The blast that ripped through a crowded street near the iconic Red Fort in Delhi last week was just one of the many terror attacks India has witnessed; however, many believe it can well be considered a seismic event, which could have far-reaching implications for India’s security architecture.
Indian investigators now believe the explosion was enabled by a growing collaboration between Pakistan-based terror outfits and Bangladesh-based extremist networks, a cross-border axis of militant activity that intelligence officials describe as the “new grey-zone battlefield” in South Asia.
What is emerging is not a single organisation or mastermind, but a lattice of militant groups, logistical nodes, safe houses, and ideological pipelines that span both sides of the subcontinent’s eastern and western frontiers.
This may well be the future of covert warfare unless nipped in the bud, top officials here said. Though India has till now been very mature in not naming any country as responsible for the terror attacks, officials indicated that investigations were on.
“India needs to take into account the fact that the linkages of these attacks may lie beyond the frontier of our borders and nip matters at the very beginning,” said Shantanu Mukharji, retired IPS officer and former National Security Advisor to Mauritius.
India’s intelligence community says that days before the Red Fort blast, Lashkar-e-Taiba commander Saifullah Saif had claimed at a rally in Pakistan’s Khairpur Tamewali on October 30 that the terror organisation’s chief Haiz Saeed was planning operations from East Pakistan.
Earlier last month, a religious event in Bangladesh saw Pakistani terror group functionaries and Hamas leaders travelling to Dhaka.
Bangladesh had earlier released all those who had been arrested on terror or terror funding charges from jails in that country after a student movement managed to force a regime change in Dhaka. Indian analysts have long been worried about intelligence they were receiving on groups such as Ansar-ul-Bangla(ABT), Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), Harkut-i-Jihad al Islami Bangladesh(HUJI-B) and Hizb-ut-Tahrir regrouping. The obvious fear is that will these groups, coalescing with Pakistan-based state-sponsored terror modules, could launch operations against India and other countries.
There are also reports of Jamaat training the Rohingyas from Bangladesh’s refugee camps in Ramu and Cox’s Bazaar for terror attacks in the Arakans.
“With new safe havens cropping up in the region, from where terror modules can function and radicalisation of youth in the region, there is a need for a counter-narrative to be created with which we can work on de-radicalisation in South Asia,” said Alok Bansal, Director, India Foundation and leading South Asian security analyst.
Several teams from ISI have visited Bangladesh since the beginning of the year and the Pakistani spy agency, which is known to run various terrorist outfits on Pakistani soil, is believed to have beefed up its presence in Dhaka. The aim of all these visits and operational strengthening in Dhaka, Indian authorities believe, is to exploit Bangladesh’s political turmoil, leverage safe houses across the border in neighbouring states such as West Bengal and Assam, and synchronize operations designed to destabilise India. While the Red Fort blast has sharpened attention, the trend line extends back decades.
Bangladesh-linked cells were behind the 2014 Burdwan blasts in West Bengal, an attack that exposed a far-reaching JMB network training Indian operatives and planning strikes. ABT members have repeatedly been arrested inside India for kidnapping plots, blast attempts, and reconnaissance missions in major metros.
From 2009 to 2023, Indian agencies, in collaboration with Bangladesh’s government, led by Sheikh Hasina, who had zero tolerance policy towards terrorism, disrupted multiple modules in Assam, Tripura, and Bengal — all of whom were reporting back to handlers across the border. The common thread of course, is geography. The India-Bangladesh frontier, the longest land border India shares with any neighbour, remains porous even after years of fencing.
Villages straddling the boundary have overlapping ethnic, religious, and familial ties, offering easy cover for infiltration. Smuggling networks that once transported cattle and consumer goods can always serve as conduits for explosives and ideologues.
For militant strategists, this terrain offers strategic depth. Pakistan-based organisations like LeT and Jaish-e-Mohammed can outsource logistics and movement through Bangladesh even when India tightens surveillance along the western frontier.
India’s security establishment increasingly frames this threat as grey-zone warfare, an activity that falls below the threshold of conventional conflict but is designed to weaken a state from within. These tactics typically rely on deniable actors, informal border economies, and political fragmentation on the other side of the line.
While Bangladesh has previously cooperated closely with India on counterterrorism, Indian officials worry that extremist groups are exploiting governance gaps, and, in some cases, finding sympathisers within the bureaucracy.
This week, Delhi is weighing a diplomatic overture with a proposed meeting between India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and his Bangladeshi counterpart Khalilur Rahman on the sidelines of the Colombo Security Conclave (CSC) to be held in New Delhi on Thursday. Officials describe it as an attempt to restore counterterrorism cooperation at a time of extreme local volatility in Dhaka.
If this grey-zone campaign continues to evolve, India could face a two-front terror ecosystem that is nimble, decentralized, and deeply embedded in border communities. The Red Fort blast, security analysts say, may signal a shift from sporadic infiltration to more coordinated, multi-state networks.