India has invited Bangladesh’s prime minister Tarique Rahman through the diplomatic side door as the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) chair rather than simply as Bangladesh’s leader. After the Sheikh Hasina press-conference fiasco, that might have looked like reason enough for Rahman to stay home.In reality, geography, trade, water and a carefully choreographed Indian reset make a Delhi visit increasingly difficult to resist.There is a peculiar feature of South Asian diplomacy – two governments can spend a week publicly expressing outrage at each other and the next week begin discussing who will sit where at dinner.Bangladesh and India appear to be entering precisely that phase. Bangladesh prime minister Rahman has been invited to the BRICS summit in New Delhi in September. But there is a small diplomatic footnote. Bangladesh is not a BRICS member. Rahman has been invited as a special guest because Bangladesh currently chairs BIMSTEC, part of India’s attempt to revive its BRICS-BIMSTEC outreach.In other words, Delhi has invited the prime minister of Bangladesh while technically inviting the chairman of something else. Diplomacy does enjoy stationery.Diplomatic room for DhakaUnder ordinary circumstances, Dhaka might have treated the distinction as mildly irritating. These are not ordinary circumstances. Only days ago, ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s virtual press conference in New Delhi produced the most serious diplomatic cold fight between the two countries since Bangladesh’s new political order took shape in August 2024 after an uprising. Dhaka responded with language normally scrubbed from diplomatic communiqués by several committees and at least one nervous bureaucrat.Yet, something important happened afterwards. India began putting distance between the Indian state and Hasina’s performance.The Indian Ministry of External Affairs had already said before the event that the government had no role in organising it. After the controversy erupted, New Delhi went further, saying it did not endorse Hasina’s remarks, particularly those concerning Bangladesh’s duly constituted government.That distinction matters enormously. India has not abandoned Hasina. Nor has the complicated question of her presence in India disappeared. But New Delhi has effectively signalled that sheltering Hasina and adopting Hasina’s politics as Indian state policy are two different propositions.For Dhaka, that creates a diplomatic room. The analysis from here becomes more interesting.A meeting expected between Rahman and India’s new envoy, Dinesh Trivedi, today should be read against this broader attempt to stabilise relations. If Trivedi uses the encounter to press the case for Rahman’s attendance in Delhi, as appears likely, the message will be difficult to misunderstand: India wants the visit.That would also help explain the political logic behind choosing a heavyweight for Dhaka. In a relationship requiring political repair rather than merely diplomatic maintenance, New Delhi needs someone capable of carrying messages upward, not simply cables outward.And Rahman has powerful reasons to listen. The most important flows through Farakka. The 1996 Ganges Water Sharing Treaty expires in December, after 30 years. The agreement governs dry-season sharing at Farakka and remains one of the foundations of Bangladesh-India water diplomacy. Both countries now face the considerably harder task of determining what replaces it.Rivers are famously unimpressed by diplomatic boycotts.The Padma will not produce additional water because Bangladesh’s prime minister declined an invitation to Delhi on principle. Climate change will not suspend itself while foreign ministries exchange statements. And Bangladesh cannot negotiate one of its most consequential bilateral agreements by pretending India is an optional neighbour.This is where the case for Rahman’s visit becomes strongest.Going to Delhi would not amount to forgiving the Hasina episode. It could instead demonstrate that Dhaka distinguishes between an objection to India’s handling of Hasina and Bangladesh’s relationship with the Indian state.That is what mature diplomacy is supposed to do. It is also consistent with the foreign-policy identity the Rahman administration appears eager to construct: Bangladesh as a state of multiple alignments rather than exclusive dependency.Dhaka wants productive relations with Washington. It wants investment and strategic engagement with Beijing. It wants access to European markets, deeper ties with Southeast Asia and influence in the Bay of Bengal. But a foreign policy advertised as multilateral becomes slightly less convincing when the largest country surrounding Bangladesh on three sides is missing from the photograph.Bangladesh cannot credibly insist that it is neither pro-American nor pro-Chinese but simply pro-Bangladesh while simultaneously allowing its India relationship to collapse.That would not be strategic autonomy. It would be strategic geometry performed without a map. There is another problem. Bangladesh’s growing engagement with both the United States and China can easily generate competing perceptions abroad. Delhi may see Chinese involvement through the prism of security. Beijing will watch American engagement. Washington will watch both.The Rahman government’s challenge, with foreign minister Khalilur Rahman playing a central role in foreign-policy formulation, is therefore not to choose one capital but to prevent any capital from believing Bangladesh has already chosen another.Bangladesh cannot diversify its geographyIndia is indispensable to that balancing act. The two countries share an enormous border, dozens of rivers, electricity connections, trade routes, security interests and transport corridors. Bangladesh can diversify its partnerships. It cannot diversify its geography.That is why the Hasina controversy may ultimately make Rahman’s Delhi visit more important rather than less.New Delhi has already taken the useful first step of publicly separating itself from Hasina’s remarks. Dhaka can pocket that clarification without pretending the original episode never happened.Rahman can then go to India not as a supplicant seeking reconciliation, nor as the inheritor of the unusually intimate relationship New Delhi enjoyed with Hasina, but as the elected prime minister of a changed Bangladesh.There would even be some poetic diplomatic symmetry. India invited him under the technical umbrella of BIMSTEC. Rahman can arrive carrying Bangladesh’s bilateral shopping list.At the top will be the Ganges. Behind it will sit trade, connectivity, border management, energy, Teesta and the much larger question hanging over the relationship: whether India is finally prepared to construct its Bangladesh policy around Bangladesh rather than around former PM Hasina.Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa of Bangladesh. He was the former Minister (Press) of Bangladesh High Commission in New Delhi.