It has been two years since Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was ousted from Dhaka. Sajeeb Wazed Joy, her son, spoke virtually to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club and discussed her fall from power. He made a dramatic warning about Bangladesh becoming a failed state and turning into another ‘Pakistan’ on the eastern border of India. The choice of words was intentional, forming a carefully constructed narrative whose assertions necessitate critical scrutiny.
Painting a bleak picture of contemporary Bangladesh, Joy alleged that convicted extremists have been liberated, Hizb ut-Tahrir demonstrates publicly, and Al-Qaeda sympathisers speak at mass gatherings. He further accused Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence of unhindered activity, warning that the country will soon become a launching pad for global terrorism.
Crafted for a targeted audience, this argument directly plays on New Delhi’s foundational security concerns. For decades, the Awami League has relied on a straightforward narrative: Sheikh Hasina stands as the sole buffer against rising extremist forces, and her absence inevitably invites chaos. By leveraging fear, this doctrine pressures foreign powers to prioritise stability over democratic governance. The core premise remains unmistakable: either back the Awami League or risk having a militant refuge along the border.
Rigorous analysis requires separating political messaging from ground realities. Since the collapse of the authoritarian administration in August 2024, Bangladesh has entered a profound geopolitical transition. While mainstream Islamist groups and conservative figures now occupy a more visible role in the public sphere, heightened public religiosity does not equate to a terror network. Joy’s claims remain entirely unsupported by empirical evidence. He provided no proof of functional terror camps or state-sponsored cross-border operations. Independent security assessments substantiate this absence, finding no evidence of new terror facilities being established.
What the Border Actually Shows
That absence of state-sponsored terror infrastructure does not mean the border has been quiet, and this is where the argument needs grounding in specifics rather than assertion.
Within hours of Hasina’s fall on 5 August 2024, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar told Parliament that India’s border-guarding forces had been placed on exceptional alert, given the porous 4,000-kilometre frontier and the risk of spillover unrest. That caution proved warranted, though not in the way Joy’s narrative suggests. Through the autumn of 2024, Indian security agencies reported thwarting multiple infiltration attempts into Assam, Tripura and Meghalaya, alongside a rise in currency smuggling and suspected trafficking, including the arrest, in November 2024, of an individual near Meghalaya’s South West Khasi Hills carrying counterfeit Indian currency close to the border. Separately, that same August, Border Guard Bangladesh confronted a group of Indian smugglers near Satkhira, seizing contraband and firing warning rounds, a reminder that the disorder cuts both ways and is criminal rather than jihadist in character.
By February 2025, when the BSF and BGB held their first Director General-level conference since the transition, the agenda itself confirmed the nature of the threat. Trans-border crime, attacks on BSF personnel and border villagers by Bangladesh-based elements, fencing disputes, and the activity of Indian insurgent groups sheltering across the frontier, not organised terrorism. A security vacuum left by a collapsed police force, emptied armouries, and gutted counter-terrorism units. Non-state actors such as Ansarullah Bangla Team have used this vacuum for online recruitment; this is opportunism exploiting institutional breakdown, not a state-directed jihadist project.
The picture has not settled with time. By mid-2026, the 57th BGB-BSF conference in New Delhi was still consumed by unresolved friction. This time over India’s alleged ‘push-in’ operations forcing suspected Bangladeshi nationals, along with Rohingya, back across the border without formal verification. Dhaka protested as a breach of agreed bilateral procedure. Commentary around the talks noted that border deaths and chaotic, often lethal crossings remain a live problem, and that pledges to investigate killings have a history of being made and quietly shelved. None of this is Joy’s imagined terror corridor; it is a harder, messier reality of migration pressure, criminal networks, and institutional strain, one that arguably demands more sustained policy attention than a single dramatic phrase can capture.
The China angle
If there is a genuine long-term concern for Indian security planners, it sits less with Pakistan’s ISI than with China’s steadily deepening footprint in Bangladesh. A dimension Joy’s framing barely touches, yet one with far more durable strategic consequence.
The clearest example is BNS Pekua (originally commissioned as BNS Sheikh Hasina) near Cox’s Bazar, South Asia’s largest submarine base, built substantially with Chinese assistance and capable of berthing up to eight submarines against a Bangladeshi fleet of just two. Indian naval planners have flagged the base as a potential logistics node for Chinese and allied vessels. These concerns sharpened in mid-2026 when a Pakistani Navy submarine, itself Chinese-built, was tracked returning to the Bay of Bengal after a port call in Colombo, prompting India to deploy P8I surveillance aircraft and anti-submarine assets. A parliamentary standing committee report around the same period went further, flagging China’s $370 million expansion of Mongla Port and Chinese involvement in upgrading the Lalmonirhat airstrip barely 15 kilometres from the Indian border, as matters warranting sustained vigilance, even while acknowledging Bangladesh’s sovereign right to choose its partners.
The strategic logic is straightforward and does not require any ISI conspiracy to explain it. A Chinese-linked naval and infrastructure presence at the northern tip of the Bay of Bengal erodes what had functioned, for decades, as a maritime sanctuary for the Indian Navy. This placed Chinese-vetted assets within reach of the Eastern Naval Command at Visakhapatnam and India’s missile test range at Wheeler Island. Combined with the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor, it also offers Beijing an overland route from the Bay of Bengal into south-western China that bypasses the Malacca Strait chokepoint entirely, shifting the locus of strategic competition northward into waters India had long assumed to be its own.
This is compounded by the reordering of Dhaka’s diplomacy more broadly: the interim and subsequent administrations lifted the ban on Jamaat-e-Islami, restored direct trade and shipping links with Pakistan, and courted Belt and Road-linked Chinese investment as a hedge against dependence on India. None of this amounts to Joy’s launching pad for terrorism it is a smaller, more conventional country diversifying its foreign relations after fifteen years tied closely to one neighbour, as post-authoritarian states routinely do. But it does mean New Delhi’s core vulnerability, the Siliguri Corridor, the narrow strip of land connecting the mainland to India’s north-east, and India’s continued dependence on Bangladeshi transit routes to that region, sits closer to Beijing’s reach than it did under Hasina.
A calibrated response, not a panic
New Delhi views Joy’s allegations with measured restraint. The Indian government has explicitly distanced itself from his platform and clarified that it does not endorse his remarks. Guided by geographic and economic realities, including a 4,000-kilometre shared border, deeply intertwined trade networks, transportation corridors and energy grids. Realist diplomacy dictates that New Delhi engage pragmatically with whichever administration holds power in Dhaka, as it has continued to do through successive rounds of border talks even amid friction over push-ins and fencing.
Ultimately, Sajeeb Wazed Joy’s interview represents an exercise in political opposition. Framing Bangladesh as a ‘second Pakistan’ serves as strategic theatre intended to delegitimise Dhaka’s current political order. Bangladesh undeniably grapples with authentic governance hurdles, a still-hollowed-out security apparatus, sluggish institutional reform, and opportunistic non-state actors exploiting the gaps left by 2024’s collapse. And it is undergoing a real, consequential reorientation towards Beijing that merits sober Indian attention. But the country is neither erecting terror infrastructure nor acting as a proxy hub for transnational jihadist networks. Equating it to a second Pakistan oversimplifies a nuanced regional realignment, one whose actual risks lie in ports, submarine pens, and connectivity dependence, not in the mass rallies Joy describes.
