Editorial

There is real power in withholding presence, and Bangladesh has just exercised it. New Delhi convenes the BRICS summit on September 12, and as of mid-August, Dhaka had given no confirmation that its prime minister would attend. Indian commentary rushed to fill the silence with speculation, the way coverage does when a smaller neighbor stops performing certainty on someone else’s timetable. Foreign affairs adviser Humaiun Kobir cut through the guesswork at his Minto Road residence, and his terms left no room for misreading: no visit happens without mutual trust, reciprocal respect for sovereignty, and an invitation extended with genuine dignity, not convenience.
The statement is worth reading for what it overturns. For most of the post-1971 relationship, an Indian summit invitation functioned as an expectation, one a Bangladeshi head of government fulfilled almost automatically. Kobir has inverted that entirely. Attendance is now conditional, judged on its merits, withheld if the terms go unmet. This is not obstruction dressed up in polite language. It is a smaller state refusing, for the first time in a generation, to treat asymmetry as the natural order of the relationship.
The condition traces to a specific injury, and Kobir did not soften it. More than fifteen hundred people died in the uprising that ended Sheikh Hasina’s rule. She now lives in India, where she has been given room for political activity and media appearances that Bangladesh’s own diplomatic protest describes as aimed at destabilizing the government that convicted her. Kobir called the arrangement what it is, a violation of basic democratic norms, and confirmed Dhaka has already lodged formal objection. The claim underneath is sharper than diplomatic phrasing usually allows: sovereignty is not just borders and treaties, it is whether a neighbor’s soil can be used against the political order Bangladesh chose for itself. India cannot host that and still call the relationship equal.
Set against this refusal is a foreign policy expanding on every other front. A Riyadh visit is being finalized. Ties with Beijing have moved into a new bilateral framework. Trade talks with Washington and Brussels are advancing. Fifty-two of fifty-four African states backed Bangladesh’s bid for the UN General Assembly presidency, a number that reflects a country actively building alternatives to its old dependencies, not waiting on any single capital’s approval.
Nothing here is estrangement. It is recalibration, delivered plainly: Bangladesh has not shut a door. It has simply stopped walking through the one India never bothered to open properly.

