In April, a visit to Bangladesh’s capital by Pakistan’s foreign secretary, Amna Baloch, marked the resumption of high-level diplomatic engagement between the two countries after a hiatus of 15 years. If Ishaq Dar had not had to postpone his scheduled trip to Dhaka due to rising tensions between India and Pakistan, he would have been the first Pakistani foreign minister to visit the city since 2012.
Bangladesh took a neutral stance during the recent India-Pakistan conflict, but between foreign office meetings, high-level military engagement, the resumption of direct trade and the relaxation of visa restrictions, diplomatic relations between Bangladesh and Pakistan have been thawing since the dramatic ouster of Bangladesh’s long-sercing Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who fled to India in August 2024 after student-led protests broke out in her country two months earlier.
Approximately 300 people died during the protests, the majority of them due to police brutality. Judicial bodies, victims’ families and student leaders held Hasina responsible for the violence. The relationship between Bangladesh and India has been tense ever since, largely due to the Indian government’s strong ties with Hasina. Her polarizing legacy has exacerbated the anti-India sentiment in Bangladesh, which has historically been closely allied with New Delhi, thereby giving a diplomatic opening to Islamabad.
“New Delhi established a political party-centric relationship and not a people-centric relationship,” said Imtiaz Ahmed, executive director of the Centre for Alternatives in Dhaka. India saw Hasina and her party, the Awami League, as helping to safeguard its own interests in Bangladesh and along its northeastern border, he added.
A considerable section of the Bangladeshi public, including student protesters, sees India as “Hasina’s enablers,” said Hassan Akbar, a fellow at the Wilson Center. “The new administration in Bangladesh sees improving their relations with Pakistan … as a key balancer against India.”
After Hasina’s ouster, the Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus became the country’s interim leader. Since then, he has met Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif twice, once on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York and then during the Developing-8 Organization for Economic Cooperation Summit in Cairo last year. Yunus met Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the first time only this year, at a regional summit in Bangkok held this April.
Such optics were noticed and taken by Indian policymakers as a recalibration, leaving them wary that perhaps their country was losing its grip on Bangladesh. Under Hasina’s leadership, Bangladesh had maintained an exceptionally close relationship with India and expanded its economic, diplomatic and infrastructure links with the country.
This shift is significant given Bangladesh’s origin story. Both Pakistan and India played a critical role in its creation. Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, split from West Pakistan (present-day Pakistan) during the 1971 war, when India supported Bangladesh’s liberation movement with military intervention, eventually leading to its independence. The brutal history of the war with Pakistan and India’s role as an ally have since defined Bangladesh’s relations with both countries.
But now the Bangladeshi government has been signaling that it is no longer beholden to India. For instance, Yunus has criticized New Delhi’s Hasina-centric approach, downplayed concerns over the safety of its Hindu minority and, during a trip to China, welcomed Beijing’s economic expansion in the region — something that India is wary of.
Combined with its rapprochement with Pakistan, these moves make clear that Bangladesh is reconstituting its relationship with India, marking an important change for the region’s geopolitics.
Along with diplomatic ties, economic ties have also expanded. Direct trade resumed for the first time in over five decades, since Bangladesh gained independence from Pakistan in 1971. Some reports indicate a 27% growth in bilateral trade between August and December 2024, following Hasina’s removal, compared to the same period in 2023. This contrasts with an approximately 9.5% decline in trade with India during that same time frame.
Efforts to promote cultural exchange are also being initiated, as Pakistan and Bangladesh have eased travel between their nations by lifting visa restrictions for citizens. Additionally, direct flights, suspended since 2018, have been reinstated by Bangladesh. To further foster goodwill, Pakistan has also offered 300 scholarships to Bangladeshi students.
On the military front, a high-level military delegation from Bangladesh made a rare visit to Pakistan in January and held talks with Pakistan’s army chief Gen. Asim Munir. According to reports, Bangladesh expressed interest in acquiring JF-17 Thunder fighter jets from Pakistan, which were jointly developed by Pakistan and China.
If arms transfers take place, it would not only strengthen ties between Pakistan and Bangladesh, it could lead to a trilateral relationship that includes China, which would fuel security concerns in New Delhi.
