The foreign ministry, sidelined

The ministry of external affairs (MEA) - and the Indian Foreign Service - has been feeling a trifle sidelined of late. In one recent incident, tempers ran high within the Indian negotiating team at the Lima climate talks in December. Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar was scheduled to meet the delegation from the US in the Peruvian capital. But the MEA representative was left out of the meeting; the environment ministry's mandarins claimed that there were too few lunch plates for them to accommodate the MEA official. The meeting, breaking protocol, eventually had no MEA representative sitting in. The US team was keen to discuss the "energy climate package" US President Barack Obama can expect from the Narendra Modi government on his visit to India in January. Last heard, the issue had reached all the way up to the foreign secretary.