From Kashmir To East: China-Pakistan Alliance Uses Bangladesh To Open New Front Against India
Pakistan and China are using Bangladesh's internal volatility, rising radicalism, and Yunus's pro-China tilt to expand their front against India beyond Kashmir
The China-Pakistan strategic nexus, long entrenched in Kashmir, is now expanding its focus to India's eastern frontier, CNN-News18 has learnt. While Bangladesh had previously remained a reluctant participant in this equation, economic pressures and the rise of Islamist radicalisation are now creating fertile ground for external interference.
Bangladesh's interim leader, Muhammad Yunus's recent remarks portraying Bangladesh as the 'only guardian of the ocean" for India's landlocked Seven Sisters region — and suggesting this could be an 'extension of the Chinese economy" — are being seen as a potential alignment with Chinese and Pakistani geopolitical interests.
Yunus's emphasis on the strategic use of Bangladesh's seaports, including Chittagong and Mongla, aligns with China's objective of bypassing India's regional dominance.
Recent geopolitical developments suggest that Pakistan is attempting to leverage Yunus's transitional leadership to further Chinese interests vis-à-vis India. This approach is consistent with Islamabad's broader strategy of diverting India's focus from Kashmir by creating a simultaneous pressure point in the East.
According to sources, the ISI is exerting pressure to remove Bangladesh's Army Chief. However, the majority of Army Commanders continue to support the Chief. The ISI's objective appears to stem from the Army Chief's advocacy for a swift restoration of democracy in Bangladesh — a move that Yunus is resisting.
Pro-Pakistan social media networks and platforms such as Dawn have sought to portray Yunus's institutional challenges as part of a broader democratic decline in South Asia, while attributing this to India's alleged regional hegemony.
China is using Pakistan to persuade Bangladesh through offers of low-cost Chinese imports, including textiles and machinery. This strategy aims to undercut India's trade dominance, which stood at Rs 14.2 billion in bilateral trade in 2023. The effort is closely linked to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which Pakistan is actively promoting to weaken India-Bangladesh economic ties.
Pakistan's ISI is also suspected of funding Islamist groups in Bangladesh, such as Hefazat-e-Islam, to propagate anti-India rhetoric. Evidence of such activity has emerged in border regions like Sylhet and Chittagong. Radicalised factions have mobilised around issues such as the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and Hindu majoritarianism in India.
The ISI is aiming to provoke cross-border unrest on India's eastern flank. Earlier protests in Assam over migrant policies were amplified by Bangladeshi Islamist groups. These demonstrations were further fuelled by Pakistani social media accounts that sought to inflame tensions.
Pakistan's deep state is also reactivating dormant insurgent networks in India's Northeast, including the ULFA and NSCN, through Bangladesh-based operatives. Recent seizures of Pakistani-origin weapons in Tripura and Assam point to the reactivation of smuggling routes.
According to credible intelligence inputs, Pakistan is coordinating with Turkey and Malaysia to introduce resolutions at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). These efforts aim to criticise India's policies in both Kashmir and the Northeast, using the Rohingya refugee crisis in Bangladesh as a parallel narrative.
Artificial intelligence-generated videos and fake news stories alleging Muslim persecution in Assam and West Bengal are being disseminated through Bangladeshi platforms such as Bhorer Kagoj. Investigations have traced the digital origins of these materials to Pakistan-based IP addresses.
China is also reviving the BCIM corridor — a BRI sub-project — to deepen Bangladesh's economic dependency. Pakistan is acting as a facilitator in this effort, which aims to bypass Indian territory and reduce Dhaka's reliance on Kolkata's ports.
In a parallel development, Bangladesh's recent procurement of Chinese VT-4 tanks and Type 056 corvettes signals a strategic shift away from India and Russia. These defence acquisitions have been facilitated through Pakistani diplomatic lobbying.
Watch India Pakistan Breaking News on CNN-News18. Get breaking news, in-depth analysis, and expert perspectives on everything from geopolitics to diplomacy and global trends. Stay informed with the latest world news only on News18. Download the News18 App to stay updated!
