I. Introduction: The Breaking of a Compact
When India suspended the Indus Waters Treaty following the terror attack in Pahalgam—carried out by The Resistance Front (TRF), a group with clear operational and ideological ties to Pakistan’s deep state—it did more than nullify a water-sharing agreement. It shattered one of the few remaining symbols of post-Partition cooperation between the two nuclear-armed rivals. For decades, the treaty withstood wars, diplomatic breakdowns, and public rage. That it should now collapse in response to yet another incident of state-proxied terror speaks volumes—not only about India’s strategic posture but about the region’s crumbling secular compact.
Now, that compact has fractured even further. In a retaliatory gesture of its own, Pakistan has suspended the Shimla Agreement (1972)—a foundational accord that once governed diplomatic protocols, bilateralism, and conflict resolution between India and Pakistan. If the Indus Waters Treaty was the hydrological pillar of cooperation, the Shimla Agreement was its diplomatic spine. Together, these two treaties formed the last architecture of mutual restraint between nuclear neighbors. Their dual collapse signals a freefall into a pre-1970s strategic environment—one where war, not negotiation, is again the default setting.
However, to treat the Treaty’s dissolution as a bilateral escalation alone would be myopic. It is better understood as the tremor before a regional quake. From the Indus in the West to the Bay of Bengal in the East, a new geopolitical alignment is taking shape—an alignment that threatens to undo the fragile, secular, and postcolonial order that had once offered a vision of stability. Across South Asia, terror proxies are resurgent, Islamist politics is infiltrating interim governments, and foreign powers are circling zones of instability under the guise of humanitarian concern.
India, at the heart of it all, finds itself in a two-front dilemma. In the West, Pakistan continues to serve as an incubator for transnational jihadist ambitions. In the East, Bangladesh’s descent into political instability and Islamist resurgence—combined with creeping Chinese and U.S. strategic footprints—threatens to encircle India in an arc of theocratic volatility.
We are witnessing, not coincidentally, the very outlines of what some jihadist organizations have long fantasized as the “Ghazwa-e-Hind”—a final, divine campaign against India’s secular order. Once dismissed as the rhetoric of fringe clerics, this fantasy now finds alarming consonance with on-the-ground developments. And the collapse of the Indus Treaty may be the first concrete signal that the region’s modernist consensus is no longer intact.
II. The Final Straw: India’s Water Retaliation
The terror attack in Pahalgam in late April 2025—claimed by TRF—was not merely another addition to the long and tragic list of insurgent violence in Jammu and Kashmir. It was strategically timed, carefully coordinated, and deliberately theatrical. The group’s public communique described the act not in local nationalist terms, but in explicitly religious and transnational ones, referencing the duty of “resistance” against “Hindu tyranny” and invoking imagery that closely mirrors the rhetoric of Ghazwa-e-Hind. This alone signals a shift in the ideological compass of South Asian terror outfits—from local grievance to theological war.
This ideological shift is no isolated evolution—it is rooted in Pakistan’s long-standing doctrine of strategic depth, with Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) as its most durable militant instrument. The Resistance Front (TRF), which claimed responsibility for the Pahalgam attack, is widely recognized by intelligence agencies as a proxy outfit of LeT, created in 2019 to rebrand jihadist operations under the guise of secular resistance. This rebranding followed mounting international scrutiny, especially from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which had placed Pakistan on its greylist for failing to curb terror financing.
LeT’s operational freedom in Pakistan is well-documented. Hafiz Saeed, its founder, operated openly for years—establishing charities, political parties (like Milli Muslim League), and even contesting elections with state tolerance, if not support. Though formally designated as a terrorist by the UN and U.S., Saeed was repeatedly shielded from prosecution by Pakistan’s courts until international pressure made his conviction strategically unavoidable. Even then, other senior leaders like Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi continue to operate with impunity.
The 2008 Mumbai attacks provided one of the clearest demonstrations of state complicity. Testimony from David Headley, an LeT operative turned U.S. government witness, directly implicated the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in planning, training, and coordinating the assault. These connections were not circumstantial; they were systemic.
What TRF represents today is a strategic laundering of jihad. Indian intelligence has traced TRF’s recruitment channels, arms supplies, and digital propaganda operations back to LeT infrastructure and ISI-backed networks. Its emergence was not spontaneous—it was sanctioned, supplied, and ideologically aligned with Pakistan’s broader playbook of asymmetric warfare.
