When Bangladesh's delegation was conspicuously absent from the BRICS summit in New Delhi, the empty chair spoke louder than any communique. It was not a scheduling conflict. It was a message, and India understood it perfectly. The presence of Sheikh Hasina, the deposed Bangladeshi prime minister who fled to India by helicopter on 5 August 2024 after mass protests toppled her government, has become a significant obstacle to normalizing relations between two countries whose fates have been intertwined since Partition.

This is, on its face, a story about diplomatic hospitality gone wrong. But it is also a very old story about power, refuge, and the price great powers pay for choosing loyalty to individuals over relationships with nations. India has been here before, in various guises, for over two thousand years. The question now is whether it has learned the right lessons.

A Guest Who Became a Liability

Sheikh Hasina is no ordinary exile. She was Bangladesh's longest-serving prime minister, governing from 1996 to 2001 and then again from 2009 until her ouster in 2024. As the daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding father of Bangladesh, and president of the Awami League since 1981, she is not merely a political figure but a living embodiment of Bangladesh's founding narrative. That is precisely why her presence on Indian soil is so combustible. To harbor her is, in the eyes of many Bangladeshis, to take a side in an unresolved national reckoning over who gets to define the country's future.

India's calculus in granting her refuge was understandable in the moment. The Awami League had been New Delhi's most reliable partner in the region for over a decade, and abandoning Hasina entirely, as protesters stormed her residence, would have signaled that India abandons its friends the instant they become inconvenient. But diplomacy is rarely a choice between good and bad options; it is usually a choice between costs. India chose the cost of alienating Bangladesh's new government and, by extension, a large and strategically vital neighbor of 170 million people, over the cost of appearing disloyal to a fallen ally. A year on, that bill has come due.

The Long Shadow of Shortsighted Alliances

There is a pattern in South Asian history of powers making short-term choices that undermine long-term regional standing, and it is worth revisiting for what it says about India's present dilemma. When the British East India Company expanded across the subcontinent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it did not win through superior force alone. It won because Indian rulers, lacking any concept of a shared national interest, repeatedly aided the Company against fellow Indian powers for the sake of temporary advantage. The Nizam of Hyderabad helped the British against Tipu Sultan; the Marathas fought each other more readily than they united against the common threat. British diplomats such as Cornwallis and Wellesley made a habit of isolating one Indian power before turning on the next, and it worked precisely because no ruler could see past the next transaction to the larger board on which they were all playing pieces.

India's Hasina dilemma inverts that history but rhymes with it uncomfortably. Where eighteenth-century Indian rulers sacrificed collective regional strength for individual gain, today's India risks sacrificing collective regional standing to protect a single individual. The logic of loyalty to an ally, however understandable, can blind a state to the larger relationship at stake. Bangladesh is not a princely state to be outmaneuvered; it is a sovereign neighbor whose 170 million citizens will decide, over time, whether India is a partner or an obstacle.

When Refuge Built Bridges Instead of Burning Them

It did not have to be this way, and Punjab's own history offers a strikingly different model of how a ruler's protection of the vulnerable can build trust rather than destroy it. In 1947, as Partition tore Punjab apart in one of the bloodiest migrations in human history, the princely state of Malerkotla stood out as an island of relative calm. Its Muslim nawab presided over a territory that became a refuge for hundreds of thousands of fleeing Muslims making their way to Pakistan. Three things made this possible: a 240-year-old decree from Guru Gobind Singh that Malerkotla's Muslims should never be harmed, the nawab's personal friendship with the Hindu Maharaja of Patiala, and the simple fact that Malerkotla's Muslims were armed and able to defend themselves. Malerkotla succeeded because its protection was rooted in reciprocal trust between communities and rulers, not in the unilateral calculation of one government sheltering a controversial figure against the wishes of a neighboring population.

Contrast that with Ranjit Singh's Sikh empire in the early nineteenth century, where the Maharaja's chief confidant on foreign affairs was Fakir Azizuddin, a Muslim minister whose diplomatic gifts helped Ranjit Singh navigate relationships with British India and Afghan powers alike. Ranjit Singh understood that durable regional influence came from cultivating trusted intermediaries who could bridge communities and states, not from unilateral acts of patronage that alienated entire populations. India's current approach to Hasina lacks that bridge-building instinct. It has chosen personal loyalty over institutional diplomacy with Dhaka's new leadership.

Magadha's Lesson in Statecraft

Perhaps the most instructive historical parallel comes from ancient India itself, from the sixth century BC rivalry between Magadha and Avanti. King Bimbisara of Magadha and Chanda Pradyota Mahasena of Avanti fought bitterly, yet when Pradyota fell ill with jaundice, Bimbisara sent his own royal physician, Jivaka, to treat his rival. That single act of statesmanship, choosing magnanimity over exploitation of an adversary's weakness, helped the two kingdoms make peace, and Magadha went on to become the dominant power in the Gangetic plain, eventually encompassing some 80,000 villages. Bimbisara understood something India's current diplomacy toward Bangladesh seems to have forgotten: that regional dominance is built through gestures that reduce enmity, not through choices that entrench it.

India today faces a version of Bimbisara's dilemma without having found his solution. Sheltering Hasina is not itself the problem; nations have long histories of offering asylum to deposed leaders without permanent diplomatic damage. The problem is that India has offered no parallel gesture toward Dhaka's interim government to offset the perception of favoritism. There has been no equivalent of sending a royal physician to Avanti; no visible effort to reassure Bangladesh's new leadership that India's regional posture rests on more than nostalgic loyalty to the Awami League.

What India Risks Losing

The stakes extend well beyond one summit boycott. Bangladesh sits at the intersection of India's northeastern security concerns, its Bay of Bengal ambitions, and its rivalry with China for regional influence. A Dhaka that feels slighted by New Delhi has every incentive to deepen ties with Beijing, which has been only too happy to expand its footprint in South Asia through infrastructure financing and defense cooperation. Every month that the Hasina question remains unresolved is a month in which India cedes diplomatic ground it may struggle to recover.

None of this means India should simply extradite Hasina or abandon the principle of asylum. States have legitimate reasons to protect individuals from politically charged prosecutions, and doing so is not inherently incompatible with good relations with a successor government, as history shows in other contexts. But principle without corresponding diplomatic effort curdles into stubbornness. India's leadership needs the imagination of a Bimbisara and the coalition-building instincts of a Ranjit Singh, not the shortsightedness that once let a subcontinent's rulers be picked off one by one because none of them could see past their immediate advantage.

The Path Forward

South Asian leadership, the kind India aspires to as it hosts summits like BRICS, cannot be built on the goodwill of a single deposed leader's supporters. It must be built on the harder, slower work of convincing neighbors that India's power is exercised in their interest as much as its own. History's clearest lesson, from Malerkotla's decree to Bimbisara's physician, is that regional trust is earned through visible reciprocity, not assumed through old alliances. India has the diplomatic tools to repair this relationship: quiet assurances to Dhaka, support for Bangladesh's democratic transition, economic engagement that does not hinge on any single political faction. What it lacks so far is the will to use them. Until it finds that will, the empty chair at the BRICS summit will remain a fitting symbol of an opportunity squandered for the sake of an old loyalty that history suggests is not worth the price.