The bilateral relationship alone, if it strengthens, could leave India with longtime rival Pakistan on its western border and a potentially less amicable Bangladesh to its east. Further, China’s growing influence in the two countries would add to India’s anxieties. Hence, in New Delhi’s calculus, while any rapprochement between Pakistan and Bangladesh is a security issue, military ties are the most concerning.
India could “begrudgingly accept a deeper commercial partnership between Bangladesh and Pakistan … but a military partnership would be a red line or something close to it because that would tap into some of India’s long-standing fears about Pakistan,” Michael Kugelman, a noted expert on South Asia, told New Lines.
Even though relations between Pakistan and Bangladesh are developing on multiple fronts, analysts agree that the scope is not yet broad enough to constitute a full regional realignment. South Asia is dominated by India, and as a middle power in the region, Dhaka cannot afford to sour relations with New Delhi.
“In an emerging multipolar world order, Bangladesh would want to have military engagements with different stakeholders, but these engagements would not be premised on any anti-Indian structure … as that would not help Bangladesh’s regional interests,” said Ahmed.
Moreover, Bangladesh remains deeply entangled — economically, geographically and culturally — with India. India was its second largest trading partner in 2024, only behind China, and the extensive 2,500-mile border between India and Bangladesh facilitates a substantial informal trading network, playing a key role in the latter’s economy.
Communities on both sides of the border are so intertwined that any disentanglement would be logistically quite difficult. Cultural and linguistic similarities between Bengali-speaking Indian communities and Bangladeshis also bind the two nations together.
With elections set to take place in Bangladesh in 2026, policymakers in New Delhi have been closely monitoring bilateral developments. They recognize that a change in leadership in Bangladesh would likely introduce a different set of priorities for the country’s long-term development and security, which would inherently require at least a working relationship with India.
All these dynamics were evident in Bangladesh’s response to the recent military conflict between India and Pakistan. Many had anticipated that Bangladesh’s stance would reflect rising anti-India sentiment, which had intensified during the conflict. Rudabeh Shahid, a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, pointed out in a blog that Bangladesh’s interim government faced “acute pressure from sections of civil society to adopt a more assertively nationalist, possibly anti-India stance.”
However, the Bangladeshi government took a measured, neutral stance by calling for restraint from both sides and was careful not to pick sides in the conflict.
Even though ties are becoming warmer, the future of Pakistani-Bangladeshi relations remains unpredictable. One of the reasons for this unpredictability is the potential influence of political posturing.
Due to anti-Indian sentiment in Bangladesh, the country’s leadership might be motivated to overplay its relationship with Pakistan. “ Dhaka and Islamabad have a strong interest in playing up progress in a relationship that might be overstated just because it’s an opportunity to poke India in the eye,” Kugelman said.
But this relationship remains constrained by historical baggage. While cultural and historical ties create some level of mutual understanding, Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan and the painful history of the 1971 war continue to complicate the development of any ties.
Bangladesh has been demanding a formal apology from Pakistan for atrocities committed by its troops during the war — which, according to Bangladeshi authorities, claimed the lives of as many as 3 million people — along with a payment of $4.5 billion for what it calls a share of its pre-1971 assets. These “outstanding issues” were officially raised during Baloch’s recent visit to Dhaka, signaling that they remain at the core of any development in closer ties.
Ahmed told New Lines that it is “quite puzzling why these two things have not been resolved, because $4.5 billion spread over several years is not terribly significant … and also the resistance to an official apology also doesn’t make sense because those who are in power now are no way responsible for what happened back in 1971. So an official apology would go a long way.”
But Pakistan has not agreed to these terms. Without such concessions, the relationship may remain stuck in the past.
Even if relations are rocky right now, New Delhi views its new dynamic with Bangladesh as “not hostile,” Kugelman said. “India has continued to engage with Bangladesh on … the highest levels,” he added. The Modi-led government maintains a working relationship with Bangladesh’s interim administration and considers it an important ally.
Meanwhile, a political alliance between Pakistan and Bangladesh could have benefits for both. Pakistan has been searching for allies in a region where it finds itself isolated. Given the current tensions with India, it needs stronger bilateral relations. As for Bangladesh, closer ties with Pakistan present an opportunity to move past Hasina’s legacy of the last 15 years by diversifying relationships beyond India.
If managed correctly, their fragile diplomatic reengagement could represent a template for how historical adversaries might forge pragmatic paths forward.
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