Arun K Singh to be India’s next ambassador to the US
Arun Kumar Singh, a 1979 batch Indian Foreign Service officer, has been named ambassador to the United States in place of S Jaishankar, who took over as foreign secretary on January 28. Fifty-nine-year-old Singh is India’s ambassador to France now.
Arun Kumar Singh, a 1979 batch Indian Foreign Service officer, has been named ambassador to the United States in place of S Jaishankar, who took over as foreign secretary on January 28. Fifty-nine-year-old Singh is India’s ambassador to France now.
South Block sources told Hindustan Times that papers relating to Arun Singh’s appointment — called agrément in diplomatese — have been forwarded to the Barack Obama administration and a formal response is awaited. Singh has served as ambassador to Israel, and was deputy chief of mission in Washington for nearly five years before going to Paris.
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Singh has handled the Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran desk as joint secretary through the past decade.
Sending out a clear signal that merit, and not seniority, is the top criterion for ambassadorial assignments, Vikram Doraiswami has been shifted from Uzbekistan to South Korea as ambassador; Saurav Kumar is likely to take over as ambassador to Iran in place of Dinkar Srivastava, who has attained superannuation. Doraiswami was involved in clinching the Indo-US nuclear deal as joint secretary (Americas) as well as taking the bilateral Defence Trade and Technology Initiative forward.
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Sources said Indian ambassador to Bahrain G Mohan Kumar is slated to replace Arun Kumar Singh in Paris as he was deputy chief of mission in the same embassy in the past. His place will be taken over by Alok Sinha, a joint secretary now at South Block. GS Gupta has been moved from Oman to Netherlands as ambassador.
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Sources said Indian ambassador to Bahrain G Mohan Kumar is slated to replace Arun Kumar Singh in Paris as he was deputy chief of mission in the same embassy in the past. His place will be taken over by Alok Sinha, a joint secretary now at South Block. GS Gupta has been moved from Oman to Netherlands as ambassador.
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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