The international community has, for too long, accepted Pakistan’s victim narrative at face value. The reasoning has often been geopolitical.

Every time the world confronts Pakistan with evidence of its support for terrorism, it responds with the same script. It is a victim of terrorism, not a sponsor. Its neighbours are out to defame it. The groups operating from its soil are rogue actors, beyond state control. The script has worn thin. Operation Sindoor, in May 2025, demolished it.

The Indian airstrikes on the night of May 6 to 7, 2025, did not target shadowy hideouts in remote tribal regions. They targeted Bahawalpur, a city of nearly a million people in central Punjab, well within Pakistan’s settled and policed heartland. They targeted Muridke, the sprawling Lashkar-e-Taiba complex on the outskirts of Lahore. They struck nine sites in total, four in Pakistan proper and five in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir. The locations told their own story. These were not camps that Pakistan had failed to find. These were camps that Pakistan had built.

The Family Business of Terror

Consider the case of Jaish-e-Mohammed, the group whose Bahawalpur headquarters India struck on May 7. Jaish was founded in 2000 by Masood Azhar, a man Pakistan released from Indian custody in December 1999 in exchange for hostages on a hijacked plane. According to multiple accounts cited by Pakistani journalists and Western researchers, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate paraded Azhar through Pakistan after his release on a fundraising tour, and helped him stand up the new outfit.

Pervez Musharraf, who served as Pakistan’s president from 2001 to 2008, admitted in a 2019 interview that Jaish-e-Mohammed had carried out attacks in India on the instructions of Pakistani intelligence. This was not an Indian allegation. This was the former military ruler of Pakistan acknowledging that Pakistan’s spy agency had directed terror operations against a neighbouring country.

Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group whose Muridke complex India also struck, has a similar profile. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies has documented that Lashkar conducts its attacks, including the 2008 Mumbai siege, with the consent and support of the ISI. David Coleman Headley, the Pakistani-American operative who scouted the Mumbai targets, testified that he met with six different ISI officers during his time with Lashkar. American investigators identified one of them, known only as Major Iqbal, as having provided 25,000 dollars in cash and direct operational guidance for the attack that killed 166 people.

What the Strikes Revealed

If Jaish and Lashkar were really rogue outfits operating outside Pakistani state control, the strikes of May 7 should have produced confused and uncertain reactions. Pakistan should have struggled to identify what had been hit, who had died, and why. Instead, the response was immediate and revealing. Pakistan’s military leadership knew exactly what had been targeted, because the targets were on Pakistan’s books in all but name.

In September 2025, a senior Jaish commander named Masood Ilyas Kashmiri appeared at the group’s annual Mission Mustafa conference and openly admitted that Masood Azhar’s family had been killed in the Bahawalpur strikes. Ten members of the family died, including Azhar’s sister, her husband, a nephew, a niece, and five children. Four close aides also died. The location of the strike was Jamia Masjid Subhan Allah, the headquarters of Jaish-e-Mohammed, sitting comfortably inside Pakistani territory, with a UN-designated terrorist living openly within its walls.

The picture this paints is unambiguous. Masood Azhar, listed as a global terrorist by the United Nations Security Council since May 2019, was not in hiding. He was at home, with his family, in a complex protected by the Pakistani state. His brother Abdul Rauf Asghar, also a UN-designated terrorist and the operational head of Jaish, was reportedly killed in the same strike. Pakistan’s posture of plausible deniability has rested for decades on the fiction that men like these are difficult to find. India’s strikes proved that the only people who found them difficult to find were Pakistan’s own authorities.

The Cost of the Charade

The international community has, for too long, accepted Pakistan’s victim narrative at face value. The reasoning has often been geopolitical. Pakistan was a frontline state in the Cold War. Pakistan was a partner in the war on terror. Pakistan held nuclear weapons that demanded careful handling. Each of these arguments contained a fragment of strategic logic. None of them justified the systematic protection of men who killed civilians in Indian cities and villages.

The cost of this charade has been borne by India and by the broader region. Pakistan’s continued sponsorship of terror groups has poisoned the entire South Asian neighbourhood. It has prevented the development of normal trade and travel relations. It has consumed resources that could have built schools and hospitals on both sides of the border. And, most tragically, it has cost thousands of innocent lives across decades of attacks that Pakistan’s intelligence services helped plan, fund, and execute.

Operation Sindoor changed the equation. By striking Bahawalpur and Muridke, India made plain what had always been true. The terrorist infrastructure attacking India operates from inside Pakistan, with the protection of the Pakistani state. The terrorist leadership lives in Pakistani cities, raises families in Pakistani neighbourhoods, and runs operations from Pakistani buildings. The fiction of state distance from these activities has collapsed.

The world now has a choice. It can continue to accept the Pakistani script of victimhood, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Or it can finally treat Pakistan as what it has long been: a state that uses terrorism as an instrument of policy, and that pays a price every time it does. India has decided which path it will follow. The international community must now decide which path it can credibly continue to ignore.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

The broker gets the headline. Whether the broker shapes the outcome is a different matter entirely.

Every few years, usually after some dramatic diplomatic moment, a version of the same argument resurfaces in Western policy circles: Pakistan, despite being economically fragile and institutionally troubled, keeps showing up at the table. India, despite being the region’s dominant economy and a democracy with global ambitions, somehow doesn’t. The implication is usually that India is doing something wrong, or that Pakistan has figured out a trick India refuses to learn. This reading is understandable. It is also, on closer inspection, considerably overstated.

What Pakistan Actually Does — and What It Costs

Let’s be clear about what Pakistan’s diplomatic record actually consists of. It has, at various points, served as a conduit between parties that could not talk to each other directly. In 1971, it facilitated the Nixon-Kissinger opening to China. Through the 1980s, it managed the American and Saudi pipeline to the Afghan mujahideen. Most recently, in early 2026, it apparently relayed a fifteen-point American peace proposal to Tehran as Washington and Iran traded strikes across the Middle East.

These are real accomplishments. The structural explanation for them is also fairly persuasive: Pakistan is nuclear-armed, so India cannot simply overwhelm it; it is perpetually broke, so it needs patrons and is therefore always in the market for a useful role to play; and it sits at a geographic crossroads that makes it hard for any outside power with regional ambitions to simply ignore. A state that needs patrons to survive is a supplicant. A state that needs patrons for everything except survival has leverage.

But this picture has a shadow side that tends to get glossed over. The same army that makes Pakistan useful as a broker also spent two decades as the Taliban’s primary patron and ran the A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network, which is perhaps the most consequential act of nuclear irresponsibility since the Cold War. The Saudi-Pakistani defence pact signed in September 2025 — widely celebrated as evidence of Pakistani strategic genius — places Islamabad in the position of simultaneously acting as Sunni military guarantor to Riyadh and back-channel to Tehran, while managing a domestic population that includes forty million Shia Muslims. That is not strategic elegance. That is a set of contradictions held together by willpower and ambiguity, and ambiguity eventually runs out.