Pakistan’s self-description of offering only “moral and diplomatic support” to Kashmiris functions as strategic euphemism—a way to legitimize terror under the language of resistance. But the operational reality is far clearer: Pakistan’s deep state has cultivated, protected, and projected jihadist violence as a tool of statecraft.
India’s decision to scrap the Indus Waters Treaty—long a diplomatic sacred cow—was therefore neither rash nor unpredictable. It was a culmination of growing frustration: a response not merely to terror, but to the intransigence of Pakistan’s military-jihadist complex and the limits of existing doctrines of “strategic restraint.”
Cross-border infiltration statistics reveal the gravity of India’s concern. According to official estimates, there were 376 documented infiltration attempts in 2023 alone, with 2024 seeing a 42% increase. TRF, LeT, and JeM continue to benefit from logistical support, arms supplies, and ideological training within Pakistani territory. The security architecture in Rawalpindi either turns a blind eye or actively facilitates these groups’ operations—a fact well known to intelligence communities across the world.
More troublingly, these outfits have evolved beyond classic insurgency. Their training camps now host militants from Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and even Myanmar’s Rohingya refugee diaspora—suggesting a regionalization of jihad, anchored in a theological unity that transcends national borders. This isn’t just about Kashmir anymore. This is about a dream of conquest cloaked in divine imperative.
By scrapping the treaty, India signalled that it will no longer play by rules that its adversary disregards. It has chosen to deploy its economic and geographic leverage—not as aggression, but as calibrated reprisal. The Indus Treaty, after all, was a gesture of peace. When that peace is persistently violated with impunity, the gesture becomes obsolete. Despite it all, it sets a dangerous precedent: if even the most resilient agreement can collapse, what hope remains for less institutionalized forms of cooperation, such as BIMSTEC or SAARC?
III. The Eastern Front: Bangladesh’s Slide into Strategic Instability
While global attention remains fixed on the unravelling of India-Pakistan relations, a more subtle yet no less alarming crisis brews to the east. The fall of the Hasina government in Bangladesh—long considered a bulwark against Islamism in South Asia—has created a vacuum swiftly filled by a mix of opportunists, soft Islamists, and old transnational alliances. And just as in the west, this eastern upheaval is no longer driven solely by domestic discontent. It is enmeshed within a wider web of geopolitical ambitions, militant resurgence, and post-secular revisionism.
At the heart of this instability lies Cox’s Bazar, now emerging not only as a humanitarian flashpoint but as a geostrategic launchpad. Nominally the staging ground for international aid to the Rohingya refugees, Cox’s Bazar has increasingly become a theatre of clandestine militaristic activity. Reports of U.S. deep state presence, allegedly coordinating support to the Arakan Army under the guise of humanitarian logistics, have surfaced with troubling frequency. While officially denied, the militarization of aid corridors—under Western patronage—has effectively turned southeastern Bangladesh into a forward-operating base in the new Indo-Pacific theatre.
This Western footprint is not neutral. It aligns, disturbingly, with the rise of Islamist political forces inside Bangladesh’s Interim Government. Key ministries are now influenced by figures either sympathetic to Jamaat-e-Islami ideology or openly hostile to secularism. Public discourse, once guardedly pluralistic, is rapidly Islamizing. Universities, press outlets, and even the judiciary are beginning to reflect this turn. Far from a mere post-coup aberration, this represents the institutional seepage of theocratic thought—not unlike what occurred in post-Zia Pakistan.
India now faces a two-front ideological war. In the west, an entrenched military-Islamist nexus wields jihad as foreign policy. In the east, a neighbour long seen as an ally in the fight against terror has become a vector for its propagation. The secular Indian state finds itself strategically strangled, not only by geography but by the ideological currents flowing in from both flanks.
The challenge is compounded by Bangladesh’s new diplomatic behavior. In a recent BIMSTEC address, Dr. Muhammad Yunus—the de facto civilian face of the Interim Government—suggested that Bangladesh is the “guardian of the oceans” for India’s landlocked Northeast, a statement that many in New Delhi interpreted as an implicit threat. Shortly thereafter, India revoked transshipment privileges for Bangladeshi cargo, citing security concerns.
But perhaps the most provocative development has come from the north. Reports—though yet unconfirmed—indicate that China is being courted to develop an airbase in Lalmonirhat, close to the India-Bangladesh border. Should this materialize, it would mark the first direct Chinese strategic installation bordering India’s critical Siliguri Corridor—a lifeline that connects the mainland to the Northeastern states.
