Dhaka's worldview

IFTEKHAR AHMED CHOUDHURY, the former Finance Minister of Bangladesh states that Dhaka's two major foreign policy aspirations of preservation of sovereignty and quest for resources combined with the fact that was surrounded on three sides by India informed its external behavior of  being a player in world politics with a web of extra-regional linkages.

In his article for the Institute of South Asian Studies, "Foundations of Bangladesh’s Foreign Policy Interactions", he states that Dhaka's international interactions were based on twelve pillars comprised of the states such as Western aid donors, South Asian states, Middle Eastern Muslim states, China, multilateral institutions such as the UN, Commonwealth, OIC, SAARC, and trade and financial institutions such as the WTO, Bretton Woods organizations, ADB and the Islamic Development Bank.

He concludes that there was a greater commitment to multilateralism and Dhaka generally kept a lower profile on high-risk issues and higher profile on low-risk issues.

Transforming Indo-Bangla relationship

C. RAJA MOHAN, scholar of foreign policy and international relations at the Library of Congress calls upon New Delhi to seize the moment in the backdrop of the Bangladeshi PM's visit and engineer a paradigm shift in New Delhi-Dhaka relations that could serve as a template for the relations with the rest of the South Asian countries. In an op-ed in the Indian Express, "Look to our near east", he opines that New Delhi should move towards a relationship with Dhaka based on the principle of sovereign equality, emphasize 'interests' rather than 'sentiments', open its markets more generously and endorse Dhaka's aspirations to lead the process of regional and sub-regional cooperation in the sub-continent, thus facilitating its emergence as a great eastern hub of South Asia.