On April 4, 2025, Bangladesh assumed the chairmanship of BIMSTEC at the 6th Summit in Bangkok. Thailand's Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra handed the gavel to Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus. The handover carried a specific weight: the BIMSTEC Permanent Secretariat has been headquartered in Dhaka since September 13, 2014. Bangladesh is now both host of the permanent institutional machinery and chair of the grouping.

The BNP government under Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, which took office on February 17, 2026, inherited the chairmanship with 14 months remaining in the two-year term. Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman, sworn in on the same date, is managing Bangladesh's BIMSTEC agenda alongside a parallel initiative to revive SAARC. This is not a diplomatic contradiction: it is a deliberate hedge.

BIMSTEC's seven member states, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, cover 1.73 billion people and a combined GDP of $5.2 trillion (2023). Its institutional architecture, however, remains thin. The Bangkok Vision 2030, adopted at the 6th Summit, is the first strategic roadmap in BIMSTEC's 28-year existence.

The FTA: 21 Years and Still Negotiating Rules of Origin

The Framework Agreement on BIMSTEC Free Trade Area was signed on February 8, 2004. Twenty-one years later, the agreement has not entered operational force. The Agreement on Trade in Goods is finalised in text. What remains blocked is its annexures: the Rules for Determination of Origin of Goods and the Operational Certification Procedures for the Rules of Origin.

The 22nd session of the Working Group on Rules of Origin was held virtually in Dhaka on March 25, 2025. A 3rd session on Customs Cooperation met on December 2, 2025. Progress is incremental. The core dispute, a long-standing disagreement between India and Thailand over the percentage of value-addition required under rules-of-origin criteria, has never been fully resolved.

In August 2024, India's Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal suggested that BIMSTEC members consider negotiating a Preferential Trade Agreement as a faster alternative to a full FTA. The current target is finalisation by 2027, coinciding with BIMSTEC's 30th anniversary. Whether Bangladesh, as chair and as the sector lead for Trade, Investment and Development, can accelerate the final annexures is the most consequential question of its chairmanship.

Bangladesh's own trade with BIMSTEC members illustrates the stakes. Intra-BIMSTEC trade reached $53.49 billion in 2023, representing 6.7 percent of the bloc's combined trade volume. That ratio exceeds SAARC's under-five-percent intra-regional share but lags well behind ASEAN's 25 percent. Bangladesh exports to its SAARC neighbors, the closest available proxy for its intra-BIMSTEC corridor, totalled approximately $1.7 billion in FY2023-24. A functional FTA would not primarily benefit Bangladesh's RMG sector, which already accesses major markets under LDC preferences, but would expand market access for processed foods, pharmaceuticals, and light engineering goods.

The Transport Master Plan: $124.4 Billion and Chronically Underfunded

BIMSTEC's 2018 Master Plan for Transport Connectivity, developed with ADB support and updated at the 5th Summit in Colombo in March 2022, identifies 267 projects totalling $124.4 billion over the decade to 2028. The breakdown is 216 hard infrastructure projects (roads, railways, ports, inland waterways, aviation) and 51 soft infrastructure projects covering process automation, single-window customs clearance, and capacity building.

The implementation picture is stark. Approximately 134 of the 216 hard infrastructure projects (60 percent) remain in the planning stage, with an estimated financing requirement of $89.9 billion. Total public investment capacity across the seven member states is insufficient to close this gap without significant multilateral and blended finance. ADB's 2024 financing framework paper, published through the BIMSTEC Secretariat, identifies co-financing structures and private capital mobilisation as necessary complements to sovereign borrowing.

For Bangladesh, the most direct consequence is the state of road and rail corridors linking it to India's northeast, Myanmar, and the Bay of Bengal ports in Thailand and Sri Lanka. Without completed corridors, Bangladesh cannot realise the transit revenue and supply-chain integration that BIMSTEC's geography promises. Bangladesh has historically been a demandeur for connectivity investment, not a financier of regional infrastructure.

BBIN: A Partial Agreement in Search of Bhutan

The Bangladesh-Bhutan-India-Nepal Motor Vehicles Agreement was signed in 2015 and ratified by Bangladesh, India, and Nepal. Bhutan's National Assembly approved it in 2016 but the National Council, Bhutan's upper house, rejected ratification in November of that year. Bhutan formally withdrew in April 2017.

The practical consequence is that the MVA cannot create a continuous overland corridor from Bangladesh through Bhutan to Nepal, which was the original connectivity rationale. Without Bhutan, Bangladesh and Nepal can route freight through India's Siliguri Corridor, a narrow strip of territory sometimes called the Chicken's Neck, but this path is logistically constrained and politically contingent on India's consent at each crossing.

