India’s moral reckoning in Bangladesh: Why the Kuki-Chin can no longer be ignored

In the remote, forested hills of Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), a slow-motion humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding, testing the conscience of the world and presenting India with a profound strategic and moral dilemma. The indigenous Kuki-Chin people, ethnically and culturally linked to communities in India’s own Northeast, are facing a systematic campaign of violence, land dispossession, and cultural erasure. As allegations of army-led atrocities mount, their decades-old struggle for autonomy has become a desperate fight for survival. For India, the world’s largest democracy and the region’s predominant power, continued silence is not neutrality—it is complicity. New Delhi must find its voice and champion the cause of a separate autonomous state for the Kuki-Chin, a move demanded by history, morality, and hard-nosed national interest.

The roots of this crisis lie in one of history’s most callous cartographic acts. The 1947 Radcliffe Line did not just partition India and Pakistan; it surgically severed a contiguous, ancient homeland. The CHT, with its overwhelming majority of Buddhist and Christian indigenous tribes, was arbitrarily gifted to East Pakistan against all logic of demography or geography. Overnight, the Kuki-Chin-Mizo people were fractured into minority enclaves across three nations: India, Myanmar, and Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, they became targets in a state-sponsored project of demographic engineering, where Bengali Muslim settlement was encouraged to dilute their presence and claim their resource-rich lands. The 1997 CHT Peace Accord, meant to redress these historic wrongs, remains largely unimplemented, a parchment promise that has failed to stop the bleeding.

This historical injustice has erupted into present-day horror. Since 2023, the violence has escalated dramatically. Human rights organisations document a grim litany: villages like those in Dighinala and Khagrachari burned to the ground; women subjected to rape by security forces; families forced at gunpoint to flee into the forests. In December 2025, credible reports detailed the Bangladesh Army’s brutal operations against the Bawm-Kuki tribe, involving extrajudicial killings and sexual violence. This is not merely civil unrest; it bears the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing, designed to displace a people and erase their claim to their ancestral land. The state narrative frames this as a counter-insurgency against groups like the Kuki-Chin National Front. The on-ground reality, however, reveals a disproportionate war on an entire civilian population.

India’s compelling imperative to act rests on three pillars: ethical responsibility, strategic necessity, and historical kinship.

The Moral Imperative: India’s founding ethos is "Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam"—the world is one family. It positions itself as a champion of the Global South and a protector of pluralism. This identity is severely undermined by a selective human rights policy. New Delhi has rightly spoken against the persecution of Hindu minorities in Bangladesh and Pakistan. Yet, its conspicuous silence on the suffering of the Christian-majority Kuki-Chin people with deep ethnic ties to Indian citizens reveals a hypocrisy that damages its global democratic credentials. True moral leadership requires consistency. Supporting Kuki-Chin autonomy would be a powerful affirmation that India stands for minority rights, irrespective of faith.

The Strategic Imperative: Stability in the CHT is inextricably linked to security in India’s volatile Northeast. The region is a cauldron of overlapping crises: the Rohingya refugee situation, the civil war in Myanmar, and China’s deepening inroads. A perpetually destabilised CHT acts as a spillover zone for militancy, arms trafficking, and refugee flows directly into Mizoram and Tripura. An autonomous, self-governing Kuki-Chin region would create a stable, friendly buffer. It would disempower radical elements, manage cross-border kinship ties constructively, and checkmate Beijing’s attempts to exploit regional grievances. Inaction, conversely, allows a crisis on India’s doorstep to fester, with direct consequences for its own sovereignty.

The Historical & Kinship Imperative: The border here is a colonial fiction. For the Mizo, Kuki, and Chin peoples, it is an artificial scar across their family and cultural landscape. Mizoram has already borne witness to this kinship, sheltering thousands of Kuki-Chin refugees fleeing the violence. This people-to-people bond is India’s greatest asset and imposes a unique responsibility. By championing their cause, India would be working to heal the wounds of Partition itself, advocating for a political solution that respects pre-colonial ethnic continuities. It would resonate powerfully across the Northeast, strengthening the idea of India as a protector, not a divider, of indigenous peoples.

The path forward requires decisive, multifaceted statecraft. India must move beyond behind-the-scenes whispers to principled public leadership.

1. Diplomatic Mobilisation: New Delhi should place the CHT crisis permanently on the agenda of every bilateral and multilateral forum with Dhaka, from the UN Human Rights Council to BIMSTEC. It must leverage its partnership to demand full implementation of the 1997 Accord, independent investigations into atrocities, and a halt to military operations.

2. International Advocacy: India’s diplomatic missions worldwide should brief governments and parliaments, framing the issue not as Bangladesh’s "internal matter," but as a threat to regional security and a test of the international "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) doctrine.

3. Support for a Political Solution: While outright secession may be diplomatically untenable, India can and should lead the call for a genuine, empowered autonomous state within Bangladesh—a "CHT Autonomous State" with full control over land, law, and cultural preservation. This is the logical endpoint of the 1997 Accord’s promise and the only formula for lasting peace.

The choice for India is clear. It can remain a passive bystander, watching as a people with whom it shares blood and history are brutalised, thereby undermining its own values and storing up greater instability on its border. Or, it can embrace its role as a responsible civilizational power. By championing the Kuki-Chin quest for autonomy, India would not be meddling in a neighbour’s affairs. It would be upholding the highest principles of democracy, securing its own frontiers, and correcting a historic wrong. In the shadowed valleys of the CHT, India’s soul as a nation is being tested. Will it look away, or will it lead?