As for the 2026 Iran ceasefire — the centrepiece of Pakistan’s current claim to indispensability — what has it actually produced? A communication channel, some announcements, a few deadlines that came and went, and a running commentary on Truth Social that has alternately declared peace imminent and threatened renewed bombardment, sometimes within the same week. Pakistan relayed a message. That is nothing. But it is a long way from a settlement, and attributing structural significance to a back channel whose existence owes something to a crypto deal signed in January 2026 between Pakistan’s army chief and the Trump family’s business venture requires a certain generosity of interpretation.

India’s Forgotten Record

The standard critique of Indian foreign policy — that it is all relationships and no obligations, all presence and no commitment — proceeds as though India’s diplomatic history began sometime around 2014. It didn’t.

During the Korean War, it was India’s V.K. Krishna Menon who broke the armistice deadlock that had stalled negotiations for over a year. The specific problem was prisoner-of-war repatriation — neither side could accept the other’s terms, and the talks had collapsed. India proposed voluntary repatriation overseen by a neutral commission. The formula was adopted in the 1953 Armistice, and India chaired the commission that implemented it. This is precisely the kind of creative, trust-based mediation that gets attributed exclusively to Pakistan in contemporary analysis. It happened, it worked, and it has been largely forgotten.

In Cyprus, from 1964 onward, India contributed meaningfully to the UN peacekeeping force at a moment when Greek and Turkish Cypriot violence was threatening to pull NATO members into direct confrontation. Again, not a passive gesture — load-bearing participation in a genuinely difficult situation.

In South Asia itself, India built SAARC in 1985 as a regional integration framework, and the diagnosis of its failure matters enormously. SAARC did not fail because India lost interest or refused to make commitments. It failed because Pakistan consistently used it as a platform for bilateral grievance rather than regional cooperation — most visibly when the 2016 Islamabad Summit was cancelled after Pakistan-based militants attacked an Indian Army base at Uri. When an institution you helped build gets repeatedly blocked by one of its members, the conclusion to draw is not that you should have built more institutions.

The Gulf: A Different Kind of Presence

The argument that India has no real presence in West Asia because it has no defence pacts or troops stationed in Gulf states reflects a fairly narrow idea of what presence means. Over nine million Indian nationals live and work across the Gulf. Their remittances — exceeding forty billion dollars annually — are not just an economic statistic. They represent a web of human and institutional relationships that generates its own diplomatic weight.

When conflict has broken out in Yemen, Sudan, or Lebanon, India has mounted large-scale evacuation operations for its citizens. These operations do not happen without the quiet cooperation of Gulf governments. That cooperation reflects a relationship of mutual utility — not formalised in a treaty, not legible in alliance databases, but real. India also does not need troops in Riyadh to have influence in Riyadh. It needs Saudi Arabia to care whether India is doing well. Given the depth of economic and human ties, Saudi Arabia does.

More recently, the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor — announced at the 2023 G20 Summit in New Delhi — represents exactly the kind of connectivity architecture that is supposedly absent from Indian foreign policy. It ties Indian ports to Gulf infrastructure to European markets, and it gives multiple partners a concrete stake in Indian diplomatic stability. It is slower than a defence pact. It is also, arguably, more durable.

Strategic Autonomy and its Variables

None of this means India’s foreign policy is without genuine limitations. The doctrine of strategic autonomy — India as friend to all, obligated to none — has real costs that deserve honest acknowledgement. A state that declines binding commitments on most contested questions of international order does not accumulate allies in the deep sense — states that owe their security to Indian support and therefore have a structural interest in Indian success. Strategic autonomy, practised consistently, means India has many friends and few clients. That is a real constraint on the kind of influence that gets exercised in crisis moments.

Whether that is a correctable policy or structural reality is the more interesting question. India’s size and economic trajectory mean that many states want its friendship regardless of whether it takes sides. The United States cultivated a similar posture through much of the early twentieth century — extensive economic engagement, minimal alliance obligations — and the transition from that posture to full great-power engagement was ultimately forced by external events rather than chosen. Whether the current deterioration of the regional security environment, including the 2025 India-Pakistan conflict, might function as a similar forcing moment is perhaps the most consequential open question in South Asian foreign policy today.

What the Competition Actually Is

The framing of India versus Pakistan as competing models of diplomatic influence obscures something important: they are not competing for the same thing. Pakistan is optimised for crisis relevance — it is useful when things are going wrong, when parties cannot talk to each other, when someone needs a conduit. That is a real and valuable role. It is also, by definition, dependent on there being a crisis, on the crisis involving parties who both trust Pakistan, and on the political incentives of outside powers aligning in ways that make Islamabad useful rather than inconvenient.

India is building something slower and harder to see — economic interdependence, connectivity infrastructure, institutional presence across multilateral forums, and the accumulated credibility that comes from not being anyone’s instrument. Whether that model generates more durable influence over the next two decades than Pakistan’s brokerage model is a genuinely open question. But it is the right question to ask, and it is not answered by pointing to who was on the phone with Trump and Tehran in the same week. The broker gets the headline. Whether the broker shapes the outcome is a different matter entirely.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

Nancy Grewal’s family is demanding justice. Justice now means more than solving a murder.

Western democracies like to sermonize about rights, pluralism, and the protection of dissent. Their real test is simpler: what do they do when an ordinary immigrant woman says she is afraid and asks for help?

Nancy Grewal asked for help.

She was a 45-year-old Sikh woman who moved to Canada in 2018, settled in Windsor, Ontario, and worked as a personal support worker. Her union later described her as a steward and a committed worker. She was not a celebrity activist insulated by institutions. She was a frontline worker, often alone, who also became known online for criticizing the violent Khalistan movement and the people she believed used intimidation, influence, and religious spaces to dominate parts of her community.

On the night of 3 March 2026, after finishing work at a client’s home on Todd Lane in LaSalle, she was stabbed multiple times and later succumbed to her injuries. Police were unusually clear from the beginning: this was “not a random act of violence” but “an intentional act against her.” The Ontario Provincial Police later joined the probe. Nancy Grewal was not caught in random chaos—she was targeted.

What makes the case darker is that she appears to have predicted it.

CityNews reported on 5 March that Nancy’s sister, Alisha, said she had been receiving threats, believed she was being followed, and had already gone to police with the names of the people she feared. Alisha called the murder “pre-planned” and “revenge” for Nancy’s videos. Later, speaking to AM800, she asked the question that now sits at the centre of the case: if her sister was “giving names, giving everything,” why was she not taken seriously?

Nancy’s own words make that question impossible to ignore. In a video recorded after someone tried to burn her house in November 2025, she said: “I’m a Canadian citizen, but I don’t feel safe in this country right now.” She also pointed toward Gurdwara Khalsa Parkash in Maidstone, alleging that the intimidation came from men linked to that gurdwara. This matters because it places the story not simply in the realm of a private feud, but in a charged religious ecosystem where community power, diaspora radicalism, and fear can overlap.

