On August 5 this year, exactly two years after Sheikh Hasina fled Bangladesh for India, the ousted prime minister is expected to be given something New Delhi had only days earlier suggested she would not have.. a platform on Indian soil from which to talk about her political future.
The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of South Asia in New Delhi has scheduled an event around Hasina that organisers have billed as an opportunity for her to announce her planned return to Bangladesh and set out her political vision.
Hasina will not appear at the club in person or by video. According to the club’s president, Waiel SHA Awwad, she will join through a live audio connection, answer journalists’ questions and speak alongside an array of former Awami League figures and supporters. Former Education Minister Muhibul Hasan Chowdhury is among those expected to attend in person.
The distinction between an appearance on a screen and a voice coming through one may matter technically. Politically, in Dhaka, it is unlikely to matter much.
Only days earlier, the Indian government had told its Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs that Hasina, who has lived in India since her government collapsed in August 2024, was not being allowed to conduct political activities from Indian territory.
India has said she was given refuge on humanitarian grounds, while Bangladesh’s request for her extradition remains under examination.
Yet Awwad told Daily Waadaa that the club had encountered no objection from the Indian authorities over the Hasina event. Asked whether anyone from the Indian government had contacted the FCC or sought to prevent it, his answer was unequivocal: “Not at all.”
Awwad said the club regarded itself as an independent journalistic organisation rather than an extension of government policy. Its purpose, he said, was to allow journalists to hear directly from political figures, not to endorse them. The FCC had repeatedly invited Bangladesh’s high commissioner in New Delhi to appear before journalists as well, he said, without success.
That distinction is defensible. The Indian government is not organising the event, and a journalists’ club providing access to a former head of government is not necessarily conducting political activity on her behalf.
But the timing has made the distinction considerably harder to sell in Bangladesh.
On Monday, Prime Minister Tarique Rahman’s Foreign Affairs Adviser Humayun Kabir raised the August 5 programme directly with India’s newly appointed high commissioner, Dinesh Trivedi. Bangladesh expected India to ensure that no individual, including Hasina, could use its territory to make political statements or undertake activities intended to destabilise Bangladesh, Kabir said, according to the Foreign Ministry.
He warned that allowing such activity could damage the recent improvement in relations.
Trivedi responded that India would examine the matter and undertake appropriate efforts, according to the Bangladeshi account.
A day later, State Minister for Foreign Affairs Shama Obaed Islam went further, publicly asking New Delhi to clarify its position. Bangladesh, she said, was attempting to move relations with India forward and did not want that progress disrupted by political activity from fugitives living there.
“India has to be clear about its stance,” she said. There has been no public response from India’s External Affairs Ministry.
Again, another ‘Hasina controversy’ is becoming the first serious test of whether the tentative Bangladesh-India reset can survive the political inheritance of the relationship it is supposed to replace.
And Hasina is increasingly not the only complication.
In Kolkata, another Bangladeshi exile has just made a politically resonant return. Taslima Nasrin, the author who was forced to leave the city in 2007 after protests over her writings, returned at the beginning of August after 19 years away. Her homecoming has drawn considerable attention in West Bengal, where she has long occupied an unusual space between literature and the region’s recurring arguments over religion and free expression.
Nasrin has already stepped into Bangladesh’s contemporary political debate, criticising the ban on Hasina’s Awami League as undemocratic.
Her return would be largely a cultural and political story of its own were it not for what Kolkata has become since August 2024.
The city is now home to a substantial community of exiled Awami League politicians and activists. Investigations by Bangladeshi and international news organisations have documented former ministers, lawmakers and senior party officials living across Kolkata, particularly in New Town and Salt Lake.
The Guardian reported earlier this year that more than 600 Awami League figures had taken shelter in the city and that some were continuing to organise politically from India.
Among those reported to be living there are some of the most recognisable figures from Hasina’s fallen political establishment. Awami League leaders have continued holding online meetings, speaking to Bangladeshi audiences and advancing the party’s account of the uprising and its aftermath from exile.
For many Bangladeshis, therefore, Kolkata increasingly looks less like a place where individual political exiles happen to reside than an informal rear base for a political establishment driven from power at home.
India may reject that characterisation. The activities of Bangladeshi politicians living privately in Kolkata cannot automatically be attributed to the Indian government, just as the FCC’s decision to host Hasina cannot automatically be described as an official Indian initiative.
