Arise Bharat

“Once political mobilisation is anchored in religious identity, restraint becomes difficult and compromise is recast as betrayal “.

The current upheaval in Bangladesh must not be misread as routine political turbulence or a transient phase of domestic unrest. For India’s security establishment, the developments on the eastern flank represent a profound structural shift, one that reopens vulnerabilities believed to have been settled more than five decades ago.

 Since 1971, the eastern frontier has remained politically sensitive but strategically manageable. This stability was the deliberate outcome of geography, history, and a regional order shaped by the liberation of Bangladesh. Today, that inheritance is being challenged. The emerging threat is not a conventional military confrontation, but an ideologically driven hostility in which religious identity, rather than territory, serves as the primary instrument of mobilisation. Conflicts rooted in ideology do not require battlefield success to endure; they thrive on persistence, grievance, and internal division.

Pakistan never truly reconciled itself to the consequences of 1971. Within its military establishment, defeat produced adaptation rather than introspection. The conclusion drawn was not that confrontation with India was futile, but that its form had to change. This mindset was visible even during the war, captured in propaganda. A seminal piece of Pakistani wartime propaganda depicted the subcontinent as a tiger: the head shaped by East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and the body by West Pakistan, with Bharat trapped between . This image conveyed a strategic pincer meant to subdue Bharat through pressure from both sides, reinforced by ideological unity. While the liberation of Bangladesh shattered the physical configuration of that pincer, the underlying concept remained dormant.

In 1971, Pakistan’s leading newspaper, Dawn, explicitly framed the war not as a territorial contest but as Jihad, carrying appeals for public donations for a religious struggle. This orientation hardened after Zia-ul-Haq and is today articulated with renewed vigor by Pakistan’s Army Chief, Asim Munir, who has recently threatened Bharat with a hit in the East in a future conflict.

The catalyst for the current conflagration, the death of youth leader Sharif Osman Hadi, appears to be a meticulously designed false flag operation. Hadi, a spokesperson for the radical Inquilab Mancha, was shot in Dhaka on December 12, 2025, and died in Singapore on December 18. While protesters demand justice, intelligence assessments suggest the assassination bears the hallmark of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) operational craft, designed to create a martyr whose death unites radical groups against a common external enemy. By sacrificial engineering, the ISI has successfully transitioned street agitation from justice for Hadi to demands for the closure of the Indian High Commission. This manufactured frenzy instigates a reactive posture from New Delhi that can then be characterized internationally as hegemonic interference.

The US Embassy in Dhaka was notably quick to react to Hadi’s death, expressing condolences in a way that suggested prior knowledge of the trajectory. This diplomatic positioning occurs alongside a landmark 2025 US-Pakistan trade deal that grants Islamabad preferential tariff rates of 15–20% while Bharat is hit with a 25% tariff penalty, ostensibly to punish New Delhi for its strategic autonomy regarding Russian energy and Iranian defense ties. Washington is leveraging the instability in Bangladesh to build immense pressure on Bharat, using the eastern flank as a bargaining chip in a new world trade order.

The ideological hostility of the present regime in Dhaka mirrors the Munir Doctrine—a vendetta-driven statecraft that prioritises radical religious alignment over regional stability. The brutal mob lynching of a Hindu youth, Dipu Chandra Das, in Mymensingh on December 18, 2025, over alleged blasphemy, is a clear civilizational signal. This act of religious vigilantism, set against the backdrop of anti-Bharat mobilization, serves to consolidate radical identity and convey defiance. It is a modern resonance of 1946’s Direct Action Day, where religious mobilisation was used as a political weapon.

Bharat must acknowledge that while it values its secular constitutional order, secularism becomes a liability when it results in the strategic denial of ideological threats. Ignoring the patterns seen in the ethnic cleansing of Jammu & Kashmir or the current radicalisation of the delta will invite a strategic catastrophe.

What is significant today is not merely that this worldview persists in Rawalpindi, but that its resonance is expanding across India’s eastern border, finding new life in a changing Bangladeshi landscape.

The unrest in Bangladesh transcends economic distress or student agitation. The speed with which anti-India sentiment has become a dominant unifying theme suggests a deeper transformation. India is no longer being portrayed simply as a powerful neighbor with bilateral disputes; it is increasingly framed as a civilisational adversary.

Once political mobilisation is anchored in religious identity, restraint becomes difficult and compromise is recast as betrayal. The repeated targeting of minorities during periods of unrest serves a signalling function—consolidating ideological identity internally while conveying defiance toward New Delhi. By conferring institutional legitimacy on figures known for hostile rhetoric, the current transition in Dhaka marks a shift from street-level agitation to state-sanctioned positioning.

The Siliguri Corridor remains India’s most exposed geographic constraint. Its narrow width lends itself to psychological pressure, even when operational feasibility is limited. However, geography imposes vulnerabilities on all sides. Persistent pressure on Siliguri logically invites a reconsideration of India’s own geographic leverage.

The Rangpur region, bounded by India on multiple sides, represents one such point of exposure. Similarly, the denial of access to the Chittagong axis would fundamentally alter the regional balance, enabling direct logistics from Tripura to the Bay of Bengal and reshaping strategic depth. Geography, once weaponised, rarely remains a one-way instrument. These are the hard realities that must constrain adversarial calculations.

Ultimately, the crisis on the eastern flank is a test of national willpower and intellectual honesty. The history of the subcontinent teaches that when religious mobilisation is ignored in favour of tactical stability, the eventual reckoning is only made more severe. India cannot afford the luxury of strategic denial, where internal ideals of pluralism blind the state to the external reality of civilizational hostility.

True security lies in the recognition that geography, while a point of exposure, is also a potent instrument of deterrence. Statecraft in this new era must be stripped of sentimentality and defined by a cold reciprocity that balances quiet capability with an unsentimental assessment of the neighbourhood. Recognising ideological hostility does not undermine a secular constitutional order; it is the prerequisite for defending it. Whether India chooses to confront this shift with foresight today or under duress tomorrow, the geography of the East will remain an unforgiving arbiter of its strategic future.