An accounting of an invitation declined, and of the diplomacy that mistook a hat for a principle
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
New Delhi · 11 September 2026
After substantial time spent in Bangladesh, one of our leading experts, Chakraborty Da of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research, had returned with the quiet certainty of a man who had listened more than he had spoken. Over tea, before the flags went up at Bharat Mandapam, he offered a premonition rather than a polemic. A room was about to assemble in New Delhi on 12 and 13 September 2026 that no foreign ministry could reconstruct by note verbale. Chinese President Xi Jinping would walk into the Indian capital after years of calibrated distance. Russian President Vladimir Putin would sit in the same constellation as United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, the leaders of Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates, and the chairs of regional organisations spanning ASEAN, the African Union, the Gulf, Latin America and Eurasia. Bangladesh, he said, held a key to that room as current chair of BIMSTEC and as a member, since 2021, of the New Development Bank. The invitation was already on the table. What remained was the will to enter. “Neighbour first is not a slogan,” he murmured. “You cannot change the neighbour. You can only decide whether you meet him where the world is also present.” That sentence stayed in the air like a weather forecast.
The 18th BRICS Summit was the apex of a year-long chairship, not a ceremonial dinner. India’s 2026 theme, Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability, had organised hundreds of sherpa, ministerial, business and think-tank meetings into two days when principals can do what technicians cannot: convert pipelines into political permission. BRICS at twenty is an eleven-member grouping, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia, surrounded by ten partner countries. It carries close to half of humanity, some two-fifths of global output at purchasing-power parity, and about a quarter of world trade. It is not the G7 and should not be flattered into pretending that it is. The G7 remains a compact of high-income industrial democracies with a shared security vocabulary. BRICS is a coalition of convenience among uneven sovereignties: a venue for development finance, experiments in local-currency settlement and central-bank digital interoperability, climate and health cooperation, institutional reform, and the standing claim of the Global South to a larger voice in a system still organised around older clubs. Internal contradictions are the reason the table exists. States attend forums precisely because interests do not already coincide. Access to leaders, markets, capital, information and influence is a club good, and club goods are collected in the room by those who bother to sit in it.
A Question of Hats, Answered Too Cleverly
The controversy over capacity deserves a calm answer, and then a larger one. State Minister for Foreign Affairs Humaiun Kobir asked, with the air of a man who believed he had found a loophole, how Bangladesh was to go when the Prime Minister had been invited as BIMSTEC chair rather than as head of government. “How shall we go? Has anyone from the Bangladesh government been invited? Our Prime Minister was not invited. The BIMSTEC Chair was invited.” It is a debater’s riposte, and it wins the debate it chooses to have. The trouble is that no one of consequence was holding that debate. The invitation to a regional-organisation chair is the established grammar of a BRICS outreach weekend, the very door through which extra-membership states enter a leaders’ gathering they do not own. In August 2026 India extended precisely this courtesy to the chairs of ASEAN, the African Union, the Gulf Cooperation Council, CELAC and the Eurasian Economic Union. Those bodies understood the grammar and answered it. The Philippines sent President Ferdinand Marcos for ASEAN; Burundi’s President Évariste Ndayishimiye came for the African Union; Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev represented the Eurasian Economic Union; Uruguay and Bahrain sent their foreign ministers for CELAC and the Gulf. Every one of them found a way through the door. Dhaka alone discovered in the doorframe a matter of wounded dignity.
There is a further embarrassment the protocol argument prefers to forget. India has used this exact door for Bangladesh before, and Bangladesh once walked through it gladly. At Goa in 2016 the host folded a BRICS-BIMSTEC outreach into the summit, and Dhaka sat at that table without a seminar on whose name was on the card. The card has not changed; the confidence has. To find humiliation in 2026 where one’s predecessors found opportunity in 2016 is not a discovery about protocol. It is a confession about nerves. High Commissioner M. Riaz Hamidullah, sent to soften the sound of it, spoke of “certain context and circumstances” after six and a half months of a newly elected dispensation, and carefully declined the word refusal. The circumlocution is its own admission. When a diplomat reaches for “certain circumstances,” he is asking the listener not to name the thing both of them can see.
