Bangladesh gets a new envoy to reset its India ties

The Bangladesh government’s decision to replace its High Commissioner to New Delhi, M Riaz Hamidullah, offers the clearest indication yet that Dhaka is fundamentally rewriting its approach toward its largest neighbour.

After nearly two years of strained relations, the government of Prime Minister Tarique Rahman has signalled a change in diplomatic approach. By ‘possibly’ dispatching the country’s incumbent Foreign Secretary, Asad Alam Siam, to take charge of the mission in the Indian capital, Dhaka is signalling a transition towards the hard ledger of transactional diplomacy.

Within Bangladesh’s foreign policy establishment, the previous approach had increasingly come to symbolise a philosophy that invested heavily in confidence-building while real disputes accumulated. For much of the past 14 months, Bangladesh’s diplomatic posture towards India appeared stuck in a time warp. Envoy Hamidullah’s tenure, which began on April 14, 2025, followed a landmark meeting between Muhammad Yunus and Narendra Modi in Bangkok.

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That summit was supposed to reset a relationship left fragile by Bangladesh’s political transition in August 2024. Instead, the subsequent months exposed a widening chasm between diplomatic activity and tangible policy outcomes.

While Dhaka’s envoy embarked on an energetic tour of the Indian subcontinent, visiting no fewer than ten states, including Tripura, Assam, Meghalaya, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala, Rajasthan and Uttarakhand, the core irritants plaguing the bilateral relationship festered untouched. To critics within Dhaka’s foreign policy establishment, this hyperactive itinerary resembled performance rather than statecraft. Hamidullah lectured at universities, attended literature festivals, and celebrated International Yoga Day, attempting to build historical trust.

Meanwhile, ordinary Bangladeshis faced an intractable visa crisis that was resolved only when India’s politically connected envoy in Dhaka intervened directly. On the border, security incidents persisted.

The uncomfortable reality confronting Dhaka was that soft power, while useful for embellishing a stable partnership, is not working for repairing one fractured by hard geopolitical disputes. Cultural festivals cannot work when the agenda is dominated by immigration restrictions and strategic competition involving China.

The ultimate catalyst for the decision to remove Hamidullah arrived not through a slow accumulation of policy failures, but via a diplomatic flare-up at New Delhi’s international airport. Zahed Ur Rahman, the influential adviser on policy and strategy to Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, abruptly abandoned an official visit to India after being held up at the airport for several hours by immigration officials at Indira Gandhi International Airport, in the presence of Envoy Hamidullah.

For Dhaka, this episode crystallised the bankruptcy of Hamidullah’s approach and influence in New Delhi. His tenure had yielded neither mutual respect nor strategic concessions; instead, it had exposed senior officials to public humiliation.

The incident also highlighted a glaring disparity in how the two nations value access and influence. While New Delhi sent Dinesh Trivedi, a veteran former Union minister, as its envoy to Dhaka to ensure direct political access to the highest levels of the Bangladeshi government, Dhaka relied on a career diplomat who struggled to command similar attention in India.

It took Hamidullah nearly 10 months before he finally secured formal meetings with India’s External Affairs Minister, S. Jaishankar, and Commerce Minister, Piyush Goyal, in March 2026. In the arithmetic of international relations, delayed access equals diminished influence.

While India’s representative in Dhaka engaged regularly with the host country’s political elite, Bangladesh’s high commission found itself frozen out of the rooms where real decisions were made.

To blame Hamidullah alone for this decline would be unfair. No single diplomat can alter the structural dynamics of regional geopolitics. The chill in bilateral ties was the inevitable consequence of Bangladesh’s political landscape, coupled with India’s evolving security anxieties and regional calculations.

Many of the most contentious choices were made in offices far above the pay grade of any ambassador. However, the true failure of Dhaka’s strategy lay in its inability to recognise that the political terrain had shifted. By replacing Hamidullah with Ambassador Siam, Prime Minister Rahman is acknowledging that the old playbook has run its course.

The selection of a serving foreign secretary underscores the seriousness with which Dhaka now views the relationship. It marks a shift away from public relations towards a more pragmatic, transactional phase of diplomacy, where measurable outcomes will take precedence over optics.

(Shaquib Ahmed is a Dhaka-based journalist. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)