In July 2025 a consignment of fruit left Bangladesh for New Delhi: 1,000 kilograms of Haribhanga mangoes, the prized variety, addressed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with more cartons for senior officials and political leaders across the Indian capital. The sender was Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel laureate who then headed Bangladesh’s interim administration. The mangoes arrived on schedule. Nothing else moved.

The Tribune reported at the time that the fruit, packed in cartons, was to be handed out over a couple of days to Modi, to diplomats and to other officials. Days earlier, according to All India Radio, 300 kilograms of the same variety had crossed into Tripura through the Akhaura land port in 60 cartons, a gift for the state’s chief minister. The arithmetic of goodwill can be precise to the kilogram. The arithmetic of politics is harder to weigh.

That gap is the subject of an argument by Faisal Mahmud, writing in Al Jazeera, that the soft arsenal Dhaka has used on India for two years (mangoes, hilsa fish, jamdani fabric, Tangail sarees) has done everything it can do. It kept the door open. It cannot walk through it.

After the fall

The occasion for all this sweetness was a rupture. In July 2024 a mass uprising began in Bangladesh that ended Sheikh Hasina’s 15 years of increasingly authoritarian rule. Hasina fled to India. She is still there, while Dhaka pursues her extradition. The old relationship between the two capitals, built on deep security cooperation, energy links and settled political arrangements, depended on her. When she went, it came apart.

What followed was a long quarrel conducted in a low voice. The two governments argued over border management, transit rights and the treatment of Bangladeshi citizens. Visa services, which Mahmud calls a long-standing measure of warmth between the neighbours, were suspended. They resumed only after Tarique Rahman’s BNP came to power in February this year, and even now the number of visas issued has not climbed back to its level before 2024. Shared river waters, the trade imbalance and regional security all remain open questions.

Through all of it, Dhaka chose not to shout. It held cultural programmes, textile shows and hilsa festivals, made trade gestures, and kept its High Commission in New Delhi talking to Indian counterparts even when the two governments had little pleasant to say to each other.

Sold out in a day

The man most associated with this approach is M Riaz Hamidullah, Bangladesh’s outgoing high commissioner in New Delhi. Under him the mission staged the first jamdani exposition in Delhi in September 2025, putting traditional Bangladeshi weaving in front of an Indian audience whose own history is bound up with it. In April 2026 it mounted a second show: 300 handloom sarees brought straight from master weavers in Tangail and Pabna. Connoisseurs came in numbers. Designers traded ideas. The sarees were gone within 24 hours.

There was reason in it. The Bengali inheritance the two countries share is far easier to talk about than the rivers they share, and Mahmud credits the effort with building constituencies in Indian society that do not see Bangladesh only through the day’s quarrels. But he warns against mistaking access for influence. Admiring a weave is not endorsing a foreign policy. Even the cloth could not escape politics: the Tangail exhibition got caught up in disputes over heritage claims and geographical indication status.

A reflection, offered as nothing more: neighbours who share a language, a cuisine and a loom have always found it easiest to agree about the things that cost them nothing.

Two invitations, no visit

The clearest sign of where things stand is a journey that has not happened. India invited Rahman twice. India’s Ministry of External Affairs said that “a formal invitation for a bilateral visit to India was extended to the Bangladesh Prime Minister upon his assumption of office in February 2026”. The second invitation was to the outreach session of the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi, held on September 12 and 13, extended to him as current chair of BIMSTEC, the regional grouping Bangladesh leads. The ministry described that as standard BRICS practice, with heads of other regional groupings invited the same way.

Even the invitation became a point of contention. Before the summit, the Indian outlet News24 reported that a Bangladeshi minister had argued it was addressed to whoever holds the BIMSTEC chair, not to Rahman personally. Dhaka’s public line was that a high-level summit needs an appropriate environment and mutual respect. Indian officials kept pointing out that invitations had been sent and no visit had followed.

Rahman did not go. On September 15, after the summit, the ministry’s spokesman Randhir Jaiswal said of the bilateral trip: “Once both sides agree on a suitable schedule, the visit will happen.” He called the relationship “a working relationship and a work in progress.”

It is the language of a door left ajar. India’s high commissioner in Dhaka, Dinesh Trivedi, has repeatedly called for direct talks at the top, arguing that only contact between the leaders can settle the outstanding issues. A prime ministerial visit, though, needs a real agenda, careful preparation and results each leader can sell to voters at home. Neither capital appears to have those yet.

What fruit cannot carry

Dhaka’s new leadership wants a new balance with India, one based on sovereignty, reciprocity and room to choose its own partners. New Delhi has its own sharp worries about regional security and about where Bangladesh is turning abroad. Mahmud lists what has to be settled: trade treaties, water allocation, border enforcement, intelligence cooperation. Cultural envoys cannot negotiate any of it.

He does not call the gifts a failure. They protected a space through a turbulent transition, when a cold silence could have hardened into open hostility. But he judges that the symbolism now brings less with each round. A basket of mangoes can warm a room for an afternoon. It cannot decide what happens to Hasina, divide a river or rebuild trust between two security establishments that once worked hand in hand and now watch each other.

Meanwhile the Haribhanga keeps fruiting in northern Bangladesh every season. The problems it was sent to soften have not gone anywhere.