SM Krishna

Washington, Oct. 25: When external affairs minister S.M. Krishna sits down with his counterparts from China and Russia on Tuesday in Bangalore, he hopes to begin a process that will demystify foreign policy from the remoteness of Lutyens’ Delhi and take it closer to the people in different parts of India.

If the Bangalore experiment in hosting the ninth trilateral meeting of foreign ministers of RIC — diplomatic acronym for the Russia-India-China grouping — is successful, similar meetings may be hosted in Calcutta, Mumbai, Chennai or other cities in future.

Although protocol sources in South Block said nothing had yet been confirmed about any future plans, they added that Calcutta had an edge in any such arrangement as the only city with a functioning “branch office” of the ministry of external affairs (MEA).

Dharamsala has an MEA liaison office but that only deals with the Dalai Lama and his activities in India.

MEA sources said Krishna and his aides pored over archival material in South Block from the time when Rajiv Gandhi hosted the first foreign policy-related meeting outside New Delhi one month shy of 23 years ago: the second South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) summit which too was held in Bangalore.

The only other attempt at moving foreign policy deliberations out of New Delhi was in July 2001 when the ill-starred summit meeting between Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf was held in Agra.

Officials in charge of Tuesday's Bangalore meeting said Krishna felt comfortable with the idea of the RIC trilateral in Bangalore because it is a city he can control, having been at the apex of Karnataka politics for several decades.

Besides, the relatively new external affairs minister has never been a “Delhi man” in the sense members of the Union cabinet usually are.

Krishna was encouraged in rejecting reservations from some MEA bureaucrats — who cited the mantra of precedent — about the proposal to move RIC to Bangalore when an aide took a leaf out of similar practices in both Russia and China, whose foreign ministers are arriving in Bangalore on Monday evening.

Ever since Vladimir Putin became Russia’s President on December 31, 1999, it has been customary for foreign leaders, including Vajpayee, to be received in Putin’s hometown of St Petersburg and then moved onward to Moscow.

The last RIC foreign ministers’ meeting took place not in Moscow but in Yekaterinburg and when China hosted the meeting in 2007, it was held not in Beijing but in Harbin.

After the trilateral meeting on Tuesday morning, followed by lunch, all eyes will be on Krishna’s separate meeting that afternoon with China’s foreign minister Yang Jiechi.

There will be no similar bilateral meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov because Krishna has just returned from Moscow after meeting Lavrov and his boss, President Dmitry Medvedev.

The Tuesday afternoon meeting will take place in the backdrop of a growing war of words and some tension on the ground between India and China in recent months.

It is understood from diplomatic sources that Yang will propose that the occasion next year of the 60th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Beijing and New Delhi should be the launch pad for a blitzkrieg of joint activities to promote people-to-people co-operation and build confidence that is essential to reducing tension.

For Krishna, hosting Yang will also be an opportunity to display what he did as Karnataka chief minister to modernise and globalise Bangalore, just as the Chinese did — albeit on a hugely bigger scale — with Shanghai, the hometown of the Chinese foreign minister.

The trilateral process will conclude with a banquet hosted by the governor of Karnataka.