Vikram Doraiswami, India's high commissioner to UK, appointed India's next ambassador to China

Diplomatic reshuffle also sees P. Kumaran moving to London, Pranay Verma to Brussels, leaving Bangladesh, where a political appointee is not ruled out

Updated on: Mar 19, 2026, 12:21:24 IST

By Shishir Gupta

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Vikram Doraiswami, who is currently India's high commissioner to United Kingdom, has been appointed as the new Ambassador of India to the People's Republic of China.

High Commissioner of India to the United Kingdom Vikram Doraiswami. (PTI/file)

In an official statement, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said, “Vikram K. Doraiswami (IFS:1992), currently India’s high commissioner to the United Kingdom, has been appointed as the next ambassador to the People’s Republic of China.” He is expected to assume charge shortly.

India’s decision to send a senior diplomat to Beijing comes as both sides attempt to rebuild ties strained by the over four-year-long border standoff in eastern Ladakh. Doraiswami will replace Pradeep Kumar Rawat.

Other key appointments include Secretary (East) P. Kumaran being posted to London, Additional Secretary Puneet Agarwal to Thailand, Nagesh Singh moving from Thailand to Australia.

Pranay Verma, currently India’s high commissioner to Bangladesh, will move to Brussels. A political appointee cannot be ruled out in Dhaka where the post remains vacant for now.

Doraiswami joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1992. Before that, he did journalism for a year. According to MEA, he received his master's degree in history from Delhi University.

After completing his in-service training in New Delhi from 1992-1993, Doraiswami was appointed third secretary in the Indian Embassy in Hong Kong in May 1994. He completed a Diploma in the Chinese Language at New Asia Yale-in-Asia Language School, Chinese University of Hong Kong.

In September 1996, he was appointed to the Indian Embassy in Beijing, where he served for about four years. On his return to the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi in 2000, Doraiswami was appointed Deputy Chief of Protocol (Official). After two years he was promoted to the Prime Minister's office. Later he served as Private Secretary to the Prime Minister of India.

In July 2011, Doraiswamy, a fomer journalist, came back to serve in the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi, where he headed the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Division.

For a two year period between 2012 and 2014, Doraiswami served as the joint secretary in the Americas Division of the ministry of external affairs.

He became India's ambassador to Uzbekistan in October 2014, before being appointed India's ambassador to Korea in April 2015. From July 2018 to April 2019, he served as the head of the Bangladesh and Myanmar department. he was tasked with setting up a new department in the external affairs ministry for the Indo-Pacific region.

He took charge as Indian high commissioner to Bangladesh on October 05, 2020 before starting his stint in the UK.

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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