After her murder, investigators released surveillance footage of what they described as a targeted arson at her home. A van stops. A man gets out with a gas can, pours liquid on the porch, sets it alight, and flees. This was no imagined danger—it was a documented attack on her home months before she was killed.

Nancy did not describe that arson as an isolated act. She linked it to an earlier shooting near St. Rose Avenue and Wyandotte Street East in Windsor. In her account, these were connected expressions of the same pattern. She said the “real man” behind the attacks does not come forward himself but “hires repeat offenders and criminals to do the job.”

That line is one reason public attention later turned to the names her family raised.

After Nancy was killed, her mother said she had feared Avtar Singh Kooner. She also named Barinder Shokar and Harpinder. According to the family, Harpinder befriended Nancy on Instagram, followed and surveilled her, came to her house, and checked for cameras around the home and car. Her mother’s point was blunt: Nancy’s location as a healthcare worker was not widely known, and it was highly unlikely that her employer had leaked it. If that account is true, this was not accidental exposure—it was deliberate access.

The Kooner name carries its own shadow. Air India inquiry records show that RCMP investigators searched Avtar Singh Kooner’s residence in June 1985. Reporting on Gurfathe “Laddi” Singh Kooner, Avtar’s son, described an earlier case in which he was seen tossing a bag from an F-150 pickup; the recovered bag contained guns and ammunition. The backdrop is darker still: Avtar Kooner appears in a social media photograph with Lakhbir Singh Rode, nephew of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. Rode has been publicly identified as a leading figure in the International Sikh Youth Federation, which Canada lists as a terrorist entity. None of this proves who killed Nancy Grewal, but it places the names raised by her family within a historical and political context far more serious than Canada likes to admit.

Then the institutional questions become impossible to ignore.

On 15 March, the OPP released the arson video and said they were trying to determine whether it was linked to Nancy’s murder. On 20 March, Alisha publicly asked why that footage had not been released sooner. By 23 March, AM800 reported that the OPP and LaSalle Police had taken over the arson file from Windsor Police because investigators believed there could be a connection. If a woman reports threats, if her home is later confirmed to have been targeted in an arson attack, and if that arson may be linked to her murder, then the issue is no longer simply whether she was afraid. The issue is whether the system acted with anything like the urgency her case demanded.

There is another deeply uncomfortable detail. Nancy had spoken to CBC in February about the threats she was facing. Canadaland later described that interview as one in which she said she feared for her life just days before she was stabbed to death. The interview, by later accounts, aired only after she was killed. CBC is entitled to its editorial judgment, but the moral question remains: when a woman says on record that she is under threat, what obligation does a public broadcaster owe—not just to journalism, but to urgency?

This should shame more than one institution. Police had warnings. Media had testimony. Her family says officers were given names and even a letter. Yet Nancy remained exposed until the danger she described became irreversible.

Canada has a habit of flattening such cases into the language of “community tensions,” as though threats, stalking, arson, and murder are merely difficult internal disagreements best managed quietly. That language is not neutral. It shields institutions from embarrassment while leaving vulnerable people to absorb the risk.

Nancy Grewal’s family is demanding justice. Justice now means more than solving a murder. It means answering the harder question Canada would rather avoid: When Nancy Grewal said she was in danger, why did Canada not act as if she was?

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

For Pakistan’s small Sikh community, long associated with sacred shrines and historical memory, but seldom with state authority, it marked a rare breakthrough.

Pakistan is often described as an Army with a state rather than a state with an army. In such a system, even seemingly routine decisions, such as military promotions, can carry deep political meaning. One such case was the promotion of Lt Col Harcharan Singh in February this year, as the first Sikh officer in Pakistan’s history to attain this rank. Months later, it still merits attention, not because it was merely unusual, but because it revealed how identity, military power, and regional politics continue to intersect in Pakistan.

At one level, the promotion was politically noteworthy and institutionally revealing. For Pakistan’s small Sikh community, long associated with sacred shrines and historical memory, but seldom with state authority, it marked a rare breakthrough. Yet in Pakistan, where the military remains the country’s most powerful institution, promotions are seldom read only as personnel decisions. They can also be instruments of strategic messaging.

Advancement within Pakistan’s armed forces carries prestige, influence, and political meaning beyond what most civilian institutions can confer. For a minority officer to rise in that structure is therefore no minor development.

Harcharan Singh’s own journey helps explain why the event resonated so widely. 

Born in 1987 in Nankana Sahib: the birthplace of Guru Nanak and one of Sikhism’s holiest centres, he came from a town central to Sikh religious consciousness worldwide. He later studied at the prestigious Forman Christian College in Lahore, one of Pakistan’s oldest and most respected institutions, historically known for producing political leaders, diplomats, academics, and public figures across communities.

Afterward, he reportedly cleared Pakistan’s Inter Services Selection Board and entered the Pakistan Military Academy, Kakul, through the 116^th Long Course. When commissioned in 2007, he was widely described as the first publicly known Sikh officer to receive a regular commission in the Pakistan Army since Partition.

He was initially inducted into the Army Ordnance Corps, a technical branch responsible for logistics, stores etc. Subsequently he joined the 12^th battalion of Baloch Regiment, indicating movement into a more operational environment linked to field command structures. In professional militaries, such trajectories matter. They reveal whether representation remains ceremonial or extends into the institution’s core functions.

By that measure, Singh’s promotion is meaningful. But it is placed within a broader strategic context.

Pakistan’s Sikh population is small, commonly estimated to be no more than 15,000. Yet its political value exceeds its demographic size. Unlike other minority communities, Sikhs occupy a space where faith, geography, memory, and India-Pakistan rivalry converge. Pakistan hosts some of Sikhism’s most sacred sites: Nankana Sahib, Kartarpur, Panja Sahib. Few states possess custodianship over the sacred geography of a community whose largest population lives elsewhere.

Islamabad has increasingly recognised the utility of that reality.

The Kartarpur Corridor, opened by former PM Imran Khan in 2019, was welcomed by pilgrims as a humanitarian and religious breakthrough. It was also an exercise in modern soft power. It allowed Pakistan to project tolerance, engage Sikh sentiment directly, and shape international perceptions at relatively low strategic cost. 

That same logic helps explain why Sikh inclusion carries a different strategic weight from the inclusion of other minorities. Sikhs constitute roughly 1.7 to 2 percent of India’s population, but their national influence exceeds numbers alone. They are economically prominent, politically mobilised, globally networked through a substantial diaspora, and historically overrepresented in India’s armed forces relative to population share. Their presence in Punjab, India’s border state adjoining Pakistan, adds another layer of geopolitical relevance.

Unlike Christians or Hindus, Sikhs offer Pakistan something rare in geopolitics: a minority constituency with emotional relevance inside India, religious relevance globally, and sacred geography inside Pakistan. 

This is why Pakistan’s engagement with Sikh politics has never been merely domestic.

During the militancy years of the 1980s, Pakistan’s security establishment was widely understood to have provided sanctuary, training, financing, and logistical support to Khalistani militant networks operating against India. Over time, the methods evolved from covert infrastructure and cross-border facilitation to diaspora outreach, information campaigns, and symbolic religious diplomacy. The objective, however, has often appeared consistent: keep Punjab politically sensitive and India strategically vulnerable. 

