Exclusive | India ex-Ambassador hits back at Ro Khanna: 'Don't drag my name for your politics'

Indian envoy to China Pradeep Rawat met US Congressional delegation at a dinner hosted by US envoy to Beijing in September 2025.

Updated on: Jun 30, 2026, 16:56:53 IST

By Shishir Gupta

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After US Democrat Congressman Ro Khanna tried to rope in an Indian diplomat to hit at President Donald Trump at the US-ISPF leadership summit in Washington, Pradeep Rawat, the former Indian envoy to China, said that it was wrong for the California Congressman to unnecessarily drag his name to score points for his domestic politics. He said there is a bipartisan consensus on furtherment of India-US ties in Washington.

L: Ro Khanna | R: Ambassador Pradeep Rawat

Speaking at the summit, Congressman Ro Khanna said : “I was in China and the Indian Ambassador told me that a generation of trust has been lost by President Trump. If we don’t speak the truth about the damage this President has done…we are not living in reality.”

Ambassador Pradeep Rawat, who demitted office in March 2026 after decades of serving in China, is an expert on East Asia, is discreet and is a low key diplomat. Hence, it is improbable that Rawat, a 1990 batch IFS officer, would have used the name of any leader that too in a formal dinner hosted by the US ambassador in Beijing, who is a close friend of President Trump. Ro Khanna was part of a US Congressional delegation that visited Beijing in September 2025.

US President Donald Trump gives a thumbs up as he walks with French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte Macron on June 17, 2026 (REUTERS)

Ambassador Rawat, who has also served in Europe, mentioned that he remembered quoting a Chinese scholar who had once said that theUS had a great strength in building alliances and coalition, soothing that China needs to learn, He said that he reminded the US delegation of this strength of the US when they are competing with China on a global stage.

While Ambassador Rawat was succeeded by Ambassador Vikram Doraiswami, Khanna’s comment has created a furor in the Indian diplomatic community as the Congressman was hitting both at India and US by putting words in the mouth of an Indian diplomat against President Trump for his own political purposes. Rawat is known for staying below the radar and quietly doing his work rather than making personal comments about a serving US leader by name.

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

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