First Published:
May 14, 2025, 14:54 IST
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Mint
25 minutes ago
- Mint
America's biggest rare-earth producer makes a play to end China's dominance
At an industrial site in this Texas city, men dressed in head-to-toe protective gear dip giant ladles into a well of molten metal heated to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. They're making something the U.S. has hardly, if ever, produced at commercial scale in recent decades: rare-earth metals. The factory is the most visible mark of MP Materials' high-stakes, billion-dollar bet that an American company can take on China's dominance over the metals—and the magnets they power in everything from cars and smartphones to missile systems. In recent months, China has used its chokehold over 90% of the world's rare-earth magnets to cut off access to Western companies, rattling industrial giants such as Ford and Tesla and forcing the U.S. to the table for trade talks. MP has invested more than $1 billion in new infrastructure and equipment. A mine it controls in California has become the largest source of rare-earth minerals in the Western Hemisphere. Now, with its expanding Texas facility and fresh investment from the Pentagon, the company is racing to complete the supply chain so it can start converting large quantities of its minerals into high-grade magnets. General Motors is signed up to start taking deliveries later this year. The Defense Department last week committed to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in MP and become its largest shareholder, in a deal that will allow MP to increase its planned magnet production to 10,000 metric tons from the previously planned 1,000. As of now, the name of the new factory is simply '10x." A White House spokesman said the deal 'marks a major step in rebuilding America's domestic rare earth industry." The company's stock jumped around 50% on the day of the announcement, and has tripled this year. Some rivals also gained. Rare earth magnets are used to power everything from cellphones and cars to nuclear submarines. They are almost all produced in China. After years of private and government investment under Trump and Biden, magnet-makers are expanding across the U.S. in an effort to build an industrial base that could meet soaring demand independently of China. Substantially cutting America's dependence on Chinese rare-earth magnets won't be easy, or cheap. But some experts posit it could theoretically be achieved within three to five years, if the current slate of projects push ahead. Vulcan Elements, a Durham, N.C.-based magnet maker founded by a former Navy officer, plans to supply the military starting next year. Noveon, in San Marcos, Texas, has signed a deal to supply U.S.-made rare-earth magnets to Japan's Nidec, among the world's biggest motor makers. German magnet specialist VAC is expected to begin operating a large, Pentagon-funded factory near Sumter, S.C., later this year. The projects are expected to have a combined capacity to produce several thousand metric tons of the magnets by the end of the year, which adds up to around a third or more of current U.S. imports. 'As we start to build out our permanent magnet manufacturing facilities in the U.S. and elsewhere, China starts to lose that leverage," said Gracelin Baskaran, director of the critical minerals security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. MP, she added, is 'essentially working at warp speed to address one of America's greatest national and economic security challenges of our time." The company's journey there highlights the hurdles American producers face as they look to reawaken the industry. China still holds most of the rare-earth cards. It has some of the world's best mines. It also has cheap chemicals for processing, a large technically trained workforce and a stomach for handling toxic rare-earth mining waste. Western producers have long complained that the country uses its dominance to prevent competitors from emerging, sometimes by flooding the market with supplies, sometimes by adopting restrictive export policies. Beijing has banned the export of key rare-earth technologies and is compiling a list of China's rare-earth scientists to ensure they don't share their knowledge abroad. For some companies, finding another source has become critical. In April, China began requiring buyers of rare-earth magnets to submit elaborate export applications proving they don't have military links. The slow processing of these applications forced a Ford SUV plant to temporarily close and sent the wider industry into a panic. One auto supplier paid more than $15 a piece for tiny magnets that usually sell for less than 40 cents, according to a trader familiar with the transaction. 'We cannot get any high-power magnets without China," Ford CEO Jim Farley said at an event in late June. Although U.S.-China trade negotiations have led to two separate truces that were supposed to make magnet supplies flow again, exports from China have remained lower than anticipated, especially to defense suppliers. Some U.S. companies have said they are willing to pay a premium for supply-chain security. They may have to. MP and other emerging suppliers don't disclose the price of their magnets, but people involved in the industry say they are likely to be, at a minimum, 50% more expensive to produce than China's. The U.S. has significant underground reserves of rare earths, 17 little-known minerals such as neodymium and samarium. Magnets made from the metals are especially strong, able to attract objects hundreds of times their own weight. But mining and processing the minerals is complex and expensive. The country's once-thriving industry collapsed in the 1990s and 2000s, unable to compete with China. A few companies tried at various points to revive it and push into magnet-making. Most failed, incurring big losses for investors. Some in the industry concluded that without government support it was too difficult to beat Chinese prices. MP co-founders James Litinsky and Michael Rosenthal got into the business almost by accident. Since the middle of the 20th century, rare earths had been dug from Mountain Pass, a rich deposit in California's Mojave Desert that for decades dominated global production. Molycorp, the previous company to run the mine, went bankrupt in 2015 after a surge in Chinese rare-earth exports tanked prices. Litinsky and Rosenthal, childhood friends with backgrounds in finance, had invested in Molycorp bonds, hoping to turn a profit. Few others wanted the mine, and the pair worried that a key strategic asset would be abandoned. In 2017 they gained control of Mountain Pass. 