The Doval Doctrine Lands in Dhaka

On the night of September 17, as the prime ministers of India and Bangladesh traded birthday greetings on social media, a Gulfstream jet landed quietly at Tejgaon airbase in the heart of Dhaka. Avoiding public tracking, its principal passenger was India's National Security Adviser, Ajit Doval.

The greetings had been a small drama of their own. Bangladesh Prime Minister Tarique Rahman had posted birthday wishes to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Facebook hours earlier, and by late evening Delhi had still not replied. At around 10:30 PM, a source in Dhaka messaged me on an encrypted channel asking why. The day isn't over yet, I told him. Minutes later, at 22:36 PM, Modi responded on X. In both capitals, the moment gave people some hope that the relationship was on the mend.

Doval stayed in Dhaka for about 18 hours, out of public view. According to sources, he met the two men who matter most to India's security calculations there: Army Chief General Waker-Uz-Zaman and Md Kaiser Rashid Chowdhury, Director General of the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI). He also invited the DGFI chief to a South Asian intelligence and security meeting that R&AW will host in New Delhi this November.

Doval's visit was very different from that of R&AW Secretary Parag Jain a month earlier. Jain flew in a commercial airline on August 9 and landed at Dhaka's international airport rather than a military airbase, and his arrival was widely reported. He came at the invitation of the DGFI, leading a four-member delegation that included the R&AW coordinator, Ashwin Kotnis, Rahul Negi and Shaibal Roy Chowdhury.

During his two days in the city, he met Brig Gen (retd) Dr AKM Shamsul Islam, Tarique Rahman's Defence Affairs Adviser, as both sides tried to manage strained ties and work towards a reset.

What brings India's spymasters to Dhaka

The central question is whether Delhi can persuade Tarique Rahman to visit India and reset relations. Sheikh Hasina is the unspoken lever in that effort.

Hasina has been found guilty by Bangladesh's International Crimes Tribunal, the same court through which her government sent 1971 war criminals to the gallows. She is living at an undisclosed location on the outskirts of New Delhi and wants to return to Dhaka this December. She faces prison and possibly execution if she does.

Doval and Jain are working a channel to secure fair treatment for the former prime minister and daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. They are also keeping her in reserve as a card to play whenever the political balance needs adjusting.

Hasina is not the only problem. Large numbers of Awami League leaders and cadres are sheltering in cities across India, and they are becoming a burden on India's security apparatus. Dhaka will not budge until India commits to denying safe haven and political asylum to Awami League workers.

Then there is the Osman Hadi case. Faisal Karim and Alamgir Hossain, both accused of Hadi's murder, were arrested by West Bengal's STF in the border town of Bongaon on March 6, 2026, under the TMC government. They are now in judicial custody and under NIA investigation. Dhaka argues that the murder is Bangladesh's internal matter and that India can charge them with nothing more than illegal entry. So why not return them? The question came up in the talks. No assurances have been given.

Rahman himself has been dithering about visiting India. His maiden foreign trip was to China, which irked Delhi. He skipped the BRICS meeting in New Delhi this September, to which he had been invited as BIMSTEC chair. India is now working towards a visit after Diwali, possibly in the third or fourth week of November.

Doval and Jain have played a major role in that effort.

Dhaka's new friends

Delhi's worry now goes beyond border security. The bigger question is how close the BNP government will get to Pakistan and China.

On his China visit, Rahman committed to buying Chinese J-10CE 4.5-generation fighter jets. Bangladesh has also agreed to joint military exercises with Pakistan and invited Pakistan Navy ships into the Bay of Bengal, reportedly their first presence there since 1971. India sees that as a direct security threat.

This month, Shehbaz Sharif and Tarique Rahman met on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, pledged deeper cooperation and agreed to hold regular high-level meetings. Bangladesh’s official airline carrier Biman now flies direct to Karachi, which marks a new era in the relationship since Hasina's ouster.

Bangladesh has also handed border control to Securiport, a US firm. Its Bangladeshi partner, Stallion Capital Ltd, is run by Syed Ibrahim Ahmed, son of Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed. The minister has his own India history. He disappeared in 2015, turned up in the custody of Meghalaya police, and lived in India until he was repatriated in 2023.

Delhi's own envoy has drawn criticism. The new High Commissioner, Dinesh Trivedi, is a former TMC politician and one-time Union Minister of State. He is promoting cultural diplomacy, but some in the foreign service privately question why a political appointee, rather than a career diplomat, holds such a sensitive post at this moment.

The ground beneath the diplomacy

While the envoys talk, the security picture keeps worsening.