| WHO WALKED THROUGH THE DOOR, AND WHO DID NOT For the outreach session India invited the chairs of six regional organisations. ASEAN sent President Marcos of the Philippines; the African Union sent President Ndayishimiye of Burundi; the Eurasian Economic Union sent President Tokayev of Kazakhstan; CELAC and the Gulf Cooperation Council sent the foreign ministers of Uruguay and Bahrain. BIMSTEC, chaired by Bangladesh, sent no one. Five organisations read the invitation as an opening. One read it as an insult. The company one keeps in a decision is itself a verdict on the decision. |
Engagement Is Not Alignment, and Presence Is Not Surrender
Diplomacy is not a seminar on protocol, and a confident foreign policy does not confuse a chair’s nameplate with a nation’s honour. The BIMSTEC chairmanship made the invitation more valuable, not less. It offered Bangladesh the chance to speak as the voice of the Bay of Bengal inside a South Asian host city, to place connectivity, energy, climate resilience, trade facilitation and the Rohingya file on the margins of a global table, and to do so without surrendering a later, carefully staged bilateral visit. A seasoned establishment asks the only adult question available to it: what can the republic gain by attending? Engagement is not alignment. Presence is not capitulation. A self-assured foreign policy can sit with China and Russia, speak with India, cultivate Indonesia, Brazil, the Gulf and the African economies, and still keep every Western market that its garments, its ships and its remittances require. The states that mastered this grammar long ago do not agonise over whose hat they are wearing when they enter a useful room. They enter, they gather what the room contains, and they leave with a shorter list of dependencies than they arrived with. That is what a foreign service is for.
The decision to stay away was dressed as prudence and sold as self-respect, but the register was defensive throughout. A newly elected government wished to demonstrate that it was not the previous order; the presence of Sheikh Hasina in India, the extradition demands, the public sensitivity after her August appearance before the Delhi media, the border incidents, and the parliamentary impulse to review a large inventory of agreements were all real domestic constraints. One may grant every one of them and still observe that none required an empty chair at Bharat Mandapam. A bilateral visit could have been sequenced afterwards with full ceremony. The two are not rivals; a mature diplomacy would have used the first to prepare the second. Instead the outreach was read primarily as a question of hats and dignity, which is the diplomatic equivalent of declining dinner because one dislikes the seating plan, and then complaining of hunger.
The Bank in Shanghai, and the Money Left on the Table
Bangladesh is not a stranger to the BRICS economic ecosystem; it is a shareholder in its most tangible institution, and there lies the sharpest measure of the loss. Membership of the New Development Bank since September 2021 is the most concrete fruit of BRICS cooperation available to Dhaka. Founded in 2015 to finance infrastructure and sustainable development in emerging economies, the Bank had by mid-2026 approved 139 projects worth roughly 42.9 billion dollars. Here is the arithmetic that ought to trouble the foreign ministry. When Bangladesh joined, the Bank signalled that it was prepared to lend on the order of a billion dollars a year, and some three and a half to five billion across the 2022 to 2026 work-plan period. Against that offer, the financing actually approved for Bangladesh has been counted in the low hundreds of millions. The window was opened by others and left half-shut by Dhaka. A member that under-draws its own bank by an order of magnitude, and then declines to appear where that bank’s principal shareholders are gathered as heads of state, is not practising caution. It is practising neglect, and calling it dignity.
The context makes the neglect costlier still. Graduation from Least Developed Country status, long aligned with the close of 2026, will thin the cushion of trade preference in the markets on which Bangladeshi garments depend. Vision 2041 still asks for upper-middle-income status. Inflation, banking-sector stress, subdued private investment, energy insecurity and an over-concentration of export destinations together turn alternative finance and South-South demand into a question of national security in the widest sense: the security of employment, of reserves, of social peace. India has placed cross-border payments, local-currency trade and the possibility of central-bank digital interoperability inside the BRICS conversation. Whether every ambition materialises is a separate matter; influence over the design of these instruments is gathered by sitting where the shareholders sit as principals, not by reading the communiqué afterwards. A foreign policy uncoupled from economic strategy is not statecraft. It is ceremony with a flag.
