Bangladesh’s interim leader Muhammad Yunus sparks diplomatic fury after gifting Pakistan’s top general a map depicting India’s Northeast and parts of Myanmar as “Greater Bangladesh.”
A fresh diplomatic storm has erupted in South Asia after Bangladesh’s interim head Muhammad Yunus presented a controversial “Greater Bangladesh” map to Pakistan’s Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee Chairperson General Sahir Shamshad Mirza during his official visit to Dhaka.
The image, proudly posted on Yunus’s official X account, showed the gift — a book titled “Art of Triumph: Bangladesh’s New Dawn” — alongside a distorted map that outrageously incorporated India’s entire Northeast, West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, and Myanmar’s Arakan State as part of a future “Greater Bangladesh.”
This reckless gesture, seen as a symbolic endorsement of the Islamist expansionist doctrine propagated by Dhaka-based group “Sultanat-e-Bangla,” has sparked mass outrage across India and renewed concerns about Yunus’s shifting alliances with Pakistan and China following the ouster of Sheikh Hasina’s pro-India government last year.
The ‘Greater Bangladesh’ concept first surfaced in April 2025, when the same map was displayed at the University of Dhaka during a Pohela Baishakh (Bengali New Year) exhibition — and was later linked to a Yunus aide, Nahidul Islam, who publicly promoted the map as a “vision for the future.”
The controversy was even raised in India’s Rajya Sabha in August 2025 by Congress MP Randeep Singh Surjewala, with External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar later confirming intelligence reports that “Sultanat-e-Bangla” receives ideological and financial backing from Turkish Islamist NGOs.
Yunus’s latest provocation marks his second attack on India’s Northeast. During a visit to China in April, he dismissed the region as “landlocked” and proclaimed that Bangladesh is the “only guardian of the ocean” — comments widely interpreted as aligning Dhaka closer to Beijing’s Belt and Road ambitions and undermining India’s regional leadership.
In response, EAM Jaishankar reaffirmed that India’s Northeast is the connectivity hub of BIMSTEC, the Bay of Bengal cooperation bloc that includes Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Thailand.
Relations between New Delhi and Dhaka have sharply deteriorated since Yunus’s rise to power, with Sheikh Hasina now living in exile in India and the interim regime courting Chinese and Pakistani patronage. Analysts warn that Yunus’s rhetoric risks transforming Bangladesh from an Indian ally into a strategic outpost for Beijing and Islamabad.
India, already managing territorial provocations from China’s false claims over Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin and Pakistan’s continued obsession with Kashmir, now faces another cartographic aggression — this time from Dhaka itself.
Diplomatic sources in New Delhi say a strong protest note is being prepared, calling the distorted map “an affront to India’s territorial integrity and regional stability.”
Yunus’s stunt, critics argue, reveals the truth behind his “new dawn” — a dangerous tilt toward Islamist and anti-India forces, threatening to destabilize the region once again.
