On the morning of July 31, in a hotel in Dhaka, the United States Special Envoy for South and Central Asia met India's high commissioner to Bangladesh. The conversation lasted about 90 minutes and took place the day before the envoy called on Bangladesh's prime minister, and that evening the Indian envoy flew to Delhi for consultations. Neither side described what was discussed.
Nothing improper occurred. Diplomats meet, and it is the business of every state to advance its own interests. India was pursuing India's. Washington was pursuing America's. Beijing continues to pursue its own across the region. States behave like states, and there is nothing in that to resent.
What stayed with me was simpler, and quieter.
A consequential conversation about this region took place on Bangladeshi soil, and Bangladesh was not part of it -- and few in Dhaka seemed to think this worth remarking upon.
Consider, too, the arrangement itself. The American envoy holds two appointments simultaneously: Ambassador to India, and Special Envoy for South and Central Asia. Delhi recognizes the first and has been visibly uneasy about the second; when he announced in June that he looked forward to working closely with India's incoming envoy in Dhaka, a former Indian foreign secretary objected publicly, observing that American ambassadors to India do not customarily approach Indian envoys posted to third countries.
The doctrine has been clear for our country, as recently stated by our foreign minister: Bangladesh would never strengthen ties with one country at another's expense, and seeks good relations with all while advancing its own interests. It is the right doctrine, and I believe it is sincerely held. The question is whether we have built anything capable of carrying it.
There is reason for doubt, and it does not require any accusation to see.
In February, Bangladesh signed a trade agreement with the United States that lowered our tariff to 19% -- a real and welcome gain for an economy under strain. But the agreement also carried conditions that made it harder for Dhaka to move closer to certain other countries, China foremost among them.
Four months later, in Beijing, China proposed the Bangladesh-China-Myanmar Economic Corridor: Road and rail from Yunnan through Myanmar to Chittagong and Mongla. Our foreign minister said, correctly and carefully, that Bangladesh was examining the proposal and had taken no position.
Read those two facts together. In February we accepted relief on the condition that our future alignments be constrained. In June we were offered something that tests exactly that constraint. And in July, envoys of two other powers sat in a Dhaka hotel and discussed the region for 90 minutes without us.
This is what the loss of strategic autonomy actually looks like. Not occupation. Not humiliation. A sequence of individually reasonable decisions, each defensible on its own terms, which together narrow the range of choices available to the country later.
Why do we keep arriving here? I do not believe it is chiefly the fault of foreign capitals, and I do not think it is a failing of the present government alone. It is older than that.
Across five decades, our politics has repeatedly sought abroad the confidence it could not settle at home. Where authority rests on a mandate that is contested rather than trusted, where institutions are staffed by loyalty rather than merit, where the press must weigh its words, a government's standing does not rest securely on the consent of its own citizens. It has to be supplemented. And the supplement is always foreign -- Delhi in one decade, Washington in another, Beijing in a third. It is paid for in policy.
That is the mechanism, and it explains why strategic autonomy is not, in the first place, a question of foreign policy at all.
A government confident of its standing at home does not need to be reassured of its standing abroad, and cannot be moved by the withdrawal of that reassurance. We have rarely sustained such confidence for long. Until we do, our negotiating position will keep being set somewhere other than Dhaka.
Nor can a country negotiate freely if it cannot discuss its own affairs freely. The most telling feature of that week was the quiet around it -- the ordinary questions a confident nation asks aloud, unasked.
Into that silence rushed rumour: Within a day, versions of events were circulating that the record does not support. When careful reporting recedes, the public appetite to know does not. It merely goes unfed.
I have lived in Sweden long enough to be careful about what I claim for it. Swedish foreign policy is not unconstrained. In 2024 Sweden abandoned two centuries of non-alignment and joined NATO -- not in tranquillity, but because Russia had made the older position untenable. Geography pressed on Stockholm as it presses on Dhaka, and Stockholm yielded to it.
The difference is not that Sweden escaped constraints. It is that the decision was argued in the Riksdag (parliament), reported by a press nobody had to be brave to read, and afterwards owned by Swedes as their own. No foreign envoy settled it in a hotel room, and no citizen was left to guess what had been agreed on his behalf.
That is the whole of what I am asking. Not the freedom to do as we wish -- no country has that. The capacity to make a constrained choice in our own name, in the open, and to answer for it afterwards. That does not require Sweden's wealth. It requires institutions we could build at our present income.
Two proposals, then. They are modest, and they can be refused.
I write from Stockholm, and I should be honest about what that distance means. I am a Swedish citizen. I will very likely never see Bangladesh again. But my mother is there, and I was born there, and a man does not choose which soil made him.
Watching that week gave me no pride. I have looked for a gentler way to say it and not found one. I do not ask that Bangladesh be admired. I ask that Bangladesh not be bullied -- by anyone.
We won our political independence in 1971 at a cost this generation cannot fully imagine. But independence was never the achievement of a single morning. It is renewed, or quietly given away, in the ordinary decisions of ordinary years -- in what we sign, in what we ask, in what we permit to be discussed about us in rooms we are not invited into.
Bangladesh's future will not be settled in Washington, Delhi, or Beijing. It will be settled in Dhaka, or it will not be settled at all.
That is the independence still waiting to be completed.
Rajani K Saha writes from Sweden and is a practising physician.