Ahead of Durga Puja, which is celebrated across West Bengal, Assam, Odisha and by Bangladesh's roughly 8% Hindu minority, police in West Bengal and Assam arrested 13 men they say have links to Bangladesh and Pakistan.

On September 29, the NIA searched 16 locations, 10 in Assam, five in West Bengal and one in Kerala. The searches were part of its probe into a cross-border terror conspiracy linked to Imam Mahmuder Kafela (IMK), which officials describe as an offshoot of Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB).

Bangladesh's own numbers are alarming. In May, figures from the National Security Intelligence (NSI) and police showed that at least 370 members of nine banned militant outfits, all wanted under the Anti-Terrorism Act, remain at large. These include: JMB (185), Hizb ut-Tahrir (59), Ansarullah Bangla Team (58), Ansar Al Islam (25), Harkat-ul-Jihad-e-Islami/ HUJI (16), Neo-JMB (16), Allah'r Dal (9), and one each of Jamaat-ul-Ansar Fil Hindal Sharqiya (JAFHS) and Imam Mahmuder Kafela.

Of these fugitives, 130 were never arrested, 61 went into hiding after getting bail during investigation, 83 absconded during trial, and the whereabouts of 96 are unknown.

The 2024 uprising made things worse. According to Md Jannat-Ul-Farhad, assistant inspector general at the Department of Prisons, 2,250 accused fled Bangladeshi jails during the unrest. Of these, 700 are still untraced, and nine are alleged militants.

A total of 1,231 alleged members of banned outfits were granted bail between 2021 and August 2024, and another 380 between September 2024 and July 2025. Of those 380, 265 belong to unnamed outfits and 68 to JMB. Only 162 alleged militants were held in Bangladesh's 16 jails as of June 2025. Crime analysts say weak surveillance and lax anti-militancy enforcement are compounding the risk.

India shares a 4,096 km border with Bangladesh, the fifth-longest international boundary in the world. Of this, 2,217 km runs along West Bengal, across land, rivers and the inhospitable Sundarbans. After the BJP came to power in West Bengal on 4 May, BSF Director General Praveen Kumar personally toured forward areas to study the terrain.

The Intelligence Bureau, after a recruitment drive in recent months, plans to open 40 sub-units under the SIB along West Bengal's border alone. It will extend its human and technical networks into the grey zones where human trafficking remains business as usual.

The border has become porous for everything from stolen phones to narcotics and arms. Sources say proxy ISI (Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence) units now run parts of this trade, aiming to disrupt the Siliguri Corridor, the 22 km "Chicken's Neck" that forms mainland India's only land link to the Northeast.

The trafficking has not slowed. Smugglers from Bangladesh, India and Myanmar are regularly caught in Mizoram, Assam, Meghalaya and West Bengal. I saw the porousness first-hand. On June 6, while covering a protest in Delhi, I lost my iPhone. My complaint at Parliament Street police station went nowhere. Seven days later, I tracked the phone to Chapai Nawabganj, across the border from Malda. Someone switched it on at 2:46 AM, and the location registered on my device in Delhi. The phone is still missing.

Friction on the border itself is rising. BSF "push-ins" of suspected Bangladeshi nationals have made the Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) hyper-vigilant, and it now uses village volunteers to watch the border. This has angered the BSF, and skirmishes have broken out in Lalmonirhat and elsewhere in Rangpur.

Changes at the top may also be coming. Praveen Kumar, a former IB Special Director, confronted Maoist leader Kishenji during the 2009 Lalgarh movement while serving as SP. He is tipped to return as West Bengal DGP when the incumbent retires in November. J&K DGP Nalin Prabhat is rumoured to be in line to succeed him at the BSF.

Ordinary citizens are paying the price. Hotel fires in Kolkata and Delhi recently killed several Bangladeshi nationals, five of them in Kolkata, where they had come for medical treatment. Since then, Bangladeshi visitors have complained of being refused hotel rooms and being harassed in Kolkata, and many are now heading to Chennai or Bengaluru for treatment instead. Both countries have begun weaponising visas against people who have little to do with politics.

The Jamaat question

All of this leaves India in a bind. Bangladesh appears to be trying to isolate India within South Asia while becoming a playground for the US, China and Pakistan.

That raises a harder question. Will Delhi turn to Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami (BJI) to keep channels and borders secure? The party won most of the constituencies in February's elections. Covering those polls, I found one thing clear: Jamaat is waiting at the gate, and it could become an option if that suits India's interests. Doval and Jain know this, and so do the diplomats.

In Delhi, Bangladesh's High Commissioner Riaz Hamidullah, who steered the relationship through its most turbulent phase, served the shortest stint in memory, just 17 months. His successor, current Foreign Secretary Asad Alam Siam, will now carry the next chapter forward with the Indian government.