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Breaching the gentlemans agreement is more ruinous for India. The balochis and pashtuns are restless enough without Indian aid, but the Indian muslims are currently peacable. Supercharging the deobandi movement with external agitation is at minimum politically destabilizing and at worst secessionist. As it stands India has some breathing room with their naxalite campaign coming to an end, but Pakistan prodding of deobandi or even khalistani domestic terrorism will be bad for india.
Though frankly the greater risk for India is the Bangladesh Pakistan rapprochement. The fall of the Awami league has put Indias eastern flank back in play and if any secessionist movements in Assam gain local traction then India has a headache that will not be worth any amount of joy that can be gained from kicking in Pakistan.
Bangladesh's military is rather impotent. Sure, they could supply rebels and insurgents in Assam and the NE, but they're highly unlikely to divert a significant portion of Indian resources from a western front.
Even with recent political changes, I very much doubt that Bangladesh has the appetite for conflict. They're a small country, mostly surrounded by India, with little strategic depth and extremely susceptible to naval blockade.
You'd need them to host a significant Chinese presence to matter, and that isn't particularly on the cards for the foreseeable future. If it was a war with India vs China +- Pakistan, I can see it making a difference.
Geography dictates that Bangladesh is a fucking terrible place to fight because it is filled with rivers and crossings are exponentially more difficult now. Indian victory is not an assured fsit accompli.
Nevertheless the bigger issue is not a hot war but Bangladesh harbouring Bengali agitators in Assam and West Bengal who play up Bengali grievances in local language. Dehli had enough problems with Tamils during the Sri Lankan civil war, and Bengalis outnumber Tamils by a comical degree. The Indian Army may be able to prosecute a campaign to clamp down any active Bangladeshi military adventurism, the GoI definitely can't handle a renewed ethnic conflict.
I agree that Bangladesh is a terrible place to fight, but I think that cuts much more against Bangladesh than against India.
India does not need to occupy Bangladesh to win anything that matters to it. There is already a convenient water barrier and rough terrain in the north that makes a defensive line on the Indian side quite workable. If Dhaka tried serious military adventurism, the Indian objective would not be to hold Dhaka, it would be to smash the Bangladeshi military and government C2, then sit behind its own rivers and wait. From that perspective, NE India is not strategically vital enough to justify India throwing itself into the full nightmare of riverine counterinsurgency inside Bangladesh.
On the other hand, Bangladesh is almost encircled by India, has very little strategic depth, and is highly vulnerable to both air attack and blockade. The Bangladesh Air Force is small, made up mostly of elderly F-7s and a handful of MiG-29s, and their ground based air defence is basically point defence with a few modern Chinese SHORAD systems around key sites rather than a dense layered network. In a shooting war, IAF squadrons already stationed for China or Pakistan contingencies could be retasked to hit Bangladeshi C2, logistics and fuel pretty quickly, with relatively low risk. "Victory" for India in that scenario is simply degrading Bangladesh to the point where it cannot meaningfully project power across the border.
Which is why, as you say, the more plausible threat is not regular Bangladeshi forces crossing rivers in strength, but Dhaka tolerating or quietly supporting Bengali militants on the Indian side. Even there, I think the constraints are pretty tight. Bangladesh is small, poor, and extremely exposed to Indian economic pressure. Hosting insurgents that blow up Indian bridges or kick off serious ethnic cleansing in Assam would invite air strikes and land/sea blockade that the country is in no position to ride out, especially without explicit Chinese backing. They'd effectively be betting the survival of your regime on Beijing deciding you are worth a confrontation with Delhi. That's a... really poor bet IMO.
There are deep class, regional and religious cleavages, and Hindu Bengali attitudes toward Muslim Bengalis are often quite hostile. West Bengal is still roughly 70 percent Hindu and 27 percent Muslim overall, and even in Assam the picture is a mix of Assamese Hindus, Bengali Hindus and Bengali Muslims rather than some unified "Bengali front". There are obviously communal tensions and sporadic violence, but the modal pattern in Assam and West Bengal is low level background strife and political jockeying, not large, disciplined sectarian militias just waiting for a shipment of AKs.
And as far as Indian Muslims go, I think people outside the region often underestimate how boringly normal this is in practice. Even in actual Indo-Pak wars, we did not see large scale Hindu–Muslim bloodbaths outside specific flashpoints, and there weren't significant numbers of Indian Muslims defecting to Pakistan. Outside of J&K, the overwhelming revealed preference has been to treat "Indian" as the primary political identity, or at least not to act on any divided loyalties in a militarily relevant way.
Hell, Bengali Muslims hate Pakistan. You know, the whole. Independence war and genocide deal. That's particularly true in Bangladesh, for obvious reasons.
Bangladesh might be cooling previously cordial ties, but they're not suicidal. I can't see a plausible path to them taking direct action, or even enough indirect action to matter. It's in a similar ballpark to Mexico deciding to invade the US during a war over Taiwan.
Insurgencies dont succeed on the back of material support, they succeed on the back of domestic opposition to the ruling class. Muslims in India largely seem tolerant of even the rising hindutva because it is patently obvious to anyone with functioning neurons that Pakistans brand of islam just results in shitty outcomes for muslims than even within india. This means that the calculus can flip however and just because muslims in India have been relatively peacable compared to naxalite tamil khalistan assamese guju violence it doesn't mean they are eternally docile.
And hostility can manifest in ways potentially more disruptive than war. Indian politics outside the hindi core are already a fragmented mess of local parties who barely hate their local enemies more than whoever is in/outside of Dehli. Bangladesh hosting dissident west bengali assamese or bihari political intellectuals calling for political localism against whoever happens to be in delhi will foment more fracturing than any direct action. Bangladesh isn't going to be a new front, but a 60 second tiktok reel can destroy Delhis political grip more than 3000 black jets of Allah.
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