Splitting hairs and double standards

Delhi based online news portal The Print recently published an opinion piece titled "Bangladesh Army turns religious. Fidel Castro had warned Sheikh Mujib." Written by journalist Deep Halder, the article attempts to construct a narrative that the Bangladesh Army is undergoing an Islamist transformation under General Waker-uz-Zaman. 

To support this ‘imposed identity’ against the armed forces of a sovereign nation of 175 million people, one might expect a dossier of verified intelligence. Instead, the evidentiary foundation of this article is astonishingly thin. 

Strip away the dramatic headline, the Fidel Castro anecdote, and historical nostalgia, and the argument essentially rests on three items: a tweet about the general's beard, an RSS journal article, and an unnamed report. This is a political narrative assembled from ideological fragments, completely devoid of local reporting or official military verification.

When a man's facial hair is presented as proof of ‘radicalisation,’ analytical rigor yields to phrenology. Millions of peaceful, observant Bengali Muslims wear traditional beards without posing any threat whatsoever to stability. Across the border, India rightly protects the religious appearance of its Sikh soldiers. No serious observer argues that a bearded Sikh general signals the creeping theocratisation of the Indian Army. 

Bangladesh's army chief deserves the same elementary standard, rather than facing a prejudicial double standard that equates piety with subversion.

The critique similarly targets military heritage, labeling the naming of four cadet companies after the first four caliphs as evidence of an Islamist shift. Yet it ignores the obvious parallel. The Indian Army proudly maintains regiments rooted in specific religious, ethnic, or caste identities such as the Sikh, Rajput, Dogra, and Jat formations whose battle cries invoke traditional deities. 

The Maratha Light Infantry invokes the legacy of Chhatrapati Shivaji. Armed forces worldwide draw upon civilisational traditions to foster cohesion. The first caliphs occupy a place in Muslim history comparable to Shivaji in India. Naming companies after them is institutional heritage, obviously not ‘jihad.’

This narrative of radicalism collapses entirely under the weight of its own contradictions as well. It ignores General Waker’s address at a Janmashtami celebration, where he assured minority communities that the nation belongs to everyone and promised firm protection. 

Instead, it mischaracterizes a routine commissioning speech urging moral values as dangerous radicalism. Anyone familiar with global academies, from Sandhurst to West Point, knows that appeals to character, integrity, and faith are completely conventional. Indian ceremonies are themselves steeped in religious symbolism. A basic exhortation to moral conduct is hardly evidence of extremism.

More instructive is the general's actual record. In August 2024, after Sheikh Hasina's security apparatus had killed hundreds of protesters, the army explicitly refused to fire on its own citizens. This crucial intervention prevented a bloodbath, precipitated the collapse of an autocracy, and forced the authoritarian Hasina into hasty exile in India. 

Since then, the military has guarded Hindu temples, maintained constitutional order, and supported a political transition leading to elections. If preserving civilian lives and enabling democracy indicates radicalisation, the term has lost all meaning. The general's real offense was refusing to sustain a tyranny through bloody violence.

The sourcing requires equal scrutiny. For its gravest assertions, the commentary leans on an article from Organiser, the ideological journal of the RSS. Treating a publication defined by Hindu majoritarianism as a neutral arbiter on Bangladeshi Islamism is analytically absurd. It resembles using a Jamaat-e-Islami tract to evaluate Hindutva. 

Unverified claims regarding altered battle cries enter public discourse through this single partisan lens before being recycled as fact. This aligns with a broader regional pattern; since Hasina’s fall, independent analysts have repeatedly exposed manufactured Indian media stories alleging fictional massacres and geopolitical takeovers.

The historical reference to Fidel Castro serves a similarly rhetorical, rather than an evidentiary, purpose. An old conversation from 1973 provides zero insight into contemporary institutional choices. Instead, it manufactures an emotional trajectory designed to justify political restoration. 

The timing is deliberately calculated. The piece arrived precisely as Hasina’s camp intensified its regional public relations campaign, seeking to portray recent legal proceedings as selective prosecution. It reads less like cold strategic analysis and more like an effort to subvert Bangladesh’s new domestic consensus.

Geopolitical ironies abound in this narrative. The Indian establishment expresses panic over Dhaka’s normal diplomatic engagement with Islamabad, yet New Delhi routinely hosts and negotiates with the Taliban’s leadership when core realpolitik interests demand it. 

This willingness to engage an isolated, actual theocratic regime while framing benign cadet traditions in Bangladesh as radicalisation highlights a profound insincerity. These pervasive fabrications of this volatile nature ultimately damage enduring bilateral relations, steadily eroding Indian institutional credibility among ordinary Bangladeshis who closely monitor such external narratives. 

The core problem has never been the personal faith of Dhaka's soldiers or their harmless academy customs. The real grievance, felt deeply by some observers, is that the Bangladesh Army ultimately chose alignment with its own populace over ensuring the continual political survival of India’s preferred regional autocrat. 

Bangladesh’s armed forces answer exclusively to their own citizens, parliament, and sovereign institutions rather than foreign demands. They must not be unfairly reduced to hostile dossiers manufactured across the border from unverified ideological fragments, partisan publications, and fleeting social media rumors that undermine genuine goodwill and mutual respect between neighbours.

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Zulkarnain Saer is an investigative journalist