rape in 1970-71 but also promote terrorist organisations like HUJI aimed at India. Begum Zia’s regime allowed several North-eastern militant elements like the main leaders of ULFA to take shelter in Bangladesh and direct militancy against India from there. The present government under Sheikh Hasina which came to power with a massive mandate had made an electoral promise to restore the original nature of Sonar Bangla and bring the perpetrators of the 1975 coup and murder to justice. The Bangladesh International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) was set up by this government. It began a series of trials. It was at this juncture that the nationalism of the people burst out in the form of a Tahrir Square like demonstration demanding both death penalty for the Jamat and other Islamist collaborators and ban on the Islamist organisations. Earlier, Bangladesh Parliament had returned the country to its original secular and liberal political set-up by amending the Constitution. The BNP initially kept quiet but then came out in favour of the agitationists. Soon enough it revoked the earlier decision against the Pakistani collaborators and is now tagging along the Islamists. The Islamist counter demonstration against hanging the prime accused in the trials has already claimed more than a 100 dead. It is obvious that the Islamists and BNP together are bent on keeping Bangladesh on the edge and thus seek to bring down the Hasina government. In any case the Awami League prime minister has to get her mandate renewed late this year and tension in the country is mounting. What made New Delhi advise the President to stick to the original schedule of his visit to the country and land himself in the midst of these demonstrations and counter demonstrations, is not known. It is most likely that having announced the visit government here must have calculated that any postponement of it would hurt the Hasina government at a time when she needed strong demonstration of outside support to her. The fact is that Manmohan Singh’s government has got itself caught in a bad situation with regard to its relationship with Dhakha. The visit of Pranab Mukherjee was projected as a means of counter-balancing the deep disappointment in the Awami League government at failure of Indian government in making any advance in Indo-Bangladesh relations. That failure is partly due to the stalling of an agreement on sharing of the Teesta waters negotiated between the two governments. New Delhi may blame West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee for her obstinacy on stalling any progress on either Teesta or exchange of enclaves. But there we go back to the weakness of the UPA-II where the prime minister is a nominee and real power is held by the Congress president. Nor did Manmohan Singh consult the Opposition before his visit to Dhaka last year on the strengthening of Indo-Bangladesh relationship. The Congress wanted to corner all the glory of an agreement with Bangladesh that was projected as “historic”. Equally the Trinamool chief wanted to underline that there could not be such a far-reaching agreement that affects her state’s perceived interests without a previous consultation and consent with her. The net result is that Indo-Bangladesh relationship has become a victim of the political weakness of the UPA-II and its nominated prime minister. Naturally, a half-hearted attempt to resuscitate that relationship by using the President’s august office and that too at this juncture in the political turmoil in Dhakha could only result in failure and greater headache for the Hasina government battling the Islamist resurgence in her country. The question now is whether the Indian prime minister’s political mishandling of the relationship with Dhakha would further weaken the hope of anti-Islamic forces succeeding in Bangladesh. Apart from the Teesta issue and the exchange of enclaves, even on other fronts Singh is perceived in Dhakha as having done nothing to strengthen that relationship. The expected Indian investment in Bangladesh has not come through. The issues like more rail and road links, the integration of the economies of Bangladesh and the surrounding north-eastern and eastern states of India and opening linkages to Burma have all been stuck in endless bureaucratic entanglements.