Realpolitik is a hell of a drug. One day you’re the iron-fisted neighbor backing a "stable" status quo, and the next, you’re frantically deleting your old tweets—or the diplomatic equivalent.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent phone call to the BNP’s Tarique Rahman wasn't just a courtesy. It was a pivot so sharp it probably gave the Ministry of External Affairs whiplash. The official readouts lean heavily on the usual clichés: "historical ties," "cultural bonds," and "shared prosperity." We know what that translates to in the real world. It means: We see which way the wind is blowing, and we’d really like you to not cancel our contracts.

For a decade, New Delhi played a high-stakes game of "all-in" with Sheikh Hasina. It was a comfortable arrangement. India got transit rights, security cooperation, and a firewall against insurgency. In exchange, Dhaka got a powerful friend who didn't ask too many annoying questions about democratic backsliding or disappearing activists. But the thing about betting on a single horse is that when the horse bolts, you’re left standing in the mud with an empty bridle.

Enter Tarique Rahman. For years, the BNP’s acting chairman has been the boogeyman of South Asian geopolitics, operating via Zoom from a leafy London suburb while fighting off a mountain of legal charges back home. To India’s security establishment, he was the guy who flirted with the hardliners. He was the risk factor. Now? He’s the man on the other end of the encrypted line.

This isn’t about "cultural ties." If Modi wanted culture, he’d go to a museum. This is about cold, hard friction. Specifically, the kind of friction that happens when billions of dollars in infrastructure investment meet a sudden change in management.

Take the Adani Godda power project. It’s a $1.7 billion monument to cross-border capitalism that pumps electricity from Jharkhand straight into the Bangladeshi grid. Under the old regime, the terms were... generous. Under a BNP-led or influenced government, those terms are going to be scrutinized with a magnifying glass and a grudge. Rahman knows he holds the leverage. India knows he knows. The "historical ties" talk is just the grease applied to a very squeaky wheel.

The tech-adjacent irony here is delicious. We live in an era where regional hegemony is supposed to be managed via sophisticated algorithms, satellite surveillance, and "neighborhood first" policies. Yet, when the street protests in Dhaka reached a fever pitch, all the data points in the world couldn't predict the speed of the collapse. Now, the diplomatic strategy has reverted to the most basic human software: the panicked apology call.

New Delhi is currently trying to solve a legacy hardware problem with a software patch. They spent fifteen years building a regional architecture that relied entirely on one operating system. Now that OS has crashed, and they’re trying to install a rival program they spent years calling malware.

It’s a messy business. The trade-offs are everywhere. If India leans too hard into Rahman, they alienate the remnants of the Awami League loyalists who actually know where the bodies are buried and how the ports are run. If they wait too long, they risk a new government that looks toward Beijing or Islamabad just to spite the neighbor who ignored them for a generation.

The rhetoric about "shared history" is particularly rich. It’s a bit like a tech giant getting caught in a massive data breach and sending an email saying, "Your privacy is our top priority." It wasn't a priority yesterday. It became a priority when the stock price started bleeding.

India’s regional influence is currently a beta product. It’s buggy, prone to crashing, and the user interface is increasingly hostile. Modi’s call to Rahman is a desperate attempt to avoid a total system reboot. They’re trying to build a bridge while the river is flooding, using the same "historical" bricks they spent a decade throwing at the BNP.

Will Rahman buy it? He doesn't have to. He just has to wait for the next invoice from the power plants and the trans-shipment hubs to hit his desk. In the boardroom of South Asian power, "cultural ties" is just the fine print on a contract that’s about to be aggressively renegotiated.

The big question is what happens when the "historical ties" script runs out of pages. After all, you can only talk about 1971 for so long before someone asks what you’re planning to do for them in 2025.

I wonder if Rahman kept him on hold.