As Bangladesh becomes a geopolitical battleground, Tagore and Lalon are crucial weapons for defence

A clandestine audio recording from a diplomatic meeting in Dhaka in December has ripped away the curtain on Bangladesh’s moment of precariousness. As The Washington Post reported on January 22, it captures a US diplomat stating that Washington wants to be “friends” with Bangladesh’s once-banned Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, noting that “100% tariffs” could be imposed overnight if the party steps out of line.

This is not routine diplomacy. It is the sound of a nation becoming a strategic battleground. With a pivotal election imminent, this leak reveals a brutal truth: Bangladesh’s sovereign choices are being framed not just by its citizens, but within the calculated games of distant capitals.

Bangladesh’s founding was a symphony of secular democracy and hard-won self-determination, born from the blood of the 1971 Liberation war. Yet that symphony is being forcibly rewritten, its pluralist notes silenced.

In a stark example, a theatre performance of Rabindranath Tagore’s Shesher Kobita was cancelled in April after threats from hardline groups. A festival for the beloved mystic bard Lalon met the same fate in November, declared “against Islam”. This cultural erasure is the domestic front of a larger geopolitical war.

This pragmatic outreach occurs as the US and China trade diplomatic barbs over influence in Dhaka, with a US ambassador warning of Chinese influence and Beijing firing back. Engaging a resurgent Jamaat, therefore, appears as much a move to secure Washington’s footing in a competitive arena as it is about direct engagement with the party itself.

Beijing’s play is one of deep strategic entrenchment. A new government-to-government deal for a $55 million military drone manufacturing plant is weaving China’s defense-industrial footprint directly into the fabric of the Bay of Bengal. When the new US ambassador voiced concerns about “broader Chinese influence”, the Chinese Embassy fired back with remarkable bluntness, stating cooperation “brooks no interference” from Washington.

For India, this is a strategic nightmare. Hearing its long-time ally, former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, speak from exile in New Delhi about a “foreign-serving puppet regime” underscores New Delhi’s anxiety as it watches a nation it helped birth drift into a new orbit. Completing this four-way pressure is Pakistan, sensing opportunity in rekindled defense ties, including talks on advanced fighter jets.

Internal fractures

However, the ultimate danger lies in how this external pressure amplifies internal fractures, threatening to dissolve sovereignty into chaos – a volatile “mobocracy”. The state’s monopoly on force has eroded since the 2024 uprising against the Hasina regime, with over 5,800 weapons looted from police armories. In this vacuum, radicalism festers. Previously banned groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir hold public rallies, while “moral policing” by sympathisers of Islamist groups has become commonplace.

Most alarmingly, symbols of global terror have been normalised at public gatherings, with flags of the Islamic State displayed openly – a once-unthinkable sight that risks legitimising the world’s most violent ideologies for a disillusioned generation.

This internal decay is the true battleground. External powers may seek influence, but the nation cracks from within, where geopolitical maneuvering provides both motive and cover for local actors to seize power through fear and division.

Reclaiming the script

The path forward is not a choice between rival patrons, but a disciplined reclaiming of agency. It requires a triad of resolve. First, building institutions stronger than any mob – an independent judiciary, a free press and a political culture that rejects the violence and extortion plaguing the current campaign.

Second, exercising a foreign policy of principled multi-alignment. Engagements, whether the Chinese drone deal or defense talks with Pakistan, must be judged on strict, transparent terms of national benefit, not as favours in a geopolitical ledger.

The final, and most potent, weapon is cultural resilience. In a world of cynical power plays, the living memory of 1971 and the defiant humanism of poets like Tagore and Lalon form an internal fortress. They are the antibody against the politics of hate and the seductive pull of external patronage. This cultural legacy must be actively defended not as nostalgia, but as a vital security doctrine for national survival.

Rabindranath Tagore dreamed of a place “where the mind is without fear”. For Bangladesh today, that mind without fear is an act of defiance. It is the conscious choice to finish its own symphony, to write its sovereign script in a world teeming with eager ghostwriters.

The leak from Dhaka is a stark clarion call. The question for Bangladesh is whether it will remain a piece on someone else’s board, or rise as the master of its own game.

Zakir Kibria is a Bangladeshi writer, policy analyst and entrepreneur based in Kathmandu, Nepal. His email address is zk@krishikaaj.com.