'There was a belief that it couldn't be fixed," said Litinsky, MP's chief executive. He had gotten rich as a young man, after founding a successful Chicago hedge fund at the age of 28, but was looking for a new challenge. 'I certainly didn't know what I was getting myself into." MP needed to generate money, and fast, but Litinsky and Rosenthal encountered a bottleneck. Once the ore is mined, it has to undergo a complex process to separate the rare earths from the rock and then isolate the individual minerals. Almost no one outside of China knew how to do that at affordable prices. Hiring was difficult; the mine had just eight workers—and a lot of wild donkeys—on a remote site that today sits near a billboard with an alien dressed in a cowboy hat advertising beef jerky. 'We've got no money, we've got eight people, the site was bankrupt, everyone says the U.S. can't make rare earths," said Rosenthal, the company's operations chief. 'We couldn't go to an engineer and say 'Want to leave Rio Tinto to join us?'" MP struck an agreement with a Chinese rare-earth company, Shenghe Resources, to provide upfront financing, in exchange for a small stake in MP. Shenghe would then sell MP's ore to buyers in China, who refined it and then created magnets As MP got on firmer footing, it used the money it earned from the arrangement to start building its own processing operations. The Pentagon started chipping in grants that came to around $100 million. Although MP's initial processing operations removed rare earths from the rest of the ore, the company still had to separate out the individual elements, each of which is nearly chemically identical. Rosenthal likened the challenge to designing a chemical process to sort out blue M&Ms from the rest of the M&Ms, and then extracting the cocoa from those candies. MP built up a plant in California filled with giant vats, called settler-mixers, that gradually winnow out the most valuable rare earths needed in magnets. By 2023, it was the only U.S. company separating rare earths at commercial scale, allowing it to bypass Chinese refiners and start selling directly to buyers in the U.S., Japan and South Korea. It is now expanding to separate another class of rare earths: strategically important heavy rare earths, which MP has been stockpiling at its mine. Despite the progress, the company struggled to stay consistently profitable. Starting in 2022, a surplus in Chinese rare earths tanked global prices, part of a pattern of Chinese overproduction of critical minerals including nickel, lithium and cobalt that has forced out Western miners around the globe. As prices kept dropping, investors lost patience. MP's stock crumbled to a fifth of its previous highs. 'I don't like to be betting behind losing horses," CNBC analyst Jim Cramer said last year. Litinsky believed the company's strategic importance would at some point translate into financial results. But the company still needed to learn how to actually make magnets, as opposed to just processing the ore and sending the minerals to others. First, they'd need to find the people who could help them. Since rare-earth magnets are hardly made in the U.S. anymore, many of the people with commercial experience are in their 60s and 70s. MP scoured the world for technical talent, netting an executive with experience at a European magnet factory and others with backgrounds at magnet material companies outside of China. To lead the project, the company hired Alan Lund, a metallurgist who had run a company developing high-performance metal alloys. Lund was determined to find an anchor customer that would commit to a long-term sales contract. It turned out to be GM, which had analyzed its supply-chain vulnerabilities after Covid-induced shocks and wanted more options. The next hurdle was finding production equipment for its Fort Worth factory. MP didn't want to buy in China, the main producer of magnet-making machinery, afraid that Beijing could hold up shipments. That meant seeking out suppliers of tools such as jet mills and furnaces in North America and Europe. The equipment was more expensive and sometimes required a nearly two-year lead time. But MP's decisions looked prescient in 2023, when China began expanding export controls to include magnet-production equipment. MP also had to master the arcane engineering skills needed to make top-quality magnets, including grain boundary diffusion. That process, often abbreviated as GBD, is a way to apply the most expensive materials in a targeted way on the magnet, dramatically lowering the cost. China is good at it; few others are. Long before breaking ground in Fort Worth, MP assembled a dedicated team at a small industrial space dubbed 'the Garage"—and sometimes called 'Bobcat"—to pore over scientific literature and crack the magnet code. Over several years, the company tested different formulations, eventually developing a heavy rare-earth composition that used GBD, and a customized method that gave magnets a consistent coating. Now, the company is gearing up for commercial-scale magnet production. The front entrance of its Fort Worth plant has a giant American flag composed of red, white and blue hard hats. Compacted rare-earth powders are placed on heat-resistant racks and stuck into furnaces. Its goal to become a national rare-earths 'champion" that can go toe-to-toe with China was turbocharged last week. The company relies on non-Chinese suppliers for equipment, which has lengthened lead-times and added expense. Under the deal reached with the Pentagon on Thursday, the Texas plant's magnet capacity will be tripled and MP will build a second, larger plant. To protect against price fluctuations, the government is setting a price floor for MP's rare-earth minerals and guaranteeing the purchase of MP's magnets, giving the company the confidence to plow ahead. Because the Defense Department will likely only require a portion of the magnets, the rest can be sold to commercial customers, like automakers. But challenges remain. As MP scales up magnet production, it will need to acquire more heavy rare earths than are available at its California mine, which is no easy feat because there are few producers of those outside of China. Building and operating a massive new facility could also create new snags. Some of its Western competitors say the government's decision to invest so heavily in a single company could drive promising startups out of the business, hurting U.S. competitiveness over the long term. 