All of this points toward a strategic encirclement of India, enabled by both Western and Eastern actors, and facilitated by an ideological collapse in Dhaka. And it is not without precedent. Similar conditions in Pakistan gave rise to an entire generation of jihadist militancy—catalysed by foreign intelligence, religious rhetoric, and regional insecurity.
The question now is whether the same ideological script is being rehearsed in the East.
IV. The Collapse of the Secular Compact: From Realpolitik to Theological War
In the 1980s and 1990s, Pakistan became the crucible of a new kind of warfare. Under the guise of Cold War alliances, Western intelligence, Gulf petro-finance, and local authoritarian ambition coalesced to incubate a militant generation. The jihadist complex born in the madrassas of Peshawar and the tribal zones did not simply fight wars; it redefined them. It blurred the line between soldier and believer, territory and prophecy, strategy and salvation. It turned a Cold War frontier into a battlefield of eschatological imagination—a theological war masquerading as realpolitik.
What began in Pakistan has now been franchised.
In Bangladesh, with the fall of the secular order and the infiltration of Islamist ideologues into state institutions, a similar incubation is unfolding. But unlike 1980s Pakistan—then a pawn in superpower games—today’s East Bengal is more ideologically self-assured, more networked, and more directly interfacing with transnational jihadist ambitions.
At the centre of this eschatological horizon lies an old fantasy with dangerous new relevance: Ghazwa-e-Hind, the prophesied final battle for the conquest of India by an Islamic army. While dismissed by many scholars as apocryphal or marginal, the doctrine has gained increasing traction among militant circles, particularly those influenced by Pakistani Deobandi and Salafi thought. Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Hizbul Mujahideen, and the more recent The Resistance Front (TRF) have all invoked its imagery to sanctify violence and galvanize recruits.
What is new—and gravely concerning—is that this rhetoric is no longer confined to the western borderlands. With the strategic vacuum in Bangladesh, these narratives are seeping eastward, finding resonance among newly radicalized segments of the population and emboldened political actors. The mythos of Ghazwa-e-Hind is not merely symbolic. It provides a transnational ideological axis that can now draw energy from both western and eastern flanks of India, thereby collapsing the geographical distinction that once afforded the Indian state strategic predictability.
The unipolar secular compact in South Asia—anchored in India and, for decades, supported tacitly by Dhaka—is cracking. In its place is rising a post-secular geopolitical order, where legitimacy is increasingly grounded in religious identity, and the state is no longer the sole arbiter of violence or ideology.
In this emerging order:
• Militancy is not a by-product of foreign occupation but a claim to divine destiny.
• Territories are not strategic assets but sacred spaces.
• Governance is not an administrative duty but a theological mandate.
India now finds itself facing not merely hostile states, but hostile cosmologies—an archipelago of militant theological visions stretching from Khyber to Chittagong, coalescing not necessarily through formal alliance, but through shared metaphysical enmity toward secular, pluralistic, and democratic modernity.
The consequences are profound. Traditional deterrents—military, diplomatic, or economic—lose efficacy against actors who do not fear destruction but sanctify it. Dialogue becomes moot when one side speaks in the language of sovereignty and the other in the language of salvation.
And herein lies the pivotal warning: South Asia is no longer in a geopolitical crisis, but in the early tremors of a civilizational one.
V. Strategic Consequences and the Path Forward: A Lamentation and a Warning
The unilateral suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty by India is more than a geopolitical signal—it is a rupture in the last remaining covenant of regional interdependence. Forged in the ashes of Partition, the Treaty endured wars, diplomatic freezes, and border skirmishes. It stood as a solitary monument to the possibility that even in subcontinental conflict, certain civilizational contracts would not be desecrated. Its revocation, in retaliation to Pakistan-supported terror, underscores that even those minimum thresholds of cooperation are no longer sacred.
But the fallout extends beyond treaties, troop movements, or transshipment corridors.
What is unravelling is a region’s metaphysical imagination of itself.
For millennia, the Indian subcontinent has not merely housed civilization—it has generated it. Long before the modern West imagined philosophy, this land gave birth to the dialectic of Being and non-Being, to notions of the self and no-self, to lokayata materialists and sunyata mystics. The Upanishads interrogated the cosmos not for conquest, but for coherence. The Buddha dismantled metaphysics with reasoned silence. Akbar’s court summoned comparative theology with intellectual humility. Kabir tore through scripture and caste alike, to find a God that lived in the weaver’s loom and the sweeper’s song. Lalon sang of a body without caste, of a God beyond religion.
These were not outliers—they were the spinal ethic of the region.
