There are political operators who rise through ideology, and there are bureaucrats who rise through obedience. Then there is Dr Khalilur Rahman, a man who appears to have risen through something far more elusive: usefulness in moments of uncertainty.
In Bangladesh’s increasingly fractured political landscape, Khalilur Rahman has become one of those rare figures who seem to survive every transition while remaining strangely above the noise.
To admirers, he is a strategic mind functioning several moves ahead of everyone else, calibrating every ambiguous statement and diplomatic maneuver toward a larger geopolitical design.
To critics, he is simply a polished improviser, a fluent technocrat capable of dressing up tactical opportunism as grand strategy. And perhaps the most unsettling possibility is that, in the modern age of fractured truths and manufactured narratives, the distinction between the two has ceased to matter.
That ambiguity is precisely where Khalilur Rahman thrives.
His appointment as foreign minister in the new government led by Tarique Rahman stunned many within the ruling establishment itself. Only months earlier, while serving as national security adviser under the interim administration of Muhammad Yunus, he had faced open hostility from sections of the now-ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).
Senior party figures privately questioned why a man with no roots in the country was suddenly handling matters of national security. Some openly described him as an “outsider in charge of the state security.”
Yet here he remains – not merely surviving the transition from interim authority to elected government, but emerging stronger from it. Indeed, the durability of Khalilur Rahman’s influence is perhaps the most fascinating aspect of his story.
Bangladesh has historically been unforgiving toward holdovers from previous administrations. Political transitions are usually accompanied by purges and ideological cleansing coupled with the ritual humiliation of those associated with the outgoing order.
Khalilur Rahman has somehow escaped that fate. More than that, he became indispensable to two successive governments that otherwise shared little political trust between them.
That alone demands explanation. Part of the answer lies in his credentials. Khalilur Rahman is not a conventional party politician parachuted into diplomacy.
He topped Bangladesh’s first regular civil service examination in 1977, graduated first in economics from the University of Dhaka and later studied at both Tufts University’s Fletcher School and Harvard’s Kennedy School, earning advanced degrees in diplomacy and economics.
He spent decades within the United Nations system, occupying senior policy positions in Geneva and New York, and contributing to major UN development frameworks.
Technocrats with international pedigrees are not uncommon. But Bangladesh rarely produces technocrats capable of navigating domestic political paranoia while simultaneously reassuring foreign capitals. Khalilur Rahman appears unusually fluent in both languages.
And so he travels. Since the formation of the new government, he has resumed the now-familiar rhythm of diplomatic shuttlecraft, Beijing one week, Delhi or Istanbul another, Washington always somewhere in the background.
He moves through foreign policy crises with an ease that appears either deeply strategic or recklessly improvised, depending on who is watching or assessing.
Take his recent state visit to China. The joint statements emerging from Dhaka and Beijing read like lyrical declarations of eternal cooperation, packed with ambitious rhetoric and promises of deeper economic partnership.
Yet critics immediately pointed out an uncomfortable contradiction: Bangladesh’s recent agreement with the US reportedly contains clauses that could complicate large-scale future Chinese investments without Washington’s approval or scrutiny.
Whether that interpretation is legally accurate matters less than the perception it creates — that Bangladesh is simultaneously reassuring Washington while courting Beijing with equal enthusiasm.
And somehow Khalilur Rahman manages to stand in the middle of those contradictions without appearing cornered by them. More remarkably, he revived discussions around China’s involvement in the long-stalled Teesta River management project, an issue historically entangled with India’s regional sensitivities.
For years, even governments of the ousted autocrat Sheik Hasina, who was seen as “exceptionally close to New Delhi,” approached the subject cautiously. Yet Khalilur Rahman reopened the conversation with notable confidence, as though diplomatic landmines were merely procedural inconveniences.
Curiously, his handling of India may be his most impressive balancing act. Relations between Dhaka and New Delhi deteriorated sharply during the Yunus-led interim administration.
Indian media commentary frequently turned hostile, portraying Bangladesh’s political transition as chaotic and unstable. But after the arrival of the Tarique Rahman government, the tone shifted noticeably.
Indian strategic circles began speaking less about instability and more about pragmatism and cooperation. Editorials advocating recalibration and engagement started appearing with surprising frequency.
Inside diplomatic circles, many quietly attribute part of that tonal shift to Khalilur Rahman’s intervention. Whether this reflects genuine strategic brilliance or merely his ability to tell every side what it wishes to hear depends largely on one’s ideological loyalties.
His critics see “contradiction” everywhere in his diplomacy. His supporters see flexibility. His detractors see improvisation. His admirers see sophisticated statecraft. The truth may be that modern diplomacy increasingly rewards exactly this kind of ambiguity.
Bangladesh today occupies an unusually delicate geopolitical position: economically dependent on Western markets, strategically important to India, increasingly tied to Chinese infrastructure financing and perpetually vulnerable to regional instability emanating from Myanmar and the Rohingya crisis.
In such an environment, ideological purity becomes less valuable than adaptive fluency. Khalilur Rahman’s greatest political talent may simply be his ability to inhabit contradictory spaces without collapsing under them. That quality has arguably made him indispensable.
To old BNP loyalists, he remains an outsider. To sections of the bureaucracy, he is still viewed with suspicion. Yet, for successive governments confronting an increasingly unstable regional order, he represents something far more useful than ideological consistency: continuity amid volatility.
And perhaps that is the real explanation behind his unlikely rise. Not that Khalilur Rahman possesses some mystical foreign policy genius. Nor that he is merely a lucky opportunist bluffing his way through power corridors.
But Bangladesh’s political class — fragmented, distrustful, and perpetually reactive — increasingly requires figures capable of operating in ambiguity without being consumed by it. And few in Bangladesh embody that ambiguity better than Khalilur Rahman.
Faisal Mahmud is a Dhaka-based journalist
