Newsmaker: Gautam Bambawale

China expert heads for Pakistan

It is rare for South Block to appoint its foremost China expert to head its Chancery Building in Islamabad's highly-fortified Diplomatic Enclave. Gautam Bambawale, the next high commissioner of India to Pakistan, will need all his experience of dealing with China, the all-weather friend of Pakistan, to negotiate the current state of cold peace between the nuclear armed sub-continental neighbours.

The only recent instance of India sending one of its brightest diplomats and a China wonk to Islamabad was over a decade earlier. In 2003, the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government posted Shivshankar Menon to Pakistan after the six-month military standoff between the two neighbours. Menon, during the tenures of both Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh governments, played a key role to usher a thaw in India-Pakistan relations. He was later to become the foreign secretary and national security adviser (NSA),

Bambawale, whose Pakistan posting is in all likelihood the last of his diplomatic career, as he retires in 2018, will be expected to accomplish something similar, given the current state of fractious India-Pakistan ties. He will also have the onerous task of ascertaining whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi could visit Islamabad to attend the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation Summit in 2016. In 1988 and 2004, the previous two occasions that Islamabad hosted leaders, incumbent Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi and Vajpayee respectively, had attended.

What is likely to help 56-year-old Bambawale is his ability to remain unruffled in even the most stressful of situations. "If anybody could match the inscrutable Chinese in remaining nonplussed during nerve wracking negotiations, it was our Gautam 'Buddha'," a colleague says. Bambawale, with a good grasp of China-Pakistan relations, is going to Pakistan when Beijing is constructing its Belt and Road Initiative, a sizable part of which will cross Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. Help from NSA Ajit Kumar Doval will also come in handy. Doval's role will be so much more important as neither Bambawale, nor Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar and not even Joint Secretary of the Pakistan desk Rudrendra Tandon, have ever served in Pakistan.

According to a Pakistan watcher, Bambawale is exactly the kind of person that South Block wants to depute to Pakistan to deal with its rambunctious Punjabi elite. Bambawale grew up in Pune in a middle class Marathi family. His parents still live in Pune. His mother, Usha, used to be a social worker while father Hemant is a doctor. The young Bambawale studied at The Bishop's School, Fergusson College and took a masters degree in economics from the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics. At Fergusson, Bambawale captained the college cricket team.

He joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1984 where he learnt Mandarin Chinese as his compulsory foreign language and German as his optional one. He has served extensively in Hong Kong and Beijing. From 1994 to 98, Bambawale was the Director of Indian Cultural Centre in Berlin and subsequently the Deputy Chief of Mission of the Indian Embassy in Beijing.

Bambawale was staff officer to then Foreign Secretary Chokila Iyer from March 2001 to June 2002 and later served in the Vajpayee PMO. From July 2004 to September 2007, he was minister (political) and head of the political wing at the Embassy of India in Washington DC and a key part of the team, led by then Ambassador Ronen Sen, that transformed India-US relations. He was the Consul General of India in Guangzhou, China from 2007 to 2009.

Returning from China, Bambawale was one of the longest serving Joint Secretary of the East Asia desk, responsible for New Delhi's relations with Japan, China and South Korea. Prior to his Islamabad posting, Bambawale was the Ambassador of India to Bhutan. He is likely to take over in January.