M. A. Hossain,
There is a template. There has always been a template. It does not announce itself. It arrives quietly — wrapped in the language of justice, dressed in the grievances of the young, amplified by the megaphone of Western media approval. By the time governments recognize what they are dealing with, the architecture of destabilization is already load-bearing.
What happened in Dhaka did not begin with students and it did not end with jobs. It began in the planning rooms of people who understood that the most durable revolutions are the ones the target population believes it started itself. This is not a new insight. Edward Bernays understood it in 1928. The CIA understood it in Tehran in 1953. The State Department understood it in Kyiv in 2014. What is new is the speed, the scale, and the disturbing sophistication with which the playbook is now being deployed across the Global South — including, with increasing visibility, across South Asia.
The pattern is not theoretical. It is operational. And it is worth examining with the clinical detachment it deserves.
The Blueprint Decoded
Begin with Bangladesh, because it is the most instructive case study in recent South Asian history.
What started as student protests against a quota system in government jobs rapidly mutated into something far more structured, far more lethal, and far less spontaneous than the world's editorial pages were willing to admit. The initial grievance was legitimate on its face. Quota reform is a real issue. Students were genuinely frustrated. This is always how these operations begin — latching onto authentic discontent the way a parasite finds a living host.
Then came the first signal: the protesters adopted the term "Razakar" after the then Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina deployed it rhetorically. In Bangladesh's historical memory, Razakars were collaborators with the Pakistani military during the 1971 genocide. That the movement's core chose to embrace — even weaponize — this label rather than reject it was not accidental. It was a communicative choice. A signal to certain audiences that this was not merely a jobs protest.
Then the layers peeled back further. Members of Jamaat-e-Islami, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, madrassa networks, and organized Islamist factions quietly folded themselves into the crowd, shedding their organizational identities like shed skin. This is a tactic with a long pedigree. In Egypt's Tahrir Square in 2011, the Muslim Brotherhood initially stayed in the background, letting secular liberals take the cameras, before eventually inheriting the revolution wholesale. The method is patient. The method is proven.
Cryptocurrency financing entered the picture — decentralized, traceable only with forensic effort, crossing borders without the friction of wire transfers or donor disclosure laws. Western and American diplomats held frequent meetings with anti-government groups. Media infrastructure — television talk shows, YouTube channels — provided the ideological runway. This is not journalism. This is ecosystem construction.
And then — the most chilling element — snipers. Former military men, reportedly alongside shooters linked to foreign networks, entered the operational theater. Minors were killed. The deaths were attributed to law enforcement. Public fury metastasized. The government's legitimacy collapsed under the weight of manufactured horror.
History Does Not Repeat, But It Rhymes Loudly
None of this should surprise anyone who has studied American covert foreign policy since the Cold War with intellectual honesty.
In Chile in 1973, the CIA did not simply sponsor a coup. It first spent years funding opposition media, supporting strikes, and cultivating military contacts — creating the conditions in which a coup became, to many Chileans, a relief. In Iran in 1953, 'Operation Ajax' began with hired crowds and fabricated newspaper stories before the tanks rolled. In Ukraine in 2014, the Maidan revolution had genuine democratic aspirations at its core — and also had the documented fingerprints of American NGO funding, State Department involvement, and the now-infamous phone call between Victoria Nuland and the U.S. Ambassador selecting Ukraine's next prime minister. The pattern is not conspiracy theory. It is documented, declassified, peer-reviewed history.
What has changed is the toolkit. Cryptocurrency has replaced suitcases of cash. Social media algorithms have replaced Radio Free Europe. Snipers who can be disavowed have replaced paramilitaries who sometimes could not be. The operating system is updated. The objective function is identical: remove governments that do not serve Washington's strategic architecture, and install those that will.
India and Pakistan in the Crosshairs
The question remains — do similar formations exist in India and Pakistan — deserves a serious answer, not a reflexive one.
In India, the signs are not invisible to those trained to look. A pattern of foreign-funded NGOs, some operating with suspiciously timed activism around electoral cycles, has been documented enough that the Indian government has moved against several under FCRA regulations. Civil society organizations with opaque funding structures have amplified narratives around democratic backsliding, minority rights, and judicial independence — all legitimate topics, but all simultaneously useful as pressure instruments against the Modi government in Western capitals.
Pakistan's situation is almost inverted in its complexity. The country has been, at different moments, both a target and a vector of precisely these operations. The removal of Imran Khan from power in 2022 carried its own cloud of disputed signals — alleged cypher communications, American diplomatic displeasure, a parliamentary no-confidence vote that moved with unusual speed. Whether Khan was removed by Washington's preference or by a domestic military calculation remains contested. What is not contested is that the technology of political disruption was present and active.
What Governments Must Understand
Here is the hard truth that no amount of diplomatic niceties should soften. These are not movements. They are operations. The difference matters enormously, because the appropriate response to a movement is political engagement — reform, dialogue, compromise. The appropriate response to a foreign-directed operation is intelligence work, law enforcement, and strategic disruption of the financing and coordination networks that sustain it. Conflating the two is not just an analytical error. It is a fatal one.
Governments across South Asia — democratic, authoritarian, or somewhere in the complicated middle — need to develop what might be called regime-change literacy. The ability to distinguish organic civil unrest from engineered destabilization is not paranoia. It is statecraft. The failure to exercise it has cost governments their survival and countries their stability.
The yaba-fueled crowds, the foreign-currency-funded coordinators, the snipers in the shadows, the compliant Western media coverage that arrives on cue — these are not the marks of a spontaneous uprising. They are the marks of a production. And every production has producers. The cockroaches, as the framing goes, thrive in the dark. Turn on the lights.
The protesters in Dhaka thought they were making history. Some of them were. The rest were making someone else's foreign policy. South Asia cannot afford to keep learning this lesson the hard way.
M A Hossain is a senior journalist and international affairs analyst, based in Bangladesh. He can be reached at: writetomahossain@gmail.com
This article published at :
1. Hindu Post, India : 11 June, 26
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