South Asia has spent more than a decade without a functioning regional summit. SAARC’s last gathering was in 2014, frozen ever since by the rivalry between India and Pakistan. Into that vacuum has stepped Bangladesh, and the timing is not incidental. A government that survived a student-led uprising, an interim administration, and a national election in the span of eighteen months is now the region’s loudest advocate for cooperation, while simultaneously managing the most consequential bilateral relationship in its foreign policy, the one with India.
That two-track effort defines Dhaka’s current position: rebuild a regional institution that others let atrophy, and recalibrate a neighbor relationship that nearly broke down entirely under the previous interim government. Neither task is simple. Both are being handled with more discipline than the region has seen from Dhaka in years.
The reason SAARC has gone twelve years without a summit sits squarely with New Delhi and Islamabad, not with the smaller states trying to keep the platform alive. The India-Pakistan relationship deteriorated further after the April 2025 killing of 26 tourists in Pahalgam, which India blamed on a Pakistan-based militant group. India’s response went beyond military retaliation, it suspended the Indus Waters Treaty “in abeyance,” a treaty that had survived every prior war between the two countries. Operation Sindoor followed in May 2025, strikes and a ceasefire within days, and by mid-2026 India was still holding the water treaty hostage to demands that Pakistan “credibly and irrevocably” end cross-border militancy, the same language it now applies whenever regional cooperation is on the table.
That posture explains why India has spent the last several years building alternatives that exclude Pakistan entirely: BIMSTEC, which held its sixth summit in Bangkok in April 2025, and the smaller BBIN connectivity grouping. These forums let India set terms without Pakistan able to block them. It is a rational strategy for India’s narrow interests. It is also precisely the kind of fragmentation that leaves smaller South Asian states with less collective leverage, which is why Bangladesh’s push to keep SAARC alive matters.
Bangladesh founded SAARC in Dhaka in 1985 under President Ziaur Rahman, built on the idea that South Asian states have more to gain together than apart. That founding instinct has resurfaced. Under the interim government, SAARC revival was named a top priority; under the elected BNP government since February 2026, that position has held, with Dhaka explicitly framing SAARC and BIMSTEC as complementary rather than competing, a position designed not to force India into an uncomfortable choice, but to keep every door open.
Bangladesh is not carrying this alone. Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar pledged cooperation on SAARC revival during a 2025 Dhaka visit. The Maldives, under President Mohamed Muizzu, has twice called publicly for SAARC’s return, offering to mediate among members. And a striking, if unplanned, moment of thaw came at Khaleda Zia’s funeral in early 2026 in Dhaka, where Indian and Pakistani officials reportedly shook hands for the first time since their 2025 military clash, a reminder that shared occasions, even solemn ones, can open doors that formal diplomacy cannot.
A full summit-level revival remains unlikely while the India-Pakistan rivalry stays this hardened. But SAARC does not need summits to be useful. It remains the only table where every South Asian state sits together, giving smaller states leverage they cannot generate alone. Its charter already permits “SAARC-minus-X” arrangements, letting willing states move ahead on shared projects like energy grids or climate-data sharing without waiting on unanimous consent. And “low politics” cooperation, disaster response, public health, climate adaptation, food security, can advance even while high politics stays frozen, building habits of trust that eventually make bigger breakthroughs possible. Keeping the secretariat and technical bodies running, rather than letting the organization die outright, preserves the option to scale back up quickly whenever the India-Pakistan freeze eventually breaks.
Bangladesh’s expanding ties with China have drawn attention in India, and they are worth stating plainly rather than apologizing for. China has become a major source of investment and infrastructure financing across South Asia, and Bangladesh’s engagement with it including the CETC drone manufacturing facility deal in Chittagong, and Prime Minister Tarique Rahman choosing Malaysia and China for his first foreign trip in office, where he called Beijing a “most valued and trusted partner”, reflects a country expanding its options rather than picking sides. Every serious middle power in the region does the same calculus. Diversification is not confrontation; it is ordinary economic diplomacy, and Dhaka has been careful to keep it framed that way rather than as leverage against any single partner.
Since Prime Minister Rahman was sworn in on February 17, 2026, the relationship with India has visibly stabilized, and it is worth recording how much of that stabilization has come from Bangladesh’s own restraint and initiative. Rahman avoided anti-India rhetoric throughout the campaign, a discipline that earned early goodwill in New Delhi, Modi was reportedly the first foreign leader to call and congratulate him. India’s Foreign Secretary and the Lok Sabha Speaker attended the swearing-in. Bangladesh resumed full visa services for Indian nationals as an early gesture of good faith. External Affairs Minister Jaishankar attended Khaleda Zia’s funeral. Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman made the first ministerial visit to New Delhi under the new government, covering visas, energy, border management, water-sharing, and trade in one sitting. An invitation for Rahman to visit India, potentially around the September 2026 BRICS Summit in New Delhi, remains open, and Indian officials have said publicly that they expect his visit to unlock further progress.
This is a government choosing engagement deliberately, not one reacting to pressure. That distinction matters, because it means the reset can be sustained on Bangladesh’s own terms rather than dictated from outside.
Not every part of the relationship has moved forward, and where it hasn’t, the responsibility largely sits with New Delhi. Sheikh Hasina remains in India, having refused Dhaka’s extradition requests even after being sentenced to death in absentia in late 2025 for her role in the 2024 crackdown that the United Nations estimates killed up to 1,400 people. On August 5, 2026, the second anniversary of her ouster, Hasina delivered her first public address since fleeing, by video link, from an event held in New Delhi. Bangladesh fo…

For most of the past five decades, India’s calculus on Bangladesh has rested on one quiet assumption: geography does the work. Surrounded on three sides, dependent on Indian rivers, historically tied through the events of 1971, Dhaka wasn’t expected to shop around for security partners. It was expected to stay put, grateful and compliant, inside a relationship India could define largely on its own terms.

That assumption is now visibly cracking, and Turkish media just put a number on how far the crack has spread.

