More than a month has gone by, and India still hasn’t given the green light to Bangladesh’s choice for its next High Commissioner. It is just the latest wrinkle in a relationship that has been anything but smooth lately.
Siam isn’t a fresh face. Before that, he was Bangladesh’s ambassador in Washington. Without India’s approval, though, Dhaka simply can’t make his new posting official. Under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, no country can just install its pick of ambassador or high commissioner somewhere else. The receiving nation has to approve it first. A Cancelled Visit, A Missed Summit Rahman was supposed to visit New Delhi in August. That trip got cancelled at the last minute. India had also asked him to attend the BRICS Leaders’ Summit in New Delhi, in his role as chair of BIMSTEC, the regional grouping covering the Bay of Bengal. He skipped that too, and Bangladesh didn’t send anyone else in his place. Even Hamidullah, who’s technically still Bangladesh’s man in Delhi, was a no-show. He took up the post at the end of June, and his position now carries Cabinet rank, which is a fairly clear signal of how seriously India is treating this relationship, at least on paper. The interim government that followed leaned harder toward China and Pakistan, and that didn’t go down well in New Delhi. In just the past month alone, India has extended two separate invitations to Rahman. One was for a state visit, the other for the BRICS summit. Neither happened.
All this comes on top of fresh friction over Sheikh Hasina, the former prime minister who fled to India after being ousted in August 2024 and has been there ever since. Relations took a real nosedive after Hasina’s ouster in 2024.
And here’s the thing: it doesn’t even have to explain itself if it says no, or it can just stay silent.
He is a veteran career diplomat who took over as Foreign Secretary last year under the interim government led by Muhammad Yunus. Earlier this year, it appointed Dinesh Trivedi, a former Union minister, as its High Commissioner to Dhaka.
