Even as war clouds begin to both recede and simmer in India’s western extremity, interesting progressions are unfolding in its eastern frontier. While the developments do not yet have an
immediate bearing on India, high order stratagem ordains that a vigilant eye needs to be kept
trained on the unusual events. This is especially so as Bangladesh of the present is almost on the fringe of a state that has radical Islamist and anti-India bearings.
The aspects that have been sought to be preambled in the article pertain to the manner in which a “regime change” was engineered in Bangladesh by the United States (US). It is important to comprehend the principal reason for the “intervention”.
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Sheikh Hasina’s resentment towards the US is a matter that no longer needs any accounting. Her antagonism has been evident ever since her entire family, including her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and ten-year-old brother, Sheikh Russel, were killed by a group of conspirators on 15 August 1975. It was clear to the presently exiled Prime Minister of Bangladesh that a powerful section of the US’ Deep State had full knowledge about the impending assassination. Consequently, she has always harboured a deep-seated animosity for the United States ever since.
Keen observers of Bangladesh’s “legacy of blood” do not quite have to re-read Gary J. Bass’ The Blood Telegram: India’s Secret War in East Pakistan (Random House India, 2013) to fathom that even the then US Consul General to Bangladesh, Archer Blood’s telegram to Washington DC expressed “strong dissent” about his country’s silence about Pakistan’s “selective genocide.” Blood also spoke of Nixon’s “moral bankruptcy” in the context.
Seymour M. Hersh in The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (Summit Books, 1983) has written that “no amount of presidential posturing could hide the truth: Richard Nixon, facing what he feared would be a most difficult re-election campaign, had been sullied by the India-Pakistan war. His administration had been looking the other way as Yahya Khan carried out his policy of genocide, and had been caught doing so. There was little doubt who would pay for the mistake”.
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But mistakes are summarily forgotten, and once forbidding time has managed to erase memories, shamed conduct surfaces again. As Herman Hesse wrote, “It is an old idea that the more pointedly and logically we formulate a thesis, the more irresistibly it cries out for its antithesis”.
Prof. Chandan Nandy, arguably India’s most well-informed scholar-scribe about Bangladesh and the abutting Rakhine province of Myanmar, has revealed on 8 May 2025 in an article in Northeast News titled “Four-member US Air Force team lands in Dhaka ahead of the arrival of “heavy cargo” that a US Air Force “advance” team led by one Tara Lynn Alexzandria Stryder, who is reportedly the Director of Logistics, Supply Chain and Planning and someone who is said to have the US’ highest security clearance, “TS/SCI”, or Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmentalised Intelligence arrived in Dhaka on 8 May 2025.
Stryder is the “Combat Mission Support Commander” of what is going to be the clandestine US team to provide covert support to the Arakan Army in its war against the Tatmadaw. The operation, it has now come to light, has the full backing of the illegitimate Mohammad Yunus regime. In fact, it is now almost common knowledge that it was always the Myanmar factor that had goaded the US to engineer the “regime change” in Bangladesh. Conspiracy theorists have been speculating about the reasons for the “regime change” in Bangladesh ever since Sheikh Hasina fled Dhaka. These have ranged from ousting a recalcitrant Sheikh Hasina, who was unwilling to kowtow to the US, to counter China, to erect a military base in St. Martin’s Island, as well as to “fence” India’s growing maritime influence in the Bay of Bengal, especially as there was enthusiasm that India’s “Act East” policy would be actively considering a naval opening via Bangladesh’s sea ports of Chittagong and Mongla. However, the US’s “Deep State” role was pooh-poohed by several “patriotic” Indians, which is interesting. At least the author has found the reluctance to name and shame the US for the mess in Bangladesh odd. It could only be because of a strange “hold” that official America has over most people! It is felt that criticising the US might jeopardise their chance to cultivate official American goodwill. It might interest the reader to know that the author (Jaideep Saikia) has not only conducted higher research in the US on a well-endowed fellowship, but was an International Visitor to the US on a special invitation by the US Department of State. He was also selected as the sole Asian Fellow of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, West Point, USA, has lectured in several important US think tanks, has written and published alongside many serving American professionals and academicians, and has several friends in the country. There is, therefore, an acknowledgement of appreciation, and even obligation. But it cannot be over one’s sacred duty and sense of patriotism for one’s motherland. Indeed, there have even been American scholars, several of whom have documented the US’s evil and dog-eared “regime change” games, a pursuit that the US’s “Deep State” has become a past master at over the yawning years.
Prof. Nandy invokes Lindsey A. O’Rourke, Associate Professor in Boston College’s Political Science Department. O’Rourke has authored a celebrated book titled Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2018). She has argued that “regime change holds a unique appeal for policymakers.” O’Rourke says that “regime change allows a state to install a foreign government that shares the intervening state’s preferences and interests. In theory, such a move is mutually beneficial to both parties and has the potential to fundamentally transform the relationship between the two states. If the operation is successful, the new government will share mutual interests with the intervener, meaning that it will then act in the intervening state’s interests”.