The proposal itself, floated in the pro-Erdoğan daily Yeni Şafak, imagines Bangladesh entering the Saudi-Turkey-Pakistan defense framework signed earlier this month in Mecca, gaining access to Turkish shipbuilding technology, Pakistani naval cooperation, and a navy modernized on Dhaka’s own terms rather than through Indian intermediation. The piece frames this as more than a defense upgrade; it describes it as a mature, independent foreign policy finally catching up with Bangladesh’s actual standing in the region. Nothing about it reads as provocation. It reads as a country doing what sovereign states are supposed to do: diversify, hedge, and stop treating any single power as indispensable.

What’s revealing isn’t the Turkish proposal itself. It’s how India reacted to it.

NDTV didn’t cover this as routine diplomatic speculation. It covered it as a security emergency, cataloguing Turkish drone capabilities, warship programs, and missile ranges like an intelligence briefing rather than a news story about a hypothetical alliance. Senior Indian analysts openly described Bangladesh’s mere proximity to this framework as a “challenge” to Indian security planning. Sit with that phrasing for a moment. A neighboring, sovereign nation weighing its own defense partnerships is being treated in Delhi’s press not as ordinary statecraft, but as a problem requiring management. That reflex says something India rarely admits out loud: it has grown so accustomed to treating Bangladesh’s foreign policy choices as subject to Indian approval that the mere suggestion of independence reads as instability rather than what it actually is, a country exercising the same prerogative every sovereign state claim as a matter of course.

There’s an irony sitting just beneath the surface of India’s anxiety, too. The same NDTV analysis that raises the alarm concedes that Saudi Arabia currently has around $100 billion invested in the Indian economy and isn’t eager to complicate that relationship over this specific pact. But treating that as the deciding factor gives India too much credit. Riyadh’s caution reflects Saudi Arabia’s own balancing act among several partners; it doesn’t reflect any limit on what Bangladesh itself can pursue. Turkey has already signaled the door is open. Pakistan has welcomed the prospect outright. And Bangladesh isn’t waiting on a single pact to demonstrate where it’s headed: Dhaka has spent the past two years actively building the alternatives itself, not requesting them.

The evidence is already on the ground. The Mongla Port economic zone, once earmarked for India, now belongs to a Chinese state enterprise after New Delhi’s own nominated developer failed to deliver for a decade. Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince personally invited Prime Minister Tarique Rahman to Riyadh. The Chattogram economic corridor is drawing investment interest from multiple directions at once. None of these moves waited for anyone’s permission, and none of them depended on this Mecca pact conversation to happen. Bangladesh has been setting its own pace for a while now; this week’s headlines just made the pattern visible to an Indian audience that had assumed otherwise.

This particular proposal may never become formal policy, and that’s almost beside the point. What it exposed was Delhi’s own posture: a regional strategy built for decades on the presumption that Bangladesh had nowhere else to go. That presumption no longer holds, and it isn’t holding because of what Turkey or Saudi Arabia decide to offer, it’s not holding because Bangladesh stopped waiting for offers and started building options on its own terms. The neighbor that was always expected to ask permission has simply moved on to informing.

Delhi hosted a panel last week and dressed it up as history. “80 Years of Indian Flag Hoisting in Chattogram Hill Tracts”, that was the actual title, which tells you everything about the angle before anyone even opened their mouth. Chakma Reporter ran it, an outlet operating out of India. A speaker said keeping the CHT out of India in ’47 was a mistake. Another floated separating it from Bangladesh now, like that’s a normal thing to say out loud about a country you don’t live in. Then the “Jumma nationalism” talk came out, the self-determination language, the whole vocabulary borrowed from indigenous rights movements elsewhere in the world.

Here’s what actually irritates me about it. Bangladesh’s constitution calls the hill peoples ethnic minorities. Protected, with cultural and land rights written in. Not “indigenous” in the international legal sense, where that word carries a claim to land that predates and outranks the state itself. That’s not a technicality some bureaucrat invented, it’s the difference between “you have rights within this country” and “this country’s authority over you is up for debate.” Calling it “Jumma nationalism” quietly swaps one for the other, in a room full of people who agree with each other and nobody there to push back.

And this is an old trick, not a new one. Nobody sends a formal claim on someone else’s territory anymore, too obvious, too easy to shoot down. You run a panel instead. A few academics, a diaspora activist or two, an anniversary framing that sounds neutral. Say the thing enough times in enough rooms and eventually it just sits there as background noise that people stop questioning. That’s the actual risk. Not four people talking. Four people talking, unanswered, for the fifth-year running.

