Where do Bangladesh and India go from here? Literary gatherings are not exactly known to be hubs of policy discussion, but the mammoth Jaipur Literature Festival held each year in the western Indian state of Rajasthan offered an insight this past week. There I joined two former high commissioners of India to Bangladesh, Pinak Ranjan Chakravarty and Riva Ganguly Das, and the academician Sreeradha Datta, a frequent visitor to Bangladesh, to do some stocktaking and to highlight sticking points.

My core views are known to readers of this column; those who are unfamiliar can reach the internet archives of Dhaka Tribune. Largely, my views and suggestions are predicated upon India reducing the establishment-led dog-whistling towards Bangladesh to mitigate the post-Hasina bilateral meltdown, urgently mending border relations, fixing river water issues, simplifying the visa regime, rationalising tariffs and trade, and supporting Bangladesh’s transition from a least-developed country to the next stage of progress and recognition.

In turn, Bangladesh needs to reduce its fulminations – especially churlish commentary by members of the interim government and their hangers-on – and stick to the core aspects of a relationship that is as inescapable as the 4,096-km border that stitches the two countries. Moreover, it will be naïve of Bangladesh to think that India will not remain hyper-reactive to any move by China or, for that matter, any overture to Pakistan, in Bangladesh.

And both countries need to get past the emotional baggage of 1971; the excess bilateral baggage facilitated by the now-deposed prime minister, Sheikh Hasina; and the politics and geo-politics of retribution.

To that end, the discussion on Bangladesh in Jaipur, which gathered significant on-site and online audiences and was covered by India media – all necessary to add to the cause of information over disinformation – was more even-handed than I initially expected. It spoke to a future of mutual, bilateral benefit. Significantly, the conversation signalled that the business of foreign policy must be reclaimed from the kennels of dog-whistlers and their rabid handlers.

Of course, more such conversations need to happen. Equally, more actions need to happen to take this ahead this relationship. To that end, let me share some aspects that often find less column-space, mind-space and traction in both Bangladesh and India than they should.

Take the visa regime between Bangladesh and India. In the wake of Hasina’s exit, while Bangladesh’s missions in India did not hinder the issuance of visas to Indians, India initially closed the doors – to subsequently reopen a handful for issuing a limited medical treatment-related visas and visas to students. Lost in the clutter of upheaval and rhetoric was the key reason for the clampdown: Some Indian visa centres were attacked. Indeed, the former high commission building in Dhanmondi in downtown Dhaka, for several years the Indira Gandhi Cultural Centre, was attacked by mobs and destroyed.

Last week, the Indian High Commissioner to Bangladesh addressed the local garment manufacturing and export community and invited them to a major garment fair in India, a productive way to enhance business visits and visas. The return to normal for issuing tourist visas – and, indeed, the enhancement of visa numbers to the staggering 1.6 million Indian visas issued in Bangladesh in 2023 – is still several months away. It will remain a gradual, calibrated approach.

There is also a realisation – although more in India’s foreign service establishment than among domestic policy planners who continue to revel in incendiary statements and misinformation and disinformation through social media, and pet media, to whip up and shore up the political base – that India needs to diligently work to keep channels open.

Bilateral trade, though diminished from 2023 levels, continues to flow despite the massive disruptions in mid-to-late 2024. Foodgrain and kitchen staples from India – rice, vegetables, edible oil – have been imported by Bangladesh in substantial amounts and is a part of the outreach by Bangladesh to overcome disruptions in domestic supply and to dampen inflation. This is going to be crucial as Bangladesh approaches the month of Ramadan in late-February, and then Eid ul-Fitr.

In early October 2024, as this column noted at the time, energy sector officials and senior executives of state-run companies of Nepal, India and Bangladesh signed off on a power purchase-and-supply agreement between Nepal and Bangladesh that would deliver 40 MW of electricity via transmission lines in India between mid-June and mid-November each year. It is a modest amount, really a test-run till transmission lines are made more robust and the quantity of electricity increases. But it was significant as a show of regional goodwill. Besides, Indian hawks were made to realise that to trip up the deal would continue to sour optics and goodwill not just in Bangladesh – where critics would find yet another excuse for anti-India rant – but also in Nepal.

A visit to Dhaka by India’s foreign secretary followed in December 2024, with meetings with top officials of the interim government. It was a crucial visit, with crucial diplomatic gestures.

More should follow. For instance, as I keep maintaining, a soft-toned Indian outreach programme that offers logic alongside dignity to Bangladeshi futures will go a long way to mend perceptions and, consequently, ties.

Take connectivity, a bugbear alongside the border, water, and visa issues. A continuing narrative in Bangladesh is that India has received undue benefit from the road, railways, and waterways projects it has undertaken in Bangladesh, primarily with a view to transhipping goods from eastern India to northeastern India; and, alongside, create a bulwark against China.

The shoring up is a fair point. Undue benefit is not. Besides, the same roads, railways, and waterways built, or enhanced, with Indian funds are today indelible Bangladeshi assets. These channels, even as they carry Indian goods, are also the very channels to carry Bangladeshi exports to India, Nepal, and Bhutan – or to the wider world via Indian ports and airports. This simple truth has not been effectively conveyed by India, or similar productive and positive aspects played up by India – in quite the same as China continually plays up its productive and positive links with Bangladesh.

Of course, China does not have to deal with the ill will in Bangladesh for harbouring Sheikh Hasina. That diplomatic hot potato has been wilfully accepted by India. More reason, then, for India to work diligently to convince a post-Hasina Bangladesh, to demonstrate to a post-Hasina Bangladesh, that it harbours no ill feeling, and that country-to-country relations are personality agnostic.

Bangladesh will need to dance the diplomatic tango too. Give, take. That is how it works in a bilateral relationship. There is no getting away.

Sudeep Chakravarti works in the policy-and-practice space in Eastern South Asia, greater South Asia, and the Indian Ocean Region.

This article was first published in Dhaka Tribune.