Pakistan, May 22 -- The sight of 12 senior Bangladeshi civil servants walking into Pakistan's Civil Services Academy in Lahore this month was bound to travel beyond the gates of a training institution.

One additional secretary and 11 joint secretaries from Dhaka attended what officials describe as the first such institutional exchange in more than five decades: a three-week executive development programme in Pakistan in what can easily be called a major foreign policy reset in the wake of former prime minister Sheikh Hasina's August 2024 ouster.

For years, Bangladeshi bureaucrats went to India's Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration in Mussoorie. That arrangement began in 2014 under Sheikh Hasina's government and was re...