A mission long delayed

When India opens its embassy in the Dominican Republic this year, the mission has the potential to figure in the Guinness World Records. Last week, the Union Cabinet decided that the second largest Caribbean nation would be one of three countries chosen for the expansion of New Delhi’s diplomatic footprint in 2021. India first announced its decision to open an embassy in Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic, in 2006. That was the day the Dominicans opened their mission in New Delhi. The move was part of a push during that period by countries in the Western Hemisphere to overcome the deficit in contacts with India caused by distance and a gap in cultural and linguistic commonalities.

The decision to open an embassy as a reciprocal gesture was conveyed to the then Dominican Foreign Minister Carlos Morales Troncoso by Anand Sharma, who was in charge of the Caribbean as the Minister of State for External Affairs in the Manmohan Singh government. Not unexpectedly, nothing happened thereafter and everyone in New Delhi forgot what Sharma had formally conveyed to his senior counterpart.

Four years later, Shashi Tharoor, who succeeded Sharma in the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), had to go on a regional tour of several Caribbean countries and Santo Domingo was on his itinerary. He came across papers and file notes about the government’s 2006 decision. No one had moved even a little finger to implement it. The visiting ministerial delegation would have lost face if they arrived in Santo Domingo and their hosts asked about the four-year-old announcement by New Delhi. In the weeks before his departure for the Caribbean, Tharoor ran around spending his energy to expedite the procedures so that he could present Troncoso with a fait accompli.

Tharoor assured the Dominicans that pending some minor formalities the Indian embassy would soon open in their capital. Ten years have passed since he gave that assurance. Not a paper had moved in South Block in an entire decade to fulfil the promises.

The Dominicans decided to open their embassy in India in 2004. When Rao Inderjit Singh, a minister of state in the first UPA government, visited Santo Domingo that year, their decision was communicated to India. In sharp contrast to India’s record, it took Santo Domingo only 19 months to inaugurate their embassy in New Delhi.

Once again, last week after a meeting of the Cabinet, it was announced that India had decided to open an embassy in the Dominican Republic. It is likely that the decision will be implemented this time because the way South Block functions now is different from the practices 14 years ago. When it happens, the new Indian embassy will probably have the dubious distinction of having been the chancery that has taken the longest in the history of international diplomacy to be set up.

Troncoso died in 2014 of a terminal illness. Since then, the Dominican Republic has had four foreign ministers. It had four Presidents since Sharma made his announcement. So when — rather if — an Indian ambassador takes up residence in Santo Domingo this year, no one high up in authority there is likely to ask about a promise made 14 years ago to augment bilateral ties, which amounted to nothing.

Yet, it a sad reflection on the way South Block conducts its diplomacy with countries which are only on the margins of its main priorities. Once I was in the MEA for a high-level appointment and was in the visitors’ room because my interlocutor was delayed in Parliament. Eswatini’s High Commissioner to India, with residence in Kuala Lumpur, was escorted into the visitors’ room. Our appointments were with the same person. Outside the room, we heard MEA officials agitatedly trying to figure out where Eswatini was and what this ‘strange’ country was about. None of them knew a thing about Eswatini. It is Swaziland, which changed its name to Eswatini in 2018. India decided in 2018 to open its mission in Mbabane, Eswatini’s capital. This was accomplished in 16 months, only because President Ram Nath Kovind committed to King Mswati III during Kovind’s visit to the kingdom that it would be done. The monarch had the commitment included in a joint communique at the end of the President’s visit.

New Indian embassies, it would seem, need godfathers to be opened on schedule, unless they are in countries critical to India’s foreign policy. New Indian consulates in the US and in China opened in record time in recent years. In Guangzhou, China, for example, the Indian Consulate opened although it had no premises and functioned from a hotel for quite a while. The first Consul General in Guangzhou, Gautam Bambawale, a Sinologist of repute, stayed in a hotel during at least half of his tenure.

Countries on the margins of India’s diplomatic priorities employ various stratagems to gain South Block’s attention. After Modi became PM, some countries frantically began looking for Gujaratis in their foreign service to be sent as envoys to India. Those who could not find Gujaratis sent Indian-origin diplomats as the next best option. But it is a ploy that does not go well either with the MEA or in New Delhi’s social circuit. Canada’s High Commissioner to India, Nadir Patel, is the best example of this doomed strategy.

When Mother Teresa was alive, Croatia’s first ambassador in New Delhi, made the most of the Catholic Saint’s Croatian connections to make himself relevant. It went down well with then External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee whose bonds with Calcutta’s Mother were deep. Once word spread about his soft spot for this envoy, a doctor, he got unprecedented access within South Block.