'It's the government picking winners and losers," said an executive at one rare-earth business, 'and they seem to have made a big bet on one company." Litinsky says a secure MP is good for the overall industry. 'There's going to be a lot of growth opportunities," he said. Write to Jon Emont at
Mint
25 minutes ago
- Mint
Nvidia wins OK to resume sales of AI chip to China after CEO meets Trump
Nvidia said it has received assurances from the Trump administration that it can sell its H20 artificial-intelligence chip in China, days after Chief Executive Jensen Huang met President Trump. The turnabout comes after the Commerce Department restricted sales of the chip in April, costing Nvidia billions of dollars. It is welcome news for the $4 trillion chip company and Huang, who is visiting Beijing this week. The administration said Nvidia would be allowed to sell the H20 chip after licenses are granted by the Commerce Department, according to the company. Nvidia said it would begin deliveries soon. In addition, it said it has developed a new chip with lower performance that meets all U.S. export criteria so it can be shipped to China. The approval could be seen as a gesture of good faith by the U.S. in its trade talks with China. Access to chips and advanced technology has been a main priority for Chinese negotiators. The license approvals will be some of the only licenses being granted by the Trump administration, which is restricting exports of AI chips and other products to protect national security. Huang plans to meet top Chinese officials during his stay in Beijing, people familiar with the matter said. Huang met Trump last week, attempting to persuade the president that his company should be allowed to continue to do business with China and tap AI talent there, according to people familiar with the meeting. Huang told Trump that Nvidia should be allowed to sell its technology freely to most parts of the world so American companies can dominate AI instead of Chinese companies, the people said. The CEO also discussed similar topics with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, they said. The globe-trotting Huang has become one of the world's most recognizable executives because of AI's growing prominence in the global economy. Nvidia chips are vital for cutting-edge data centers that train AI models and operate AI applications. Few companies are caught in the U.S.-China trade war as much as Nvidia, pushing Huang to spend more time making his case to politicians. Write to Raffaele Huang at and Amrith Ramkumar at
Mint
34 minutes ago
- Mint
Nvidias CEO says it has US approval to sell its H20 AI computer chips in China
BANGKOK — Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang says the technology giant has won approval from the Trump administration to sell its advanced H20 computer chips used to develop artificial intelligence to China. The news came in a company blog post late Monday and Huang also spoke about the coup on China's state-run CGTN television network in remarks shown on X. 'The U.S. government has assured Nvidia that licenses will be granted, and Nvidia hopes to start deliveries soon,' the post said. 'Today, I'm announcing that the U.S. government has approved for us filing licenses to start shipping H20s,' Huang told reporters in Beijing. He noted that half of the world's AI researchers are in China. 'It's so innovative and dynamic here in China that it's really important that American companies are able to compete and serve the market here in China,' he said. Huang recently met with Trump and other U.S. policymakers and this week is in Beijing to attend a supply chain conference and speak with Chinese officials. The broadcast showed Huang meeting with Ren Hongbin, the head of the China Council for Promotion of International Trade, host of the China International Supply Chain Expo, which Huang was attending. Nvidia is an exhibitor. Nvidia has profited enormously from rapid adoption of AI, becoming the first company to have its market value surpass $4 trillion last week. However, the trade rivalry between the U.S. and China has been weighing heavily on the industry. Washington has been tightening controls on exports of advanced technology to China for years, citing concerns that know-how meant for civilian use could be deployed for military purposes. The emergence of China's DeepSeek AI chatbot in January renewed concerns over how China might use the advanced chips to help develop its own AI capabilities. In January, before Trump began his second term in office, the administration of President Joe Biden launched a new framework for exporting advanced computer chips used to develop artificial intelligence, an attempt to balance national security concerns about the technology with the economic interests of producers and other countries. The White House announced in April that it would restrict sales of Nvidia's H20 chips and AMD's MI308 chips to China. Nvidia had said the tighter export controls would cost the company an extra $5.5 billion, and Huang and other technology leaders have been lobbying President Donald Trump to reverse the restrictions. They argue that such limits hinder U.S. competition in a leading edge sector in one of the world's largest markets for technology. They've also warned that U.S. export controls could end up pushing other countries toward China's AI technology. researcher Yu Bing in Beijing contributed. This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
