Bangladesh’s Continued “Pakistanization” Poses A Growing Threat To India

It’s a bad omen that the interim Bangladeshi leader, who came to power after a US-backed coup, gifted a visiting top Pakistani general a book whose cover implies claims to Northeast India.

The visit of Pakistani Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee Chairman General Sahir Shamshad Mirza to Bangladesh to meet with Chief Advisor Muhammad Yunus was already concerning enough for India given Dhaka’s drift away from Delhi since August 2024’s US-backed regime change there. This ipso facto signified that Bangladesh will at the very least rely on Pakistan as a counterbalance to India instead or remaining firmly allied with it. The US could thus exploit this to intensify its containment of India.

To make matters worse, Yunus gifted Mirza a book whose cover displays an abstract painting of Northeast India as part of Bangladesh. This wasn’t a coincidence considering that Bangladesh has already made three “plausibly deniable” claims to that region since its violent regime change almost 15 months ago. Readers can learn more about them here, here, and here. Yunus’ stunt with Mirza was therefore meant to send India the message that Pakistan might soon help Bangladesh advance this goal.

Bangladesh used to host Pakistani-backed separatist militants, who India designed as terrorists due to the means through which they sought to pursue their agenda, but abandoned this policy during the long rule of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. Her ouster was immediately followed by the return of political Islam, ultra-nationalism, and the military’s preeminent role in society, all three preexisting trends of which she’d hitherto suppressed and can collectively be described as “Pakistanization”.

Precedent suggests that the interplay between these aforesaid factors results in a fierce hatred of India fueled by specific religious and counterhegemonic perceptions. The primary difference between “Pakistanization” in its eponymous country and in Bangladesh is that the former is still embroiled in the unresolved decades-long Kashmir Conflict with India while the latter has no territorial disputes with it. That actively changing, however, as proven by Bangladesh’s spree of “plausibly deniable” claims.

To remind readers, Bangladesh used to be known as East Pakistan and was dominated by West Pakistan till its successful Indian-backed Independence War of 1971, amidst which Bangladesh alleges that Pakistan genocided its people (estimates widely vary from 300,000-3 million killed). It was the injustices that led to this war and the brutality committed upon the Bangladeshis during it that led to the last two generations intensely disliking Pakistan. The new one, however, has no memory of those dark times.

This paired with the popular perception of widespread corruption during Hasina’s rule to predispose large segments of society, whose median age is only 26, to radicalism and thus facilitated the regime change. The natural outcome was “Pakistanization”, the final geopolitical form of which could see former East Pakistan voluntarily subordinate itself to what was once its Western overlord in order to function as a launchpad for a joint Hybrid War on India against its Northeast States, one that the US might also aid.

Yunus’ stunt with Mirza confirms that Bangladesh is undergoing “Pakistanization”, which poses a growing threat to India that could soon lead to a return to Pakistani-backed Bangladeshi-emanating terrorist-separatist threats. Pakistan might even justify this as a symmetrical response to what it claims to be similar Indian-backed Afghan-emanating ones. If this comes to pass, then the stage would be set for a regional war, the fear of which the US could exploit in a bid to pressure India into strategic concessions.