India’s strategic establishment is increasingly alarmed by what it sees as a resurgence of extremist forces in Bangladesh and a sharpening of hostile rhetoric and posturing by Islamist militant organisations toward India.
Former National Security Adviser to Mauritius Shantanu Mukharji, in an interview to UNI said recent developments across India’s eastern border suggested “a dangerous reversal of hard-won gains against militancy.”
The recent incidents of mob attacks on individuals and on diplomatic missions are believed to be organised and led by radical Islamist outfits and the trend is being carefully watched here.
Radicalised extremist prisoners, Mukharji, a former IPS officer noted, have been released from jail and allowed to reorganise, creating conditions that could once again make Bangladesh a staging ground for transnational ‘jihadist’ networks as had existed in the 1990s and early 2000s. “The way these groups have regrouped after being freed last year is deeply troubling,” Mukharji said.
Bangladesh’s as an unlikely epicentre of terrorism came into sharp relief in the late 1990s, when a bomb ripped through a cultural program organized by the secular group Udichi in Jessore on March 6, 1999, killing 10 people and injuring more than 100. The attack marked the beginning of a troubling era of militant violence.
The threat intensified in the early 2000s, culminating in the August 21, 2004, grenade attack on an Awami League rally in Dhaka that killed 24 people. More than a decade later, the 2016 assault on the Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka which killed 22 persons including large numbers of foreigners, again brought into focus the continued danger from extremist elements in the country.
This time round too attacks on secular cultural institutions like Udichi and Chayanaut have been targeted by mobs. Unfortunately unlike previous years, the police and security forces for the most part have been idle spectators, claim eye-witnesses.
“It raises the risk not only of violence inside Bangladesh but of renewed cross-border threats to India,” Mukharji, a well-known strategic affairs expert said.
India’s concerns about cross-border terrorism linked to Bangladesh have evolved over decades, shaped less by open warfare than by shifting militant networks and regional politics.
During the 1990s and early 2000s, several insurgent groups operating in India’s Northeast, including factions of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), were known to maintain camps and logistical bases inside Bangladesh.
Militant Islamist outfits also figured in Indian assessments. Groups such as Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI) and Ansar-Ul-Bangla which had roots in Bangladesh, were linked by Indian investigators to bombings and plots targeting cities including Kolkata and Varanasi in the 2000s. Security experts believe political patronage in Bangladesh at the time allowed such networks to operate with relative freedom and “this can happen again”.
Indian officials are particularly concerned about the possibility that Bangladeshi militant groups could re-establish links with extremist organisations in Pakistan and the West Asia.
Mukharji pointed to earlier periods when militants trained in Bangladesh later “appeared in conflict zones such as Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq”.
A similar pattern, he warned, “could re-emerge amid the current instability”. Security analysts in New Delhi say the fear is not limited to distant battlefields. The prospect of attacks within India, or against Indian interests in Bangladesh, has become more immediate in recent months, especially after a series of assaults on Indian diplomatic missions and facilities.
Those incidents, Mukharji said, underscored the fragility of the security environment. At the same time, he argued that India must resist the temptation to retreat into a purely defensive posture even though steps must be taken to tighten border management and keep an eye on possible cross-border movements.
Expanding people-to-people ties between Indians and Bangladeshis, he said, remains essential to countering radical ideologies and preserving the broader relationship between the two neighbours, whose histories and societies are deeply intertwined.
“Engagement is necessary to defeat extremism at its roots,” Mukharji said. “However, engagement cannot come at the cost of security. The safety of Indian personnel and institutions has to be non-negotiable.”
For New Delhi, Bangladesh’s political and societal developments have been of great importance as these concern India’s border security, regional stability and the balance of influence in South Asia.
As extremist networks show signs of revival, officials say, the challenge will be to contain the threat without eroding the social and diplomatic ties that have historically anchored the relationship.