Rahman’s first foreign trip will shape Bangladesh’s new direction

Three months into his premiership, Tarique Rahman still hasn’t left Bangladesh on an official foreign visit. That restraint is itself a diplomatic act. 

For a leader who spent 17 years in London exile, returned to win a landslide election, and now governs a country of 170 million sitting at the intersection of two competing great-power orbits, the question of where he goes first carries a weight that few inaugural trips anywhere in the world currently match.

The invitations have arrived from China, India, Pakistan and the Gulf. But the real contest has always been between Beijing and New Delhi, and it has been playing out in hotel lobbies, foreign ministry corridors and carefully worded press releases for months.

Before getting to that contest, it is worth dismissing the options that were never really viable. 

The United States, for instance, has effectively ruled itself out. Trump’s travel restrictions, which came into force on January 1, 2026, have placed Bangladesh under a visa bond regime — meaning Bangladeshi nationals face additional financial requirements and enhanced scrutiny when seeking entry. 

More significantly, reports indicate that the Bangladesh PM faces an unresolved FBI-related travel restriction that complicates any visit to Washington. 

A Bangladeshi state head cannot realistically make the United States his first foreign destination when his own entry is legally uncertain and the host country’s immigration architecture treats his citizens as a security category of concern. 

Pakistan, too, was never a serious contender for the first trip, despite Islamabad’s enthusiasm. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif rang Rahman with congratulations, Pakistan sent a senior minister to the swearing-in ceremony, and formal invitations were extended. 

The relationship between the two countries has genuinely warmed since Hasina’s fall — direct flights have resumed, military exchanges are happening, Bangladeshi bureaucrats are, for the first time since 1971, undergoing training at Pakistan’s Civil Services Academy in Lahore. 

But there is a ceiling on how far and how fast this relationship can move, and visiting Islamabad first would smash right through it. 

The 1971 Liberation War is not ancient history in Bangladesh — it is the founding trauma of the nation. The war in which Pakistani military forces killed hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis remains raw in public memory and central to national identity. 

Going to Pakistan before any other country would be read domestically not as smart hedging but as an insult to that memory. Pakistan is a relationship Bangladesh is quietly recalibrating; it is not a showcase.

Given the current conflict in the Middle East, that also does not seem like a viable option. 

That leaves China and India — and in the space between their two capitals, the real story of Bangladesh’s diplomatic future is being written.

China has been the more aggressive suitor. Within days of Rahman taking office, Beijing’s ambassador hand-delivered a personal invitation from Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang. Since then, the courtship has been relentless — BNP delegations to Beijing, the Foreign Minister’s visit in early May, a joint statement, and reports later saying China was seeking to host Tarique in late June. 

Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman subsequently confirmed to reporters that China was being prioritized as the most likely destination. The machinery is in motion. Sources close to both the BNP and the Chinese embassy say June is now almost certain.

India moved quickly too. Modi sent a warm personal letter through Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla on the day of the swearing-in, inviting Rahman and his entire family to New Delhi. 

Bangladesh’s Foreign Minister visited Delhi in April, met Jaishankar and National Security Advisor Doval, and described the atmosphere as one of convergence. He returned publicly optimistic, confirming that a Modi-Rahman summit would happen — just that dates hadn’t been fixed. 

The warmth is genuine. But warmth and readiness are two different things, and right now India is not ready.

The obstacle is former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. She sits in Delhi, convicted to death by a Bangladeshi tribunal, with Dhaka formally demanding her extradition under an existing treaty. India has not responded substantively. 

It is very difficult to imagine Tarique Rahman sitting across from Narendra Modi for a state dinner while his government is publicly seeking the extradition of the woman India sheltered — the woman whose fall was partly blamed, in Bangladeshi public sentiment, on Indian backing. 

The optics would be impossible at home. Until there is at least a framework for addressing the Hasina question, a full Rahman-Modi summit carries too much domestic political risk for Dhaka.

There is also Teesta. For over a decade, India promised Bangladesh a water-sharing agreement on the Teesta river and repeatedly failed to deliver, blocked each time by Mamata Banerjee’s West Bengal government. That obstacle has shifted now that the BJP governs Bengal. 

But in the intervening years, Bangladesh turned to China — and China said yes. Bangladesh has formally sought Chinese funding and technical support for the Teesta River Comprehensive Management and Restoration Project, a billion-dollar scheme to dredge and rehabilitate over a hundred kilometres of a river that millions of northern Bangladeshis depend on. 

If Rahman visits Beijing in June, a formal announcement on Teesta is widely expected.

This is where the story becomes genuinely alarming for India. The Teesta project sits in territory geographically proximate to the Siliguri Corridor — the famous “Chicken’s Neck,” a strip of land barely twenty-two kilometres wide that connects India’s mainland to its entire northeastern region. 

