India, Jan. 11 -- The present turbulence around Bangladesh cannot be read as a sudden break from the past. It belongs to a landscape shaped by history, memory, and geography, where tension rarely appears without precedent and rarely disappears without trace. What seemed to end in 1971 did not conclude. It paused. That pause is shifting again, not in spectacle, but through a slow, persistent movement that is felt across the border and will sooner rather than later have repercussions inside the eastern arc of India.

This is not a moment for loud assertion or emotional display. It is a moment for steadiness. The region between the delta, the river valleys and the hills has always responded sharply to political change. Instability here does ...