The Indian foreign secretary, Harsh Vardhan Shringla, was in Dhaka on August 18 and 19 with a message of peace and friendship. Before leaving the Bangladesh capital, he said his visit was “short but very satisfactory”. The seasoned diplomat, who had a successful stint as the Indian high commissioner in Bangladesh, didn’t elaborate on the reasons for calling the visit, which was planned barely 36 hours before the special Indian air force flight landed in Dhaka, satisfactory. However, a scrutiny of his engagements in Dhaka reveals that the career diplomat had several reasons to call the visit satisfactory.

The most important of them was his one-on-one meeting with the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, that went on for over an hour on Day One of his visit. Although no senior official from the government came to receive or see him off at the Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport and the Bangladesh foreign minister, A.K. Abdul Momen, was conspicuous by his absence in Dhaka during his stay in the capital, the fact that Shringla met Hasina, who hasn’t even met her party’s secretary, Obaidul Quader, for over five months was no mean feat.

The visit drew all the attention in Dhaka and was undoubtedly the headline news. The who’s who of Dhaka, including businessmen and senior media personalities, were literally queuing up outside Pan Pacific Sonargaon to call on Shringla, the boy from Darjeeling who, later, went to Mayo College, Ajmer, and St Stephen’s College, Delhi.

Shringla also held a bilateral meeting with his Bangladeshi counterpart, Masud Bin Momen, and they discussed an entire gamut of issues, ranging from collaboration for developing a coronavirus vaccine to the creation of an air bubble for travel between the two countries.

The moot question, however, is whether the foreign secretary was able to deliver on the mandate of communicating the message of peace and friendship from India.

For South Block, Bangladesh under Hasina has been a trusted friend and an ally. Even though the Chinese footprint has been expanding in the country and Pakistan has been trying to woo Dhaka aggressively, a significant majority in the foreign policy establishment in India has always been confident that Dhaka, despite the steady rise in anti-India sentiments in the country, cannot afford to look beyond New Delhi. Shringla’s sudden visit, which was made public barely 12 hours before he landed in Dhaka, was probably planned based on this hypothesis. The second important question about the visit is whether Dhaka responded according to Delhi’s expectations.

Finding the answer to the first question is not that difficult if one analyses the coverage of the visit in mainstream media and the comments in social media. The Bangladeshi press, often accused of toeing the government line more diligently than is expected of them, produced some matter-of-fact reports on Shringla’s visit without getting into the details. Social media, however, was flush with Bangladeshi nationalistic pride that India — scared of advances by China and Pakistan — was desperately trying to reach out to Dhaka and that became the predominant narrative. If the visit of the senior-most diplomat of a big neighbour is seen as an act of desperation, there is little doubt that the message of peace and friendship didn’t trickle down.

Now, if the response of the host country — the second question — is analysed, the pay-off seems to be dismal as the Bangladesh government was silent about the high point of Shringla’s visit. There was no official briefing on what transpired between the two at Gono Bhaban, the official residence of Hasina. The moment was not even captured on camera by the official photographer at the Prime Minister’s Office.

The answers to the two important questions about the visit highlight certain deficiencies, which India, as the bigger neighbour, needs to address so that Bangladesh doesn’t become another Nepal. First, there is a major public relation failure by the Indian establishment in Bangladesh. The present approach — no point making much effort as Bangladeshis will always criticize India — smacks of hubris. Second, adhocracy can’t replace deft diplomacy if South Block is serious about its immediate neighbourhood. Instead of a sudden trip, New Delhi should have planned it better so that it yielded the desired outcome.