Dhaka After the Maldives, India's neighbour Bangladesh Opposition leaders have started an anti-India campaign. The Bangladesh National Party (BNP) has been encouraging citizens to boycott Indian products for a long time. However, this time the Indian saree is in the limelight. Notably, the leaders had started the "India out" campaign before the National elections, which the incumbent Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina won with a resounding majority. But the matter escalated in recent times when senior BNP leader Ruhul Kabir Rizvi threw away a shawl he was wearing around his shoulders.
According to local media reports, the shawl he threw was a famous Kashmiri one. This triggered a war on social media where several other opposition leaders joined the trend and posted similar photos and videos with hashtags- #IndiaOut #BoycottIndianProducts and others.
Bangladesh PM Hasina hits out at Opposition leaders for "India out" campaign
Although some leaders from the ruling government had thrashed over running such campaigns, it acted as a wildfire when Prime Minister Hasina publically denounced the campaign and asked the leaders to burn the sarees that their wives wore. As per Hasina, most of the women in the country wear sarees from India. In fact, the Bangladeshi PM claimed family members of the Opposition leaders fly to India for shopping and then sell it in Dhaka.
"The BNP leaders are advocating for boycotting Indian products. My question is – how many Indian sarees do the boycott campaigners' wives possess? Why don't they take the sarees from their wives and burn them?," Prothomalo quoted Hasina as saying.
“BNP leaders are saying #BoycottIndian products. But “BNP leaders should make sure their wives don’t wear Indian sarees. The day you burn them (your wives’ Indian sarees) in front of the (BNP) office, that day I will believe you are actually boycotting Indian goods.”
Bangladesh opposition leader recalls a story about Indian saree
Meanwhile, reacting to the claims made by Hasina, Rizvi rejected the claims and said the wives of Opposition leaders do not buy Indian sarees. The BNP leader recounted the time when his maternal uncle gifted an Indian saree to his wife during their visit to India long ago. He recently asked his wife about the whereabouts of the saree and came to know that it was stitched with a kantha, which also tore, he said.
In his speech, the local media reported Rizvi castigated the growing intolerance of speeches that go against India. He claimed that the newspapers do not publish any anti-India news. However, he did not provide any proof to substantiate his claims.
India-Bangladesh relations
It is worth mentioning both India and Bangladesh share "friendly" relations amid the fact it was liberated by Indian armed forces from Pakistan in 1971. Besides, Bangladesh is India’s biggest trade partner in South Asia and India is the second biggest trade partner of Bangladesh in Asia. India is Bangladesh’s largest export destination in Asia, with approx USD 2 billion of Bangladeshi exports to India in FY 2022-23. In FY 2022-23, the total bilateral trade has been reported as USD 15.9 billion.
Additionally, India runs a number of infrastructural and energy projects which support the country's development.
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