OPINION | The ISI's Bangladesh gambit: A slow encirclement India cannot afford to watch passively

Recent reciprocal contacts between Pakistan's ISI and Bangladesh's intelligence establishment are significant less for the visits themselves than for the pattern they reveal. Taken alone, the visits would be a footnote in the wire reports. Set against the arc of the past two years, the pattern reads as a strategic relationship that has been building steadily since August 2024, when Sheikh Hasina's government fell and the interim dispensation under Muhammad Yunus began actively courting Islamabad.

What had for decades remained a deeply constrained relationship, kept cold for decades by a Bangladeshi establishment wary of reopening the wounds of 1971, has thawed in under two years, emerging as one of the more consequential realignments in South Asia's security architecture. This is not a matter for the foreign office alone. It carries direct weight for the eastern theatre, the Siliguri Corridor, and the Bay of Bengal.

It is, in truth, a layered problem rather than a single one: ISI modules operating externally, Jamaat-linked networks inside Bangladesh, foreign-funded interference in the deep state, and a homegrown current of radical ideology that does not need an external hand to sustain itself. Three fronts, and a fourth, half-visible one that intelligence assessments alone cannot fully map.

The trajectory is increasingly difficult to ignore. In January 2025, a senior ISI delegation travelled to Dhaka, with reports indicating that ISI chief Lieutenant General Asim Malik was among those involved in the engagement, the first visit by a serving ISI head since 1971. It did not stand alone. Pakistan's foreign secretary followed, then its interior minister, then its commerce minister, and eventually Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar himself, the most senior Pakistani leader to set foot in Dhaka in over a decade. By October 2025, Pakistan's Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, General Sahir Shamshad Mirza, was meeting Bangladesh's military leadership directly, with an ISI official quietly present in his delegation. Within the same window, a formal Joint Intelligence Mechanism was established between the ISI and Bangladesh's Directorate General of Forces Intelligence, converting what had been informal back-channel contact into an institution with its own momentum and permanence.

The institutional backdrop makes this outreach harder to dismiss as posturing. Pakistan's recent constitutional changes have concentrated an unusual degree of authority in the office of the Army Chief, creating a Chief of Defence Forces construct that formalises military primacy over foreign and security policy, a matter earlier arrangements left ambiguous. An ISI that answers to a Rawalpindi with sweeping, constitutionally entrenched authority is not the same instrument as one operating under contested civilian oversight. Its outreach to Dhaka carries the weight of a state apparatus rather than a bureaucracy improvising ties on the margins, and that distinction should sharpen rather than soften Indian assessments of how durable the relationship is likely to prove.

What deserves New Delhi's attention in the latest movement of Bangladeshi intelligence officers is less the visit than its placement. The officers reportedly called on New Delhi before travelling to Islamabad, a sequence that can reasonably be read as Dhaka keeping its options open rather than committing to either capital. India would be wrong to treat this as evidence of a durable balance, and wrong again to reward it with concessions on that basis. The more useful discipline is to track substance rather than sequence: intelligence exchanges, military contacts, and institutional linkages accumulating quietly beneath the optics of any single visit.

The broader pattern is familiar to anyone who has studied Pakistan's approach to regional destabilisation. Formal intelligence arrangements of this kind rarely remain confined to counterterrorism cooperation. Over time, they tend to become infrastructure: safe havens for anti-India elements and conduits through which extremist networks acquire funding, training and legitimacy. Late in 2025, Pakistan reportedly established a dedicated ISI cell within its High Commission in Dhaka, formalising exactly this kind of institutional footprint on the immediate periphery of Indian soil. Alongside this has come a visible shift in the character of the Bangladesh Army, whose leadership has begun inaugurating explicitly Islamic educational institutions within military establishments, a symbolic but far from trivial departure from the secular, professional ethos the force cultivated for decades.

The operational context must be understood. The narrow Siliguri Corridor, through which the Indian mainland is linked to the northeastern states, remains a vulnerability, despite recent attention. Any attempt to resurrect militant sanctuaries or an intelligence grid in Bangladesh will affect the security of the corridor and interfere with India's efforts to reinforce its northeastern states during a crisis.

The northeast carries a long and painful institutional memory of cross-border sanctuary for insurgent groups, and that memory should weigh heavily on how seriously New Delhi treats the present trajectory. Reports of ISI-DGFI cooperation, including monitoring of the Bay of Bengal and the airspace along India's eastern flank, add a maritime and aerial dimension that the Eastern Naval Command and Eastern Air Command cannot afford to ignore.

Bangladesh's decision to send a major warship to Pakistan's multinational naval exercise, its first such participation in over a decade, is a further marker of intent rather than an incidental gesture. Such exercises build interoperability. They familiarise personnel with each other's doctrine and equipment and normalise a relationship that, until recently, was considered politically untouchable in Dhaka because of the unresolved legacy of the Liberation War. That Bangladesh continues to seek an apology from Pakistan for 1971, even as it deepens military and intelligence ties with Islamabad, says something about the nature of the current alignment. It is transactional, almost deliberately so. Historical grievance has not vanished. It has simply been set aside in favour of a strategic recalibration aimed, at least in part, at India.

For Indian policymakers, five responses are warranted, and none of them calls for alarmism.

First, the diplomatic establishments should approach Dhaka's outreach to New Delhi with scepticism rather than reassurance. A visit to India, swiftly followed by one to Pakistan, is not evidence of balance. It should be treated as evidence of strategic hedging, not as proof of a durable balancing relationship.

Second, there is a need for consistent funding to develop surveillance, human intelligence, and quick-response units within Eastern Command and the paramilitary organisations deployed as border security forces in Assam, Tripura, Meghalaya, and West Bengal.

Thirdly, Indian engagements with Dhaka on trade, connectivity, or river-water matters must be devoid of any naïve notion about the Bangladeshi establishment's underlying security inclinations.

Fourth, the internal front should be considered the most insidious of the four because it is the least visible. External actors can exploit existing social, ideological and criminal networks rather than create them from scratch. The response therefore has to extend beyond intelligence collection to national-level resilience.

The fifth point is that the intelligence agencies need to be more nimble and more alert, moving beyond a purely reactive watchdog mode. What they are good at is not proving that something has occurred, but rather bringing to light what is about to occur. Preventive, actionable intelligence at the operational level and sound strategic assessment at the policy level are distinct products, and both need to reach India's decision-makers and the military without the delays or dilution that have often blunted their utility in the past.

There is a longer horizon to this as well. A possible Pakistan-Turkey-Saudi-Bangladesh combination could provide Islamabad with a third vector of strategic pressure, and it is better for New Delhi to monitor this scenario than to find it in full bloom. Neither alarmism nor complacency serves India here. What serves India is sustained engagement, sharper intelligence, and a clear-eyed reading of where Bangladesh's external relationships are headed, distinct from where its public statements suggest they are headed.

For Pakistan, engagement with Bangladesh is more of a battle fought on one front in the larger competition for influence in its immediate neighbourhood. Years of diplomatic normalisation, economic engagement and military cooperation can create strategic space that is hard to reclaim once institutional norms and networked individuals are in place.

India cannot choose a partner, and neither should it. It can influence the context in which those options are exercised. A more robust deterrent posture in the east, increased intelligence awareness, robust border infrastructure, and continued diplomatic engagement with Bangladesh would reduce the scope for hostile actors seeking to exploit the geography of India's Northeast region. The goal is not to force Bangladesh to pick a side. It is to ensure that no external power can turn India's eastern neighbourhood into the next source of strategic surprise.

(The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.)