Vikram Doraiswami: Here’s all you need to know about the newly-appointed India’s envoy to UK

Doraiswami will replace ambassador Gaitri Issar Kumar, who superannuated on June 30

• Pramod Thomas
• 02 July, 2022

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By: Pramod Thomas

VIKRAM DORAISWAMI, the current Indian Ambassador to Bangladesh, will become the Indian envoy to the UK. A 1992 batch Indian Foreign Service officer, Doraiswami is a Chinese speaker who has served as Indian ambassador to Uzbekistan, South Korea and served in US as well as private secretary to prime minister.

Doraiswami will replace ambassador Gaitri Issar Kumar, who superannuated on June 30.

The present deputy chief of mission in the US, Sudhakar Dalela, a 1993 batch IFS officer, is expected to replace him in Dhaka, according to reports.

Doraiswami, 45, joined the IFS in 1992. Prior to that, he worked as a journalist. He took a master’s degree in history from the University of Delhi.

After in-service training from 1992-1993, Doraiswami was posted to the Commission of India in Hong Kong in May 1994 as the third secretary. He learnt Chinese, taking an extra elective diploma at the New Asia Yalein-Asia language school of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He was posted to the Embassy of India in Beijing in September 1996 where he served for nearly four years.

Upon returning to the external affairs ministry in New Delhi in 2000, Doraiswami was appointed deputy chief of protocol (Ceremonials). After two years, he was transferred to the prime minister’s office in 2002. He later served as private secretary to the prime minister of India.

In 2006, Doraiswami was posted to the Permanent Mission of India to the UN in New York as a Political Counsellor. In October 2009, he was posted as India’s Consul General in Johannesburg, South Africa.

In July 2011, Doraiswami returned to the ministry, where he was given charge as the head of the division of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). During this period, he was also the coordinator for the Fourth Summit meeting of BRICS hosted by India in New Delhi in March 2012.

From October 2012 to October 2014, Doraiswami was Joint Secretary of the Americas Division of the ministry.

He arrived in Tashkent at the end of October 2014 as Ambassador of India to Uzbekistan.

Doraiswami’s interests include reading, sports, hiking, travel and Jazz. He speaks, reads and writes in Chinese, and speaks limited French and Urdu.

His wife Sangeeta is a trained primary school teacher with 15 years of experience and a master’s degree in psychology from Bangalore University. They have a fifteen-year-old son.