A palpable tension grips India’s eastern frontier. The carefully managed-if uneasy-calm that defined the India-Bangladesh border for over a decade has evaporated, replaced by a familiar and toxic churn that those of us who served through the 1990s recognise with a sense of dread.
The old ghosts we believed had long been consigned to history-Pakistan and its jihadist proxies-are not merely resurfacing but are being actively rehabilitated. The eastern front is being deliberately reawakened, and the warning signs are too glaring to ignore. Bangladesh is a nation convulsing, at war with its own political soul. The judicial death sentence against Sheikh Hasina acted like a detonation, violently shattering the political order.
The aftershocks have turned streets into battlegrounds and paralysed state institutions. Into this power vacuum slither forces that view both stability and India as permanent adversaries. We have seen this movie before. In the 1990s, an unstable Bangladesh became a secure launchpad and sprawling sanctuary for insurgent groups from India’s Northeast. We witnessed how our security apparatus, through a hard-won campaign of relentless pressure and later cooperation with Sheikh Hasina’s government, choked those routes, dismantled the camps in Chittagong and Sylhet, and arrested their leadership. We severed the cross-border oxygen supply that sustained the insurgency.
That entire architecture of security, built over a decade of painstaking effort, is now collapsing in real time.
The indicators of this dangerous regression are no longer subtle whispers; they are public and brazen warning shots. The radical ecosystem, suppressed for years, is being openly rehabilitated with state acquiescence. The Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT) no longer operates from the shadows. The release of its chief from prison within days of the current regime’s takeover was a bold signal of impunity-a green light to radicals. Even more telling is the orchestrated move to involve Zakir Naik, the radical preacher and fugitive from Indian justice, in a state-sponsored “peace conference”.
This is a deliberate act of ideological arson, pouring fuel on the smouldering fires of extremism. It legitimises a man whose sermons have inspired terror and sends a clear message about the new ideological compass of the power centres in Dhaka.
The threat is not merely local; it carries a global jihadist signature. The recent arrests in Gujarat, Bengaluru, Haryana, and Delhi reveal a disturbing pattern. The encrypted communications, the specific apps used, and the linkages uncovered by investigators bear the unmistakable hallmark of al-Qaeda. This is a chillingly familiar playbook. Operational experience confirms that the fountainhead of AQIS operations has long been located in Bangladesh. Groups such as JMB and ABT have formally pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda, effectively acting as its local branches. This transforms them from regional irritants into nodes of a global terror network.
Simultaneously, Pakistan’s re-entry into this fractured landscape is ominously confident. The recent visit of Pakistani Navy ships to Chittagong was a strategic declaration, not a routine diplomatic port call. It provides a platform for intelligence handlers operating under diplomatic cover and sends an unmistakable signal of patronage to anti-India elements.
But the ground-level incursions are even more alarming. Credible intelligence suggests visits by Pakistani ISI and Army personnel, as well as their proxies such as Lashkar-e-Toiba, to sensitive areas in Bangladesh, including the strategic districts of Sylhet, the Chittagong Hill Tracts, and the coastal areas of Cox’s Bazar.
This is a deliberate attempt to rekindle the old networks, to re-establish the staging points, recruitment zones, and logistical hubs that fuelled decades of bloodshed in the Northeast. The most audacious provocation, however, was the cartographic aggression displayed during the recent visit of Pakistan’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Dhaka. He was presented with a coffee-table book whose cover blatantly depicted vast swathes of India’s Northeast and West Bengal as territory belonging to Bangladesh.
This was not an innocent error. It was a calculated, hostile act designed to signal revisionist intent and implicitly challenge India’s territorial integrity on an international platform. These are not mere signals; they are deliberate warning shots fired across India’s bow.
The gravest danger in this unfolding crisis is that the legitimate government in Dhaka is either complicit or too politically crippled to respond. When a regime is fighting for its own survival, national security and counter-terrorism become secondary, even inconvenient. The police and intelligence apparatus are overwhelmed by political management.
This state of paralysis is the perfect petri dish for groups such as JMB, HuJI-B, and ABT to regenerate, recruit, and plot. Chaos provides the plausible deniability and the dark corridors through which terror can travel straight into the heart of India’s Northeast.
For India, this is the quintessential nightmare scenario. A hostile but stable Bangladesh under Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party was a manageable entity. A Bangladesh spinning into chaos, with its soil actively offered to Pakistani intelligence and a resurgent al-Qaeda network, represents a clear and present danger to Indian sovereignty. Passivity is a luxury we cannot afford.
Our response must be swift, seamless, and strategically comprehensive. First, we must achieve an unprecedented level of internal security integration. The threat is networked and agile, and our counter-measures must be a fused, real-time intelligence machine, where all central agencies operate with a single purpose and shared data. Critically, this integrated approach must extend horizontally to the state level. The police forces of Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura, Manipur, and West Bengal must operate from a single, unified playbook. A shared intelligence grid is no longer optional but essential. A vulnerability along the riverine borders of one state cannot be isolated from a threat emerging from the jungle tracks of another. Deep coordination between the central security apparatus and state forces is our first and most critical line of defence.
Beyond the immediate security response, we must wage a simultaneous battle of narratives. Pakistan and global jihadist groups feed on alienation-real or perceived. We must counter this with an aggressive and tangible narrative of inclusion and development. Accelerated infrastructure projects, economic investment, and political sensitivity in the Northeast are not merely welfare measures; they are vital instruments of national security, as critical as any military hardware. We must ensure that the sense of being “different” or “ignored” does not become a psychological gap for adversarial agencies to exploit. This requires a whole-of-government approach, ensuring that the people of the region feel an unbreakable bond with the rest of India, making them immune to the poisonous propaganda emanating from across the border.
The reactivation of jihadist hotspots, an emboldened Pakistan, the naval visit, the al-Qaeda linkages, and the rehabilitation of radicals are not disconnected events. They form the interconnected battle lines of a coordinated offensive designed to reopen a long-closed front. Having witnessed the immense cost in blood and treasure of the negligence of the 1990s, I can state unequivocally that the price of inaction would be exponentially higher.
India cannot control the political storms in Dhaka, but we have an absolute responsibility to fortify ourselves. We must act now with clarity, vigour, and unwavering resolve. The eastern front is awake. We must ensure that we are not caught sleeping.