Russia expert, Ajay Bisaria, to be India's new High Commissioner in Islamabad

The 1987 batch IFS officer was also private secretary to former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee

Ajay Bisaria will be India’s new High Commissioner in Islamabad, the Ministry of External Affairs announced Wednesday.

Bisaria is considered the foremost expert in the Ministry of External Affairs on Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. In Islamabad, Bisaria succeeds Gautam Bambawale, also known as the Indian Foreign Services (IFS)’s China expert who had spent a little less than two years in Islamabad before being posted to Beijing last month.

The appointments of Bisaria and Bambawale to Islamabad and Beijing, respectively, come at a crucial time in India’s bilateral relations with its two neighbours. Bisaria will be heading to Islamabad at a time when relations between India and Pakistan remain low. 

India had snapped its dialogue with Pakistan after the terror attack in Pathankot on January 2, 2016. New Delhi had also pulled out of the SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) Summit that Islamabad was to host in 2016.

As New Delhi consolidates its strategic partnership with the United States (US), Moscow has moved closer to Islamabad with the two countries holding their second joint military exercise in September.

Bisaria, a 1987 batch Indian Foreign Service officer, is currently the Indian ambassador to Poland and Lithuania. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from St Stephen’s College, Delhi University and is an MBA from Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Kolkata. Bisaria also has a Master’s in Public Policy from the prestigious Princeton University in US.

After his training at the Foreign Service Institute in New Delhi, Bisaria chose Russian as his language of specialisation. His posting was to Moscow, where he worked as a Soviet internal affairs specialist in the months leading up to the breakup of the USSR. Bisaria has also served in the Ministry of Commerce and Indian Embassy in Berlin.

He was private secretary to then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee from 1999 to 2004. From 2004 to 2008, Bisaria was posted at World Bank as the advisor to the executive director for South Asia. He served as the joint secretary (Eurasia) in the MEA from 2009 to 2014. The MEA’s Eurasia desk deals with India’s bilateral relations with Russia, Ukraine and the Central Asian countries.

According to his profile on the website of Indian Embassy in Poland, Bisaria has a deep interest in yoga and enjoys golf. He is married to environmentalist and writer Bharati Chaturvedi. She is the founder of Chintan, a non-governmental organisation working in the field of environment protection.