| THE LEDGER OF A SINGLE EMPTY CHAIR A member of the New Development Bank since 2021, offered up to a billion dollars a year, has drawn a fraction of it. A chair of BIMSTEC, invited to speak for the Bay of Bengal on a global stage in a South Asian capital, sent no voice. A neighbour with fifty-four shared rivers, an unfinished Teesta file and a graduation deadline that will thin its trade preferences declined the one weekend when water, transit, energy and finance could be raised in the same breath, with the leaders who decide them all in the same hall. The bill for this is not paid on the morning of 13 September. It is paid in instalments, later. |
Geography Is the First Diplomat
Geography does not consult a nation’s domestic politics before setting its borders. India is the land-and-transit neighbour, a power-trade partner, a source of diesel in shortage, a corridor state for Himalayan and north-eastern connectivity, and the co-riparian of the Ganges-Padma, the Teesta and a family of shared rivers. Chakroborty Da, who had walked the political weather in Dhaka and the riparian anxiety of the lower basin, returned to water with the patience of a man who knows that treaties are living instruments. The Ganges arrangements and the unfinished Teesta file do not live only in foreign ministries. They live in the paddy of northern Bangladesh and in the federal politics of West Bengal and Bihar, where dry-season flows, silt, the flood pulse and a climate-altered hydrology are livelihood questions before they are legal ones. A first bilateral visit can still carry those files with ceremony. A BRICS outreach weekend would have allowed something subtler and, in diplomacy, often more productive: issue-linkage on the margins, a quiet word on water, transit, energy and border management, without forcing every grievance onto a cold and formal agenda. Neighbour-first diplomacy begins from a law of international life that no ideology repeals. The neighbour cannot be replaced, and asymmetric interdependence is a description of the map, not an insult to be nursed. Strategic autonomy is a capacity, not a posture. It is performed by sitting, speaking, and leaving with a shorter list of unresolved dependencies, not by the theatrical dignity of the vacant seat.
The Cultivation of Options, and the Art of Narrowing Them
The wager Dhaka appears to be making is that other capitals will compensate for the room it declined to enter. The wager misreads how influence accrues. In the June 2026 joint communiqué that followed Prime Minister Tarique Rahman’s visit to Beijing, China supported Bangladesh’s participation in BRICS activities and its ambition to become a partner of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. In Moscow, in the same season, Dhaka asked Russia for support on BRICS and SCO entry and recorded a positive reply. These are useful sentences, and they are worth exactly what they can be made to purchase. Neither Beijing nor Moscow will compensate Bangladesh for its absence from a hall in which Beijing and Moscow were themselves present as principals. Multi-alignment is the cultivation of options; it is a discipline of adding rooms, not subtracting them. Forum-shopping that skips the forum is the opposite discipline, the steady narrowing of a menu in the belief that one is expanding it. There is a pattern here, and pattern is policy. Bangladesh attended the BRICS outreach at Johannesburg in 2023 and Kazan in 2024, and stayed away from Rio in 2025. After Johannesburg, when the expansion list was read, Dhaka’s name was not on it. Relevance is accumulated in rooms; it is not reserved for the morning an expansion list is announced. A second consecutive absence, now under a new government, is no longer an incident. It is a habit forming in public.
Sideline diplomacy is not a luxury for a climate-vulnerable, trade-dependent, riverine republic; it is the ordinary machinery by which such a state survives. International business is often transacted in corridors. Leaders meet without communiqués. Ministers form the habits of contact that outlast a crisis. Officials open channels that survive the next rupture. Business delegations read a room that no photograph can convey. In New Delhi, Bangladesh could have spoken trade, investment, energy security, infrastructure finance, technology, climate finance and supply-chain diversification in a single movement, and placed BIMSTEC more visibly on a global agenda than a decade of secretariat meetings could manage. It could have carried the Rohingya file directly into conversation with China, whose leverage in Naypyidaw is a fact rather than a hope, and with the partners who fund the camps and want a political horizon for them. The recognition owed to a Bengali-speaking civilisational state, seen at last as a contributor to South-South public goods rather than a petitioner at the edge of the frame, travels with the leader who arrives, and stays at home with the leader who does not. Status-seeking, in a multipolar order, is not vanity. It is a method of enlarging the menu of finance and the margin of manoeuvre, and it was left unpractised.
