Indian Foreign Services (IFS) officer Gopal Baglay has been appointed as the new spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs on February 27. He has replaced Vikas Swaroop who has been appointed as High Commissioner of India to Canada.
Gopal Baglay is a 1992 batch IFS officer who served as a press counsellor at the embassy in Kathmandu and director in the external publicity division of the ministry of external affairs. He had also served as Secretary at Embassy of India, Kyiv from 1996 to 1999, to Moscow from1999 to 2002 and a deputy high commissioner to Pakistan. Baglay has also been a special assistant to High Commissioner, London; First Secretary (Economic) from 2002 to 2005. In MEA he has served as deputy secretary in Central Europe and deputy secretary and director United Nations-Economic & Social from 2005 to 2008. Baglay currently heads the territorial division of PAI (Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran).
Vikas Swarup was appointed as the official spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs of India to head its Public Diplomacy divisions at New Delhi, succeeding Syed Akbaruddin in April, 2015. He is a 1986 batch IFS officer who wrote the popular book Q and A, which was adapted into the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire. Swarup joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1986 and served in Turkey, the United States, Ethiopia, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Japan in various Indian diplomatic missions.
