For 15 years India has been so engrossed with the threat from Pakistan, that it has almost completely ignored the threat that has slowly developed on its east. This originates in its slowly deteriorating relations with Bangladesh.

Indians tend to react with perplexity and irritation when they are confronted by the hostility that many Bangladeshis feel towards their country and the apparent lack of cooperation by their government on issues vital to India''s security. Did India not aid in the birth of their country? Did its troops not behave in an exemplary manner while they were there, and did Mrs Indra Gandhi not withdraw them in record time?

Given that building the, Farakka barrage was a mistake, did India not make handsome amends during Mr Inder Gujral''s prime ministership by guaranteeing Bangladesh a minimum of 30,000 cusecs of water from the barrage even during the worst of the lean season?

Why then does Bangladesh ''repay'' India by allowing the ULFA and other north-eastern extremists to make permanent camps inside its borders? Why is it becoming a staging post for attacks on Indian targets by Islamic extremist groups, possibly aided by Pakistan''s ISI ? Why does it refuse, point blank, to even admit that there is a serious exodus of Bangladeshis to India, when anyone who visits Nizamuddin in faraway Delhi, can hear Bengali being spoken freely in the narrow lanes around the dargah? Why does Bangladesh impose draconian non-tariff barriers (NTBs) on Indian exports by banning the ''overland'' imports of key consumer goods? Why has it ignored its own bilateral commitments in 1972 and 1980 and a multilateral one under SAARC in 1993 to allow rail and water transit to Indian goods from the north-east?

Most perplexing of all, why does it refuse to take up key infrastructure projects with India, when these will benefit it enormously? Why has it not even considered a proposal to link the Brahmaputra and the Ganges with a canal that would marginally reduce flood waters in the former and augment the lean-season flow in the latter, that has been on the table since 1976? Why is it objecting so vigorously to Indian hydro-electric projects on several of the tributaries of the Brahmaputra when these will help to regulate the flow in that monster river, and reduce the annual flooding of Bangladesh itself ?

Bangladesh has its own catalogue of complaints. Its officials bridle at the mere suggestion that it is abetting ULFA and other militants:" When most of them target Muslims who, you yourselves claim, are coming from Bangladesh, why should we help them?" They categorically deny turning a blind eye towards Islamic terrorists or tolerating the presence of the ISI. They regret the occasional forced seizure of lands owned by Hindus, but claim that this is a product of the weakness of the law and order machinery in the rural areas, and not specifically of religious persecution. The media insists that it is India that is pushing West Bengali Muslims over the border into Bangladesh, and not the other way about.

As an explanation for the NTBs they cite Bangladesh''s huge trade deficit with India, forgetting that all they are doing is to drive the imports from India underground and deny themselves the customs revenues that these could yield. Finally, to explain their reluctance to collaborate in infrastructure projects, they point to India''s insistence on bilateralism, its refusal to involve Nepal and China in the discussion of river water projects, and its imperious unilateralism — demonstrated by Farakka and other alleged misdeeds. Bilateral deals with a huge neighbour can too easily end in a loss of control, and therefore of economic sovereignty.

The end product of these reciprocal pinpricks is a stalemate. New Delhi thinks it can live with this because in the end, unlike Pakistan, Bangladesh does not pose a serious threat to its security. In Bangladesh, the right wing of the ruling elite, consisting of the Bangladesh National Party and a sizable track two force of retired military officers and civil servants, is also happy to cash in on the resulting low level anti-Indian sentiment to keep the Awami League on the defensive. Both are living in a fool''s paradise. Foreign policy is very largely shaped by domestic political change, and the changes taking place in Bangladesh are steadily eroding even the fragile equilibrium that exists today.

By far the most important is the creeping Islamisation of the country. Its roots lie in Bangladesh''s massive export of manpower to West Asia. About three million Bangladeshis work there and a large proportion come back changed almost beyond recognition: " They go as ordinary men but come back completely different. They wear different clothes, cut their beards differently, put their women in burqas and profess an intolerant Wahabi type of Islam that is completely alien to us", one Bangladeshi intellectual told me. A second cause is the failure of the state educational system. This has sent more and more children to madrassas, which are funded by private donations, and by liberal inflows of funds from religious trusts in Saudi Arabia and other West Asian countries.

These changes have led to the emergence of an intolerant, aggressive, messianic fringe of ''reformed '' Sunni Muslims, who are bent upon ''purifying'' Bangladesh on the lines of the Taliban in Afghanistan. A telltale sign is the rise of vigilante forces bent upon persecuting the minorities. Hindus, Buddhists and Christians are once again becoming a convenient target.

On May 18 this year, Frank Pallone, the Democratic Congressman from New Jersey, drew the attention of the US House of Representatives to the plight of the Hindus whom he called a ''disappearing minority''. Pallone''s sources were entirely from within Bangladesh, its media, BBC, CNN and the US State Department.

An even more disturbing development is the emergence of the Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh, an unabashedly terrorist organisation which claims 10,000 full time cadres and 300,000 part timers and helpers in the country, and has been killing cadres of extremist groups like the Purbo Banglar Communist Party, whom the police has not been able to control. By doing this it has gained a spurious legitimacy with not only key members of the BNP but also the police. The JMJB has openly modelled itself on the Taliban and claims that its aim is to " build a society based on the Islamic model laid out in the Holy Quran-Hadith". It is therefore only a matter of time before it turns its guns on the non-Muslim minorities and heretical Muslims.

The most revealing development, because it is so new, is the attack by the Jamaat-e-Islami on the Ahmadiyas of Bangladesh. While the Jamaat-e-Islami had tried to emulate its Pakistani counterpart and get the Ahmadiyas declared non-Muslims in the seventies and eighties, till the early nineties it made absolutely no dent on the population. Things however changed rapidly for the worse from 1997, when it began a violent campaign to seize Ahmadiya mosques, that has cost scores of lives and heaped untold misery on this talented, and deeply secular minority. Bangladesh''s political parties, and its intelligentsia, are trying to ride the tide. Under the BNP Bangladesh has recognised the ubiquity of the madrassas and opted to recognise their degrees and to modernise their curricula. Recognising the growing strength of the Jamaat-e-Islami, and realising that it is concentrated in the western border belt alongside India, the BNP was quick to form an alliance with it. This was the main reason for its stunning and unexpected victory in 2001. But the BNP is having to pay a price for its support. In January this year it banned all Ahmadiya publications, and in May a member of the ruling coalition introduced an anti-blasphemy bill in parliament.

But such compromises seldom succeed. The compromisers end by losing in small degrees all that they had hoped to preserve. Secularism is thus definitely under threat in Bangladesh. This cannot fail to make its relations with India more difficult. But it also threatens to sweep away the secular Muslim tradition of which Bangladesh is so justifiably proud. ( A sequel to this article, "", will be published on Monday.)

* The author, a noted analyst and commentator, is a former editor of the Hindustan Times, The Economic Times and The Financial Express, and a former information adviser to the prime minister of India. He is the author of several books including, The Perilous Road to the Market: The Political Economy of Reform in Russia, India and China, and Kashmir 1947: The Origins of a Dispute, and a regular columnist with several leading publications.