What I don’t want is for this to turn into something aimed at the Chakma, Marma, Tripura, Mro people who actually live there. They didn’t organize this panel. Most of them have never heard of it. Treating them like they’re somehow implicated because a few voices in Delhi spoke “for” them would be exactly the gift this argument is fishing for, an actual grievance, manufactured by Bangladesh’s own overreaction, where none existed an hour earlier.

What Bangladesh actually needs is boring and unglamorous: put the legal case on paper somewhere people can find it. Why the CHT is Bangladeshi territory, why the classification is minority and not indigenous, why that was a decision and not an accident. Right now, that argument lives in government filings nobody reads, while Delhi’s version is short, emotional, and gets repeated at dinner tables. That imbalance is the actual problem, more than the panel itself.

And none of these matters if the land disputes in the CHT stay unresolved and the ’97 accord keeps sitting half-finished. That’s the only soil this kind of argument can actually grow in. Everywhere else, it’s just people talking about a place they don’t live in, deciding things for people who were never in the room.

Political biography tends to reduce a life to a sequence of offices held and elections won. That framework fails Begum Khaleda Zia almost entirely. Her life did not simply intersect with Bangladesh’s political history; for four decades it was one of the threads holding that history together. On her 82nd birth anniversary, the country is not observing the customary rites owed to a former head of government. It is reckoning with what it means to lose someone whose personal fate and the nation’s democratic fate had become, by degrees, the same story.
She entered public life without design. In 1981, following the assassination of her husband, President Ziaur Rahman, in Chattogram, she faced the kind of grief that could have justified withdrawal from public view altogether. Instead, she joined BNP the following year and rose to its leadership within three years, an ascent built through the patient, often thankless labor of organizing a party still finding its footing rather than through any inherited claim to authority. That distinction matters. Bangladesh has no shortage of leaders who inherited political capital; she constructed hers.
The 1980s asked her to prove that construction under pressure. Detained repeatedly during the movement against autocratic rule, she returned each time to public organizing rather than retreating into private life, a pattern of behavior that eventually earned her the description “uncompromising leader.” The phrase has since become almost decorative through repetition, but its origin was not sentimental. It described a specific, testable commitment: that political conviction, once declared, would not be renegotiated under duress. Few public figures anywhere are asked to prove that commitment as many times as she was.
When autocratic rule finally ended in December 1990, she stood among those whose persistence had made that ending possible, and the following year the country entrusted her with its highest office, making her its first woman prime minister. The significance of that moment extends past the personal achievement. A young parliamentary democracy choosing a woman as its head of government sent a signal about the kind of political order Bangladesh intended to become, and her government’s investment in girls’ education and stipend programs translated that signal into material change reaching well beyond the capital’s political class.
Her later decades demanded something closer to endurance than leadership in the conventional sense. During the 2007 emergency period, when departure from the country would have been the more comfortable option, she declared that she had no address outside Bangladesh and remained. The years that followed extracted a considerable price for that decision: both of her sons faced arrest, and her younger son, Arafat Rahman Koko, died abroad in 2015, his mother unable to see him through his final illness. That a public figure absorbed that kind of private grief while continuing to carry national political weight is not a detail biography can fully account for; it belongs to a category of endurance that resists tidy narrative treatment.
Imprisonment and deteriorating health defined her final years in politics, and by all available accounts, neither altered her stated positions on governance or civil rights. Her full release in 2024, following the change in government, closed a protracted period of confinement, though the physical toll of those years proved irreversible. She died at Evercare Hospital in Dhaka on December 30, 2025.
The public response to her death offered its own form of historical evidence. The procession from her Gulshan residence to the National Parliament’s South Plaza was not the product of official mobilization. It reflected an unprompted, cumulative judgment by ordinary citizens about what she had represented to them, expressed through sheer numbers rather than ceremony.
To assess Begum Khaleda Zia honestly on this anniversary requires holding two things together: her formal record as a three-time prime minister, and the less measurable fact that she treated political principle as a fixed point rather than a variable, even when the cost of that fixity fell on her own family. Bangladesh’s democratic development over the past four decades cannot be narrated without her, and that, more than any single office she held, is the measure of what her life amounted to.

