Dhaka wants to reset India ties and drop what it calls a fascination

Bangladesh's state minister for foreign affairs, Humayun Kabir, said on Sunday that Dhaka wants to reset its relationship with India and treat New Delhi as just another country. He described the 15 years under Sheikh Hasina as uncomfortable and said the next step should be a bilateral conversation, not a meeting on the edge of a multilateral summit.

We have to get out of the India fascination, Kabir told reporters at the foreign ministry. India is just another country, and Bangladesh wants good bilateral relations with it. He added that Prime Minister Tarique Rahman's first engagement with New Delhi should be a proper bilateral visit rather than a pull-aside at someone else's event.

The remarks came two days after Dhaka confirmed Rahman would not attend the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi. India had invited him as chair of BIMSTEC. Bangladesh said the invitation was to the chair, not to Rahman in his own right. A separate bilateral invitation has sat on the table since February. It has not produced a date.

Hasina fled to India in August 2024 after a student-led uprising ended her fourth consecutive term. She remains in India. Her speeches from Indian soil have repeatedly angered the transition in Dhaka. Kabir's briefing is the clearest official attempt so far to put a doctrine on that anger: stop treating India as the organising fact of Bangladeshi foreign policy, and rebuild the file country to country.

Dhaka is also reviewing 101 agreements signed with India during the Hasina years. Kabir did not list which ones will be kept, rewritten or dropped. Water sharing, transit, power imports and border management sit inside that pile. Any rewrite will take months and will be watched in Kolkata, Agartala and New Delhi as closely as in Dhaka.

India's public line has been steady. New Delhi says it is prepared to work with whoever holds office in Dhaka and that Hasina's presence on Indian territory should not freeze the rest of the relationship. Bangladeshi officials have answered that the presence itself is the freeze. Kabir's formulation is a political sentence as much as a diplomatic one. It tells a domestic audience that the new government will not be measured by how close it sits to Delhi.

Rahman is due at the United Nations General Assembly later this month. That trip gives both capitals a chance to test Kabir's method. A corridor meeting in New York would be multilateral by location even if bilateral in content. Kabir said he prefers a standalone visit. Neither side has announced one.

Trade and people still bind the two countries whether the speeches do or not. India is a large source of consumer goods, power and medical travel for Bangladeshis. Bangladesh is a market and a transit question for India's northeast. Border killings, visa delays and the Teesta file have survived every change of government. A reset that does not touch those files will look like a press note.

The BRICS snub is the immediate irritant. India hosted 11 members and a ring of guests in New Delhi on 12 and 13 September. Rahman stayed away. Kabir now says multilateral rooms are the wrong rooms for the repair job. That leaves a thin calendar and a long list of agreements under review.

What happens next is simple to state and hard to schedule. Either Rahman visits India on a bilateral ticket, or the review of the 101 agreements becomes the relationship. Kabir has named the method. He has not named the date.

For readers who already saw the BRICS empty-chair story, the new fact is the doctrine. Dhaka is no longer arguing only about an invitation card. It is arguing about the rank India should hold in Bangladeshi politics. That argument will outlast this week's briefing.