Seen in that light, Harcharan Singh’s promotion is about more than minority advancement. It reinforces outreach to Sikh communities abroad, complements Pakistan’s custodianship narrative over Sikh heritage sites, and projects institutional openness at a time when the country continues to face scrutiny over blasphemy laws, discrimination against Christians, insecurity among Hindus, and the constitutional exclusion of Ahmadis.

That leads to a more difficult question. If this promotion is evidence of broad-based inclusion, why has no Christian, Hindu, or other minority officer publicly emerged with comparable prominence in the Army’s visible hierarchy? Are others less capable, less deserving, or simply less useful to the state’s strategic narrative?

This is where representation shades into selective inclusion.

Institutions sometimes elevate a few exceptional individuals not only to reward merit, but also to project an image of systemic openness and institutional inclusivity. One success story can be amplified as proof of reform. Yet symbolic mobility for a handful does not necessarily amount to structural equality and inclusion of minorities. 

None of this diminishes Harcharan Singh’s personal achievement. Rising through a rigid military hierarchy requires discipline and competence. But in Pakistan’s case, it would be simplistic to read the episode solely through the language of diversity and one individual’s calibre.

As with many political gestures in Pakistan, the significance of this promotion lies not only in what it reveals, but in what it may conceal. The deeper story is about how states convert identity into influence. Pakistan’s handling of Sikh symbolism: from Kartarpur diplomacy to selective representation in the army, suggests a maturing soft-power strategy in which minority visibility serves not only domestic optics, but wider geopolitical aims vis-à-vis India. 

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

India has tended to treat each episode as a bilateral matter, protest, and move on.

On April 10, 2026, China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs unveiled its sixth round of “standardised” place names for what it calls “southern Tibet”—a reference to India’s Arunachal Pradesh—adding 23 new entries to its expanding list. This latest exercise continues a pattern that began in 2017, taking the cumulative number of renamed locations to over 110.

Before 2017, such efforts were limited, with just 16 names officially retained between 2009 and 2017. However, the pace has accelerated significantly in recent years, with successive batches introduced in 2017 (6 names), 2021 (15), 2023 (11), 2024 (30), 2025 (27), and now 2026 (23), reflecting a sustained and deliberate push.

Notably, the 2026 list is overwhelmingly focused on geographical features rather than inhabited areas. Only two names—Chaku and Xinjing (Shincheon)—refer to settlements, both located in zones of historical or strategic relevance dating back to the Sino-Indian War. The remaining 21 names are assigned to mountains, peaks, and slopes, many situated around the Yarlung Tsangpo basin and its adjoining valleys, underscoring a targeted approach to cartographic assertion in sensitive terrain.

Three Fronts, One Target

Arunachal Pradesh is only one corner of a much larger game. In Nepal’s northern districts — Humla, Rasuwa, Sindhupalchowk — there have been documented encroachments over the last several years: border pillars moved, Chinese infrastructure appearing on areas Nepal’s own maps show as Nepali territory, grazing land that Himalayan communities have used for generations quietly absorbed into what Beijing treats as administered Chinese space. The renaming of these locations follows the encroachment, retrospectively assigning Chinese names to places already brought under de facto control.

Nepal’s response has been muted, for reasons that are not hard to understand. Its Belt and Road commitments — including the Pokhara International Airport, financed by Chinese loans and opened in 2023 — create financial obligations that generate strong incentives to avoid confrontation. Beijing’s United Front Work Department has invested heavily in cultivating relationships within Nepal’s major political parties and media institutions. And Nepal’s political instability — the country has cycled through governments with remarkable speed since its 2015 constitution — means there is rarely an administration in Kathmandu with both the institutional continuity and the political will to push back consistently.

In Bhutan, the stakes are starker still. China and Bhutan have been negotiating their border since 1984, with more than 25 rounds of talks without resolution. In 2020, China introduced an entirely new dispute by listing Bhutan’s Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary as a “disputed area” at a Global Environment Facility board meeting, despite having raised no prior claim there. Sakteng lies in eastern Bhutan, far from the longstanding western disputes, abutting Arunachal Pradesh. The strategic logic was transparent: manufacture a new bargaining chip to trade for concessions in Doklam, the plateau whose military value China has coveted ever since the 73-day standoff of 2017.

Doklam matters not because of its size but because of where it points. A Chinese military presence there would command the Chumbi Valley, which in turn points directly at the Siliguri Corridor — the narrow strip of Indian territory, roughly 22 kilometres at its narrowest, that connects India’s entire northeastern region to the rest of the country. Strategists sometimes call it the Chicken’s Neck. It is the most consequential piece of geography on the eastern front, and it is what sits at the end of the thread that runs from Doklam through Bhutan’s border negotiations to Beijing’s renaming exercises in Arunachal.

The Real Prize Is Not on the List

None of the 23 newly named locations in Arunachal Pradesh are what China actually cares about most. Arunachal is a display case — a pressure point kept warm to ensure that India cannot concentrate its diplomatic and military energies on the one piece of territory that China genuinely cannot afford to lose: Aksai Chin.

China’s National Highway 219, which traverses the Aksai Chin plateau at an altitude, is the primary logistical link between Tibet and Xinjiang — two regions whose stability is central to the CCP’s territorial narrative. Beijing quietly built the road through Aksai Chin in the late 1950s before India even knew construction had begun. When New Delhi eventually discovered it, the resulting crisis fed directly into the 1962 war. India has never formally conceded the territory. Every official Indian map still shows Aksai Chin as part of Ladakh. The 2019 reorganisation of Jammu and Kashmir, which created the Union Territory of Ladakh with Aksai Chin explicitly within its stated boundaries, was a deliberate signal — and Beijing read it precisely that way. The military buildup in Ladakh that led to the Galwan Valley clashes of June 2020 was, at least in part, a response to Indian infrastructure development that China interpreted as preparatory to a more assertive posture.

The shadow of Zhou Enlai’s “package deal” offer to Nehru still haunts the diplomatic architecture. In 1959, China proposed recognising the McMahon Line in the east in exchange for India’s acceptance of Chinese sovereignty over Aksai Chin in the west. Nehru rejected it, and the offer was never formally revived. What China appears to be doing today is inflating the price of any future version of that deal: each new disputed name in Arunachal, each encroachment in Humla, each manufactured claim in Sakteng adds another chip to Beijing’s side of the eventual table. India’s domestic political constraints — no government can publicly concede Aksai Chin and survive — mean that formal negotiation remains frozen. But in the meantime, the ground shifts.

What India Has Got Right, and What It Hasn’t

India’s response since Galwan has been more serious than its pre-2020 posture. The acceleration of border infrastructure in Ladakh and Arunachal — roads, tunnels, forward helipads — has been real and measurable. The forward deployment of additional mountain divisions has followed. The Modi government’s decision to ban hundreds of Chinese apps, restrict Chinese investment in sensitive sectors, and publicly call out Beijing’s encroachments represented a departure from the studied ambiguity that characterised Indian China policy for most of the 2000s.

