Why Tarique Rahman Will Probably Go to Delhi |
Listen to this article:
India has invited Bangladesh’s prime minister Tarique Rahman through the diplomatic side door as the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) chair rather than simply as Bangladesh’s leader. After the Sheikh Hasina press-conference fiasco, that might have looked like reason enough for Rahman to stay home.
In reality, geography, trade, water and a carefully choreographed Indian reset make a Delhi visit increasingly difficult to resist.
There is a peculiar feature of South Asian diplomacy – two governments can spend a week publicly expressing outrage at each other and the next week begin discussing who will sit where at dinner.
Bangladesh and India appear to be entering precisely that phase. Bangladesh prime minister Rahman has been invited to the BRICS summit in New Delhi in September. But there is a small diplomatic footnote. Bangladesh is not a BRICS member. Rahman has been invited as a special guest because Bangladesh currently chairs BIMSTEC, part of India’s attempt to revive its BRICS-BIMSTEC outreach.
In other words, Delhi has invited the prime minister of Bangladesh while technically inviting the chairman of something else. Diplomacy does enjoy stationery.
Diplomatic room for Dhaka
Under ordinary circumstances, Dhaka might have treated the distinction as mildly irritating. These are not ordinary circumstances. Only days ago, ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s virtual press conference in New Delhi produced the most serious diplomatic cold fight between the two countries since Bangladesh’s new political order took shape in August 2024 after an uprising. Dhaka responded with language normally scrubbed from diplomatic communiqués by several committees and at least one........