When Sheikh Hasina addressed a virtual press conference from New Delhi on Wednesday, marking the second anniversary of the uprising that ended her 15-year rule, Bangladesh’s foreign ministry answered with unarguably the sharpest language it has used against India since her ouster in August 2024.The former prime minister, speaking via an audio link at an event organised by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of South Asia, rejected the charges against her, criticised the government in Dhaka and repeated that she intends to return to Bangladesh by year’s end.Her son, Sajeeb Wazed Joy, joining from the United States, thanked Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for what he called the “utmost respect” shown to his mother.Dhaka’s statement that night called Hasina an “absconding convicted genocider” and the head of a “mafia enterprise”, termed her appearance “an affront to the sovereignty of Bangladesh” and declared that the country would “never again” be a “client state”.It repeatedly invoked the “July Revolution”, a firmer framing than the “July Uprising” that had been the government’s default term till now.Read alone, that statement looks like a turning point – the moment Dhaka’s frustration with New Delhi went from implicit to official. The 48 hours since have complicated that reading considerably.An old complaint, not a new oneBangladesh has held India responsible, in some form, for Hasina’s presence and her public remarks for almost the entire two years she has lived there.In February last year, under the interim government that succeeded her, Dhaka lodged a formal protest with India’s acting high commissioner after one of her addresses and asked New Delhi to stop her from making “fabricated” comments – prompting India to summon Bangladesh’s envoy in turn and insist Hasina had spoken as an individual. The then-Indian envoy in Dhaka was summoned in December as well.And days before this week’s event, Prime Minister Tarique Rahman’s foreign affairs adviser, Humayun Kabir, had already pressed the new Indian high commissioner, Dinesh Trivedi, to ensure Hasina could not use Indian territory for activity aimed at destabilising Bangladesh.But the day after Bangladesh’s warning, India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal claimed that the interaction was “being organised by a private media entity” and that “the government has no involvement whatsoever in it”.What changed on Wednesday is less the substance of Dhaka’s position than its register and its target.Joy’s on-air thanks to Modi personally handed the government language it could point to directly, and it used a formal ministry statement – rather than a private protest note – to do so. That is a real escalation in form.However, it is not, as it might first appear, a shift from blaming Hasina to blaming India; Dhaka has effectively been doing both since 2024.A softer version, a day laterIf the written statement was built for maximum effect, the press conference that state minister for foreign affairs Shama Obaed Islam gave on Thursday was calibrated for something closer to negotiation.She avoided the ministry’s harsher formulations and framed the matter as a decision India still had to make, urging it to “take a very intelligent decision” about the future of ties.She also emphasised, unprompted, the issues that still require the relationship to function – water, energy, the border – and said Bangladesh wants “good relations” built on “equality, mutual respect and dignity”.Governments rarely produce their toughest and most conciliatory language within a single day by accident.Read together, the two look less like a contradiction than a division of labour: the written statement absorbed the symbolic weight of the anniversary and the domestic demand for a strong response, while the spoken remarks a day later kept the door open for the relationship to keep functioning.Delhi’s answer, and a meeting still on the calendarIndia’s response has been notably restrained.Its foreign ministry had already said, before Hasina even spoke, that the event was privately organised and that the government did not endorse it.On Friday, spokesperson Jaiswal repeated almost exactly that position when asked about Dhaka’s statement – a reiteration, not a rebuttal, suggesting New Delhi has little interest in matching Dhaka’s escalation with one of its own.The clearer signal, though, is a meeting still on the books in Dhaka.Trivedi is due to call on Rahman on August 10 – an appointment India had been requesting since July 1, confirmed before Hasina’s press conference and, as of writing, not cancelled.The agenda is unglamorous but consequential: fixing a date for Rahman’s proposed visit to India in September (even though Dhaka maintains the invitation to attend the BRICS Summit remains “under review”), and continuing talks on energy cooperation that include Bangladesh’s request for more diesel supplies from India.What to watch out forNone of this makes Wednesday’s anger performative, or the relationship untroubled.Border killings, a dysfunctional visa system and an unanswered extradition request for Hasina are all real and unresolved, and this week has made Dhaka’s position on each harder to soften.But a ministry statement, a state minister’s press conference, an MEA briefing and an unchanged diplomatic calendar do not all point in one direction – and together they are a more honest picture of where things stand than any single one read alone.Whether August 10 produces a routine courtesy call or something visibly strained will say more about the relationship than this week’s words did.Jannatul Naym Pieal is a Dhaka-based writer, researcher and journalist. His email address is jn.pieal@gmail.com.