Indian security analysts have warned for years that even a civilian Chinese technical presence in that zone could give Beijing eyes and ears near some of India’s most sensitive military installations, including the Hasimara air base. 

What began as a water dispute between two neighbours has become a live strategic question about how close China’s infrastructure footprint will get to India’s most vulnerable geographic chokepoint. 

India had the chance to own the Teesta project. It didn’t. Now it watches from the outside as China prepares to step in — and cement that role with a PM-level visit that puts a seal of political legitimacy on the arrangement.

Beyond Teesta, Beijing is also pushing Rahman to formally endorse Xi Jinping’s Global Development Initiative and Global Security Initiative — two frameworks that, beneath their development language, represent China’s effort to build an alternative global order. 

There are also discussions about connecting Bangladesh to a China-Myanmar-Bangladesh road corridor stretching to Kunming. Not one of these is simply a commercial proposition. All are China’s attempt to institutionalise Bangladesh’s strategic orientation so deeply that no future government in Dhaka can easily unwind it.

Rahman and his advisers are not naive about any of this. Bangladesh’s Foreign Minister has been admirably candid about the philosophy guiding Dhaka’s diplomacy. 

Speaking to Indian media after his April visit to New Delhi, Khalilur Rahman said directly: “Our relationship with India or China is not a zero-sum game. If there are worries, we expect our Indian friends to state them clearly with specifics.” 

It was a confident, even pointed statement — addressed to New Delhi’s anxieties about Chinese engagement, while signaling that Bangladesh intended to pursue both relationships on its own terms. 

He maintained a similar view when he was a part of the former interim government led by Dr Muhammad Yunus as well. The consistency of this framing across two governments tells you something important: this is not diplomatic spin. It is Bangladesh’s genuine strategic doctrine.

That makes sense for a country in Bangladesh’s position. It is too economically intertwined with India — sharing over four thousand kilometres of border, dependent on Indian diesel, fertilizer, and medical infrastructure — to antagonize New Delhi. And it is too deeply embedded in Chinese investment and infrastructure to walk away from Beijing. 

The BNP itself has always had closer instincts toward China, dating back to Ziaur Rahman’s presidency in the late 1970s. What Tarique Rahman’s government is trying to do is what every small state surrounded by giants has always tried to do: preserve its room to maneuver, extract concessions from both sides and avoid becoming anyone’s satellite.

What makes this moment genuinely significant is what it reveals about the limits of India’s neighborhood policy. 

For 16 years, India had in Hasina a Bangladeshi leader who was close, compliant and willing to accommodate New Delhi’s strategic preferences. When she fell — brought down by a student uprising that many in Bangladesh associate, rightly or wrongly, with Indian-backed political management — the goodwill built up over those years evaporated almost overnight. 

The BNP won its landslide not just on policy but on a sentiment: Bangladesh is not anyone’s backyard. Tarique Rahman’s “Bangladesh First” slogan is not empty nationalism. It is a direct response to the perception that Hasina’s Bangladesh had subordinated its sovereignty to India’s comfort.

That is the context in which this first trip lands. Going to India first, without Hasina resolved, without Teesta resolved, without any demonstrable win for Bangladesh, would look like continuity with the very dynamic his government was elected to change. 

Going to China first allows Rahman to demonstrate independence, secure deliverables and still tell India that its turn is coming — which it genuinely is, because geography and economics make the India relationship structurally inescapable.

The bet Bangladesh is making is that it can extract the best from both relationships without being consumed by either. It is a bet smaller countries have made before in South Asia, with mixed results. 

Sri Lanka tried it with Chinese port investment and nearly lost its sovereignty over Hambantota. Pakistan has tried it and found itself increasingly dependent on Beijing. 

Bangladesh believes it is different — more economically dynamic, more strategically located, better positioned to play the field. Also, Tarique Rahman is an intelligent leader who understands the stakes. 

The question is whether understanding the game is enough to win it, or whether, in a region where India controls the rivers and China builds the roads, Bangladesh will eventually discover that there is no neutral ground — only the illusion of one, sustained for as long as the giants find it convenient to let a small country believe it is free.

The plane ticket, whenever it is booked, will tell us a great deal. But it is what gets signed on arrival — and what gets quietly surrendered in exchange — that will define Bangladesh’s place in South Asia for a generation.

Jannatul Naym Pieal is a Dhaka-based journalist, writer and researcher with over a decade of experience in professional journalism. He has worked across a range of topics, including politics, economics, society, climate change, gender and human rights. He is also the author of 10 published books and a researcher focusing on Bangladesh’s media industry and its intersections with broader social and academic fields.