But foreign policy is shaped as much by perception as by administrative distinctions. And in Bangladesh, the accumulating perception is becoming difficult for New Delhi to ignore: India says Hasina cannot conduct politics from its territory while Hasina and members of her political movement continue to find ways to remain politically audible from India.
This is precisely the problem India had appeared to recognise.
Its recent assurance that Hasina would not be permitted to conduct political activities was potentially significant because her continued presence in India has become perhaps the most persistent irritant between the two countries. Dhaka continues to seek her extradition. India says that request is being examined by the appropriate authorities.
But even before the FCC programme, the line between refuge and political activity was becoming blurred.
Hasina recently gave Reuters a lengthy interview from exile in India in which she discussed her political future, the Awami League and her intention to return to Bangladesh. She said she and senior party colleagues intended to return around December and surrender.
Reuters had previously reported that she planned to return during 2026.
None of that proves Indian government involvement. Speaking to a news organisation is also not the same as organising a political campaign.
But those distinctions have limited political value in Dhaka, where Hasina’s presence in India has become inseparable from a larger argument about the nature of New Delhi’s relationship with Bangladesh.
Barely six months after Tarique Rahman took office, the initial warmth surrounding India’s approach to the new government is beginning to collide with something more familiar…New Delhi’s difficulty in separating its relationship with Bangladesh from the political order through which it exercised extraordinary influence for much of the previous 15 years.
That may prove a serious miscalculation.
The Bangladesh India dealt with during the Hasina era no longer exists. More importantly, Dhaka’s emerging foreign policy is increasingly based on the proposition that it does not have to choose between India, China, the United States or other powers.
Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman has put the principle plainly—improving relations with one country does not require worsening relations with another.
Prime Minister Tarique Rahman’s first foreign tour offered a practical demonstration.
Instead of making New Delhi his first destination — the traditional diplomatic pilgrimage for many Bangladeshi leaders — he travelled first to Malaysia and then China in June. Malaysia received him formally as prime minister, with bilateral talks with Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, before Rahman continued to China.
His China visit produced agreements and memorandums covering trade, investment, infrastructure, connectivity, diplomacy and strategic cooperation. An analysis by the National University of Singapore’s Institute of South Asian Studies described the emerging approach not simply as a pivot toward Beijing but as a form of “multi-alignment” designed to preserve Bangladesh’s strategic autonomy.
The distinction is crucial. Dhaka is not trying to replace India with China. It is trying to replace dependence with options. And India’s difficulty appears to be adjusting to that change.
The controversy surrounding PM Tarique Rahman’s possible visit to New Delhi offers another example.
Indian reporting initially portrayed an invitation connected with the BRICS summit as an invitation to Bangladesh’s prime minister as a special guest. Reporting in Bangladesh subsequently established that the invitation was extended to Bangladesh in its capacity as the current chair of BIMSTEC, as part of India’s effort to revive BRICS-BIMSTEC engagement.
To New Delhi, that may seem like a diplomatic maneuver. To Dhaka, protocol has political meaning.
The comparison with Hasina is difficult to avoid. She was invited to the G20 summit in New Delhi in 2023 as Bangladesh’s prime minister even though Bangladesh was not a member of the grouping.
Tarique, whose Bangladesh Nationalist Party returned to government with a commanding parliamentary majority in February, now finds his engagement with India framed through Bangladesh’s rotating chairmanship of a regional organisation.
That risks reinforcing precisely the perception India should be trying to dismantle: that New Delhi was more comfortable maintaining a relationship with Hasina than building one with Bangladesh.
That was arguably the central weakness of Indian policy during the final years of Awami League rule.
India accumulated substantial strategic gains under Hasina. Security cooperation improved dramatically. Insurgent sanctuaries affecting India’s northeast were dismantled. Connectivity expanded. Transit arrangements multiplied. Bilateral trade grew. Bangladesh became an increasingly important part of India’s effort to connect its northeastern states with the Bay of Bengal.
But the closeness came at a political cost.
Among many Bangladeshis, India gradually became associated not merely with Hasina’s government but with its political survival. When her government collapsed in August 2024 and she fled to India, New Delhi inherited much of the resentment directed at its closest Bangladeshi partner.
