NEW DELHI: Even as the Centre encounters mounting foreign policy challenges, the appointment of the country’s new Ambassador to North Korea has brought to the fore the discontent in the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA).
The ministry had on May 15 named counsellor at the Indian High Commission in Fiji, Ajay K Sharma as the country’s new envoy to Pyongyang.
Though the MEA announcement was treated with characteristic nonchalance by diplomatic circles, it did result in internal rumblings within the ministry.
Within a week of the MEA making its formal announcement, three associations of the IFS (B) cadre officers submitted a written complaint to the Prime Minister’s office (PMO) and External Affairs Minister S M Krishna expressing their “utter disappointment” and demanding a review of Sharma’s appointment.
The opposition to Sharma’s appointment mainly stemmed from the fact that he belonged to the stenographers’ cadre -- who are mainly recruited to provide secretarial skills to the ministry’s basic cadre of IFS officers and the feeder cadre, the IFS (B).
“Selecting an officer with only stenographic background to head such a sensitive mission abroad adversely reflects upon us in the context of India’s pre-eminent role as an emerging global power,” said the letter, signed by the office-bearers of the three IFS (B) associations, dated May 22.
According to the official records, Sharma had joined the cadre in 1981 and was promoted to the rank of private secretary within five years. Later, he was made the principal private secretary and then went on to become the senior principal private secretary.
A senior MEA official, however, strongly refuted the allegations, insisting that it was not the first time that non-IFS cadre officials had been appointed as Ambassadors. “There have been people from the interpreters and cyber cadre who have been made Ambassadors. Even in North Korea, one of the previous ambassadors, Zile Singh had entered the ministry as a stenographer,” he said.