Behind every trade corridor between South and Southeast Asia stands a war. That is the starting point of an OpEd published by Eurasia Review on September 17, 2026, whose author, retired Bangladeshi brigadier general Hasan Md Shamsuddin, argues that India and Bangladesh keep building roads toward each other’s east while Myanmar burns in between.
His case, in one line: “The central argument is that roads, ports and economic corridors cannot deliver their full benefits without political dialogue, local participation and sustained regional stability.”
Two projects carry the essay. A trilateral highway of roughly 1,360 kilometers is meant to run from Moreh, in Manipur, to Mae Sot in Thailand through Myanmar’s Sagaing Region. The Kaladan multi-modal transit project would move goods from Kolkata upriver to Mizoram via Sittwe port and the Kaladan river, in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. There the record diverges: the port and river terminals work, while the 109-kilometer road leg to the Mizoram border is still unfinished, its completion now aimed at 2027. Fighting in Chin and Rakhine states keeps pushing that date.
What Delhi Wants
India’s interests, as the retired officer frames them, are a quiet northeastern frontier, a working Act East Policy, begun as Look East in 1991 and upgraded in 2014, and a hedge against China. More land customs stations, from Avangkhu in Nagaland to Nampong and the Pangsau Pass in Arunachal Pradesh, plus border haats for local trade, serve that aim. He also urges New Delhi to keep talking to Naypyidaw and to powerful local actors, the Arakan Army among them. “Regional security cannot be achieved without a durable solution for the roughly 1.3 million displaced Rohingya.” He calls the crisis a security question for the region, not only a humanitarian one.
What Dhaka Should Do
Bangladesh’s own Look East line, adopted in 2001-2002, rests on what he terms “strategic balance”: less dependence on a few markets, more investment from ASEAN, China, Japan and South Korea, without dropping India or Western partners. Recent visits to Malaysia and China have lent it momentum, and Beijing, by his account, has floated cooperation on the Teesta Master Plan, together with a sustainable Rohingya approach and closer BRICS ties, plus talk of a Chattogram-Rakhine-Mandalay corridor running on into China.
Relations with Myanmar itself remain frozen, he concedes: Rakhine is largely under Arakan Army control, the Naf River is insecure, trafficking continues, and Dhaka has no sustained contact with Rakhine communities or the AA. His prescriptions run from a standing national committee for Myanmar policy to accelerating the Friendship Road and links to Paletwa, paired with humility about what commerce can fix. “Economic cooperation alone will not resolve the Rohingya crisis, but it could help create conditions that support stability and eventual repatriation.”
Infrastructure, he closes, “must be matched by peace, political dialogue and institutional cooperation.” The region’s prosperity, in his telling, waits on the politics.