What India has not done well is tell this story internationally. The cumulative pattern of China’s toponymic campaigns, its physical encroachments in Nepal, its manufactured Bhutan disputes, and its administrative restructuring in Xinjiang is not a series of bilateral irritants. It is a coherent grey-zone strategy whose logic would be recognised—and should concern—any government that has watched Beijing deploy the same playbook in the South China Sea.

India has tended to treat each episode as a bilateral matter, protest, and move on. It has not systematically built the international narrative that would make Beijing’s methods legible and costly in global opinion.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

Nancy had said she was unsafe. She had said her home was targeted. She had gone to police with names.

Nancy Grewal was a Canadian Sikh woman who came to Canada in 2018 to work, support her family, and build a life through sheer effort. She worked in Windsor, Ontario, as a personal support worker, often long hours, and became known in her union as a committed member and steward. But beyond her work, she became known for something else: she spoke openly against the violent Khalistan movement and against those she believed wielded fear and influence within her community.

That public voice came with a cost. According to CityNews Canada reporting on March 5, 2026, Nancy’s sister, Alishaa Grewal, said Nancy had been receiving threats, believed she was being followed, and had already gone to police with the names of people she feared. Alishaa described the killing as a “preplanned murder” and “revenge” for Nancy’s videos. These details place Nancy’s death in the context of repeated warnings, not sudden chaos.

On the night of March 3, 2026, Nancy was stabbed outside a home on Todd Lane in LaSalle, Ontario, shortly before 9:30 p.m., after finishing work at a client’s residence. CityNews reported that she was attacked outside and “stabbed continuously.” LaSalle Police later said the killing was “not a random act of violence” and was being investigated as “an intentional act against her.” The Ontario Provincial Police were later brought in to assist.

What makes this case especially troubling is that Nancy had already described the danger in her own words. In a video recorded before her death, she said someone had thrown gasoline on the front porch of her house in November 2025 and stated plainly: “I’m a Canadian citizen, but I don’t feel safe in this country right now.” In that same video, she alleged that the man behind the attack was linked to Gurdwara Khalsa Parkash in Maidstone. She also connected that intimidation to an earlier shooting near St. Rose Avenue and Wyandotte Street East in Windsor.

Local reporting in the Windsor Star confirms that Windsor police investigated shots fired in that area on March 9, 2023, at the location (St. Rose Avenue and Wyandotte Street East) that houses Pal’s Auto Service. In Nancy’s telling, these were not isolated incidents—they formed part of a pattern.

Her account went further. Nancy said the “real man” behind the attacks never comes forward himself, but instead “hires repeat offenders and criminals to do the job.” She described a family with a criminal background, said one man had already faced a drug case, and claimed his son kept illegal weapons in a vehicle and tried to dispose of them before police caught him.

That detail gives particular relevance to the public record surrounding Gurfathe “Laddi” Singh Kooner, as reported by the Windsor Star. Reporting on Gurfathe Kooner’s case (son of Avtar Singh Kooner) stated that he was seen tossing a bag from the window of his F-150 pickup, with the recovered bag containing guns and ammunition. Nancy did not name him directly, but the overlap between her description and that record is striking.

After Nancy was killed, her mother’s videos further sharpened the picture. She said Nancy was brutally killed by enemies she had long feared, that those enemies were tied to Gurdwara Khalsa Parkash in Maidstone, and that Avtar Singh Kooner was among the men Nancy feared. She said Nancy had been pressured to apologize to him, that people linked to the gurdwara threatened she would lose “her job” and “her home,” and that someone had previously tried to attack her at home but fled when cameras were noticed.

She also said Nancy had reported “each and everything” to police, including submitting a letter. CityNews independently reported that Nancy had indeed gone to police and supplied the names of people she feared.

The name Avtar Singh Kooner also carries historical weight. Air India inquiry materials record that RCMP investigators searched his residence for guns in June 1985. On Avtar’s social media, he appears in a photograph with Lakhbir Singh Rode, nephew of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. Rode has been identified in public archival and terrorism-related references as a figure associated with the International Sikh Youth Federation, an organization listed in Canada as a terrorist entity.

That history may not answer the question of who killed Nancy Grewal, but it gives the local network she and her mother described a deeper and more serious context.

In the aftermath of the murder, Nancy’s mother was later seen softening or retracting parts of her earlier accusations. Even so, the core facts did not change: Nancy had said she was unsafe. She had said her home was targeted. She had gone to police with names. Then she was killed in what police themselves described as an intentional act.

Nancy Grewal’s story is not simply the story of a murder. It is the story of a working woman who warned that she was under threat, identified the people she feared, and was killed anyway. Her family, and much of the wider community, are now living not only with grief but with fear—and they are demanding justice.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

The increasing number of voluntary surrenders suggests that more people now see returning as a viable option.

For anyone who has spent time studying political violence, India’s experience with Left-Wing Extremism feels different from the usual story. It is not just about an insurgency being pushed back by force. Something slower, less visible, but ultimately more important seems to be taking place.

Over the years, I have followed armed movements in different parts of the world—from Latin America to parts of Europe—and what is happening in India today stands out because it challenges a long-held assumption: that insurgencies are defeated mainly through military pressure.

A recent article by Zahack Tanvir in Times of Israel, “Left-Wing Terrorism No More? India’s Strategy from Force to Trust,” captures this shift quite well. As he writes, the real question now is not simply whether Maoist violence can be controlled, but whether “the conditions that allowed it to thrive are finally being addressed.”

That distinction matters. Across countries and contexts, insurgencies tend to survive not because of ideology alone, but because they grow in places where the state is absent, where poverty is entrenched, and where people feel they have been left behind.

When belief begins to fade

The Maoist movement in India, which traces its roots back to the Naxalbari uprising in 1967, followed a pattern we have seen elsewhere. It began in regions marked by inequality and neglect, drawing strength from local frustrations. For a time, that gave it a certain legitimacy in the eyes of some communities.

But movements like these rarely stay the same. Over time, they harden. Leadership becomes distant, ideas become rigid, and maintaining control often starts to rely more on pressure than persuasion. What we seem to be witnessing in India today is what I would describe, less academically, as a kind of exhaustion within the movement.

The growing number of surrenders is telling. More than 100 cadres lay down arms in a single day, as happened in Bijapur. It suggests more than fear of security forces. It points to something deeper—a quiet loss of faith.

Researchers often note that insurgencies don’t just end on the battlefield. They unravel when people stop believing in the cause. Tanvir makes this point directly: such movements “fade when people stop believing in them.” We have seen similar patterns in places like Northern Ireland and Nepal, where the psychological shift came before any formal end.

The slow return of the state

At the same time, the Indian state has not stood still. Security operations have continued, and the loss of key Maoist leaders in 2025 clearly disrupted the group’s structure. But what is more interesting is what has been happening beyond those operations.