Realist theories of interstate bargaining rest on a simple premise: asymmetry of power translates into asymmetry of outcomes. A larger state sends senior emissaries to a smaller neighbor, the visit itself functions as pressure, and the weaker party concedes ground to avoid friction. This model has governed India’s approach to Bangladesh for decades, largely because it worked. This week, in Dhaka, it stopped working, and the gap between what Delhi expected and what it got reveals something more consequential than a single failed negotiation.
Consider the sequence. India’s intelligence chief arrived in Dhaka within the same window that the Indian High Commissioner secured a meeting at the Prime Minister’s Office, a coordinated show of institutional weight rarely deployed without an expected return. The return never materialized. Bangladesh conceded nothing at any table where core national interests were under discussion. The High Commissioner, rather than departing with a negotiated outcome, returned to Delhi to recalibrate an approach that had clearly misjudged its target.
The deeper explanation lies in a category error. Indian foreign policy toward Dhaka since 5 August 2024 has continued to operate on the assumptions of the previous decade and a half, a period in which the relationship functioned less as diplomacy between sovereign equals and more as management of a dependent partner. That framework produced consistent results under Sheikh Hasina. It has produced almost nothing but missteps since her departure, most visibly in India’s tolerance of her continued political activity from its soil, conducted with apparent disregard for how that choice would register with the Bangladeshi public. What Delhi failed to anticipate was not that Dhaka would object. It was the calibration and consistency of the objection.
The clearest evidence of that recalibration predates this week’s visits. When Prime Minister Tarique Rahman selected Malaysia and China, rather than India, for his government’s first bilateral engagements abroad, the choice functioned as a diplomatic signal in the formal sense: a deliberate act intended to be read and interpreted by the intended recipient. Delhi’s response followed a familiar script, an invitation offered not as a bilateral state visit but folded into the multilateral BIMSTEC framework, carrying conditions rather than parity. Dhaka declined it without deliberation. In signaling theory, a rejected overture of that kind carries more information than an accepted one; it establishes where the threshold for engagement actually sits. India appears to have absorbed that lesson only after the fact.
The foreign ministry’s language following Sheikh Hasina’s recent press appearance made the underlying position explicit, describing a Bangladesh no longer willing to function as a client state in the region’s power structure. Whatever weight that phrase carried in domestic politics, its real audience was Delhi, and by the evidence of this week’s scramble, it was heard.
What emerges from this episode is not simply a story about one failed round of pressure diplomacy. It is a data point in a broader recalibration of how power is distributed and perceived in South Asia. Bangladesh’s position for much of the post-independence period has been that of a secondary actor, absorbing the expectations of larger neighbors without the leverage to set its own terms. The events of the past several days suggest that arrangement is no longer operative, and that any Indian strategy premised on its continuation will keep producing the same result it produced this week.
None of this forecloses a working relationship between the two countries. A visit by Bangladesh’s prime minister to India remains plausible, and even likely, in time. But the terms of that visit, and of the relationship it would represent, are now a matter for negotiation between equals rather than an outcome India can assume. Whether Delhi is prepared to operate on those terms is a question only Delhi can answer, and the coming months will show whether it has understood the message or simply absorbed the inconvenience of it.

