When newly-elected Bangladeshi Prime Minister Tarique Rahman took office earlier this year, there was a tentative hint that New Delhi and Dhaka might finally move past the bitter recriminations that followed the dramatic ouster of former leader Sheikh Hasina in a 2024 coup, from which she fled into exile in India.
Early indicators were positive. India’s diplomatic tone softened, officials preached the gospel of continuity and analysts warned of a long-overdue recovery after nearly two years of eroding distrust.
However, in the geopolitics of South Asia, citizenship is rarely defined by the sterile pleasures of communiques. It is revealed in the unvarnished realities of border posts and airport terminals.
The friction became undeniable with the recent treatment of Zahed Ur Rahman, an adviser in the rank of minister of state to the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport.
Asked to wait for hours under the clinical guise of a “verification process”, Indian media later revealed that he had been put on an immigration watch list for past anti-India comments.
The reaction in Dhaka was swift and clear. Bangladesh’s foreign ministry summoned India’s acting High Commissioner and lodged a formal protest, viewing the episode as an insult to a senior representative of the prime minister’s office.
New Delhi, however, offered little beyond a brief explanation that Rahman had been detained for “verification,” a response that many in Bangladesh saw as insufficient, given that the individual involved was not an ordinary traveler but a high-ranking government adviser.
For a relationship trying to find a new footing, this incident is, of course, damaging. If New Delhi is indeed seeking to cultivate a working relationship with Rahman’s administration, subjecting one of his close confidants to a corrosive airport ordeal signals just the opposite.
In an editorial, The Daily Star, Bangladesh’s largest English-language daily, called the episode “unfortunate and avoidable,” warning that it cast a long shadow over bilateral ties just as the two capitals needed to dismantle accumulated mistrust.
If New Delhi had legitimate complaints about the adviser, the newspaper noted, discreet diplomatic channels — rather than public humiliation — should have been used.
This airport tussle is not likely to be an isolated bureaucratic problem; it was, in all likelihood, a symptom of a deeper disease. Notably, it coincides with an increasingly volatile confrontation along the two sides’ 4,000-kilometer shared border, where Dhaka has protested India’s aggressive “crackdowns” on suspected undocumented migrants.
While Indian officials say they are simply repatriating illegal residents, Bangladesh counters that these unilateral deportations lack proper verification and violate established bilateral protocols. The issue is a political box in Dhaka, which directly harms national sovereignty and public dignity.
Images of impoverished individuals stranded in borderlands feed a powerful domestic narrative of Indian austerity, complicating matters for a Bangladeshi administration trying to stabilize relations with its dominant neighbor.
The result is a stark, widening gap between diplomatic rhetoric and transactional reality. On paper, the incentives to stretch are overwhelming. Bangladesh remains India’s vital security buffer and its gateway to regional connectivity, while New Delhi is an inescapable economic and geographic reality for Dhaka.
However, the institutional muscle memory developed during the Hasina era has proven remarkably resistant to change. For more than a decade, India’s policy in Bangladesh was focused only on a cozy and exclusive partnership with Hasina’s Awami League. The cataclysm of 2024 destroyed that diplomatic architecture.
While India has formally acknowledged Bangladesh’s democratic transition, deep institutional uneasiness persists with a political class long viewed with suspicion by the security establishment in New Delhi.
The airport incident perfectly encapsulates this myopia. Immigration officials may see the implementation of a watch list as a routine administrative exercise, but diplomacy requires a keen sensitivity to optics. What a bureaucrat thinks is standard operating procedure can easily be interpreted by a neighbor as a deliberate and calculated insult.
Compounding this friction is the reality that India’s foreign policy towards Dhaka is increasingly hostage to its provincial politics. New Delhi’s stance is heavily tainted by electoral calculations in West Bengal. In the hyperpolarized environment of border-state politics, illegal migration and demographic change are powerful electoral currency.
This reality prompts a tough stance that could bring domestic dividends in Kolkata and Delhi, but severely undermines India’s diplomatic maneuvering with Dhaka.
The Dhaka strategy has also yielded meager gains. Since the post-Hasina transition, the interim administration, mainly through the appointed High Commissioner, relied heavily on a strategy overly dependent on cultural symbolism.
Saree exhibitions, culinary festivals and events highlighting a shared heritage became the preferred instruments of engagement. While soft power possesses inherent value, it is only effective when it serves as the handmaiden of hard political diplomacy. It can never serve as its substitute.
History is replete with examples of this structural limitation. Decades of cricket diplomacy and cultural exchanges between India and Pakistan have instantly vanished whenever difficult security crises – from Kargil to Pulwama – occur, exposing a fundamental lack of fundamental political trust.
Similarly, Sri Lanka’s deep cultural and religious affinity with India has never been enough to resolve sharp, politically sensitive disputes over Tamil rights and regional security. When difficult questions arise, regional states judge each other by political actions rather than cultural displays.
Locked in symbolism at a time when borders, water sharing and migration require difficult negotiations, Dhaka’s strategy has yielded predictable results. Sarees produced pictures and biryani created headlines, but neither facilitated real strategic breakthroughs.
Moreover, an over-reliance on soft diplomacy during moments of geopolitical tension carries a distinct reputational cost. Nations that substitute cultural programming for rigorous political engagement risk appearing frivolous or incapable of protecting their core interests. In international affairs, visibility should not be confused with influence.
A state that is absent from critical political chambers, while remaining highly visible on the cultural circuit, signals either a lack of leverage or a lack of trust. Consequently, Dhaka did not make any significant diplomatic interventions with Delhi during this critical transition.
The overall risk is therefore cumulative. An airport detention, a border delay, a formal protest, a hostile headline – individually, these are manageable crises. Together, they reinforce a toxic perception in Dhaka that goodwill with Delhi is a one-way street.
The Zahed Ur Rahman case matters because it serves as a litmus test of whether one of South Asia’s most critical bilateral relations can be disentangled from the ghosts of 2024. For now, the verdict leans toward pessimism.
While official statements will continue to extol cooperation, actions on the ground reveal a colder truth that the promised bilateral fusion remains a mirage, limited by old habits, domestic anxieties and lingering suspicions.
Faisal Mahmud is a journalist based in Dhaka.
