Daily Times

After India, ties between Pakistan and Bangladesh have also gone sour as Dhaka has refused to accept new Pakistani high commissioner to Bangladesh.

Credible diplomatic sources told Daily Times that Islamabad was awaiting the agreement of high commissioner Bangladesh Saqlain Syedah.

The post of the high commissioner of Pakistan to Bangladesh went vacant after the retirement of Rafiuzaman Siddiqui in February this year. Following the retirement of Siddiqui, Saqlain Syedah was designated as new high commissioner to Bangladesh. She is a PBS-20 officer of the foreign service of Pakistan. Following the diplomatic procedures, the Foreign Office immediately sent nomination credentials of Saqlain to Bangladesh, but despite a number of reminders through note verbales Dhaka neither gave any response nor any reason. When asked to comment, former high commissioner Rafiuzaman Saddiqui told Daily Times that the approval to agreement hardly takes a month. “The delay is indeed a refusal of her acceptance by the Bangladesh government.”

Siddiqui said that the agreement might take more time, but the delay would not bode well for bilateral relations between the two countries, which are members of many international organisations, including UN, SAARC, OIC and Commonwealth.

In the recent past (2015-16), both Islamabad and Dhaka had expelled each other’s diplomats on various charges.

Published in Daily Times, October 7^th 2018.

This story was updated on October 8 as the earlier version contained an inaccurate quote by Pakistan’s former high commissioner to Dhaka.