Sheikh Hasina picked up a microphone in Delhi and announced she’s coming back to lead her party. That single fact should embarrass New Delhi more than it appears to.
For months, India’s position has been simple and repeated at every level: Hasina is on Indian soil for humanitarian reasons only. No political platform. No political activity. That line was echoed almost word for word in the Congress-commissioned report on India-Bangladesh relations led by Shashi Tharoor, which described her status as strictly humanitarian, with no space allowed for political operations. It’s a formulation with real legal weight behind it, asylum on humanitarian grounds is a recognized international norm precisely because it’s supposed to come with a condition: the guest doesn’t turn the host country into a base of operations against the government of the country they fled.
Then came a virtual press conference, hosted by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of South Asia, where Hasina did exactly what Delhi insists, she isn’t allowed to do. She spoke as a party leader. She talked about a return to power. She addressed her supporters as a politician still in the fight, not a guest quietly waiting out asylum. The distance between the policy on paper and the event on screen wasn’t subtle.
India’s government response followed a script familiar to anyone who has studied how states manage embarrassment without admitting fault. The event, officials said, was organized by a private body, not the state. Technically true. Practically meaningless and worth naming for what it is. Statecraft has a term for this maneuver: plausible deniability, the practice of keeping leadership formally uninformed and communication deliberately vague; a nod, a wink, an unwritten understanding, so that if an operation surfaces, the state can disclaim knowledge and let a “private” or “rogue” actor absorb the blame. The Cold War is full of case studies where this exact mechanism let governments run operations abroad while keeping their hands clean on paper. What’s happening with Hasina’s press appearances fits the pattern closely enough that pretending otherwise requires more credulity than the facts support.
Look at who that “private body” actually is, because the deniability only works if the organization is genuinely arm’s-length from the state. The FCC South Asia brands itself as an international press organization, but its roughly 500 members are overwhelmingly Delhi-based, and Indian nationals sit atop its leadership, the club’s president and its secretary among them, alongside diplomats, lawyers, and corporate-media figures drawn into its associate membership. A handful of foreign correspondents on the rolls doesn’t change what the club functions as in practice: a Delhi institution, staffed and run by people embedded in India’s own media and political ecosystem, on Indian soil. An organization built like that does not stage a politically charged event for a foreign fugitive on a whim. Somewhere between the invitation and the livestream, someone made a judgment call about what would and wouldn’t draw consequences and concluded, correctly, that it wouldn’t.
There’s a structural asymmetry underneath all of this that’s worth naming directly. Plausible deniability as a strategy only works when the state deploying it has enough regional weight that the smaller neighbor’s objections can be absorbed without real cost. Bangladesh raised concerns about this kind of programming before it happened. India was free to intervene, discourage it, or distance itself in advance, the way governments do when they actually intend to honor a stated policy. It didn’t. It let the press conference happen, absorbed a diplomatic complaint it had already anticipated, and reached for the explanation it had pre-loaded. That’s not incompetence. That’s a calculation that the relationship can take the strain, a calculation smaller states are rarely in a position to make about larger ones.
The Tharoor report’s language, “humanitarian refuge, no political space”, deserves scrutiny on its own terms, not just as a description contradicted by events. It was written to sound like a firm boundary. In practice it functions as a boundary India controls the enforcement of, case by case, appearance by appearance, with no independent mechanism ensuring it actually holds. A policy that only constrains behavior when someone chooses to enforce it isn’t a policy. It’s a discretionary courtesy, extended or withdrawn as convenient, which is precisely what a live political address from a fugitive prime minister, broadcast from Indian soil, exposes.
As for the comeback Hasina announced: it may not travel far, whatever platform Delhi permits her. The party she once ran with total control is now scattered, its leaders scrambling in different directions, its internal cohesion bleeding out along with her personal standing. Fifteen years of rule left behind more resentment than loyalty in Bangladesh, and no press conference staged from Delhi changes what’s waiting for her at home. Declaring an intent to return is easy from a studio in Delhi. Facing the country she left is a different proposition entirely and no amount of institutional cover from across the border will substitute for it.

When Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim announced late last month that Myanmar had consented to receive 5,000 Rohingya currently residing in Malaysia, the announcement bore the trappings of diplomatic achievement. Beneath that veneer, however, lies a striking absence of substance. No timetable has been published. No selection criteria have been articulated. Nothing has been said about the legal protections, if any, that would greet these refugees upon their return to Myanmar soil.
The Malaysian government has offered a single qualifying assurance: the transfer will not proceed if officials determine that returnees would face persecution. Government spokesperson Fahmi Fadzil has indicated that the Foreign and Home Ministries remain engaged in reviewing the proposal. This assurance, however well-intentioned, does little to allay the concerns of rights organizations, and the reasoning is not difficult to trace. A pledge against endangerment carries scant weight in the absence of any articulated framework for assessing that danger, let alone clarity on which authority bears responsibility for making such determinations.
Stripped of diplomatic phrasing, the matter reduces to a single, unresolved question: citizenship. Myanmar’s 1982 Citizenship Law rendered the Rohingya population effectively stateless decades ago, and nothing within the current arrangement suggests that legal exclusion has been revisited. A Rohingya returned to Myanmar today would arrive precisely as stateless as when they departed, without secure legal identity, without assured freedom of movement, without protection against arbitrary detention. Malaysia has offered no clarity on whether returnees would be permitted to reclaim their ancestral villages, or whether they would instead be consigned to displacement sites bearing an uncomfortable resemblance to the very conditions that first compelled their flight.
Human Rights Watch has already called upon Malaysia to abandon any plan carrying the risk of forced return, invoking the doctrine of non-refoulement, the internationally recognized prohibition against returning individuals to territories where their lives or liberty would be imperiled. Malaysia’s abstention from the 1951 Refugee Convention does not exempt it from this obligation, which is grounded in customary international law rather than treaty membership alone.
Conditions within Myanmar lend the timing of this proposal an air of recklessness. Arakan State remains contested territory, divided between the military and the Arakan Army, with Rohingya civilians caught amid detention, forced conscription and coerced labor. UNHCR has stated plainly that the prerequisites for a safe, voluntary and dignified return do not currently exist. To dispatch refugees into an active conflict zone under a legal status that guarantees them nothing is not repatriation in any meaningful sense. It is relocation into a different register of peril.
A domestic dimension merits attention as well. Rohingya communities in Malaysia have encountered mounting hostility this year, including harassment and pressure to vacate their homes. The government has simultaneously moved to tighten oversight of refugee registration, introducing its own system and requesting that UNHCR suspend new registrations. None of this establishes that the return plan is coercive by design. It does, however, mean that any refugee weighing this proposition does so within an environment ill-suited to genuine deliberation, a circumstance that bears directly on Malaysia’s insistence that the return remains voluntary.
Bangladesh’s own experience offers an instructive precedent. Dhaka has spent years pursuing repatriation negotiations with Naypyidaw while hosting approximately 1.2 million Rohingya refugees, and no substantial organized return has materialized, because refugees themselves have consistently declined to move absent guarantees on citizenship, security and fundamental rights. That refusal should not be mistaken for obstruction. It stands as the clearest available evidence that repatriation cannot be engineered as a transaction between states while the people being transacted possess no voice in the arrangement.
Before Malaysia proceeds further, ASEAN, the United Nations and other international observers must demand answers extending well beyond Myanmar’s bare consent to accept a fixed number of refugees. Where, precisely, would these 5,000 individuals be resettled? What legal status would await them? Which authority would guarantee their safety, and would independent monitors retain access to verify that such guarantees hold? Until these questions receive credible answers, characterizing this arrangement as a solution to the Rohingya crisis remains, at best, premature.

Sheikh Hasina addressed international media from New Delhi this week while facing genocide charges over the killing of unarmed civilians. She chose the anniversary of the uprising that ended her government to do it. The choice of date was deliberate, and it changes the character of the act, this was not simply a fugitive granted an interview but a calculated act of political theater staged against a day of national mourning.
Bangladesh’s response has been outrage. That reaction requires no defense.
The factual record here is not in dispute domestically or internationally. UN investigators documented the killing of civilians, children among them, during the crackdown Hasina ordered to preserve her hold on office. From a studio in New Delhi, she contested that record anyway, recasting a mass uprising as conspiracy while the families of the dead watched from a country that has already rendered its judgment on her rule. There is a term political theorists use for this kind of performance: the manufacture of an alternative legitimacy, staged for an audience that no longer has the power to grant it.
India’s decision to host the event invites its own scrutiny. Bangladesh conveyed its objections in advance, laying out precisely what the appearance would cost a relationship both governments describe as a priority. New Delhi proceeded regardless. There is a meaningful distinction, well established in the diplomatic conduct of asylum, between granting a person residence and granting that person a platform. Hasina is not simply residing in India, she is contesting Bangladeshi sovereignty from Indian soil, with an extradition request still pending. That distinction is precisely the one that international norms around asylum are meant to preserve, and India’s conduct here blurs it.
The extradition treaty the two countries signed in 2013 was written for cases like this one. Bangladesh has formally invoked it. New Delhi’s silence is not a neutral position; treaties acquire meaning only through enforcement, and their absence of response constitutes a decision, whatever diplomatic language might obscure that fact.
Power and legitimacy are not the same currency, and Hasina’s years in office bought her the former without ever fully securing the latter, a distinction her government’s reliance on rigged elections and enforced disappearance made increasingly visible over time. A broadcast from a sympathetic capital cannot retroactively purchase what a governed population already withheld. The judgment rendered in the streets in July 2024 was not procedural; it was foundational, the kind of verdict that a press conference, however widely covered, has no standing to appeal.
Bangladesh has stated its position without ambiguity: no return to the pattern of state violence and disappearance that defined the preceding years, and no role for Hasina or her circle in the country’s political future. This is less an act of vengeance than the ordinary business of a state consolidating the settlement its people have already reached.
The relationship with India can still proceed on the terms Dhaka has proposed, terms drawn from the standard grammar of interstate relations, sovereign equality, mutual respect, non-interference. But each accommodation extended to the person whose presence most directly undermines those terms erodes the credibility of the offer. The question of which matters more to New Delhi is no longer rhetorical. It is now a matter of record, and Bangladesh is watching how it gets answered.

