Harsh Shringla tests Covid negative after false alarm; MEA heaves sigh of relief
Foreign secretary Harsh Shringla’s ‘inconclusive’ report of the Covid-19 test on Shringla and the subsequent cancellation of the meeting sent the entire MEA into a tizz
Foreign Secretary Harsh Shringla tested negative on Wednesday morning after a false alarm on Tuesday, which led to the cancellation of a meeting between visiting French foreign minister Jean Yves Le Drian and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, people familiar with the matter said.
Foreign minister S Jaishankar and foreign secretary Harsh Shringla at the meeting with visiting French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian (Twitter/S Jaishankar)
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The ‘inconclusive’ result of the Covid-19 test on Shringla and the subsequent cancellation of the meeting sent the entire MEA into a tizzy since external affairs minister S Jaishankar and visiting French minister had held the delegation-level talks earlier on Tuesday. The Indian envoy to France and the French ambassador to India were also present at the delegation-level talks.
Foreign secretary Harsh Shringla’s periodic Covid-19 test had produced an “inconclusive” result sometime after a meeting between the delegations led by external affairs minister S Jaishankar and Le Drian at Hyderabad House
This test report not only led to the cancellation of the meeting with PM Modi but all top officials present at the delegation-level talks went into isolation. However, foreign secretary Shringla, who has already been administered two doses of the Covid vaccine, went for an RT-PCR test, which gave a negative result.
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This will not only allow the French minister to continue with his scheduled programmes in Bengaluru but also allow foreign secretary Shringla to return to his engagements within and without the foreign ministry.
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This will not only allow the French minister to continue with his scheduled programmes in Bengaluru but also allow foreign secretary Shringla to return to his engagements within and without the foreign ministry.
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.
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