India has lately discovered that Tarique Rahman is not merely the chairman of BIMSTEC. He is also, inconveniently, the prime minister of Bangladesh.

This revelation arrived in New Delhi with ‘characteristic’ South Asian speed. India had invited Tarique Rahman to the BRICS outreach in September in his capacity as BIMSTEC chair. In Dhaka, that was received as an administrative technicality…come to Delhi, but wearing your regional rather than national hat. 

Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman pointedly noted that the invitation was not addressed to the prime minister of Bangladesh. Well, protocol is political language, and after years in which many Bangladeshis believed Delhi took their government for granted, the choice of title carries unusual weight. 

Then, after unusually sulphurous exchanges, India clarified that Tarique Rahman had also been invited for a bilateral visit. Diplomacy sometimes advances through charm. It seems, in this region, it more often advances after somebody issues a statement containing the words “sovereignty”, “affront” and “genocider”.

The immediate cause was Sheikh Hasina. On August 5, the second anniversary of the uprising that ended her rule, the ousted prime minister joined a Delhi press event by audio and announced that she intended to return to Bangladesh in December. This was foreseeable. 

Two days earlier, Dhaka had explicitly asked India to ensure that Hasina and other Awami League leaders did not use Indian territory for political statements, warning that precisely such activity could damage improving relations.

India said its government had no involvement in the event and did not endorse the views expressed there. This was formally neat but politically beside the point. From Dhaka, the distinction between the Indian state arranging Hasina’s appearance and the Indian state permitting a convicted former ruler, whose extradition Dhaka seeks, to conduct politics from Delhi is unlikely to soothe anyone.

So Dhaka responded with perhaps the most vitriolic diplomatic prose it has ever directed at India…or to anyone. The foreign ministry said it was “outraged”, called Hasina an “absconding convicted genocider”, accused her and her associates of launching “venomous vitriol” against Bangladesh, and described the event as an affront to sovereignty and an insult to the martyrs of the July Revolution. 

It added, with all the subtlety of a brick through a drawing-room window, that “Bangladesh will never be a client State”.

That last sentence matters. From Dhaka, the reason is obvious. For much of Hasina’s long tenure, India was widely perceived here as the external guarantor of a political order increasingly rejected at home. Fair or not, politically it hardened into fact. 

Hasina’s flight to India in August 2024, followed by her continued residence there and periodic political interventions, made it harder for Delhi to argue its Bangladesh policy extended beyond one woman and party.

The symbolism could hardly have been designed better by India’s enemies. On the anniversary of Hasina’s overthrow, Bangladesh was commemorating those killed in 2024 while Hasina was speaking from the Indian capital and disputing the narrative of the uprising. 

The United Nations estimated that as many as 1,400 people were killed during the crackdown. In Dhaka, therefore, the event was never going to look like an innocent exercise in press freedom.

Yet indignation is not a foreign policy, and geography is famously immune to press releases. Bangladesh and India need a reset because neither can afford estrangement.

India surrounds Bangladesh on three sides and remains central to its trade, transit, transhipment, energy links and regional connectivity. Bangladesh, meanwhile, is not merely a small neighbour to be managed from the South Block. It sits beside India’s vulnerable northeast, commands crucial approaches to the Bay of Bengal and is essential to Indian plans for subregional transport and economic integration. 

Cooperation on border management, water sharing, power, security and commerce is not diplomatic decoration. It is the plumbing of the relationship. The countries share a border of nearly 4,100 kilometres, while the Ganges water-sharing treaty expires this December.

There is also China. Bangladesh will continue to deepen economic and strategic relations with Beijing because doing so is rational, just as India will pursue its own interests with powers Dhaka may dislike. Delhi’s worst response would be to treat every Bangladeshi engagement with China as evidence of ingratitude. 

Dhaka’s worst response would be to imagine that China can somehow replace India. It cannot. The sensible course is diversification without theatrical realignment.

This is why Tarique Rahman should probably go to Delhi, provided the visit is ‘unmistakably’ bilateral. A Bangladeshi prime minister cannot appear to have slipped into India through the service entrance of a BRICS outreach session. The optics matter. 

Tarique Rahman leads an elected government whose domestic constituency is far more suspicious of India than Hasina’s was. He must demonstrate that engagement with Delhi is conducted on sovereign equality instead of an inherited deference.

India, for its part, should understand that Hasina has become more than an extradition file. Her presence is now a daily test of Delhi’s claim that it wants relations with Bangladesh rather than merely with the Awami League. India may have legal reasons for delaying extradition. But allowing her political activities to spill into bilateral relations is strategically extravagant.

There is irony in the latest invitation. Dhaka’s ferocious statement was criticised as needlessly incendiary. Perhaps it was. Governments usually keep a few adjectives in reserve. But shortly afterwards, India publicly stressed that Tarique Rahman was indeed invited for a bilateral visit as prime minister, not merely wearing his BIMSTEC badge.

The quarrel may yet have performed a service. Delhi has been reminded that post-2024 Bangladesh expects ceremony to reflect sovereignty; Dhaka has been reminded that outrage must eventually give way to negotiation. The two countries have spent two years testing how much they can annoy each other. It is an expensive experiment with a predictable conclusion.

Tarique Rahman should go to Delhi. Narendra Modi should receive him as the prime minister of Bangladesh. And Sheikh Hasina should cease to be the organising principle of relations between 1.4 billion Indians and 170 million Bangladeshis. 

That would not constitute friendship. It would constitute adulthood…which, in South Asian diplomacy, is already an ambitious start.

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Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa