Jaishankar’s principal aide Shilpak Ambule to now head China desk in MEA

A 2002 batch IFS officer, Dr Shilpak Ambule has served with S Jaishankar in Foreign Secretary and External Affairs Minister’s office for the past eight years.

Published on: Jun 2, 2022, 17:07:45 IST

By Shishir Gupta

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Dr Shilpak N Ambule, Joint Secretary in External Affairs Minister's office, has been appointed as head of China Desk in South Block with Sandeep Kumar Bayyapu, another Chinese language speaker, slated to take over as Director in the same office.

Dr Shilpak Namdeo Ambule is the new head of China desk.

A 2002 batch IFS officer, Dr Ambule is a very experienced hand in the External Affairs Ministry after having worked in the office of Foreign Secretary when Dr S Jaishankar occupied that position and later when he became the External Affairs Minister.

A Chinese language speaker who has worked both in Beijing and in the East Asia division, which he will now head, Dr Ambule keeps a low profile despite working in the spotlight for the past eight years. He succeeds Additional Secretary Naveen Srivastava, who has taken over as Indian Ambassador to Nepal.

Replacing Shilpak in the EAM office is Sandeep Bayyapu, who has worked in Beijing, Guangzhou and Abu Dhabi.

While Dr Ambule is currently accompanying Minister Jaishankar to Czech and Slovakia Republic, he has a tough job ahead as Joint Secretary (East Asia) with the onerous job of negotiating with the Chinese to restore April 2020 status quo ante in East Ladakh. As Jaishankar's principal aide, Dr Ambule has had first hand experience in dealing with China, Korea and Japan.

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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