Kalam dinner move raises hopes of Indian Embassy staff

Sitting next to President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin’s banquet table on Tuesday night, President APJ Abdul Kalam sprang a surprise. ...

Sitting next to President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin’s banquet table on Tuesday night, President APJ Abdul Kalam sprang a surprise. Mid-way through, he called forth Indian Ambassador Kanwal Sibal and asked him to directly brief Putin on the one problem rankling the Indian mission in Moscow for the past four decades. Real estate.

Few at the banquet could have guessed the nature of this last item on Kalam’s agenda. The President was trying to get the Indian mission in Moscow, possession of a prized piece of land measuring 6.7 hectares, which through formal reciprocal agreements, had been allotted to the Indian Embassy in the ’60s.

Located near Moscow’s famous Victory Park, the plot has been earmarked for an Indian School and residences of Indian mission staff, but officials say over the years, Russian officials appear to have had a change of heart.

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Having been briefed on the problem and also understood to have received e-mails from Indian schoolchildren in Moscow, there was some satisfaction when the President engineered his mid-course move.

Officials say that though the Indian Embassy had a formal agreement on the handover of the plot to them, the Russian Foreign Office was now keen on allotting another piece of land, this one located in the Kutuzovsky Prospekt area.

According to a senior Indian Embassy official, ‘‘Our agreement for the land goes back to the days of Indira Gandhi, but ever since, the Indian School has been located in an inadequate building. Now, we think we have the best chance of this problem being solved.’’

Meanwhile, President Kalam landed at Geneva airport on Wednesday afternoon, after a brief stop-over at St. Petersburg. Immediately after landing, he headed for interactions with captains of the Swiss industry and also met a group of Indian children.

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He then left for a visit to CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, where India signed a statement of intent for cooperation in high-technology experiments.

Ritu Sarin

Ritu Sarin is Executive Editor (News and Investigations) at The Indian Express group. Her areas of specialisation include internal security, money laundering and corruption. Sarin is one of India’s most renowned reporters and has a career in journalism of over four decades. She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since 1999 and since early 2023, a member of its Board of Directors. She has also been a founder member of the ICIJ Network Committee (INC). She has, to begin with, alone, and later led teams which have worked on ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks, Swiss Leaks, the Pulitzer Prize winning Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Implant Files, Fincen Files, Pandora Papers, the Uber Files and Deforestation Inc. She has conducted investigative journalism workshops and addressed investigative journalism conferences with a specialisation on collaborative journalism in several countries. ... Read More