As Imran Khan enters his seventies behind bars, the stakes extend far beyond his individual fate. Should his detention continue—or worse, should harm befall him in custody—the consequences could be explosive. Public anger, already simmering, may erupt into widespread unrest, challenging the state’s ability to maintain control.
Bangladesh has survived partition, the liberation war, famine, floods, military coups, and democratic collapse. It has always returned. But returning is not the same as resolving. Fifty-six years after independence, the founding paradox remains: a nation whose birth is still debated cannot fully inhabit its future. The gun salutes will be loud and unambiguous. The questions they echo, however, about what Bangladesh is, who founded it, and whose vision should guide it, remain, as they have always been
For India, this raises complex challenges. Historically, India has positioned itself as a strong advocate of anti-colonialism and sovereignty. However, in the current context, its responses have often appeared measured and cautious, despite the direct implications for its interests—ranging from energy security and regional stability to strategic initiatives such as connectivity through Iran.
For India, the failure is particularly significant as its presidency was an opportunity to translate “strategic autonomy”, the current buzzword in foreign policy circles, into multilateral leadership. True, its response is shaped by structural constraints. The country imports more than 85% of its crude oil, much of it from West Asia and Russia. Some nine million of its citizens live in the Gulf. The United States is its largest trading partner. Iran anchors the Chabahar port project and India’s access to Afghanistan and Central Asia. Each relationship is too consequential to risk.
It is not easy for a country faced with heavy debt payments to find resources to accelerate domestic growth, exports and infrastructure development. It has to carefully balance infrastructure priorities, social spending, and ongoing economic reforms. Next two years will be crucial for the government to at least complete the ongoing projects to fulfil major promises while taking up the remaining ones that were temporarily shelved for early implementation.
The India-UAE military equipment cooperation is a burgeoning strategic partnership focused on joint production, technology transfer, and industrial collaboration, moving beyond mere arms sales to build a self-reliant defence ecosystem, support India's 'Make in India' initiative, and establish the UAE as a gateway to African/Middle Eastern markets, creating a mutually beneficial, politically neutral defence bloc for regional stability and economic growth.
The strategic consequences extend well beyond Dhaka. Bangladesh occupies a critical position in the Bay of Bengal, bordering major sea lanes and neighboring one of the world’s most volatile regions. A Bangladesh drifting toward extra-constitutional governance while deepening ties with China and Pakistan would alter regional dynamics in ways that merit serious attention in Washington and European capitals.
Today, India’s grand strategy faces a similarly critical moment—this time shaped not by the Kissinger Doctrine but by the Donroe Doctrine. New Delhi must avoid relying on limited or incremental approaches. Instead, its strategy must be upgraded to a level that allows it to take calculated risks, withstand U.S. diplomatic blitzkrieg, and navigate an anxiety-ridden global order with greater resilience and confidence.
Greenland’s geopolitical prominence illustrates how a distant region can reflect deeper shifts in global power, economics, and security. For countries like India, Greenland is not about territorial ambition; it is a reminder that structural shifts in global power dynamics transcend geography. In a realist world, engagement is not optional; it is necessary for safeguarding long-term interests in a system where power continually redistributes itself.
According to realist paradigms, nuclear weapons can be seen as the ultimate guarantee of national security and when there will be no restrictions, states will strive to dominate or achieve parity. Lapse of New START can thus create worsening security dilemmas, where efforts of any state to enhance its deterrent value is seen as a threat, and the state retaliates. The position of nuclear weapons as power projectors will, therefore, be more intense.
Some analysts are of the view that Sri Lanka’s differential access — full executive level for India versus foreign ministry level for China — may reflect Sri Lanka’s carefully calibrated foreign policy. Sri Lanka is leveraging India for urgent, high-impact assistance and wider policy coordination and engaging China for strategic reassurance and medium-to-long-term cooperative alignment that is less intertwined with immediate executive decisions.
India’s challenge, and opportunity, lies in mastering torque rather than seeking a mythical centre of gravity. In a world defined by flux, leverage matters more than alignment, and agility matters more than allegiance. Strategic autonomy will not be preserved through rigid doctrines, but through continuous recalibration anchored in national interest, economic resilience, and confidence in India’s civilisational depth.
India’s response to Iran’s crisis illustrates the dilemmas facing middle powers navigating a polarised global order. While reaffirming principles of sovereignty, non-intervention and dialogue, New Delhi has largely confined itself to cautious diplomacy. For a country that positions itself as a voice of the Global South and a defender of strategic autonomy, such restraint invites scrutiny. Silence at moments of legal strain is never neutral. It contributes to the gradual normalisation of coercive precedent.
If Washington persists down this path, the response from the Global South will not be submission. It will be coordination. China, Russia, Brazil, India, and others have every incentive to deepen trade, energy, and financial cooperation—not out of ideological unity, but out of defensive necessity. Ironically, Trump’s economic nationalism may succeed in what decades of rhetoric could not - forging a more cohesive Global South.
So long as Indians do not find a true watchdog for the government, people will have to keep choosing the lesser evil. Youth are well aware of the situation of Arab countries post-revolution. In South Asia, although Sri Lanka and Nepal have been able to consolidate power to some extent, Bangladesh remains in a frenzy with rampant human rights violations, religious persecution and no legitimate government in sight. Hence, Indian youth prefer to seek reform from within rather than a full-blown revolution without any vision for the future
For Bangladesh’s Hindus, each funeral deepens the message that their lives are negotiable and their suffering invisible. If this trajectory continues unchecked, the country risks normalizing a culture of impunity that will ultimately consume more than one community. Violence ignored does not fade; it spreads. And the price of silence, as history repeatedly shows, is always paid in lives.
Keen observers of international and regional politics will not have missed the tacit presence of the invisible hand of the US in determining the democratic transition in Bangladesh. Obviously, TarIque had been tutored by the Americans about the best way forward for the transition towards democratic rule and delivering on the promises of cooperation on regional security. The intelligentsia inside the country could have hoped for Tarique referring to ‘’historical’’ figures from the Indian subcontinent, the Muslim world, and Bangladesh’s past.
The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation's (SAARC) Charter, by contrast, establishes no regional human rights treaty, monitoring body, or court. Scholars emphasize that governments in the subregion demonstrate a lack of deep commitment to human rights and remain unwilling to acknowledge subregional solutions. Victims of systemic violations have no forum for binding adjudication.
This fully unfettered approach to everything Trump does also has serious consequences for India. At least through the duration of the Trump administration until 2028, the Modi government will have to spread around its geostrategic and geoeconomic needs among various countries such as Japan, Australia, Germany, France and the United Kingdom or collectives such as the European Union, even as it deals with America with some judicious leveraging.