In many of these regions, the state is becoming visible again in ways that matter to everyday life. Roads are being built where there were none. Mobile connectivity is reaching areas that were once cut off. Police stations are not just present, but fortified and functioning.

These changes may sound technical, but they reshape the environment in which an insurgency operates. Areas that were once isolated—where armed groups could move, recruit, and control information—are becoming harder to dominate.

There is also a quieter contest taking place: a battle over who represents the people. Maoist groups long positioned themselves as protectors in places where the state was missing. But as governance slowly returns, that claim becomes harder to sustain. When people can access services, communicate freely, and see institutions working, the appeal of parallel authority weakens.

Some of the steps taken by authorities carry a symbolic weight as well. Giving surrendered cadres copies of the Constitution may seem like a small gesture, but it signals something important—that the relationship with the state is meant to be based on rights, not just control.

Beyond surrender: rebuilding trust

What stands out most to me, however, is how surrenders are being treated. In many parts of the world, former insurgents face suspicion and limited opportunities, which can push them back toward violence. India appears to be trying a different approach.

Rehabilitation policies in Indian states like Chhattisgarh offer financial assistance, housing, land, and training. These are not entirely new tools, but the intent behind them feels different. The focus is less on showcasing victory and more on creating a path back into society.

This is where trust becomes central. In many of these regions, the absence of the state created space for insurgents to step in. Over time, that absence fed the conflict itself. Reversing that cycle requires patience. It is not something that can be achieved through security operations alone.

There are signs, however, that this process has begun. Community engagement initiatives, more sensitive policing, and efforts to bring officials and locals into direct conversation are gradually changing perceptions. It is not dramatic, and it is certainly not uniform, but it is noticeable.

The increasing number of voluntary surrenders suggests that more people now see returning as a viable option. That, in itself, is a significant shift. Trust is not built overnight, but once it begins to take hold, it can reshape the dynamics of a conflict.

A quiet but important shift

The progress made so far will depend on whether governance continues to improve and whether trust is sustained. Daily life is beginning to look different. Roads are opening up, communication is improving, and state institutions are becoming part of the landscape again.

Perhaps the most telling change is in how success is being measured. As Tanvir notes, the focus is slowly shifting—from counting how many insurgents have been neutralized to how many have chosen to come back. That is not just a policy adjustment; it reflects a different way of thinking about conflict.

From a broader perspective, there is something to learn here. Insurgencies rooted in deep social and economic issues cannot be resolved by force alone. They require the state to be present in a meaningful way—to provide services, to listen, and to be seen as legitimate.

In the study of terrorism and political violence, we often look for decisive moments, clear endings. India’s experience suggests that change can be quieter than that. It can happen through small, cumulative shifts—people making different choices, communities slowly re-engaging, institutions rebuilding their place.

If this trajectory continues, India may offer an example that goes beyond its own borders: not of how to simply defeat an insurgency, but of how to make it lose its reason to exist.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

What is unfolding in Pakistan’s case is part of a wider global trend. The line between domestic and international repression is becoming harder to draw.

At this year’s session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, Pakistan was once again in the spotlight. That, in itself, is not unusual. What felt different, however, was the tone of the conversations taking place in the corridors and side events. The focus was no longer limited to what happens inside Pakistan’s borders. Increasingly, attention is shifting to what follows critics when they leave.

As someone who studies terrorism and state responses to dissent, I found this shift telling. It points to a broader transformation in how power is exercised. Repression, in this sense, is no longer something contained within territory. It travels with people. It adapts to new environments. And it often slips through the cracks of legal systems that were never designed to deal with such subtle, dispersed pressure.

The discussions on March 27 at the Palais des Nations brought this into sharper focus. Activists and observers described a pattern that many in academic circles have been tracking for some time: the gradual erosion of the idea that exile offers safety. What used to be a clear boundary—inside versus outside—now feels increasingly blurred.

Disappearances at Home, Silence by Design

To make sense of what is happening abroad, it is necessary to begin within Pakistan. Enforced disappearances remain one of the most troubling and persistent issues, particularly in regions like Balochistan. For years, families have protested, sometimes in small groups and sometimes in large marches, asking a simple question: where are their loved ones?

Reports by Human Rights Watch and similar organisations have documented these cases in detail. The pattern is painfully familiar. Someone is taken, often after an encounter with security forces. Then comes silence. No official acknowledgement, no clear legal process, and very little hope of accountability.

What is often missed in policy discussions is the wider effect of this practice. Disappearances are not only about removing individuals; they are about sending a message. Fear spreads outward—from the missing person to their family, their community, and beyond.

In my own research on political violence, I have seen similar dynamics in very different contexts. The actors may differ, but the outcome is strikingly similar: silence, caution, and self-censorship.

The case of Idris Khattak brought rare international attention to this issue. Yet it also highlighted a deeper problem. For every case that reaches global headlines, many more remain invisible. This uneven attention creates what some scholars describe as a “hierarchy of suffering,” where only a handful of stories are heard while the rest fade into the background.

This is reinforced by a lack of transparency. Legal processes are often opaque, oversight is limited, and avenues for redress are weak. Over time, this creates a system where such practices can continue with little consequence. It is from within this environment that the outward projection of pressure begins.

When Pressure Crosses Borders

What became clear in Geneva is that these domestic patterns do not stop at the border. Instead, they seem to follow those who leave. Testimonies from activists, including Roshaan Khattak, painted a picture that is less dramatic than high-profile international incidents, but no less unsettling.

The methods described are rarely direct. There are no dramatic confrontations or visible operations. Instead, the pressure is quieter. Family members back home are approached or questioned. Administrative hurdles appear unexpectedly—delayed documents, unexplained complications. Messages arrive, sometimes anonymous, reminding individuals that distance does not necessarily mean safety.

Because these actions are informal and often deniable, they are extremely difficult to address. Host governments in Europe or North America may be aware that something is happening, but proving it is another matter entirely.

Freedom House has identified Pakistan as one of several countries engaged in what is now termed transnational repression. What stands out in this case is not spectacle, but persistence. There are no headline-grabbing incidents, but rather a steady, ongoing pressure that shapes behaviour over time.

From a research perspective, this challenges how we think about coercion. Traditional frameworks tend to separate what happens inside a country from what happens outside it. But here, the two are clearly connected. The same habits, the same tools—only adapted to a different setting.

A Contemporary Glimpse: Pressure Through Families

A recent case involving journalist Waqas, reported by DropSite, offers a glimpse into how this can unfold in practice. He alleged that police in Karachi harassed his parents after he reported on Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz and claims regarding her son Junaid Safdar’s use of a government Gulfstream jet for a private European trip. According to his account, his family was pressured into issuing a statement.

The Sharif family has firmly denied these allegations, calling them propaganda and stating that the aircraft in question was undergoing maintenance. As with many such cases, the details are contested and difficult to independently verify.

Yet what matters analytically is the pattern. The idea that pressure can be applied not directly to the individual, but to those close to them, is not new. It is, however, highly effective. People may be willing to take risks themselves, but far fewer are willing to see their families bear the consequences.