A word keeps surfacing in Bangladeshi politics that was never built for Bangladesh. “Adivasi” is an Indian legal term, imported wholesale and pressed onto the Chittagong Hill Tracts as though it belongs there. It doesn’t, and the mismatch isn’t incidental.
Trace the origin and the picture sharpens. The 1900 Chittagong Hill Tracts Regulation wasn’t drafted to safeguard tribal culture. The British designed it to seal off difficult terrain and choke off anti-colonial resistance before it could spread into the hills. It was a mechanism of control, engineered under the logic of empire, not a charter of rights. Reviving that colonial relic now, repackaged as indigenous protection, is a different undertaking entirely, one aimed at carving a legal enclave out of a republic meant to answer to a single constitution.
Consider who actually settled the region. The Chakma migrated from Arakan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, brought in under Mughal and British land grants as a strategic buffer against Arakanese raids, not discovered as the land’s original people. The same holds for the twelve other recognized hill communities: Marma, Tripura, Mro, Bawm, Lushai, Khumi, Khyang, Pangkhua, Chak, Tanchangya, Rakhine, Usui. Each traces its roots to Myanmar or India’s northeast, arriving through migration, resettlement, or flight from conflict. None predate the Bengali-speaking population of the delta, whose presence in the region stretches back millennia. Measured against the actual international standard for indigeneity, continuous presence in a territory from before colonization, the claim simply doesn’t hold.
Bangladesh’s Constitution settled this question with precision. Articles 28(4) and 23A speak of “tribes, minor races, ethnic sects, and communities.” Not indigenous peoples. That phrasing was chosen deliberately, to foreclose the creation of a separate legal class of citizens defined by ethnicity rather than nationhood.
Then there’s “Jumma,” a term now invoked as though it names an ancient, unified nation. It doesn’t. Insurgent leaders coined it in the 1980s to fuse more than a dozen unrelated communities, distinct in language, religion, and political history, into a single bloc capable of commanding international sympathy. It functioned as a branding exercise, effective at generating leverage, hollow as a description of lived history.
The sharpest edge of this conflict is unfolding in the courts. After the Supreme Court upheld the 1900 Regulation in rulings handed down in 2016 and 2018, fresh petitions now seek to elevate that colonial instrument into something resembling a regional constitution, one that would place land and residency law in the CHT almost entirely beyond the reach of national authority. A counter-petition runs in the opposite direction: Bengali settlers, many placed in the region under government programs during the 1970s and ’80s, are asking the court to strike 37 of the Regulation’s 65 clauses so they can own land and reside freely where they have lived for generations. Two petitions, two irreconcilable visions of what equal treatment under the law should mean.
Behind much of the activism advancing the first vision, particularly the student campaigns centered at Dhaka University, sits more than cultural pride. These movements draw in foreign funding and international advocacy networks, transforming what is fundamentally a domestic constitutional argument into a lever for outside interests to pull.
None of this serves the people who actually live in the Hill Tracts. A dual legal order doesn’t shield minorities; it isolates them, cordons them off from the rest of the country’s civic and legal life, and hands external actors a durable foothold inside Bangladesh’s internal affairs.
The Constitution already supplies the answer, and it doesn’t require reinterpretation: one republic, one law, equal citizenship regardless of ethnicity. The Chittagong Hill Tracts are not a contested territory awaiting outside arbitration. They are Bangladesh, in full.