Dhaka’s New Radical Reality

Bangladesh's crisis is no longer episodic unrest—it reflects a historic shift in identity, power and ideology. For India, this is not a neighbour's problem; it is a strategic alarm bell

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What we are witnessing is not chaos — it is an organised ideological transition

Indo-Bangladesh relations, historically a cornerstone of South Asian stability, currently face their most formidable strategic challenge since the 1971 Liberation War. This volatility reached a breaking point following the tragic death of Sharif Osman Hadi, a prominent youth leader and spokesperson for the influential protest platform Ingilab Moncho. Shot in mid-December 2024 in Dhaka's Paltan area, Hadi succumbed to his injuries on December 18, 2025, after being airlifted to Singapore. In the immediate aftermath, radical groups-fueled by a potent mix of grief and anti-India sentiment-claimed that the assailants had escaped across the border to find sanctuary. This sparked a wave of nightlong mayhem across major cities.

The symbols of cultural and diplomatic friendship bore the brunt of this resentment. The Indira Gandhi Cultural Centre was ransacked, and Chhayanaut, a bastion of Bengali heritage and secular tradition, was vandalised. Perhaps most disturbingly, the burning of Rabindranath Tagore's books at various protest sites served as a symbolic rejection of the shared cultural history of the two Bengals. This indicates a targeted hatred toward the secular identity of the nation, marking a departure from the moderate, syncretic values that traditionally defined the region.

The current crisis in Bangladesh underscores the enduring validity of Samuel Huntington's 1993 thesis in The Clash of Civilizations, which predicted that religion-based conflicts would dominate 21st-century politics. Huntington argued that in the post-Cold War world, the primary sources of conflict would be cultural and religious rather than ideological or economic. In the Bangladeshi context, we see the manifestation of Paul Brass's perspective: that Islamic ideology is often a social construct sponsored by the elite in pursuit of specific political objectives.