The Pulse | Diplomacy | South Asia

Beyond Deference: India’s Bangladesh Reckoning

A course correction is needed in New Delhi.

On October 6, Indian High Commissioner to Bangladesh Dinesh Trivedi called on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi. It isn’t unusual for heads of Indian missions assigned to critical or sensitive bilateral stations to provide direct update or receive specific strategic directives during visits or consultations in New Delhi. Modi’s office maintains an active and hands-on approach to foreign policy implementation, making direct communication and briefings with key diplomatic personnel a standard part of administrative routine. However, Trivedi’s case and the circumstances of the meeting are rather unique. 

Trivedi was appointed as India’s high commissioner to Bangladesh in April 2026, a rare political appointment to a key neighboring diplomatic mission. A businessman and a politician of the ruling BJP from the eastern state of West Bengal, he has direct access to Modi and does not need to route his meetings through the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). His appointment to Dhaka in April 2026, replacing a career diplomat, came at a time when bilateral relations between India and Bangladesh had hit a rough patch.

Bangladeshi demands for the deportation of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who has found refuge in India since August 2024, has been a particular sore point. India has ignored repeated pleas by the new BNP government and its predecessor interim government to extradite Hasina, despite the existence of an extradition treaty between the two countries since 2013. The treaty’s terms (Article 6) allows either country to refuse extradition if the offense is of a political nature. 

Three days before his meeting with Modi, Trivedi’s response to a direct question at the Bay of Bengal Conversation (BoBC) 2026 in Dhaka had hit the headlines. The BoBC is an annual international conference with participants from over a hundred countries comprising world leaders, policymakers, diplomats, researchers, academics, experts, and civil society representatives organized by the Centre for Governance Studies (CGS). I participated in the conference, held this year on October 3-4, as a panelist and a guest of the CGS. 

A participating Bangladeshi student asked the Indian high commissioner: “When will India send back Hasina?” Trivedi appeared to diplomatically avert the direct query and instead passed the buck to the Bangladeshi military, who had sent her to India on a military aircraft before she even resigned from her post. Moreover, Hasina was meant to be transiting via Delhi to a third country, which never actually materialized. This put New Delhi in a quandary.

“At that point in time, she [Hasina] was still the prime minister of Bangladesh. We had hardly any choice on that. It was our duty as a neighbor to accept the reality of life,” Trivedi said. He added that New Delhi cannot set a deadline for her return, as her extradition request is under review as part of the legal process. “Nobody can give you a time frame [over Hasina’s return],” he concluded.

While no press statements were issued, the meeting between Modi and Trivedi may reflect an effort on New Delhi’s part to gauge Dhaka’s mood from its own representative. Dhaka has ignored the MEA’s invitations to new Prime Minister Tarique Rahman to visit Delhi. In fact, Bangladesh’s State Minister for Foreign Affairs Humaiun Kobir, who attended the same conference, was categorical in saying, in a subsequent media interview on the sidelines of the BoBC, that the “principal challenge” in planning Rahman’s visit to India are the activities of Hasina, who he termed a “terrorist,” and her team, who are there. Trivedi could be suggesting a course correction in New Delhi’s policies toward Dhaka.

Since November 2025, India’s MEA has maintained that the formal request for Hasina’s extradition is being “examined as part of ongoing judicial and internal legal processes.” Yet, these “processes” remain inconclusive even after 11 months. While New Delhi is unwilling to sacrifice its former ally, it hasn’t closed the door to mending ties with its........

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