New Delhi: Khalilur Rahman, the foreign minister of Bangladesh is set to arrive in New Delhi Tuesday for his maiden visit to the country as foreign minister. Rahman is set to meet Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, apart from External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar.
Rahman’s visit is set to begin with a meeting with Doval Tuesday, before a bilateral with Jaishankar Wednesday. The Bangladeshi foreign minister may also meet Commerce and Industry Ministry Piyush Goyal and Hardeep Singh Puri, India’s Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas.
Diplomatic sources indicated that the focus of the meeting between Khalilur Rahman and the Indian leadership is to see how the India-Bangladesh ties can look towards the future, and building the relationship beyond any “regime specificity”.
The visit is a part of the ongoing reset in relations, as New Delhi and Dhaka look to move past the previous phase in ties when the Muhammad Yunus-led interim government was leading Bangladesh. Khalilur Rahman’s visit to India is scheduled for 7 April till 9 April, before he travels to Mauritius for the Indian Ocean Conference organised by the government of Mauritius and India Foundation.
Foreign Minister Rahman will be accompanied by Humayun Kabir, the prime minister’s adviser for foreign affairs, according to the Bangladeshi daily Prothom Alo. This will be the first visit by a Bangladeshi foreign minister to India since 2024.
Foreign Minister Rahman’s agenda is open-ended in the sense that Dhaka is looking to hear from New Delhi, India’s concerns and vice versa, the diplomatic source said. Another source highlighted that India understands the challenges the new government in Dhaka is facing domestically and the meeting between Jaishankar and Rahman is only the first between the two.
Ties between India and Bangladesh cratered following the ouster of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina after the student-led demonstrations in August 2024. The roughly 18-month tenure of the interim government led by Yunus rarely met Indian leadership, with the chief adviser going so far as to make comments perceived as threatening India’s North-East.
However, following elections in February, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made an outreach through various letters to the newly sworn-in Prime Minister of Bangladesh Tarique Rahman. Both leaders have sought to recalibrate ties and find common ground on challenging issues.
India is considered to have been close to the Awami League, led by Hasina and that has led to backlash within Bangladesh. However, Prime Minister Tarique Rahman from the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) has reached out to India for continued delivery of diesel due to the ongoing conflict in West Asia.
India has offered to export an additional 40,000 tonnes of diesel to Bangladesh during April, according to reports, as New Delhi continues to support countries in South Asia due to the economic and energy fallout from the war in West Asia.
The visit of Bangladesh’s foreign minister to India comes roughly a month after the Director General of Forces Intelligence Major General Kaiser Chowdhury visited India and held meetings with his counterpart Lieutenant General R.S. Raman, as well as Parag Jain, chief of the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) and also Doval. The meeting was first reported by ThePrint.
(Edited by Viny Mishra)
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