“Greater Bangladesh”: Yunus gifts new map, with India’s N-E, to Pak general!
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Dancing to the tunes of its erstwhile tormentor, Islamabad, Dhaka is now fancying to forge a so-called “Greater Bangladesh,” incorporating India’s northeastern states, the media reported on Monday.
This ‘plot’ surfaced with the Bangladesh government’s interim chief advisor Muhammad Yunus gifting a distorted map to a visiting Pakistani general. It immediately sparked a row as the controversial map of Bangladesh included Assam and other northeastern states as part of the Muslim-majority country that broke away from Pakistan in 1971.
Yunus presented the gift to Pakistan’s Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee chairperson, General Sahir Shamshad Mirza, during his visit to Dhaka.
The image of the gift, which Yunus’ official X account shared shows a book titled “Art of Triumph: Bangladesh’s new dawn”, which can be seen as an ode to the so called 2024 ‘student movement’ which toppled the Sheikh Hasina government.
The dream of a “Greater Bangladesh” was championed by Dhaka-based and pro-Pakistan Islamist outfit “Sultanat-e-Bangla,” backed by a Turkish NGO. This concocted map of Bangladesh includes India’s entire Northeast region, West Bengal, and parts of Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, as well as Myanmar’s Arakan state.
The map first surfaced in April 2025 after it was displayed at an exhibition at the University of Dhaka held on Pohela Baishakh, the Bengali New Year.
The issue was later raised in the Rajya Sabha by Congress MP Randeep Singh Surjewala in August 2025.
The so-called map also emerged in 2024 after a close aide of Yunus, Nahidul Islam, floated the idea of “Greater Bangladesh” by sharing a map which included parts of West Bengal, Tripura, and Assam as those of Bangladesh.
The presentation of this map is not the first time the Bangladesh leader has invoked northeast India. During his visit to China in April, Yunus championed Dhaka as the “only guardian of the ocean” for the region, adding that India’s northeast remains landlocked.
“The seven states of India, the eastern part of India… they are a landlocked country. They have no way to reach out to the ocean,” Yunus was quoted as saying.
Following this remark, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar reaffirmed the strategic importance of India’s northeast, referring it as a connectivity hub for Bimstec – Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, the reports said.
Since the Islamists, under the guise of a ‘student movement,’ toppled the democratically-elected Hasina Wajed government in August 2024, ties between India and Bangladesh plummeted, especially when Yunus rushed closer to China and Pakistan.
India’s access to the northeast, via the so-called ‘Chicken’s Neck’ corridor in north Bengal, has been a challenge. Over the last decade, New Delhi engaged with Dhaka on transit routes in the region. But after the fall of the Hasina government, Bangladesh came under the anti-India regime led by Yunus who has been warming up not only with China and the US but even with Pakistan.
India also cancelled a transhipment agreement that allowed Bangladeshi goods to move through Indian territory on way to Nepal, Bhutan, and Myanmar.
Tensions flared again in May after a close aide of Yunus suggested that Bangladesh should collaborate with China to occupy India’s northeastern states if it attacked Pakistan. The remark by Major General (retd) Fazlur Rahman came following the Pahalgam attack by Pakistani terrorists that left 26 dead.
Despite such provocative posts and remarks from Bangladeshi leaders, Yunus’s stoic silence prompted analysts to suggest that his repeated invocation of India’s northeast may represent a veiled attempt to manipulate regional dynamics amid growing ties with China and Pakistan.
