In an effort to politically attack Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the UK state broadcaster BBC purposefully revisited the Gujarat riots of 2002 and cited a covert investigation carried out at the time by a junior diplomat of the UK High Commission in the western state. The biassed report was then distributed to EU envoys in the capital. According to what is known, the French envoy to India at the time informed the South Block of the harmful report spreading among the EU diplomats.
source: hindustan timesAfter informing then-External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh about UK diplomats violating diplomatic protocol by conducting secret inquiries in Gujarat and disseminating anti-India reports among other EU envoys, the then-Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal warned foreign missions against meddling in the domestic affairs of India. This begs the fundamental question of why the Ministry of External Affairs is frequently kept in the dark while the government gives foreign diplomats full rein during their deployments in India. While Indian ambassadors to nations like China and Pakistan are aggressively followed by the relevant intelligence services, and even their interlocutors are subjected to unrelenting physical and mental abuse, the representatives of those same nations hardly face any restrictions and were once feted by the Indian elite. The same holds true for ambassadors from the UK, US, Russia, and even Germany, who in the past were treated on par with ministers of the Union Cabinet and were free to enter any office without letting the MEA know.It is a known truth that diplomats from India’s enemies conduct exclusive briefings to discuss their national interests, a luxury that is not given to Indian ambassadors stationed in these nations.
It is important to remember that a Chinese junior diplomat serving as the Consul General in Mumbai publicly criticised Pranab Mukherjee, who would later become the President of India, for his assessment of the 1962 war. While the Indian ambassadors and diplomats in Beijing and Islamabad are frequently kept inside their own diplomatic compounds rather than risk being attacked by intelligence toughies, their equivalents in Delhi were until recently regular invitees to cocktail parties held by Delhi’s elite.
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