New Delhi
6 July 2007
Has the government rendered the process of selection and
appointment of foreign secretary vulnerable to extraneous considerations, including
pressure by various lobbies? The government would claim not but the integrity of the
selection process appears to have been adversely impacted, if the events leading up to
the appointment of Mr Shivshankar Menon as the foreign secretary are any indicator.
Sources privy to the decision-making process in the government told this newspaper that
at least one of the candidates for the top job might not have got the nod ostensibly
because of what that officer wrote in an internal note, after India voted against Iran in the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The note, copies of which were sent to the then minister of external affairs Natwar Singh
and others, sought to explain why India should not have voted against Iran. That, and the
desire to keep the fledgling India-US ties on even keel, also contributed to the selection
and appointment of Mr Shivshankar Menon as foreign secretary, the sources said.
Documents available with this newspaper also suggest that the Prime Minister's Office
(PMO) has sought to deny information about the appointment of Mr Menon under the
Right to Information Act, on the ground that the information sought was personal and
amounted to invasion of privacy.
The PMO has written to the Chief Information Commission that the "relationship between
the public authority and the candidates is that of between a trustee and a beneficiary.
The information regarding the names of those considered should be held in trust by the
public authority. No larger public interest is served by the disclosure of such names."
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's assertion, that there are no files in the matter of
appointment of Mr Menon as foreign secretary, has been received with surprise by those
familiar with the process. "This is unprecedented ... no detailed examination [was done]
by the cadre-controlling authority," said a source.
The government took barely two days to finalise Mr Menon's name. On August 29, 2006
the Ministry of External Affairs sent the annual confidential reports (ACRs) extracts and
service profiles of IFS officers of 1970, 1971 and 1972 batches to the Cabinet Secretariat,
which had made a "verbal" request.
By August 31, the Prime Minister's Office had issued a press release to announce the
appointment of Mr Menon as the foreign secretary. Intriguingly, the appointment of Mr
Menon as the foreign secretary had not been approved by the Appointments Committee
of the Cabinet until September 4.
By its own admission, the Ministry of External Affairs has said that "detailed
examination was not necessary", as it was the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet
that appointed the foreign secretary and, as such, it could be expected to ask for the
ACRs of officers that it could wish to consider.
The Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) has asked the PMO to make available the
records pertaining to the appointment of Mr Menon as foreign secretary by July 18. The
direction came on the application filed by Ms Veena Sikri, who is one of the 16 diplomats
superseded by Mr Menon.
Ms Sikri moved the CAT after the government obtained a stay on the decision of the CIC
to read the files. Mr Menon and Ms Sikri appeared for the 1970-1971 Union Public
Service Commission examination together. Ms Sikri topped the examination but Mr
Menon failed to qualify. He reappeared the next year and got selected.
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