India’s ambassador to the US, Navtej Sarna, is all set to get a one-year extension in Washington. The 1980-batch Indian Foreign Service officer was to retire in December 2017.
India's ambassador to the US Navtej Sarna with finance minister Arun jaitley at New York's John F Kennedy airport. (PTI file photo)
South Block sources said that the Narendra Modi government decided in favour of extending Sarna’s tenure after his successful work during the transition in Washington.
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi met US President Donald Trump in June. The visits of US defence secretary Jim Mattis and secretary of state Rex Tillerson to New Delhi have led to an expansion of bilateral ties.
Sarna took over as US ambassador on November 5, 2016 and is believed to have good working equation with foreign secretary S Jaishankar and external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj.
The extension order is expected to be issued in December. Before his Washington tenure, Sarna served as Indian envoy to the United Kingdom and Israel. An author of more than six books, Sarna is the longest serving spokesperson of the ministry of external affairs.
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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