India, Dec. 22 -- Eighteen months after Sheikh Hasina's ouster from Bangladesh as the country's Prime Minister, hopes for normalcy between India and Bangladesh remain elusive as the bilateral relationship plunges from one crisis to another. The ongoing protests in Dhaka and growing anti-India sentiments are only indications of that. While there is a hope in New Delhi that things could get better after the February elections in Bangladesh, there is little certainty of that. New Delhi must change its approach to Dhaka, shedding a politico-emotional framing to adopt a clinical and problem-solving national security framework. For India, the rapidly deteriorating relationship with Bangladesh poses a threefold challenge: growing insecurity and infiltration along the 4,000-kilometer border; the rising threat of anti-India forces establishing cross-border bases; and the exploitation of the rift between Dhaka and New Delhi by Islamabad and Beijing at a time when Bangladesh actively pivots towards a Pakistan-China axis in the region. Consider the rapidly shifting geopolitical context. In June this year, a trilateral meeting in China's Kunming, involving the foreign secretaries of Bangladesh and Pakistan and Chinese vice-minister Sun Weidong, set a concerning tone for New Delhi. This was followed by the unprecedented visit of a Pakistani Naval ship to Bangladesh's Chittagong port in late 2024, and Beijing is intensifying its engagement with the Muhammad Yunus government. Whichever way one looks at it, the current state of bilateral relationship is deeply unhelpful to India. It harms the interests of Bangladesh and its people even more, but perhaps not the regime in Bangladesh for whom tensions with India help cover its domestic failures and incompetence, economic or otherwise. Therefore, our assumption that an unhealthy relationship with India is worse off for Dhaka could be a significant miscalculation. Just as blaming India for harbouring the killers of the Bangladeshi youth leader Sharif Osman Hadi is unjustified, so too is the demand for New Delhi to hand over Hasina for execution (since she has already been sentenced to death) an impossible proposition. To blame New Delhi for not apprehending and handing over Hadi's killers who have reportedly fled to the Indian side of the border, which witnesses a number of infiltration attempts almost every day, is irresponsible. Neither Hadi's assassination nor the protection of his killers serves New Delhi's interests; in fact, reality is quite to the contrary. In dealing with today's Dhaka, we must keep in mind five things. One, we must ideally separate noise from substance. But in today's Bangladesh noise is the substance because the Yunus regime thrives more on the noise than on the substance. In that sense, neither an outreach to chief advisor Yunus nor to the country's national security advisor may calm the anti-India tempers on the ground. In any case, the noise in Bangladesh is not in India's control. Therefore, New Delhi's strategy of minimal engagement with Dhaka is understandable. But if such minimal engagement is premised on the hope that things could change for the better after the February elections and when there is stable government in Dhaka, that prospect could be a long shot. Therefore, New Delhi must engage Dhaka at every level since not engaging will only deepen the trust deficit. New Delhi's long-term interests demand engagement with Dhaka, not hopeful waiting for a better tomorrow in Dhaka. Two, we must approach the question of the handover of exiled PM Hasina to the authorities in Bangladesh with more pragmatism. Though the Bangladesh government strategically exploits the Hasina issue for domestic political gain and to keep New Delhi on the defensive, it nevertheless remains a major obstacle to bilateral relations. It then follows that we must deal with the Hasina question more unemotionally. There is little doubt that New Delhi will not send Hasina back to Dhaka to be put to death, and rightly so. But that doesn't necessarily mean that she must continue to be in New Delhi, complicating our relations with Dhaka. Why not consider negotiating asylum for her with friendly Gulf or European nations, who have no direct stake in Bangladesh as we do, a solution she deserves and one that could diffuse the current bilateral impasse? Three, we should continue to insist that the Awami League should be allowed to participate in the February elections. But if an election without Awami League in it leads to a new government in Dhaka, which is a likely outcome, New Delhi must engage it, nevertheless. Should Bangladesh conduct a sham election, the onus would be on them, not on us. We need not take the responsibility for what Bangladesh does with its own democracy or its domestic politics: Our engagement must be guided by our national interests. While a genuinely democratic Bangladesh serves our interest, national security imperatives should always take precedence. Therefore, concerns over Bangladesh's internal politics must not complicate the pursuit of our more vital national interests. Four, the India-Bangladesh relationship has been over-politicised since Hasina's ouster; perhaps the solution lies in depoliticising it and re-framing it purely within a sharply national security framework. In that sense, the November meeting between India's NSA Ajit Doval and Bangladesh's NSA Khalilur Rehman in New Delhi on the sidelines of the Colombo Security Conclave is significant and is a useful road ahead. Finally, our approach to Bangladesh must be framed within the larger regional geopolitical context, which unfortunately is unfavourable to India today. We should not allow our relationship with Dhaka to further poison this already adverse regional dynamic. Therefore, a patient hearing of Dhaka's complaints is a small price to pay if it helps diffuse the strength of the China-Pakistan-Bangladesh axis on India's doorstep....