Bangladesh, India, and Nepal conducted a trial bus run in 2018. Full implementation remains stalled on protocols governing insurance arrangements, bank guarantees, and freight vehicle tonnage limits. Bhutan has reiterated that its carbon-neutral commitment and current road infrastructure are incompatible with a high-volume motor vehicle agreement. There is no current pathway for Bhutan's re-entry.

This creates a structural gap in BIMSTEC connectivity. The BIMSTEC Transport Master Plan addresses some of these gaps through its road and rail corridors, but a multi-modal corridor that fully bridges Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, and Nepal requires the MVA layer to work. As chair, Bangladesh can raise BBIN re-engagement as a BIMSTEC-level agenda item, framing Bhutanese participation in regional connectivity as a BIMSTEC collective interest rather than a bilateral pressure campaign.

SAARC Dormancy and the Dual-Track Hedge

SAARC last convened at the 18th Summit in Kathmandu on November 26-27, 2014. The 19th Summit, scheduled for Islamabad in November 2016, collapsed when India withdrew after the Uri terror attack, citing Pakistan-linked terrorism. Eight SAARC member states have not gathered at the summit level for more than 11 years.

The BNP government has explicitly stated that SAARC revival is a foreign policy priority. At his first post-election press conference on February 14, 2026, Tarique Rahman said: "Bangladesh was the initiator of SAARC. So naturally, we would want SAARC to be revived." This is not a rhetorical flourish: BNP's charter-member identity in SAARC is part of its historical narrative, and SAARC includes Pakistan, with which BNP has historically maintained better relations than the Awami League did.

The dual-track posture, BIMSTEC chairmanship plus SAARC revival advocacy, is logically coherent. Both tracks, if successful, benefit Bangladesh. The risk is sequencing and capacity. Bangladesh's Ministry of Foreign Affairs is not a large institution. Running a BIMSTEC chairmanship agenda, managing the FTA acceleration, keeping the SAARC revival credible, and conducting the India relationship through its current period of friction simultaneously requires both strategic triage and diplomatic bandwidth that the BNP government is still building.

The structural logic favours BIMSTEC in the near term. SAARC's paralysis is driven by the India-Pakistan conflict dynamic, which Bangladesh cannot resolve. BIMSTEC, which excludes Pakistan, has operational momentum: Bangkok Vision 2030, FTA finalisation target by 2027, and an active Secretariat in Dhaka. Bangladesh's leverage as chair is real and time-bounded. Using it effectively before April 2027 is the more actionable task.

Sectoral Consolidation: What Seven Pillars Replace Fourteen

Before the 5th Summit in Colombo (March 30, 2022), BIMSTEC had 14 sectors of cooperation. The consolidation to seven was designed to reduce coordination overhead and concentrate accountability. Each sector has a single member-state lead:

• Trade, Investment and Development: Bangladesh
• Environment and Climate Change: Bhutan
• Security: India
• Agriculture and Food Security: Myanmar
• People-to-People Contact: Nepal
• Science, Technology and Innovation: Sri Lanka
• Connectivity: Thailand

Bangladesh's position as lead on Trade, Investment and Development is not coincidental: it reflects Dhaka's consistent advocacy for a functional FTA and its role as an LDC-to-developing-country graduation case study for the region. As chair and sector lead simultaneously on the most economically consequential pillar, Bangladesh's credibility on FTA finalisation is now institutionally visible. Progress or failure on the rules-of-origin annexures will be attributed, in part, to Bangladesh's diplomacy in 2025-2027.

What the Chairmanship Is Worth

BIMSTEC chairmanships do not grant veto powers or new institutional authority. They provide scheduling priority: the chair sets summit and ministerial meeting agendas, hosts working group sessions, and controls the rhythm of communique negotiations. Bangladesh has chosen to use this to push FTA annexure finalisation and transport master plan financing as its two declared priorities.

The harder policy question is whether Bangladesh can maintain the institutional quality of its chairmanship while its bilateral relationship with India, BIMSTEC's largest economy, remains under friction. The Teesta project, the Ganga Treaty renewal, and the Hasina extradition file are all live bilateral irritants. India's appetite for accelerating BIMSTEC FTA annexures may not be independent of the health of the broader India-Bangladesh relationship.

This is the structural tension at the centre of Bangladesh's BIMSTEC moment: it holds a chairmanship that gives it real procedural leverage over the region's most consequential trade negotiation, but its bilateral relationship with the country that has blocked the most critical FTA clause for two decades is simultaneously its most fraught diplomatic file. Resolving that tension, or managing around it, is the defining diplomatic task of Bangladesh's two-year term.