Putin dinner row: As Rahul Gandhi, Kharge are not invited, a diplomatic tradition fades away

Consider this:

November 2010: When US President Barack Obama visited India, among the dignitaries who met him in New Delhi were the then Leader of the Opposition and BJP leader Sushma Swaraj. During the 30-minute meeting, she spoke about the historical evolution of India-US ties and underlined initiatives taken by the A B Vajpayee government to further the relationship.

January 2015: Months after Narendra Modi became Prime Minister, when Obama returned as President, he met the then Congress president Sonia Gandhi and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh along with party leaders Rahul Gandhi and Anand Sharma. The meeting took place a day after Obama and Modi announced a “breakthrough understanding” on the nuclear deal. The Congress leadership underscored that it was the UPA government, which had scripted the nuclear deal, taking enormous risks.

December 2014: A month earlier, Sonia Gandhi also had a meeting with visiting Russian President Vladimir Putin. Gandhi, with her party now in the Opposition, told Putin that Congress can take a bit of credit for the success of his meeting with Prime Minister Modi, given the close relationship between the two sides during his predecessor Manmohan Singh’s tenure.

Cut to last week: No one from the Congress had a meeting with Putin.

“It has been a tradition and practice, which was always respected by all governments. There has never been a departure. A call-on by the NDA chairman and LoPs, for instance, was part of the printed programme of visiting dignitaries during the UPA time,” former Union minister Anand Sharma told The Indian Express.

“Initially, this government too followed the practice… but they have gradually dispensed with the practice. It is most unfortunate. It is disrespecting our Parliamentary democracy. It is not whether you like someone’s ideology or party… The Leader of the Opposition holds a Constitutional office. It reflects very poorly on us as a functional democracy,” Sharma said.

According to the BJP, however, the onus is on the visiting delegation.

“It is the responsibility of the MEA (Ministry of External Affairs) to conduct meetings with Government officials. As far as meetings with other individuals, it is the visiting delegation, which decides who they want to meet and the MEA only facilitates such meetings,” BJP MP and party spokesperson Sambit Patra said.

He said Rahul Gandhi as LoP had meetings with five visiting heads of state. “So whichever delegation desired to meet Rahulji… he had a meeting with all of them,” Patra said.

A tradition, disappearing

For decades, one of the meetings in the carefully crafted itinerary of a visiting head of state to India was with the Leader of the Opposition. In fact, the itinerary issued by the MEA before a visit by a foreign dignitary used to mention this convention.

Sample this: Going by advisories issued by the MEA between 2004 and 2014, when the UPA government was in office, Leaders of the Opposition had 162 such meetings — from Obama to Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, French President Francois Hollande, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, among others.

But that convention was done away with over the past ten years since the BJP-led NDA came to power. Since 2014, meetings between a visiting head of state and Opposition leaders have come down to a handful. In the initial years after 2014, the Congress leadership did have meetings with visiting heads of state, from Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping to Bangladesh President Md. Abdul Hamid, and the Presidents of Namibia and South Africa, and the Prime Minister of Nepal.

At the banquet hosted in honour of Putin, the only Opposition representative was Congress Lok Sabha MP Shashi Tharoor in his capacity as chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs.

Sharma slammed the decision not to invite the LoPs for the official banquet. “This makes the President’s office blatantly partisan. It would have been unthinkable for any past President to have permitted that,” he said.

Since 2014, the MEA has gradually stopped mentioning “call-ons” by the Leader of Opposition with visiting dignitaries in the itinerary, reflecting the breakdown in an unwritten political consensus that had been followed for decades. In 2014, there were only two mentions: Gandhi’s meeting with visiting Chinese President Xi in September and the Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha’s meeting with Bangladesh President Md Abdul Hamid in December.

While some of the visiting dignitaries have had meetings with Opposition leaders, the long-held tradition of including these as part of the itinerary was quietly buried, subtly suggesting that the MEA will facilitate a meeting only if the visiting head of state desired.

The Sonia-Putin meeting of 2014, for instance, was not listed by the MEA in its advisory on the Russian President’s official itinerary. Also present in that meeting was former Prime Minister Singh. The Congress leadership’s meeting with Obama in 2015, too, was not mentioned in the MEA advisory.

Not the rule book

While sources pointed out that the LoP-visiting dignitary meeting was not in the rule book — and hence there was no violation — it was a norm that reflected political propriety and helped India project a united domestic face to the visiting head of state.

The other argument was that there was no recognised Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha from 2014 to 2024. However, the Rajya Sabha did have a recognised Leader of the Opposition all these years.

Sources in the MEA said the Ministry merely organises “meetings for the incoming dignitary with Government officials and Government bodies” and that “it was up to the visiting delegation to organise meetings outside the Government”.

While Gandhi claimed that the “Government doesn’t want people from the Opposition to meet foreign dignitaries”, MEA sources said he has had meetings with five heads of states since he took over as Leader of Opposition in 2024 — the then Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina, Prime Minister of Vietnam Pham Minh Ching, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim of Malaysia, Prime Minister of Mauritius Navinchandra Ramgoolam and Prime Minister of New Zealand Christopher Luxon.

The BJP, on the other hand, claimed that Gandhi has often skipped major national and ceremonial events and has no moral right to raise such objections.

“On many occasions, Rahul Gandhi has skipped Republic Day celebrations and the Independence Day ceremony. These are events where leaders across the political spectrum traditionally participate as symbols of national unity. He was absent during the inauguration of Kartavya Bhawan — a public institution built with public funds. Recently, Gandhi did not attend the swearing-in ceremony of Vice President C P Radhakrishnan, skipped the oath-taking of Justice Surya Kant as Chief Justice of India,” a BJP leader said.

Government sources said “no protocol or rule has been disregarded”.

Citing the Table of Precedence released by the President’s Secretariat and published on the Ministry of Home Affairs website, which has been in circulation since 1979, they said with the President as host, those who must be invited at such ceremonial banquets include the Prime Minister, Vice-President, State Governor or Lt-Governor, Deputy Prime Minister, Chief Justice of India and the Lok Sabha Speaker.

For the Putin dinner, they said, there was “an appropriate presence of the Opposition” in the form of Tharoor.

— With inputs from Divya A