PM MODI'S GAME OF CHESS & THE BANGLADESH CRISIS

Neighbouring Bangladesh is simmering and its deposed leader, now in asylum in India, blames the US for engineering the coup to gain access to a strategic island that Bangladesh controls.

-  PALAK SHAH

Meanwhile, in the wake of meetings between the US Consul in Hyderabad, radical politician Asaduddin Owaisi and Telengana Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, whose 18 MPs support the BJP government at the Centre, Naidu decides to oppose a BJP-backed Bill to regulate land controlled by the Waqf board. PALAK SHAH offers an analysis as apparently disparate events evolve as pieces of a geopolitical jigsaw puzzle.

THE HEAT HAS TURNED a notch higher in geopolitics with the toppling of the Sheikh Hasina Wazed government in Bangladesh. Thanks to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Sheikh Hasina survived an attempt by Bangladesh's Islamic fundamentalists to assassinate her brutally. She escaped to India just minutes before a mob ransacked her official residence.

Sheikh Hasina is unlikely to forget or forgive those who plotted the bloody coup against her government, which incidentally, had returned to power with an absolute majority in January. The deposed leader of Bangladesh has trained her guns on the United States. She told a media person that the incumbent administration in the US had orchestrated her fall because she had resisted handing over St. Martin's Island, currently under Bangladesh's control, to the US for a military base.