In studies of coercion and political violence, this kind of indirect pressure is well understood. It works precisely because it targets emotional and social ties that are almost impossible to shield. When used by states, it becomes even more complex, raising difficult questions about accountability and response.

A Policy Gap That Is Hard to Ignore

One of the clearest takeaways from the Geneva discussions is that policy has not kept pace with reality. There is growing documentation of abuses within Pakistan, and now increasing evidence of pressure beyond its borders. Yet responses remain fragmented.

There is still a tendency, particularly in Europe, to assume that offering asylum or residency is enough. In many cases, it is not. The forms of pressure described by activists do not fit neatly into existing legal categories. They rarely cross the threshold required for criminal prosecution, but they still have a real impact on people’s lives.

This creates a difficult situation for governments. How do you respond to something that is hard to prove, easy to deny, and yet clearly harmful? Existing counterterrorism frameworks offer little guidance, as they are largely focused on non-state actors. Diplomatic considerations, meanwhile, often limit how far states are willing to go in confronting such practices.

There are no easy solutions. Better documentation and coordination between countries would be a start. So too would legal frameworks that recognise and address transnational repression more directly. Without such steps, there is a risk that these practices will become more common, not less.

The Bigger Picture

What is unfolding in Pakistan’s case is part of a wider global trend. The line between domestic and international repression is becoming harder to draw. States are finding ways to extend their reach without resorting to overt or easily traceable actions.

For those of us who study political violence, this presents both a challenge and a warning. The tools of control are evolving, and our ways of understanding them need to evolve as well.

The discussions in Geneva made one thing clear: leaving a country no longer guarantees distance from its power structures. Repression, in its modern form, is more flexible than that. It moves through networks, relationships, and systems that span borders.

The question now is whether international institutions and national governments are prepared to deal with this shift. If not, they risk confronting a new reality with outdated assumptions—and that is rarely a winning strategy.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

The Merchant case therefore fits a recognizable pattern: recruitment outside Iran, deployment in third countries, and reliance on criminal intermediaries to carry out violent actions.

In March 2026, a U.S. federal jury convicted Asif Merchant, a Pakistani national with links to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), on charges of terrorism and murder-for-hire.

Prosecutors argued that Merchant attempted to orchestrate the assassination of American political leaders during the 2024 election cycle, including president Donald Trump. The plot collapsed only because the individuals he attempted to hire turned out to be undercover FBI agents.

At first glance, the episode might appear to be another isolated case of a failed extremist plot. Yet the details emerging from court records, intelligence disclosures, and related cases reveal something more troubling.

Merchant’s trajectory—from alleged recruitment by the IRGC in Pakistan to his attempt to coordinate a political assassination inside the United States—illustrates the evolving architecture of transnational covert operations directed at American political targets.

For U.S. policymakers, the Merchant case should not merely be treated as a criminal prosecution. It is a warning signal about the persistence of state-linked assassination plots and the vulnerability of open democratic societies to external clandestine networks.

From Recruitment to Assassination Planning

According to U.S. prosecutors, Merchant began working with operatives linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in late 2022 or early 2023 while in Pakistan. His responsibilities included laundering funds and establishing operational contacts outside Iran.

By late 2023, investigators believe Merchant had been tasked with a more ambitious assignment: identifying potential recruits for covert operations in the United States. In April 2024, he traveled to the country and began seeking intermediaries who could carry out violent acts against political figures.

Court filings describe a chilling sequence of meetings in New York during June 2024. Merchant reportedly explained to individuals he believed were professional hitmen that he required three services: document theft, organized protests at political rallies, and the assassination of a “political person.”

The operation was never realized. Merchant unknowingly paid a $5,000 advance to undercover agents and was arrested in July 2024 before leaving the United States.

In March 2026, after a federal trial in Brooklyn, a jury convicted him of attempting to commit terrorism and murder-for-hire, crimes that carry a potential life sentence.

What makes this case particularly alarming is the alleged state-linked dimension. U.S. prosecutors argued that Merchant was acting under the direction of IRGC operatives.

The Soleimani Factor and Iran’s Retaliatory Doctrine

To understand why American political figures might be targeted, analysts often point to a pivotal moment in January 2020: the U.S. drone strike that killed Qasem Soleimani, commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force. The strike, ordered by President Donald Trump, dramatically escalated tensions between Washington and Tehran.

Since Soleimani’s death, U.S. intelligence agencies have warned of Iranian efforts to retaliate through covert operations targeting American officials. In fact, the Merchant plot was widely interpreted by investigators as part of a broader revenge campaign.

The strategic logic is consistent with Iran’s historical reliance on asymmetric tactics. Rather than confronting U.S. military power directly, Iranian security institutions—including the IRGC and associated intelligence units—have frequently relied on proxy networks, covert agents, and deniable intermediaries abroad.

The Merchant case therefore fits a recognizable pattern: recruitment outside Iran, deployment in third countries, and reliance on criminal intermediaries to carry out violent actions.

Not an Isolated Case

The significance of the Merchant episode becomes clearer when examined alongside other documented plots attributed to Iranian networks.

One of the most prominent examples involves Shahram Poursafi, an IRGC-linked operative charged by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2022 for allegedly plotting to assassinate former national security adviser John Bolton.

Prosecutors said Poursafi attempted to hire a hitman and offered payments of up to $1 million for the killing.

Another case emerged in 2024, when U.S. authorities accused Farhad Shakeri, an alleged IRGC asset, of coordinating murder-for-hire operations targeting American and Iranian-American figures in New York.

According to investigators, Shakeri’s network sought to recruit criminal associates to carry out the killings.

Similarly, the FBI issued alerts in 2024 regarding Iranian intelligence operative Majid Dastjani Farahani, suspected of recruiting individuals to assassinate U.S. officials.

Taken together, these cases suggest a strategic pattern rather than isolated incidents. The use of intermediaries—often foreign nationals or diaspora contacts—allows state actors to maintain plausible deniability while extending operational reach.

Implications for U.S. National Security

The Pakistani Merchant conviction underscores a fundamental challenge confronting American security institutions: the growing intersection between state intelligence operations and transnational criminal networks.

Unlike traditional espionage, these plots do not rely exclusively on trained intelligence officers. Instead, they recruit businessmen, expatriates, or individuals with international mobility who can move between countries without immediate suspicion.

Merchant himself reportedly maintained business interests and family connections across Pakistan, Iran, and the United States, enabling him to travel and operate with relative ease.

For the United States, this raises a difficult policy question. Counterterrorism frameworks were largely designed to combat non-state extremist organizations such as al-Qaeda or ISIS. State-sponsored assassination networks, however, operate under different strategic assumptions.

They can leverage diplomatic cover, international logistics networks, and intelligence infrastructures that blur the line between criminal conspiracy and geopolitical confrontation.

In practical terms, the Merchant case highlights three vulnerabilities. First, the reliance on global business and migration networks can provide cover for covert operatives. Second, the use of freelance intermediaries complicates intelligence detection. Third, political polarization within the United States may increase the symbolic value of targeting prominent political figures.

