Dinesh K Patnaik set to be India's new envoy to Canada
Patnaik is expected to be replaced in Spain by Jayant Khobragade, currently India's ambassador to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), the people said on condition of anonymity. The process for securing an agrément, or the formal agreement whereby a state receives a foreign country's envoy, for Patnaik is already underway, the people said.
During their first meeting on Tuesday on the margins of the G7 Summit in Canada, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Canadian counterpart, Mark Carney, agreed on several steps to reset bilateral ties, which had plunged to an all-time low because of a diplomatic row over the killing of a Khalistani separatist in 2023. Among these steps was the appointment of new high commissioners in each other's capitals.
HT first reported in March that Patnaik, from the 1990 batch of the Indian Foreign Service, was the front-runner for the post of high commissioner in Ottawa. He is one of India's senior-most diplomats and served as deputy high commissioner to the UK during 2016-2018, a position that required handling the Khalistan problem within the Indian diaspora, as is the case with Canada.
Patnaik has more than 30 years of experience in assignments within India and abroad. He has served in the missions in Geneva, Dhaka, Beijing, and Vienna, and in the divisions focusing on Africa, Europe (West), the UN, and external publicity in the external affairs ministry.
Patnaik was the deputy chief of mission at the Indian embassy in Austria during 2009-2012, the ambassador to Cambodia during 2012-2015, and the envoy to Morocco during 2015-2016.
Though Khobragade was officially named as India's envoy to Poland in January, the posting did not go ahead because of various reasons, the people said.
Khobragade is from the 1995 batch of the Indian Foreign Service and has done a stint in the Indian embassy in Spain in the past. He has also served in the Indian missions in Russia, Pakistan, and Kazakhstan, and served as the ambassador to Kyrgyzstan.
Within the external affairs ministry, he has served in the disarmament and international security division and the West Africa Division. He has also served on deputation with the Department of Atomic Energy from 2017 to 2020. Khobragade was appointed the ambassador to Asean in Jakarta in 2021, months after Pakistan refused to accept his posting as the charge d'affaires in Islamabad.
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It is common knowledge now that Operation Sindoor, though a limited success, was badly bungled at several levels and mistakes were made which could have been avoided. This is something the government is yet to admit buy responsible Indian military officers have dropped adequate hints in public fora. When an honest military officer cited " restraint from political leadership" as a reason for some Indian fighter planes going down, he was serving the interest of truth. The Modi government's initial silence on the other hand was meant to protect the prime minister's image. Modi was clearly on the backfoot after operation Sindoor and was unable to fully convince his own constituency (including the RSS) that it was an unqualified success. He therefore swallowed his ego for the first time and approached the opposition parties to take part in a joint delegation to present India's case abroad as no country had explicitly condemned Pakistan's role in the Pahalgam terror attack. 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