Indian diplomats need not blog,says Nirupama Rao

The Public Diplomacy (PD) division’s website was also launched,months after it debuted on Twitter,Facebook,Youtube and other social media websites.

MEA Joint Secretary (PD) Navdeep Surie,also answering to the same question,said,“We intend to go a bit slower on this…. Right now,the contents are moderated by us.”

Diplomats from US,UK,Canada and Israel use the social media websites,and also write blogs. Surie said that British diplomats have been blogging for the last four years,but there have been only three cases where there have been instances of them blogging about things that they were not supposed to.

Rao also disapproved of the WikiLeaks cable leaks,saying diplomatic communications are of “privileged” nature and should “stay that way”. “All democracies and civilised societies operate on certain rules and regulations. There is privileged communication that a government enters into,lets say between an embassy and the headquarters. This is what was happening in the case of American leaked cables,” she said. “So,there is a certain system that has prevailed and operated successfully for many decades…. And they should stay that way until few decades are passed and such information is open to scholars,journalists as part of non-classified archives.”

Talking about the new websites,MEA spokesperson Vishnu Prakash,who handles the website,said the ministry was working on an ambitious integrated portal to introduce uniformity in the look and content for all the ministry’s websites. He said it should be operational by mid next year.

While the MEA site aims to make available comprehensive and speedy information on India’s foreign relation activities as well as the Ministry’s views on salient foreign policy issues,the PD website’s mandate is to project India and its foreign policy,both within the country and overseas,Rao said.