News
Envoy with a ‘soft spot’ for Lanka leaves her shores after a job well done
Outgoing Indian High Commissioner Taranjit Singh Sandhu is seen applauding award-winning Indian artistes who participated in ‘Divine Quartet’, held at the BMICH last evening to mark the 71st Republic Day of India. Pix by Amila Gamage
A diplomat’s duty is always to protect his country’s interests. However, India’s High Commissioner to Sri Lanka Taranjit Singh Sandhu has always had a genuine affection, a ‘soft spot’ some would say, for this island-nation he has served in.
The envoy came here as a Political Officer at the turn of the century when a majority of Sri Lankans were seriously disaffected with India’s support for the separatist movement in the festering ‘ethnic conflict’.
A workaholic, he soon began recalibrating the broken down relations, quickly cultivating key political figures and with his wife Reenat also a career diplomat (now India’s Ambassador in Italy) as Press and Cultural Attache at the time – the couple made a dynamic team, the husband’s signature colourful turbans a familiar sight in Colombo’s diplomatic circuit. When their daughter Meher was born in Sri Lanka, and a temple visit was due, it was the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy that the proud young diplomat-parents took the child for blessings.
Clearly a rising star in India’s highly competitive Foreign Service, Sandhu set up the Indian embassy in Ukraine, before being posted to India’s mission in Washington in 1997 as First Secretary.
From July 2005 to February 2009, he was at the Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations, New York and served from 2011 to 2013 as Consul General in Germany, before returning to the US as Deputy Chief of Mission where often he had to play the role of the Numero Uno. Credited was he for his backroom role in thawing the icy climate between the two nations at the time to the point where relations have become as warm as the Indian summers.
It was no surprise that New Delhi sent him to Colombo, to heal the fractured relations between the two neighbours. Those in his official contact list had become his personal friends. Mr. Sandhu leaves next week to return to familiar pastures – as India’s Ambassador to the US with the satisfaction of a job well done and Indo-Lanka relations on a high.
That, of course, could only be one last stepping stone to the pinnacle of his country’s foreign service – the Foreign Secretaryship.
