4 min readNew DelhiUpdated: Apr 28, 2026 04:36 AM IST
AT A time when ties with Bangladesh is at a crucial stage of repair, former Union minister and BJP leader Dinesh Trivedi has been appointed as India’s High Commissioner to Bangladesh, the Ministry of External Affairs announced on Monday. This is the first time in the last 12 years of the NDA government that a political leader has been appointed to serve as an envoy.
While the practice of appointing non-Indian Foreign Service officers is not new, the BJP-led government had not made many appointments where career diplomats were not sent as Indian envoys.
In December 2015, Ahmad Javed, a 1980-batch Maharashtra cadre IPS officer and former Mumbai Police Commissioner, was appointed as Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
Trivedi, who joined the BJP from Trinamool Congress in 2021, has been chosen after months of speculation over the appointment of Indian High Commissioner to Bangladesh.
Currently, career diplomat Pranay Verma is the Indian High Commissioner in Dhaka. He had navigated the tough and challenging period during the interim government from August 2024 to February 2026, after the Sheikh Hasina-led Awami League government collapsed on August 5, 2024.
Sources told The Indian Express that earlier, career diplomat and Indian ambassador to Indonesia, Sandeep Chakravorty, was in contention to succeed Verma, who is now headed to Brussels as India’s envoy to Belgium and the EU.
Sources said Chakravorty was considered for the past few months since he had served in Dhaka as India’s Deputy High Commissioner. He had served during the Hasina regime, and had a good network with the BNP as well as the other political stakeholders, and his name was almost finalised.
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But, sources said, the government decided to look for a political candidate after BNP chief Tarique Rahman won a landslide victory in the Bangladesh polls in February 2026.
Among the names considered were former Governor of Bihar and Kerala and former Civil Aviation Minister Arif Mohammed Khan and former Minister of State of External Affairs M J Akbar.
But, finally the BJP leadership and the government decided to pick Trivedi for the position.
A BJP leader, who is aware of the vetting process, told The Indian Express, “After the Donald Trump administration assumed office in the US and appointed non-career diplomats as political appointees in ambassadorial positions, there is a thinking in the party that the Indian government can also experiment with similar strategy — at places where we need and we can.” This has influenced and shaped some thinking towards choosing Trivedi.
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A former Railways Minister and Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare, Trivedi has close to three decades of experience as a parliamentarian; he was awarded the ‘Outstanding Parliamentarian’ award in 2016. With roots in student politics, he has been a member of both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha. He was earlier with the Congress, Janata Dal and Trinamool Congress, before joining the BJP in 2021.
As someone who speaks Bengali, and has represented the Barrackpore constituency in West Bengal, Trivedi is aware of the complex nature of India-Bangladesh ties. But he will need to navigate the political landscape in Dhaka, where BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami are the key political parties, while Awami League has been banned from the political process right now. This is going to be a challenging task for him, since India has given refuge to Hasina — much to the chagrin of the Bangladesh government which has been asking for her extradition.
Earlier this month, Bangladesh’s Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman visited India and held talks with NSA Ajit Doval and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar. The focus of the meetings was to bolster the bilateral ties, including in areas of trade, energy and people-to-people exchanges.
The two sides initiated efforts to stabilise the relations after Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, accompanied by Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri, represented India at the inauguration of Tarique Rahman as the Prime Minister in Dhaka on February 17.