India faced a strategic choice after Bangladesh’s February election…rebuild the relationship institutionally or attempt to preserve some of the leverage accumulated under the previous order.
Its initial signals suggested the former.
The tone surrounding Tarique’s assumption of office was conciliatory. Political contacts resumed. Both governments began speaking about rebuilding relations. India’s Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs described Bangladesh as extremely important to Indian foreign policy and urged closer engagement with the new government.
Yet the contradictions have steadily accumulated.
Visa services remain restricted, even though emergency, medical and other categories continue to be processed. India’s parliamentary committee has itself urged the government to progressively normalise visa operations, recognising their importance to people-to-people relations.
India also withdrew a transshipment facility used by Bangladeshi exporters in April 2025, arguing that congestion at Indian airports and ports was delaying Indian exports. New Delhi said Bangladesh’s transit trade with Nepal and Bhutan remained unaffected, but the decision strengthened a perception in Dhaka that economic connectivity could become a tool of political leverage.
And now there is Hasina.
India’s decision to shelter a former Bangladeshi prime minister can be defended on humanitarian grounds. Allowing her to remain politically audible while assuring Bangladesh that she cannot conduct political activity from Indian soil is much harder to explain.
The problem is not merely Hasina herself. It is what she represents.
New Delhi appears at times to underestimate how fundamentally Bangladesh’s political landscape changed in August 2024 and again in February 2026. The assumption that geography ultimately gives India the stronger hand — that Bangladesh will eventually have to accommodate Indian preferences because it cannot change its largest neighbour — contains an obvious truth but also a strategic trap.
Bangladesh cannot change its geography. It can change its options.
China can provide infrastructure, investment and defence cooperation. Southeast Asia offers markets, labour destinations and diplomatic partnerships. The Gulf is increasingly important for capital and energy. Washington has its own strategic interests in the Bay of Bengal. Japan remains one of Bangladesh’s most consequential development partners.
None can replace India. Together, however, they can reduce the cost of disagreeing with it. That is why multi-alignment under the Tarique administration matters more than whether his first trip was to Kuala Lumpur or New Delhi.
Bangladesh’s emerging doctrine appears to be that relationships should overlap rather than exclude one another. Dhaka can deepen economic ties with China, maintain security engagement with the United States, expand relations with Japan and Southeast Asia and still pursue a productive relationship with India.
For India, the rational response would be to compete within that system rather than try to constrain it.
There are indications that parts of New Delhi understand this. The parliamentary committee has recommended rebuilding relations with Bangladesh’s new government, normalising visa operations and preparing for negotiations over the 1996 Ganges Water Treaty, which expires this year.
Those recommendations implicitly acknowledge something geography alone cannot guarantee… political influence.
India still possesses advantages in Bangladesh that China and other powers cannot easily reproduce — a border stretching more than 4,000 kilometres, deep cultural connections, intertwined economies, energy links, transport corridors and decades of institutional relationships.
Bangladesh, equally, has compelling reasons to maintain stable relations with India. Neither country benefits from prolonged hostility.
But proximity can become a liability when it produces complacency.
India’s exceptional access to Hasina’s government may have encouraged precisely that. New Delhi could secure strategic cooperation without investing heavily in Bangladeshi public opinion. The arrangement worked while Hasina controlled the political system. Its vulnerability became apparent the moment she did not.
Tarique’s government is offering India another opportunity to construct the relationship differently — less around personalities and more around reciprocity and sovereign equality.
The events of this week suggest how easily that opportunity could be squandered.
India says Sheikh Hasina cannot conduct political activity from its soil. Bangladesh has now explicitly asked India to prevent her from doing so. Yet on the second anniversary of her fall, Hasina is scheduled to address journalists through a New Delhi institution at an event built around her political “homecoming,” while its organiser says the Indian government has raised no objection.
A few hundred kilometres away, Kolkata hosts hundreds of members of the political movement she still leads, some openly contemplating their return to power. Taslima Nasrin has returned to the same city after 19 years and immediately re-entered Bangladesh’s political conversation.
None of these things, individually, proves an Indian policy of enabling the Awami League.Together, they create an image that New Delhi will find increasingly difficult to reconcile with its assurances to Dhaka.
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Faisal Mahmud is a Dhaka-based journalist