Prof Nandy states in a yet another interesting article in Northeast News, 4 May 2025, titled
“A 2018 book on US covert regime change operations explains the Bangladesh puzzle” that
“naïve naysayers might continue to contest that the US deep state had nothing to with the
August 2024 regime change in Bangladesh, but O’Rourke’s theoretical framework would
certainly be applicable to Bangladesh”. Delving on the “three main types of security interests
that (drive) the US to intervene, Prof. Nandy quotes from O’Rourke that one of the drivers
namely “hegemonic operations seek to keep target states politically subordinate. In these
cases, the intervener is trying to acquire or maintain hegemony over a certain geographic
region to obtain the military, political, and economic benefits associated with being a regional
hegemon.” The aid that had to be provided to the Arakan Army was the most vital impelling
factor for intervening in Bangladesh. In fact, he terms the intervention as “mutually beneficial
to both parties”.
The author has conferred about the matter with Prof. Nandy in some detail and has concluded
that, as “the main obstacle in the US’ path (Sheikh Hasina) has been vanquished”, the American “Deep State” is now well on its way to launch its post-regime change operation. As aforesaid, the mission is to topple the junta in Naypyidaw.
The Bangladesh Army’s Ramu-based 10th Infantry Division will reportedly provide the logistics and supplies to the Arakan Army. The first phase of the operation would be to launch a military offensive on three townships of Sittway, Kyaukpyu, and Manaung, which are currently being held by the Myanmar army.
Incidentally, there is an important section within the Army, primarily led by General Waker-uz-Zaman and some of the General Officers Commanding who are of the opinion that the prevailing security situation along the Myanmar-Bangladesh border is an “outcome of the geopolitical and geostrategic measures that the US seeks to put in motion by employing the Bangladesh Army in clandestinely backing the Arakan Army and the People’s Defence Force in Myanmar.” It is reported that this section is not in favour of being drawn into the American game. It has even been termed the so-called “Humanitarian Corridor” that the American clone Yunus is engineering as “Bloody Corridor,” and has been rather public in its opposition to such a “passageway”.
In any event, the American “pseudo-covert” plan was to first remove Sheikh Hasina, followed
by funding and backing “dogs of war” that constituted the rapacious “July Warriors” who destroyed all remnants of democracy and Bangladesh’s spirit of liberation from Pakistan in 1971. The installation of the undemocratic Yunus regime, the legitimising of the radical Jamaat-e-Islami even as the secular Awami League was banned, had all been clinically strategised. However, the most important motivation continues to be the military support to the Arakan Army. The side-shoot of the putsch and the attendant conspiracies would also have an added advantage—an American base in the erstwhile East Pakistan within breathing distance of both India and China. The US desperately needs to halt China’s inroads into South Asia, especially as it has read the entrails that Beijing is eyeing Sittwe as well as an outlet to the Bay. Bangladesh, as aforesaid, is important because of the “corridor” it provides for the US military’s entry into the Rakhine province. Furthermore, the US can no longer afford to view Myanmar as a “boutique issue”. Indeed, this has become even more important as the watershed moment in the Indian Ocean region seems to be slipping out of its hands, with even the Chagos Archipelago abutting Mauritius falling into possible adversarial hands. The fact that China already has bases in Hambantota, Gwadar, and Djibouti is already quite a mouthful. But for now, Rakhine and Yunus’s aided subterfuge in the “Land of the Bangabandhu,” the creation of which had lent precious Indian “blood, toil, tears and sweat,” clearly points to Advantage-America.
The conspirative “star-spangled” brew has already been concocted in the hinterland and the coasts of Bangladesh. With a pliant Yunus in place, cloaked operatives in Langley-Anacostia- Bolling-Pentagon, who had together created and later weathered the likes of Osama Bin Laden, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the US’s “Deep State” seems to have just no qualms about giving rise to yet another Neo-Caliphate in Bangladesh. Radical ideology, “clash of civilisations”, and even safety are acceptable as long as the American Homeland is secure. Radicalisation can not only be tolerated, but utilised the world over (barring American soil!) if it suits stateside. As a matter of fact, the new American adaptation of Frankenstein’s monster in Yunus’s Bangladesh is already on the prowl. Once the “Bloody Corridor” is completed and the “march of the radicals” has goose-stepped all over Bangladesh, the monstrosity would decisively enter the North East of India. A myopic New Delhi would then watch in dismay as the “Ugly American” gets yet another opportunity to intervene.
(Jaideep Saikia is India’s foremost strategist and bestselling author)