New Delhi, June 16 :     The failure of the Delhi-Lahore bus diplomacy is forcing political big guns to jump off the Calcutta-Dhaka inaugural bus run on Saturday. Neither Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee nor West Bengal chief minister Jyoti Basu are willing to risk a ride. Both are flying to Dhaka. The Prime Minister will fly to Dhaka with foreign minister Jaswant Singh and other senior officials on June 19 to be able to receive the bus from Calcutta when it reaches Bangladesh. Ditto Basu. But the chief minister has decided to keep a safe distance from Vajpayee ? he will not travel in the Prime Minister?s special aircraft. He will take a commercial flight from Calcutta to Dhaka. It is still unclear how Trinamul Congress leader Mamata Banerjee will reach Dhaka. Initial reports suggested she would be part of the Prime Minister?s delegation. But that is in doubt. She may take the bus from Calcutta to prove a point and satisfy her supporters, who are likely to line up along the route all the way to the Benapole-Petrapole border. Two buses are scheduled to leave Calcutta at 4.30 am on Saturday so they are in time for the early evening ceremony in Dhaka. One bus will bear state transport minister Subhas Chakraborty, the tourism minister, a host of eminent personalities and reporters. The second bus will carry passengers who have taken the trouble of buying tickets. The Calcutta-Dhaka bus is politically no less significant than the Delhi-Lahore bus. If anything, the failure of the bus diplomacy with Pakistan will perhaps drive the Indians harder to ensure that the bus route joining the two Bengals is a success and does not get caught in a Kargil-like quagmire. Indo-Bangladeshi ties ? though not as contentious or sensitive as Delhi?s relations with Islamabad ? have been through ups and downs. However, the successful completion of the Ganga water-sharing agreement in December 1996 brought some stability. When the BJP-led coalition came to power in Delhi in early 1998, it worried the Sheikh Hasina government because there was a growing feeling that the issue of ?illegal migrants? may snowball into a major controversy. However, a visit by Hasina allayed the fears and she went back satisfied that the BJP government ? like its predecessors ? would follow the policy of good neighbourly relations with Bangladesh. But it is not as if there are no contentious issues between the two sides. The use of Bangladeshi territory by insurgents in the Northeast, the huge trade imbalance between Delhi and Dhaka and perhaps the failure of India to get transit facilities through Bangladesh to reach the remote northeastern states are issues likely to be taken up during the summit-level meeting between Vajpayee and Hasina. However, the most important thing is the bus service itself. For Vajpayee, who took the initiative of riding the peace bus to Lahore in February, the presence of Pakistani armed intruders in Kargil may have come as a shock. Hence he is keen that India uses the opportunity on Saturday to tell the world how wrong Pakistan has been in spitting on the hand of friendship extended by India.