The Only Adult Test
The national-interest test is the sole grown-up standard by which the decision can be judged, and by that standard the answer was of the first order. China and Russia are major development and strategic partners. India is the immediate neighbour and among the most consequential of economic, political and security interlocutors. Brazil, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and South Africa are markets, energy partners and rising voices. BRICS now runs through trade and investment, development finance, technology, climate, health, education, cultural exchange, institutional reform and the working out of cross-border payments. Attendance would have required no anti-Western turn, no pro-Chinese or pro-Russian conversion, and no endorsement of a single BRICS position that Dhaka found uncongenial. Engagement does not equal alignment; the entire purpose of diplomacy is to engage the countries whose interests do not always coincide with one’s own. To measure an invitation by protocol rather than by outcome is precisely how a foreign ministry forgets that diplomacy is the art of being in the room. Anticipation, imagination and the ability to see several moves ahead remain the scarce resources of statecraft, and on this occasion all three were in short supply. In a system whose economic centre of gravity is shifting toward Asia and the wider Global South, a country like Bangladesh advances by seeking more platforms, cultivating more relationships and widening its strategic options, not by refusing the platform, cooling the relationship and narrowing the options in a single gesture and calling the result principle.
What May Yet Be Recovered
Prescription follows diagnosis, or the diagnosis remains mere literature. The first visit to India can still be bilateral, ceremonial and productive, and neighbour-first diplomacy will be the stronger for arriving with the memory of having already sat in a larger room rather than the memory of having flinched from it. The agenda can carry water, trade, energy, border management, transit, connectivity and the rebuilding of political confidence. The relationship with the New Development Bank can be thickened by ministerial attention rather than surrendered to project officers and left to under-perform. Water talks can be prepared as the federal conversation they truly are, one that includes West Bengal and Bihar rather than pretending the rivers stop at a foreign ministry’s door. BIMSTEC can be wielded as a megaphone into other clubs instead of brandished as a reason to decline them. China and Russia remain essential partners, and they are most useful when they are met both in Beijing and Moscow and in the halls where India, the Gulf, Africa and South-East Asia are also present. The review of agreements can be conducted as a sober audit of national interest rather than a theatre of grievance; ports, power-trade, transit and people-to-people movement are assets when they function, and an inventory of a hundred and one memoranda is an argument for careful management, not for reflexive suspicion. Long-run prosperity in a riverine, export-oriented republic is built by widening options beside a helpful neighbour, patiently and without drama.
The Ledger, Closed
Chakroborty Da had said the loss would not be counted in the headlines of 13 September. It would be counted later, in postponed rivers and postponed pipelines, in postponed recognition, and in the discovery that a golden room does not reconvene in this composition for a long time. He had spent enough days in Bangladesh to know the country’s hunger for capital, its pride in its independence, and its need for a neighbour who remains, through every weather, the fact of the map. India will still be there. The Ganges will still cross the border. The Bank in Shanghai will still open files, and BIMSTEC will still need a chair who can carry the Bay into larger rooms. What will not return on demand is the simultaneous presence of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Prabowo Subianto, Masoud Pezeshkian, Cyril Ramaphosa and the Secretary-General of the United Nations on a South Asian stage to which Bangladesh had been invited as the voice of its own regional organisation. “You cannot change the neighbour,” he repeated at the last, as if closing a ledger. “You can only decide whether you use the table that history set beside him.” The premonition has become the record. The golden opportunity has passed. And the work of recovering its equivalent will be slower, costlier and less elegant than walking through a door that stood open, unguarded, and waiting.
Views: 1775
Dr. Maheep
Dr. Maheep is Director, Indian Perspective on Global Affairs (IPGA), and a leading analyst of India’s foreign policy and South Asian geopolitics. He earned his PhD in Arab and Islamic Studies. With more than a decade of teaching and research experience in International Relations and Global Politics, he contributes regularly on issues shaping national and global affairs.
