Bengal has never been a quiet corner of the subcontinent. When events turn there, they do not turn gently. They gather force, acquire momentum, and leave marks that endure long after the moment has passed. India forgets this too easily.
What is unfolding in Bangladesh today is being read in New Delhi as political turbulence of a familiar kind. Governments fall. Protests rise. Tempers flare and are expected to cool. It is comforting to believe that this will pass, that the patterns we have known will reassert themselves. History suggests otherwise. Bengal has a way of influencing the subcontinent in ways that are neither temporary nor contained.
The creation of Pakistan itself offers an early warning. It is convenient to believe that Pakistan was forged primarily in Punjab, in the violence of the west. The record tells a more complicated story. Without Bengal, Pakistan might well have remained an argument rather than a state. The Muslim League was born there in 1906 and the Bengal provincial elections gave Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s (who joined the IML in 1913) demand for a separate state mass legitimacy at a moment when it still lacked inevitability. Anglo Indian support proved decisive. When Calcutta erupted after the Direct Action call, a threshold was crossed. Partition ceased to be negotiable. It became irreversible. That threshold was crossed in Bengal.
The pattern repeated itself after 1947. East Pakistan was the demographic heart of the new country and its economic mainstay. It earned the foreign exchange and sustained the state. Yet power remained concentrated in a Punjabi dominated West Pakistan that viewed Bengalis as useful but suspect. Even when prime ministers came from the east, authority rarely followed. Language was dismissed. Culture was patronised. Economic extraction was normalised. Sada Punjabi, Saala Bengali! Alienation set in long before it found political expression.
There was history behind this fracture. Even before Partition, East Bengal had developed a guarded relationship with the intellectual elite of West Bengal. Independence widened that distance. By the late 1960s, the idea of Pakistani unity was already hollow. When elections finally offered a democratic correction, it was refused. When repeated cyclones devastated the east, indifference replaced empathy. That combination proved fatal.
What followed in 1971 was not spontaneous rage. It was accumulated fury. After the army crackdown began, violence became systematic. Much of the killing was not carried out by regular troops alone, but by local collaborators, the Razakars, who knew their communities intimately and struck accordingly. This detail matters because it explains why the trauma did not end with the war. Those social fault lines remain embedded within Bangladeshi society, capable of reopening under stress.
India played a decisive role in that war, yet memory has proved uneven on both sides of the border. I write this not as an observer alone, but as someone who has been close to events on the ground. My father commanded 18 Rajput in 1971. His battalion pried open the eastern approach to Dacca through Akhaura and Ashuganj, under conditions that demanded resolve rather than rhetoric. These were not cinematic moments. They were hard, grinding advances, shaped by terrain, weather, and resistance, paid for in blood and exhaustion.
India lost close to 3,500 men in that war, while over 9,000 were wounded. We ourselves have largely forgotten them. Their names are rarely spoken. Their sacrifices are increasingly reduced to background noise in popular culture. We have allowed the war to be refracted through the prism of cinema, where complexity is flattened and cost is abstract. If we have not preserved the memory with seriousness, we should not be surprised that Bangladesh has chosen not to remember it at all.
When I visited Dhaka in 2018 with the former Director General of Military Intelligence, this absence of memory was stark. Outside veteran circles, there was little awareness of India’s role in 1971. Many had grown up believing that nothing of consequence had happened, or that events had unfolded without external involvement. Only recently did a more honest acknowledgment begin to surface, encouraged by Sheikh Hasina after years of strategic reticence.
Even then, something else was evident. Among sections of Bangladesh’s strategic and military intelligentsia, there existed a quiet way of looking east and north toward India’s northeastern region as a natural geographic extension for Bangladesh’s pressures. It was rarely articulated openly and never formalised, but it surfaced often enough to be noticed. Demography, when combined with grievance and opportunity, has a way of shaping intent over time. India would do well not to dismiss this as idle talk.
Our own attitudes compound the problem. Many Indians encounter Bangladeshis primarily as domestic workers or daily wage labour. Familiarity breeds a quiet contempt that corrodes relationships from below. Cultural slights, sporting rivalries, and small humiliations accumulate. They matter more than we admit. Strategic relationships are not conducted by governments alone. They are sustained or undermined by how societies see one another.
The present moment is therefore more serious than it appears. Bangladesh today is politically volatile in a way that is historically familiar and strategically dangerous. Authority is fragmented. Narratives are contested. Violence simmers just beneath the surface. This is not a society that needs much encouragement to cross thresholds it has crossed before.
There is also a need for restraint closer to home. In recent months, a troubling strain of jingoistic commentary has emerged in India, particularly among retired military officers and television commentators, who speak loosely of rapid thrusts and decisive slicing operations as if Bangladesh were an empty map. This kind of talk is not strategy. It is fantasy.
Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the eastern theatre knows that the terrain itself would be a hard grapple. Rivers, marshes, built up areas, and dense civilian concentrations impose constraints that no amount of bravado can erase. Bangladesh is not a vacuum. Even limited military contingencies would be complex, slow, and costly. To suggest otherwise is to mislead the public and trivialise war.
More dangerously, such rhetoric ignores the strategic reality that Bangladesh is no longer a quiet backwater. It has become a crowded space. American and Chinese interests increasingly intersect there, with eyes not only on Dhaka, but on Myanmar, India’s Northeast, and the wider Bay of Bengal. Pakistan’s ISI and the Jamaat-e-Islami are the twin pivots through whom they operate today. This is no longer a bilateral equation. Loose talk of military solutions only creates openings for external actors to insert themselves further into an already volatile environment.
India must also remember geography. Our island territories sit cheek by jowl with Bangladesh. Any instability along that littoral has maritime consequences that extend far beyond land borders. The Andaman and Nicobar chain, India’s strategic forward presence in the eastern Indian Ocean, does not exist in isolation from developments in Bengal. What happens on the delta reverberates at sea.
The departure of Sheikh Hasina has removed a stabilising force, however imperfect. What follows is uncertain, and uncertainty is where external actors thrive. It would be naïve to assume that China will remain a passive observer. Bangladesh offers Beijing leverage on India’s eastern flank without the risks of overt confrontation. Influence, investment, and quiet encouragement of instability can achieve what pressure cannot. A second strategic lever against India would stretch attention and dilute resolve.
India’s strategic imagination remains fixated on the western border and the northern heights. That focus is understandable. It is also incomplete. The eastern theatre has always been underestimated, even though history suggests it is where demographic, cultural, and political forces intersect most powerfully.
One should also remember how mass violence returns. In 1971, it was not imported. It emerged from within. Minorities became targets because they were available and symbolic. Lynching became both signal and instrument. Each act lowered the threshold for the next. There is no reason to believe those mechanisms have disappeared.
This is why Bengal matters. Not because it is loud, but because it endures. When instability takes hold there, it reshapes the subcontinent quietly and decisively. The British learnt this after Curzon’s partition of Bengal, when nationalism took root and never returned to the bottle. Pakistan learnt it in 1971. India cannot afford to assume immunity now.
Strategic patience is not strategic indifference. India must engage Bangladesh with realism, not nostalgia. It must recognise that instability there is not episodic, but structural. It must correct social attitudes that undermine long term relationships. And it must remember its own history before lamenting the amnesia of others.
The warning signs are visible. They always are. Ignoring them has never ended well.
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Shiv Kunal Verma is the author of various books including the Long Road to Siachen, Northeast Trilogy, Assam Rifles, 1962: The War That Wasn’t and 1965: A Western Sunrise.
