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Exclusive | India ex-Ambassador hits back at Ro Khanna: 'Don't drag my name for your politics'

Indian envoy to China Pradeep Rawat met US Congressional delegation at a dinner hosted by US envoy to Beijing in September 2025.

After US Democrat Congressman Ro Khanna tried to rope in an Indian diplomat to hit at President Donald Trump at the US-ISPF leadership summit in Washington, Pradeep Rawat, the former Indian envoy to China, said that it was wrong for the California Congressman to unnecessarily drag his name to score points for his domestic politics. He said there is a bipartisan consensus on furtherment of India-US ties in Washington.

Speaking at the summit, Congressman Ro Khanna said : “I was in China and the Indian Ambassador told me that a generation of trust has been lost by President Trump. If we don’t speak the truth about the damage this President has done…we are not living in reality.”

Ambassador Pradeep Rawat, who demitted office in March 2026 after decades of serving in China, is an expert on East Asia, is discreet and is a low key diplomat. Hence, it is improbable that Rawat, a 1990 batch IFS officer, would have used the name of any leader that too in a formal dinner hosted by the US ambassador in Beijing, who is a close friend of President Trump. Ro Khanna was part of a US Congressional delegation that visited Beijing in September 2025.

Ambassador Rawat, who has also served in Europe, mentioned that he remembered quoting a Chinese scholar who had once said that theUS had a great strength in building alliances and coalition, soothing that China needs to learn, He said that he reminded the US delegation of this strength of the US when they are competing with China on a global stage.

While Ambassador Rawat was succeeded by Ambassador Vikram Doraiswami, Khanna’s comment has created a furor in the Indian diplomatic community as the Congressman was hitting both at India and US by putting words in the mouth of an Indian diplomat against President Trump for his own political purposes. Rawat is known for staying below the radar and quietly doing his work rather than making personal comments about a serving US leader by name.

Author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (2011, Hachette) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (2014, Hachette). Awarded K Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 by Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA) and the 2011 Ben Gurion Prize by Israel.Read More