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When Sajeeb Wazed Joy addressed an audience at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in New Delhi alongside an audio appearance by the ousted former prime minister Sheikh Hasina on August 5, he was reviving a familiar doctrine that has shaped Awami League’s politics for nearly two decades.

That is without Sheikh Hasina and her party Awami League, Bangladesh inevitably descends into terrorism, Islamist militancy and state collapse. It is a ‘powerful’ narrative. It is also one that increasingly struggles to survive contact with reality.

Throughout his remarks, Joy painted Bangladesh as a “failed state,” warned that it had become “another Pakistan” on India’s eastern frontier, claimed that Hezbollah marches openly, that Al-Qaeda operatives address public rallies, that foreign intelligence agencies enjoy a free hand, and that Bangladesh could become the world’s next exporter of terrorism.

He urged India and the international media to rally behind this interpretation before it was too late. These are extraordinary allegations. They demand extraordinary evidence. And none was provided.

‘Accept the conclusion without presenting the evidence’

The most striking feature of Joy’s speech is its repeated substitution of insinuation for verifiable fact. His central proposition is that Islamist militancy has returned because Sheikh Hasina is no longer in power.

Yet nearly two years after her removal, Bangladesh has witnessed no major terrorist attack, no cross-border terrorist operation against India, and no evidence that the country has become the regional epicentre of ‘jihadist violence,’ like the way Joy and Awami League wanted to portray Bangladesh.

If Bangladesh had truly become “another Pakistan,” as Joy claimed, the first people to sound the alarm would almost certainly have been India’s own security establishment. That has not happened yet.

Nor has New Delhi issued any public warning suggesting Bangladesh now constitutes a terrorism threat. Intelligence cooperation between the two countries has continued. Cross-border security mechanisms remain functional.........

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