Delhi and Dhaka look to give diplomacy a chance

The shifting geometry of India’s relationship with Bangladesh is only now coming into full focus, following a period where West Bengal’s domestic electoral landscape has effectively rewritten the rules of New Delhi’s eastern strategy. For decades, West Bengal sat uneasily at the intersection of India’s regional ambitions — a site where migration, border security, communal politics, and regional influence converged into a single, volatile equation. The state was never merely another electoral battleground; it was the political hinge upon which India’s management of Dhaka turned.

However, the recent consolidation of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the state has transformed these regional issues into primary drivers of national foreign policy, making the bilateral relationship inseparable from the ideological currents of the Indian mainland.

Even before the West Bengal election, Narendra Modi’s administration has opted for a departure from bureaucratic orthodoxy, signaling that the era of technocratic management of Dhaka has given way to a more visceral, political form of engagement. The appointment of Dinesh Trivedi as India’s new envoy to Dhaka is the clearest manifestation of this recalibration.

A political heavyweight and former railway minister with long experience inside the turbulence of Bengal politics, Trivedi possesses a quality that India’s recent handling of Bangladesh conspicuously lacked: political weight. While his Gujarati origins are a footnote, his intimate familiarity with the linguistic and communal sensitivities shared across the border is central to his mission. By dispatching a seasoned politician rather than a career diplomat, New Delhi has tacitly admitted that the relationship can no longer be contained within the sterile corridors of the Ministry of External Affairs.

As the veteran scholar Partha S. Ghosh noted in his piece in The Wire, a politician is often better equipped than a career diplomat to understand the communal undercurrents shaping relations. Diplomacy, particularly in South Asia, functions as much through political signaling as through formal negotiation. When relations deteriorate, symbolism acquires strategic value.

Career diplomats are trained to preserve continuity, but political crises rarely reward continuity alone. Once mistrust hardens and domestic narratives begin driving foreign policy, governments seek intermediaries with political instincts rather than bureaucratic polish. New Delhi appears to have concluded that Bangladesh can no longer be managed through institutional diplomacy alone; it requires political handling at a moment when bilateral tensions are shaped by domestic ideological currents.

This shift suggests a quiet recognition in New Delhi that it mishandled the transition following the rise of the Muhammad Yunus-led interim government. Concerned primarily with stability and continuity, New Delhi adopted a posture that often appeared hesitant and strategically tone-deaf.

In Dhaka, that caution was interpreted as aloofness, even suspicion. India underestimated both the interim government’s domestic legitimacy and Bangladesh’s acute sensitivity to perceived condescension from its larger neighbor. This diplomatic vacuum allowed mistrust to harden at precisely the moment when connectivity projects, trade integration, and regional security cooperation required deeper confidence.

In South Asia, diplomacy rarely remains compartmentalised; once political sentiment sours, even technically sound agreements begin to stall under the weight of mutual suspicion. New Delhi’s ever-present rhetoric of “neighbourhood first”, combined with the deployment of a politically connected envoy, indicates an attempt to repair ties that drifted perilously close to strategic complacency.

Bangladesh occupies a critical place in India’s eastern corridor ambitions, linking the northeast to maritime routes and regional supply chains. Instability in relations with Dhaka therefore carries implications extending well beyond diplomacy. However, a stark asymmetry now defines the relationship. While India has pivoted toward political diplomacy, Bangladesh continues to rely on the traditional machinery of the professional foreign service. Its envoy in Delhi, M. Riaz Hamidullah, is an experienced diplomat, but he lacks the political stature and informal influence that Trivedi brings to the table.

This asymmetry increasingly matters because India-Bangladesh relations are no longer driven principally by technocratic consensus. Hamidullah’s difficulties during the interim period exposed the limits of conventional diplomacy in an environment where Indian political rhetoric has hardened.

As the BJP’s internal political ecosystem became the primary driver of policy, Dhaka often appeared reactive rather than strategically influential. Bangladesh found itself responding to developments generated inside India instead of shaping the conversation. The shift is inseparable from the BJP’s own ideological evolution in Bengal.

During the state election campaign, party leaders repeatedly promised to identify “illegal Bangladeshi migrants”, strip them of protections, and, in some cases, send them “back” across the border. While Dhaka once dismissed such talk as routine electoral theater, it now regards the rhetoric as an indication of strategic intent. The quiet tightening of patrols by Bangladesh’s border forces near Benapole in Jashore is a testament to this new reality.

Officially, the move was framed as vigilance against illegal “push-ins” by India’s Border Security Force, but the message was unmistakable: Dhaka now believes migration has ceased to be a domestic talking point and has become an organising principle of bilateral relations.

The anxiety is grounded in geography; West Bengal shares more than 2,200 kilometers of border with Bangladesh, India’s longest frontier. For decades under ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s leadership, India publicly celebrated Bangladesh as a strategic partner while privately complaining about undocumented migration. That balance is now fraying.

The experience of Assam offers Bangladesh an unsettling preview of what may follow. In the National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise completed in 2019, roughly 1.9 million residents were excluded from the rolls. Most were not proven foreigners; they were simply unable to produce documentary evidence predating 1971, often because poverty or administrative failure had erased the paper trail.

Applying similar mechanics to West Bengal would produce staggering consequences. Even a modest exclusion rate of 3 per cent could leave nearly three million people effectively stateless. The central question is no longer whether errors will occur, but how the Indian state intends to manage the category of the “doubtful citizen”.

The infrastructure for this type of demographic management already exists, ranging from Foreigners’ Tribunals to detention centers. With a more cooperative political environment in West Bengal, replicating parts of this architecture becomes administratively easier.

Incremental measures could begin with tighter documentation requirements for welfare access and intensified surveillance in border districts. From Dhaka’s perspective, the view across the frontier is one of mounting strategic alarm. Bangladesh fears not merely the humanitarian implications, but the possibility that future citizenship disputes could create sustained diplomatic pressure on Dhaka to absorb populations it does not recognise as its own.

This environment poses a fundamental question for Dhaka: is conventional diplomacy still adequate for managing a relationship increasingly driven by ideology and domestic mobilisation? India has already answered that question by dispatching Trivedi. Dhaka faces a more complicated calculation. Retaining bureaucratic continuity offers a certain strategic restraint, subtly suggesting that India, not Bangladesh, misread the moment.

Diplomacy often operates through calibrated asymmetry; silence itself can become leverage. Yet restraint carries risks. If India is willing to invest political capital in resetting ties, Bangladesh risks diminishing its own influence by responding with administrative caution alone.

A politically empowered envoy in Delhi would possess something increasingly valuable: political access. They would be better positioned to navigate the intersections between BJP politics and bilateral disputes over trade, water sharing, and border management. South Asia remains among the least integrated regions in the world despite obvious economic complementarities.

Bangladesh’s manufacturing rise and India’s ambitions for its eastern corridor create a natural foundation for deeper cooperation, but opportunities of that scale rarely advance through bureaucratic inertia. They require political sponsorship at the highest level and a degree of strategic imagination that technocratic management alone cannot provide.

Ultimately, diplomacy is not about moral vindication; it is about leverage, timing, and the ability to shape outcomes before they harden into structural realities. New Delhi’s reset is evidence that it recognizes it misjudged the political mood in Dhaka. The real question confronting Bangladesh is whether it intends merely to stabilise relations or actively to shape them.

Retaining a career diplomat may provide symbolic satisfaction, but sending a political envoy would signal that Dhaka understands the new logic governing the relationship and intends to compete within it rather than simply react to it.

(Faisal Mahmud is a Dhaka-based journalist. He was the former Minister (Press) of Bangladesh High Commission in New Delhi)