China expert Pradeep Rawat will be India’s new envoy to Beijing

Pradeep Rawat’s posting comes at a time when India and China are facing serious friction all along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) with the People's Liberation Army (PLA) ramping up military infrastructure and weaponry.

Published on: Nov 14, 2021, 09:37:39 IST

By Shishir Gupta, New Delhi

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

China expert and former head of the East Asia division in the ministry of external affairs (MEA), Pradeep Kumar Rawat, an Indian Foreign Service (IFS) officer of the 1990 batch, is expected to take over as India’s new envoy to Beijing with the incumbent Vikram Misri returning to New Delhi as a secretary. Rawat is the envoy to the Netherlands since January 2021.

Pradeep Kumar Rawat is an Indian Foreign Service (IFS) officer of the 1990 batch,  (File Photo)

Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, Rawat has spent the majority of his diplomatic career either in China or handling Beijing from Delhi and was the joint secretary (East Asia) from 2014 to 2017. He was posted to Indonesia as an ambassador from 2017 to 2020.

Rawat’s posting comes at a time when India and China are facing serious friction all along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) with the People's Liberation Army (PLA) ramping up military infrastructure and weaponry. The Indian Army and PLA are fully deployed along the 1597 km LAC in Ladakh after Beijing decided to unilaterally change the status quo on the north banks of Pangong Tso in May 2020. The Chinese aggression led to a clash in Galwan in June 2020 where the Indian Army lost 20 personnel, including Colonel Santosh Babu, but not before giving a reply in equal measure to the PLA.

In Rawat’s appointment, the Modi government has put faith in a diplomat who has huge institutional memory on the bilateral relationship as Beijing is known to twist historical facts to suit its purpose. Pradeep Rawat, who has worked with now external affairs minister S Jaishankar as his East Asia division head when he was the foreign secretary, has handled all the bilateral mechanisms and is known for his calm and professional demeanour.

Incumbent Vikram Misri returns to Delhi as the secretary in the MEA after a successful tenure in Beijing, where he handled the Ladakh crisis with equanimity. Misri, a 1989 batch IFS officer, will be able to provide his acquired expertise on China to the ministry as it will be quite sometime before the bilateral relations between the two countries get normalised.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

Get the latest India News, breaking headlines and real-time updates from across the country. Stay informed about politics, government policies, crime, weather and major national developments.