An otherwise reticent and publicity-shy bureaucrat, home secretary G K Pillai has queered the pitch again just ahead of the US president’s visit to India. Without any apparent provocation, he told the media on Wednesday that India was disappointed with the US for not sharing intelligence input regarding the Lashkar-e-Taiba operative, David Coleman Headley, at the right time. “We were disappointed the name of David Headley was not provided, if not pre-26/11, at least post-26/11”, Pillai said.

There is nothing new in it, though. Our security establishment has made their displeasure known in the past too, pointing out that the US shared information about Headley only after his arrest in Chicago in October 2009. Had that not been so, Headley could have been arrested, if not before 26/11, at least after 26/11, when he travelled to India.

But this was serious diplomatic faux pas and prompted an immediate rebuttal from the US ambassador to India, Timothy Roemer, who said: “The U.S. shared intelligence on a regular and consistent basis with the government of India prior to the Mumbai attacks. We have also shared information with the government of India after the Mumbai attacks”.

Pillai had done the same in July this year, just a day before foreign minister S M Krishna was to visit Pakistan for bilateral talks.  Pillai had mentioned Headley then too and said how he had implicated Pakistan’s ISI in the 26/11 terror strike on Mumbai. This remark became the focus of the bilateral talk and the joint press conference that followed, causing a serious embarrassment to Krishna and the country.

True the subject has everything to do with Pillai’s brief but timing it to high-profile diplomatic visits raises serious questions about his motivation. Surely a bureaucrat of his stature understands the implication of what he said and he also knows that there is a ministry for external affairs to raise the issue, if it all it has to be, with the US president or his officials. It would be naïve to assume that he was talking out of turn. But the other plausible inference, that it was a command performance, doesn’t speak well of the government, at least on the diplomatic front, if true.

Is there a disconnect between the home and the external affairs ministries? Is the home ministry trying deliberately to undermine the external affairs ministry?

Or is it a ploy to engage the US in a diplomatic exchange on a subject that we may not dare or desire to take up directly?
We may never know. But for now, it doesn’t reflects India’s maturity in handling diplomatic affairs.