Browned off

A fierce argument appears to have broken out on Twitter between an alumnus of the Indian Foreign Service and Ashutosh Varshney, head of the India programme at Brown University. K C Singh, a former ambassador, said the ambassador-designate to the United States, S Jaishankar, was being "rewarded" for the Indo-US civil nuclear agreement, when Hardip Puri, a former permanent representative of India to the United Nations (UN), should have been given the job because he got along with his former UN colleague, Susan Rice. Rice is currently serving as the US National Security Advisor. Singh then went on to accuse former foreign secretary and ambassador to the US Nirupama Rao of going to Brown University after an endowment from the Government of India created a position there. He also asked whether former foreign minister S M Krishna went to Brown, in Rhode Island, to deliver a lecture when New York University and Columbia University are both in Manhattan, because the university offered a "sinecure" to an outgoing ambassador. Varshney responded angrily saying K C Singh was "spreading lies", and there was "no endowment from the government of India for any position at Brown". Singh responded: "Someone is planning an RTI [Right to Information] to find out what funds have gone from the MEA's public diplomacy department to US universities, if any." Perhaps suspicions have been raised by the announcement of a large grant of $3 million made anonymously this year to create a professorship of modern India studies at Brown University.