When Sheikh Hasina's helicopter lifted off from Dhaka on the afternoon of 5 August 2024 and touched down hours later in Delhi via Agartala, it did more than end a fifteen-year premiership. It reopened a question that India has never fully answered: can a country aspire to be a global power while its own neighborhood keeps drifting away from it?

Bangladesh's interim government has since described the Hasina-era relationship with India as "uncomfortable" and has openly signaled a desire to "reset" ties. Tarique Rahman, now Bangladesh's prime minister, postponed a planned visit to India even as New Delhi insisted its door remained open for normalization. It is a strange kind of estrangement: no war, no border clash, just a slow curdling of trust between two countries that share the world's fifth-longest land border and a river system on which a hundred million lives depend.

A Familiar Pattern, Repeating Itself

Hasina, daughter of Bangladesh's founding leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and head of the Awami League since 1981, was Bangladesh's longest-serving prime minister. Her fall was sudden and total, and India's decision to grant her refuge, however defensible on humanitarian or strategic grounds, has left New Delhi holding the diplomatic bill for a relationship that Bangladeshis themselves increasingly associate with authoritarian excess.

This is not India's first experience of backing a leader so closely that the leader's fall becomes India's liability. It is, in fact, a pattern with deep roots. Consider the British experience in nineteenth-century Punjab and Afghanistan, chronicled by historians including Rajmohan Gandhi and Bipin Chandra: the East India Company's habit of propping up favored rulers, isolating their rivals, and then discovering that local populations resented the puppet as much as the puppeteer. When British, Sikh, and Company forces installed Shah Shuja on the Afghan throne in 1839, the Afghans reportedly "detested and despised" him almost immediately, and the arrangement collapsed in catastrophe. Ranjit Singh, by contrast, "cleverly hung back" from the campaign, refusing to overextend his own credibility past Peshawar. The lesson was not that alliances are bad. It was that alliances built on convenience rather than legitimacy eventually demand repayment, usually at the worst possible moment.

India's relationship with Hasina's Bangladesh had exactly this quality of convenience. It delivered real security cooperation, transit access, and a bulwark against extremism and Chinese influence. But it also meant New Delhi's fortunes in Dhaka rose and fell with one woman and one party, an arrangement that looked stable for fifteen years and unraveled in an afternoon.

Diplomacy Without Empire

It is worth remembering that India today possesses far more genuine power than any precolonial or colonial-era actor in the subcontinent: the world's fourth-largest economy by nominal GDP, the second-largest armed force, and the third-largest military expenditure globally. It has full diplomatic relations with 201 states and a Ministry of External Affairs capable of running a genuinely global foreign policy. By any conventional measure, India is not just a regional power but, as some analysts argue, a potential superpower.

And yet raw capability has never been the thing that wins neighbors. Ancient Magadha understood this in the sixth century BC. King Bimbisara built Magadha into the dominant power of the Gangetic plain not merely through conquest but through calibrated diplomacy: marriage alliances, calculated generosity, and gestures of goodwill even toward rivals. When Chanda Pradyota Mahasena of Avanti, Magadha's most serious competitor, fell ill with jaundice, Bimbisara sent his own royal physician, Jivaka, to treat him. It was a small act, but it converted a defeated adversary into something closer to a stable neighbor, and it helped Magadha eventually command what tradition remembers as 80,000 villages. Power, even in the sixth century BC, was understood as insufficient without the accompanying currency of trust.

Contrast that with the colonial pattern that Bipin Chandra describes: the British conquest of India succeeded not primarily through overwhelming force but through the "absence of modern nationalism" among Indian actors, who saw no contradiction in helping the British subdue fellow Indians for short-term advantage. The Nizam helped the British against Tipu Sultan; the Marathas fought each other rather than uniting against the common threat; Indian rulers, Chandra notes, consistently "underestimated British strength and failed to unite against the common enemy." The British then systematically isolated each rival before striking, a strategy perfected by Cornwallis against Tipu and Wellesley against the Marathas.

The relevance to today's South Asia is not that India is behaving like the East India Company. It is that the region has never been an easy place to convert power into loyalty, and the actors who succeeded, whether Magadha's kings or the British administrators, did so through patient, often unglamorous relationship management rather than assumptions of natural deference.

The Limits of Big-Power Diplomacy

Fakir Azizuddin, the Muslim Sufi-trained diplomat who became Maharaja Ranjit Singh's foreign affairs minister after treating the Maharaja's eye ailment, is a useful reminder of what effective regional diplomacy actually looks like. His "gifts lay in diplomacy and persuasive speech," and his effectiveness came from genuine personal trust cultivated over years, not from Ranjit Singh's undoubted military strength alone. Azizuddin and his brothers became indispensable precisely because they operated as bridges rather than instruments of dominance.

India's foreign policy establishment has moments of this instinct. Atal Bihari Vajpayee's 1999 bus journey to Lahore, where he told Nawaz Sharif that "it is unworthy of two nations the size of India and Pakistan to have wasted so much time in mutual ill will" and that "there is nothing in our bilateral relations that can ever be solved through violence," captured a genuine attempt at the Bimbisara model: goodwill as strategy, not sentiment. That initiative collapsed within months amid the Kargil war, a reminder that goodwill gestures are fragile things, easily undone by events beyond any one leader's control.

Bangladesh today presents India with a similar test in miniature. New Delhi's insistence that its door remains open for normalization is the right instinct. But an open door means little if the underlying strategy continues to bet on individual leaders rather than institutional relationships, and if India's neighbors continue to associate Delhi's friendship with the fortunes of whichever party happens to be in power.

What Would a Better Approach Look Like

India does not need to abandon strategic partnerships with sympathetic governments in Dhaka, Colombo, or Kathmandu. But the last decade suggests a repeated failure mode: deep bets on incumbents, thin engagement with opposition and civil society, and then scrambling diplomacy when governments change. Nepal's 2015 blockade controversy, the Maldives' "India Out" campaign, and now Bangladesh's post-Hasina chill are variations on a single theme.

The historical record, from Bimbisara's physician diplomacy to the catastrophic backlash against Shah Shuja, points toward the same conclusion: durable regional influence is built on relationships that survive changes in leadership, not on the assumption that today's ally will remain tomorrow's government. India's ambition for global leadership, its seat at the G20, its courtship by Washington and Brussels, will mean little in the history books if it cannot first convince Dhaka, Kathmandu, and Colombo that it is a neighbor worth trusting rather than merely a power worth fearing or humoring.

That is not a call for retreat. It is a call for humility, patience, and the kind of long-game diplomacy that ancient Magadha, for all its military ambition, somehow understood better than we sometimes credit it for.