India all set to open its embassy in Dominican Republic

New Delhi, India: India reveals its embassy in the Dominican Republic this year; the mission has the potential to figure in the Guinness World Records. Last week, the Union Cabinet decided that the second-largest Caribbean nation would be one of three nations taken for the development of New Delhi’s diplomatic footprint in 2021. CLICK HERE TO READ MOREIndia first published its decision to open an embassy in Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic, in 2006. That was the day the Dominicans began their mission in New Delhi. The move was part of a push during that time by countries in the Western Hemisphere to overcome the lack of contact with India caused by distance and a gap in cultural and linguistic commonalities.The decision to open an office as a mutual gesture was conveyed to the then Dominican Foreign Minister Carlos Morales Troncoso by Anand Sharma, who was in charge of the Caribbean as the Minister of State for External Affairs in the Manmohan Singh cabinet. Not unexpectedly, nothing happened thereafter, and everyone in New Delhi forgot what Sharma had formally conveyed to his senior counterpart.CLICK HERE TO READ MOREFour years later, Shashi Tharoor, who got Sharma in the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), had to go on a regional tour of several Caribbean countries, and Santo Domingo was on his itinerary. He came across papers and file notes about the government’s 2006 decision. No one had gone even a little finger to implement it. The visiting ministerial committee would have lost face if they came to Santo Domingo also, their hosts asked about the four-year-old announcement by New Delhi. In the weeks before his departure for the Caribbean, Tharoor ran about giving his energy to expedite the systems so that he could present Troncoso with a fait accompli.