MM Rahmatullah: “We are not forming any alliance,” he told the foreign ministry as he was asked for comments about the trilateral meeting in China’s Kunming.
Foreign Affairs Adviser M Touhid Hossain also dismissed the notion of any emerging alliance among Bangladesh, China and Pakistan saying a recent meeting between the three countries was not of political nature rather an informal official level discussion on Thursday.
Foreign Affairs Adviser said, “It was a meeting at the official level, not at the political level”, where there was “no element of formation of any alliance”.
Asked if the meeting was intended to sideline India, Hossain asserted, “It is certainly not targeting a third-party (which) I can assure you”.
The foreign ministry in an earlier statement said representatives from Bangladesh, China, and Pakistan held an “informal trilateral meeting” on the sidelines of the 9th China-South Asia Exposition and the 6th China-South Asia Cooperation Forum in Kunming.
Former acting Foreign Secretary Md Ruhul Alam Siddique represented Dhaka in the meeting with Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Sun Weidong, and Pakistani Additional Foreign Secretary Imran Ahmed Siddiqui.
China and Pakistan issued separate statements on the meeting while Beijing said the three countries held “extensive discussions on trilateral cooperation” and agreed to move forward based on “good-neighborliness, mutual trust, equality, openness, inclusiveness and shared development”.
Islamabad, on the other hand, described the gathering as the “inaugural meeting of the Bangladesh-China-Pakistan trilateral mechanism”.
Asked whether Dhaka rejected such characterizations, the adviser said “there is no need to deny anything” but emphasized that it was “not anything big and not something structured”.
Hossain said that the discussions mainly focused on connectivity and related areas, noting, “If there is any further progress, you will know that (but) there is not much scope to speculate”.
Hossain further said Dhaka did not have reservation in joining any such meeting like the Kunming one with other countries citing a hypothetical example involving India.
“If India wants to have such a meeting among Bangladesh, India and Nepal, Dhaka will remain interested to ‘do’ the meeting next day,” the adviser said adding the Dhaka-New Delhi relation currently was going through a phase of “readjustment”.
“The relationship with India is now at a stage of ‘readjustment’ and there is no lack of goodwill from Dhaka’s side to that end,” he said.
During the Kunming meeting, the three sides discussed prospects for trilateral cooperation in key sectors such as infrastructure, connectivity, trade, investment, healthcare, agriculture, maritime affairs, ICT, disaster preparedness, and climate change.
“Look, let us acknowledge the truth. The level of deep relationship between India and the previous government had and the kind of relationship India had established, the current relationship with us is not like that one,” he said as asked what he meant by readjustment.
