South Block’s efforts to take Indian diplomacy out of the rarefied environment of New Delhi’s Raisina Hill and Chanakyapuri and allow the rest of the country to feel its working will receive a shot in the arm on Saturday when Shashi Tharoor, the minister of state for external affairs, sits down in Calcutta with regional passport officers for a day-long meeting.
Tharoor has called the meeting to take stock of the work of his ministry’s main arm for public dealings, the offices, which issue passports and attest documents such as university degrees or marriage certificates for Indians going abroad.
Tharoor called a similar meeting earlier in Thiruvananthapuram, which was attended by regional passport officers from southern and western states.
The minister was elected to the Lok Sabha from Thiruvananthapuram and provision of passport services is an issue that can make and unmake politicians in Kerala, which has a huge number of non-resident Indians, particularly in the Gulf.
Saturday’s meeting in Calcutta will be attended by regional passport officers from the northern and eastern states, from Jammu and Srinagar all the way down to Calcutta and Bhubaneswar.
Tharoor is an alumnus of St. Xavier’s School in Calcutta and often speaks with affection for the city where he spent some of his early years.
He told The Telegraph on the eve of the Calcutta meeting that his PhD thesis at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy on the domestic underpinnings of foreign policy was in a way being implemented by taking external affairs to the people instead of being cocooned in South Block.
“Foreign policy is too important a subject to be dealt with in the confines of the ministry of external affairs (MEA),” he said. “There is a strong internal brief to our work.”
Taking stock of the work of regional passport offices, which deal with the public, he said, is a way for his ministry to translate the Prime Minister’s vision of the security and well being of the people into reality.
Earlier this week, external affairs minister S.M. Krishna chose Bangalore instead of New Delhi to host a trilateral meeting of foreign ministers of Russia, India and China.
That move away from New Delhi came 23 years after Rajiv Gandhi hosted the second South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation summit in Bangalore.
As part of taking the MEA to the rest of India, the ministry has opened branch secretariats in Guwahati, Hyderabad and Chennai. Calcutta has had an MEA branch office since the war for the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971 and Dharamshala much earlier for dealings with the Dalai Lama.
Recently, at Tharoor’s initiative, the MEA organised an international seminar on the “new dimensions of Indo-Arab relations” in Kochi. Several Arab ambassadors, including a representative of the Arab League, travelled to Kerala to attend the seminar.
To expose students outside New Delhi to foreign policy, Tharoor also held an interactive discussion, preceded by a policy speech, before students of Aligarh Muslim University on the theme of “why foreign policy matters”.
Name of Source: The Telegraph