A Test of Strategic Vigilance

The conviction of Asif Merchant represents a success for American law enforcement and intelligence cooperation. The FBI’s use of undercover agents prevented a potential assassination and provided prosecutors with decisive evidence.

Yet the broader lesson is not one of closure but of caution. Merchant’s case demonstrates how geopolitical conflicts can spill into the domestic political sphere of the United States. Whether acting under coercion, ideology, or financial incentives, individuals embedded in transnational networks can become instruments of foreign strategic agendas.

For the U.S. government, the challenge moving forward is not simply prosecuting individual operatives. It is recognizing that such plots may represent only the visible edges of deeper covert infrastructures. If the Merchant case is treated merely as a criminal anomaly, the larger pattern may go unnoticed.

In that sense, the verdict delivered in March 2026 should be interpreted less as the end of a story than as the opening chapter of a continuing security challenge—one that requires vigilance not only from law enforcement, but from policymakers responsible for safeguarding the stability of American democracy.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

The Yunus-led interim government provided fertile ground for Pakistan to manoeuvre this policy.

When Sheikh Hasina was removed from office in August 2024 after mismanaging two-month student uprising through violence, the political aftershocks were felt well beyond Dhaka. While an interim administration led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus took charge shortly to stabilize and reset the country, but inside the shifting currents of Bangladeshi politics, there was another country saw opportunity, which was Pakistan.

For Islamabad, the fall of Prime Minister Hasina, who was long perceived as closely aligned with India, appeared to offer a rare strategic opening. The interim arrangement which was crowded by sympathizers of Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, created space for religious parties long marginalized under the Awami League’s rule. Pakistan moved quickly with intensified diplomatic exchanges, and even senior military leadership of two countries making reciprocal visits.

But what increased with unusual frequency was Pakistani religious delegations travelling to different cities and towns of Bangladesh from Dhaka to Cox’s Bazar in south and Sylhet in east, among others.

Behind the choreography appeared Islamabad’s clear calculation that if Bangladesh’s Islamist political sphere could be rejuvenated, Dhaka might be kept away from New Delhi and within the broader regional orbit of Islamabad. That bet seems to have failed now. In the recently concluded 13^th general election, Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) won a landslide two-thirds majority, winning 212 of the 299 seats on the ballot.

Led by Tarique Rahman, son of former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia and former President Ziaur Rahman, BNP campaigned on the slogan of “Bangladesh First”, emphasising that it will not be beholden to any foreign capital. This political messaging seems to have resonated powerfully with the Bangladeshi electorate.

Such a decisive vote has delivered a strong message to Pakistan, which seemed convinced that its favoured Islamist bloc will win the elections and give Islamabad a strong footing in Dhaka.

Pakistan’s Bangladesh policy in the post-Hasina moment followed a familiar template. It has for decades viewed South Asia through the prism of strategic competition with India. Where New Delhi consolidates influence, Pakistan seeks counterweights as has been witnessed in Afghanistan where this logic has shaped policy for years. In Bangladesh, Islamabad appeared to hope for a softer replay.

The Yunus-led interim government provided fertile ground for Pakistan to manoeuvre this policy. As Islamist networks that had faced political constraints under the Awami League suddenly found renewed visibility, Islamabad’s outreach extended beyond official channels into clerical and ideological spaces.

For instance, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, head of Deobandi Islamist Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (F), led a delegation of around two dozen prominent Pakistani religious leaders to Bangladesh ahead of parliamentary election in November 2025. They addressed large gatherings, organised under the banner of Khatm-e-Nabuwat conferences, across major cities and towns of the country, which were reportedly held in support of Islamist political actors preparing to contest the February 12 election.

The symbolism of this religious affinity was hard to miss and, it seems, Islamabad believed that by encouraging the Islamization of Bangladesh’s political sphere, it could cultivate a government less beholden to India and more receptive to Pakistan.

Yet this approach rested on two flawed assumptions. Firstly, it overestimated the electoral pull of Islamist forces in contemporary Bangladesh and secondly underestimating the depth of Bangladesh’s historical memory around 1971 war crimes committed by Pakistan Army in what was then East Pakistan.

This memory and Islamabad’s reluctance to issue a formal apology over the war crimes remains central to Bangladesh’s national identity. It seems Pakistani policymakers willingly or otherwise seemed to calculate that five decades were enough to blunt that legacy and that religious affinity could transcend historical grievance.

For many Bangladeshis, Pakistan is not simply another state but a former ruler whose actions precipitated immense trauma which remains unchanged across generations. If anything, it has been institutionalized through education, public commemorations and war crimes trials. And BNP’s campaign slogans captured this sentiment with clarity as it called for “Bangladesh First” against any outright alliance with any foreign power (Na Pindi, Na Dilli).

Moreover, Pakistan’s attempt to leverage Islamization as a foreign policy tool also reveals a deeper tension. While Bangladesh is a Muslim-majority country, yet its political culture remains fundamentally based on Bengali linguistic nationalism. The Awami League’s secular framing was one expression of that synthesis.

Even the BNP, while more accommodating of religious parties as was witnessed during its earlier rules, has not sought to subordinate national policy to clerical authority. While it is true that interim government’s closeness with Jamaat-e-Islami may have energized segments of Islamist base, but, as the results showed, it did not translate into a groundswell.

Therefore, it is quite possible that Islamabad’s outreach through clerical visits, cross-border religious gatherings, symbolic solidarity may have reinforced suspicions that Islamist mobilization was being externally encouraged. For a country sensitive to sovereignty, such perceptions usually prove counterproductive.

In fact, there is an irony here.  While Pakistan’s own domestic experience illustrates the complexities of entangling religion and statecraft, yet in Bangladesh, it appeared willing to encourage precisely that dynamic in pursuit of geopolitical advantage.

Nevertheless, the failure of Pakistan’s Bangladesh bid echoes its recent miscalculation in Afghanistan where Islamabad’s military-dominated establishment believed that it possessed decisive influence in Kabul after backing Afghan Taliban’s return to power in 2021. But relations with Afghanistan today are strained, marked by months long border closure and recurrent skirmishes along the contested Durand Line dividing the two countries. 

It can be argued that Pakistan overestimated the durability of ideological affinity as a substitute for structural partnership in both the cases. Neither has religious affinity guaranteed strategic alignment with Kabul nor has it now delivered political ascendancy in Dhaka as Bangladesh’s electorate has signalled that while religion remains integral to social life, it does not automatically translate into foreign policy alignment.

For Pakistan, this presents a dilemma since Dhaka’s determination to pursue a “Bangladesh First” policy offers limited space for the kind of ideological leverage that Islamabad sought to cultivate.

While Islamabad’s Bangladesh policy after 2024 was built on the hope that a moment of political flux could be shaped into strategic realignment, its engagement will therefore need recalibration and for any pragmatism to sustain, the relations will have to be transactional and grounded in mutual interest rather than religious solidarity.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.