Today, that ethic is imperilled. The rise of Islamist theocracy in Bangladesh, the invocation of apocalyptic mythologies like Ghazwa-e-Hind, the weaponization of religion in Pakistan, and the growing militarization of Indian secularism signal a collapse not only of political order, but of civilizational memory.
In such a context, India faces three fundamental strategic dilemmas:
1. Security vs. Philosophy: Can the Indian state secure its borders without abandoning the pluralistic ideals that defined its spiritual heritage?
2. Realism vs. Regionalism: Should India continue to invest in regional frameworks like BIMSTEC, BBIN, and/or BCIM or retreat into strategic insulation?
3. Secularism vs. Survival: If its eastern and western flanks become openly theocratic, can Indian secular democracy withstand the twin pressure of security imperatives and domestic polarization?
These are not mere policy questions. They are existential.
Yet even now, history offers a fragile reassurance. The subcontinent has always had a way of regenerating itself. When power collapsed, philosophy rose. When empires fell, poets rebuilt metaphysics. When the sacred was seized by zealots, sant-poets (mystic poets) reclaimed it for the people.
The path forward, then, lies not just in counterinsurgency or water treaties, but in civilizational reclamation.
India must become not merely a counterweight to Islamist extremism—but the counter-narrative. A home not just for Hindus, but for thought itself. A sanctuary not just of sovereignty, but of syncretism—the one tradition that has always defied fundamentalism with wisdom.
For if this battle is to be fought—and it now must be—it cannot be fought only with guns or diplomacy. It must be fought with memory. With literature. With constitutional fidelity. With the re-assertion of a plural ethos that the world forgot, but that this region once gifted to it.
To lose that ethos now would not merely be a geopolitical defeat.
It would be a philosophical betrayal. A betrayal of what it meant, and could still mean, to be South Asian.
Citations:
1. Indus Waters Treaty, 1960 – World Bank Archives. https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/867071468759914589/indus-waters-treaty-1960
2. TRF’s linkage to Pakistan – South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), “TRF: Terrorist Profile.” https://www.satp.org/terrorist-profile/india-the-resistance-front-trf
3. BIMSTEC diplomatic communications – Ministry of External Affairs, India. https://www.mea.gov.in/briefing-documents.htm (for latest statements and communications)
4. Reports on Lalmonirhat airbase development – Various open-source intelligence (OSINT) analyses; see discussions on satellite imagery and regional military build-up at https://www.orfonline.org and https://www.janes.com (subscription sources).
5. U.S. involvement in Cox’s Bazar and Myanmar corridor – International Crisis Group & Reuters reports:
o ICG: https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-asia/bangladesh
o Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific
6. Ghazwa-e-Hind references in Islamist ideology – “Islamism and Its Discontents in South Asia”, Routledge (2022). ISBN: 9781032068620
7. David Headley’s testimony linking ISI to the 2008 Mumbai attacks – U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois (2010); covered in BBC News: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-south-asia-12458329
8. TRF’s affiliation with LeT and operational guidance by Pakistan’s ISI – Reuters (2025): https://www.reuters.com/world/india/kashmir-resistance-group-that-claimed-attack-tourists-indian-kashmir-2025-04-23
9. The Resistance Front (TRF) profile and its LeT lineage – SATP: https://www.satp.org/terrorist-profile/india-the-resistance-front-trf
10. Pakistan’s FATF greylisting and failure to prosecute UN-designated terrorists – FATF Pakistan Monitoring Reports: https://www.fatf-gafi.org/en/countries/pakistan.html
11. Pakistan’s jihadist dilemma and strategic duplicity – Carnegie Endowment (2021): https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/02/25/pakistan-s-jihadist-dilemma-pub-83970
12. Hafiz Saeed’s state-sanctioned political activity and legal protections – The Hindu: https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/hafiz-saeed-launches-political-party/article19505240.ece
13. UN designation of Hafiz Saeed and Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi – UN Security Council 1267 Sanctions List: https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/sanctions/1267/aq_sanctions_list
14. Role of Pakistan’s ISI in sponsoring terror groups – Brookings Institution (Bruce Riedel): https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/pakistan-and-terror-the-role-of-the-isi
15. Pakistan’s evolving terror threat and ISI’s linkages – RAND Corporation: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9652.html
I am Iconus Clustus—justice activist, truth-seeker, and writer. My work is rooted in the unfinished struggle for recognition of the 1971 Bangladesh Genocide. Guided by philosophy, I write to provoke thought, stir conscience, and insist on justice as a shared responsibility.
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