Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Kolkata:Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Friday appealed for support from India and the international community to put pressure on Myanmar to take back the 1.1 million Rohingya refugees in her country.
She was speaking in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Santiniketan at the inauguration of the Bangladesh Bhavan.
The Rohingya refugees currently living in Bangladesh were allowed to take shelter out of “humanitarian considerations”, Hasina said.
However, Myanmar must take them back and all countries must come together to put pressure on Naypyidaw to take the refugees back, Hasina said.
While Dhaka allowed the Rohingyas to take refuge in Bangladesh, Delhi has blocked the uprooted Muslims from Myanmar from entering India. Some have, however, managed to enter India and are living in camps under pressure from the administration to return to their homeland.
On the bilateral front, Hasina said lawmakers in the two countries could work together to seal the land boundary agreement and exchange their former enclaves. Countries go to war over enclaves but India and Bangladesh had been able to easily resolve the issue. Still, not all bilateral issues have been solved, Hasina said, without naming them.
Hasina, who was attending the convocation of the Visva Bharati University along with Modi and West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, said it was not the right occasion to raise unresolved issues.
One of the unresolved issues is the sharing of waters from the Teesta river, on which Banerjee has a strong position. Dhaka is of the view that after Banerjee took office in 2011, the state took steps to alter the flow of the river upstream, which led to the Teesta drying up in Bangladesh.
Hasina is scheduled to meet Banerjee in Kolkata on Saturday, and it is expected that the Teesta issue will be discussed.
Modi said he wanted students of the Visva Bharati University to adopt 100 villages around Santiniketan and work for their development to ensure that each home had power and cooking gas, and every child was vaccinated. He mentioned central government projects under which these goals could be achieved.
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