New Delhi: The external affairs ministry on Monday (April 27) formally announced the appointment of Dinesh Trivedi as India’s high commissioner in Dhaka, making him New Delhi’s first political appointee to an ambassadorial post in South Asia in over three decades.The appointment of Trivedi, a BJP leader, as high commissioner also comes amid a reset in Indo-Bangladesh ties following the Tarique Rahman-led Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) government’s ascent to power earlier this year.He is expected to begin his assignment soon, the external affairs ministry said in a press release. It had sent his name to Dhaka for agrément earlier this month and Monday’s announcement signals that Bangladesh conveyed its formal approval.Trivedi replaces Pranay Verma, a career diplomat of the foreign service’s 1994 batch, whom the Union government appointed as ambassador to Belgium and the European Union on April 10.A former Union cabinet minister who represented West Bengal’s Barrackpore Lok Sabha seat between 2009 and 2019, and the state for two terms in the Rajya Sabha before that – both as a Trinamool Congress leader – Trivedi joined the BJP in 2021.India rarely makes political appointments to ambassadorial posts other than to the US and UK and the last time it did so to a South Asian nation was in the early 1990s, when New Delhi chose historian Bimal Prasad as its envoy to Nepal.Trivedi’s appointment comes at a time when New Delhi has moved to reset ties with Dhaka amid the BNP’s rise to power, before which it experienced frosty relations with the Muhammad Yunus-led interim government.It also takes place as the lingering issue of Sheikh Hasina and her former home minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal’s extradition to Bangladesh from India lurks in the background.Bangladesh under both Yunus and Tarique Rahman has sought the extradition of the duo, who fled to India after the youth-led 2024 uprising toppled their government and who were sentenced to death in absentia by the Dhaka-based International Crimes Tribunal for their role in suppressing the protests. New Delhi has said it is examining the request.When the BNP was placed as the likely winner of the February 2026 general elections, India in December dispatched external affairs minister S. Jaishankar to the funeral of former prime minister and party matriarch Khaleda Zia, where he also met her son Tarique Rahman. He notably did not meet chief adviser Yunus.Two months later, after Rahman’s landslide victory in the general elections, Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla and foreign secretary Vikram Misri attended Tarique Rahman’s swearing-in ceremony in Dhaka. Earlier this month Bangladeshi foreign minister Khalilur Rahman’s visit to Delhi marked the highest-level bilateral contact between the two sides since the polls.