New Delhi: India’s increasingly strained ties with Bangladesh have created a vacuum, particularly in defence ties, allowing China and Pakistan to step in and create a potential three-front conundrum that also impacts the situation surrounding Taiwan, writes Wolfgang Petermann, a US Army official currently assigned to the Defence Intelligence Agency.
“Dhaka is reviving defense ties with Pakistan. Until recently, such a move would have been politically untenable… At the same time, Dhaka is also deepening engagement with China…With these developments, India’s traditional two-front dilemma risks hardening into a perceived three-front encirclement,” Petermann argues in an article published Thursday on the website, War on the Rocks.
“For much of the past decade, Washington treated Bangladesh as important but secondary. From 2009 to 2024, US policy toward Dhaka was shaped largely by an India-centric frame, with Hasina’s Awami League government broadly aligned with New Delhi on counterterrorism, connectivity, and managing China’s rise”, he adds.
However, with the growing distance between New Delhi and Dhaka, Petermann writes that India’s focus could “invert”, focusing on China in the North, Pakistan to the West and Bangladesh to the East, reducing any potential pressure Beijing would face from its Western flank in any future crisis in Taiwan.
The US military official points out that Bangladesh has increasingly sought defence deals with Pakistan, making an order worth 40,000 rounds of artillery ammunition from Islamabad last year. Visits by Bangladeshi military officials to India’s Western neighbour highlight a growing sense of an institutionalisation of ties between the two countries.
“In early November, Pakistan Navy Ship Saif docked in Chittagong, the first Pakistani naval visit to Bangladesh in more than 50 years. Shortly after, Heavy Industries Taxila’s chairman, Lt. Gen. Shakir Ullah Khattak, held discussions in Dhaka on upgrades to Bangladesh’s Chinese-origin Type 59 and Type 69IIG tanks, reinforcing the defense-industrial turn,” writes Petermann.
This has consequences for India. “Chinese hardware, Pakistani expertise, and Bangladeshi adoption, creates a de facto alignment that could complicate India’s air defense and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance planning,” he adds.
He points to an opportunity for Beijing to “consolidate its broader regional architecture” as Bangladesh now is the second largest recipient of Chinese military technologies. The implications Petermann highlights are more than just the encirclement of India. It will lead to a potential tilt in the maritime areas if Bangladesh, even at a “modest level”, integrates further into the Pakistan-China naval system, further complicating the situation for Taiwan.
“It lessens the likelihood that India could use its navy to threaten Chinese sea lines of communication in a crisis, and increases the incentive for New Delhi to husband scarce assets for the defense of its own coasts and islands instead of supporting a broader maritime coalition in the South China Sea,” notes Petermann.
Even the change in government in Bangladesh, with new Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, is unlikely to change the more transactional nature of ties between New Delhi and Dhaka currently, according to the author.
Rahman, elected last month has shown his willingness to consider China as a “development” partner. Meanwhile, though ties between India and Dhaka have seen some signs of a thaw, the fundamentals of the relationship are still under a lens.
India has been perceived as too close to the former government led by Sheikh Hasina, who was ousted in August 2024. Hasina’s ouster through student-led protests, has left the Awami League powerless within Bangladesh. The party was blocked from contesting the February 2026 elections, while Rahman’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and the Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh have become the largest parties in the country’s parliament.
The Jamaat has historically been anti-India, and the shadow of Hasina continues to loom large on New Delhi’s approach to Dhaka. For China, the vacuum is a positive outcome, giving it more space to manoeuvre in the South China Sea if India is unable to free its focus from the Eastern boundaries.
“A less-encircled India could play a far more consequential role in a Taiwan crisis. With fewer local dilemmas, India could turn the eastern Indian Ocean into a genuine second front by threatening China’s sea lines of communication and offering its ports and airfields as enablers for U.S. and allied forces,” notes Petermann.
He adds, “This would force the People’s Liberation Army to keep substantial troops and aircraft tied down along the Himalayan frontier, rather than shifting them east to the western Pacific. By opening critical infrastructure to coalition operations, India could credibly threaten China’s western sea lanes, sustain operations far beyond its borders, and create a two-front challenge for Beijing.”
(Edited by Niyati Kothiyal)
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