Foreign secretary Jaishankar to go on Saarc Yatra in March
Foreign secretary S Jaishankar will begin a 'yatra' of Saarc countries next month with a visit to Bhutan, followed by Bangladesh or Nepal. He will end his tour with a trip to India's western neighbours, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Foreign secretary S Jaishankar will begin a 'yatra' of Saarc countries next month with a visit to Bhutan, followed by Bangladesh or Nepal. He will end his tour with a trip to India's western neighbours, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
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South Block sources said New Delhi has already asked Saarc countries for convenient dates for Jaishankar's proposed visit.
After his first set of Saarc visits, Jaishankar will accompany Modi on a bilateral visit to Mauritius, Maldives and Sri Lanka starting March 12.
"He will separately visit Sri Lanka and Maldives after the PM's tour," said an official.
"By tradition, a new foreign secretary makes the first visit to Bhutan. But Jaishankar was tasked by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to accompany external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj on a four-day visit to China as soon as he took over last month," said a senior South Block official.
While the Pakistan agenda of Jaishankar's visit is still a work in progress, the Saarc context of the dialogue enables India to go ahead with it, notwithstanding the irritant of Pakistan talking to Kashmiri separatists, which led to the cancellation of foreign-secretary level talks last August.
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However, restoring peace and tranquility on the India-Pakistan border in Jammu and Kashmir will be a priority for Jaishankar as New Delhi is keen to strengthen the 2003 ceasefire agreement and also wants para-military forces on both sides to exercise restraint.
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However, restoring peace and tranquility on the India-Pakistan border in Jammu and Kashmir will be a priority for Jaishankar as New Delhi is keen to strengthen the 2003 ceasefire agreement and also wants para-military forces on both sides to exercise restraint.
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Jaishankar, who was previously the ambassador to the US, was appointed foreign secretary on January 28.
He was scheduled to fly to Washington on Tuesday night to bring his family back.
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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