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The young Mongol knelt “reverently upon the ground” and “with the deepest gratitude”, acknowledged himself “to be a Mongol slave of inferior ability, perfectly unable to repay in the slightest degree the imperial favours of which his family have been the recipients for generations past, he declares his intention of performing his duties to the best of his feeble powers”. He then “turned himself toward the palace and beat his head upon the ground…in grateful acknowledgement of the imperial bounty.”

The above passage is excerpt from an 1878 report in the Peking Gazette and quoted in Jack Weatherford’s book ‘Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World’, giving a glimpse of the ceremony of receiving an Ambassador from a vassal state in the Manchu court of those days.

And this is exactly how future Indian Ambassadors could be sworn in a decade from now at the Chinese court if the recent events are any indication of the path the MEA and its political master the UPA are hell bent on dragging India towards.

The Chinese of course were rude and discourteous enough to summon the Indian ambassador and a lady at that at 2 am in the morning to express their “displeasure” at the scaling of their embassy wall in New Delhi by Tibetan protestors. Now this is something that could have easily been taken up during working hours. And one can easily blame the Chinese for their uncivilized conduct. But what one cannot excuse is the pusillanimous behavior of the MEA in the light of such reprehensible behavior on the part of the Chinese. Not only did the Ambassador meekly turn up at the doorstep of the Chinese foreign ministry to face the music, the MEA did not even lodge a protest at this public humiliation later on!

India was not the only country where the local Chinese embassy was targeted by protestors during the last one week. Protests took place in dozens of countries all over the world. The Chinese embassies were also targeted in New York, Sydney, Paris and Austria. But not one of the Ambassadors of these countries was humiliated in this way. Infact in these cities the incidents were even more violent involving mob violence and in one case protestors scaling the embassy building itself and tearing down the Chinese flag which never happened here.

In all these cases the Chinese expressed “satisfaction” with formal apologies from these countries. Only India was targeted in this manner and this begs an explanation. What is the MEA doing wrong in representing India and its interests abroad?

The Chinese embassy in New Delhi is huge even by the palatial standards of the embassies in the Chanakyapuri enclave. Big enough to host an entire PLA armoured division. There is a huge open ground in front of it and as far as one can tell there are no barricades around the embassy like there is around the US embassy nearby, it is easy for anyone to walk right up to its walls. So the Chinese themselves are not blameless here. To prevent the incident where a small group of Tibetan protestors tried to scale the walls of the embassy the Delhi Police would have had to form a two layer thick human chain all around this huge building 24 hours a day seven days a week in anticipation of such an event which might or might not have happened!

The MEA couldn’t even be trusted to put forth this point forcefully in front of the Chinese and protest the horrible treatment meted out to its envoy and one wonders why? Unfortunately when an incident like the public shaming of the ambassador by a foreign country happens it automatically morphs into an issue of “insult to the country itself” and the people automatically line up behind their man (or woman in this case) .

But in this case this will merely shield the MEA from accountability for its sins which brought about such a situation in the first place. Atleast in this case the Indian public can save their anger and direct it where it should be, not at the Chinese but at their own foreign office. Because the trend since the days of KM Panikkar and going right upto and including the current foreign secretary when he himself was posted there has been for the Indian embassy in Beijing to act as a surrogate for Beijing rather than as a representation of India. No wonder the Chinese, practitioners of realpolitik have developed a healthy disregard for Indian diplomats and treat them as their doormat. This is perhaps what made the difference for an insomniac Chinese foreign office clerk ordered by his masters to find a scape goat among the nearly two dozen countries to trouble early in the morning to pick up the phone and dial the Indian ambassador’s number.