Foreign secretary disapproves of leakage of US cables by Wikileaks

Disapproving the leakage of US diplomatic cables by Wikileaks, foreign secretary Nirupama Rao today said diplomatic communications are of "privileged" nature and should "stay that way."

"All democracies and civilised societies operate on certain rules and regulations. There is privileged communication that a government enters into, lets say between an embassy and the headquarters. This is what was happening in the case of American leaked cables.

"So, there is a certain system that has prevailed and operated successfully for many decades. Even before we had electronic means, there were privileged communications. And they should stay that way until few decades are passed and such information is open to scholars, journalists as part of non-classified archives," she said.

Rao was speaking after launching the redesigned Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) and Public Diplomacy (PD) websites here.

"There is a system. There is an order. There is a civilisational system that we would all prefer to see the world operate in," she said while replying to a question about her views on whistleblower website Wikileaks making the US diplomatic cables public.

The website made approximately 250,000 diplomatic cables public last month.

She also announced that MEA was working on an ambitious integrated portal to introduce uniformity in the look and content for all the websites of the ministry and its over 160 Missions/Posts abroad. She said it should be operational by mid of next year.

While MEA site aims to make available comprehensive and speedy information on India's foreign relation activities as well as the Ministry's views on salient Foreign Policy issues, the PD website's mandate is to project India and its foreign policy, both within the country and overseas, she said.

The MEA site is getting as many as three lakh hits per day, she said.

Apart from containing stories from overseas missions which are "regulated and moderated" by the ministry officials here, the PD website also carries lectures by retired ambassadors on various important foreign policy matters and country's foreign relations.

However, the serving diplomats are not expected to present their views on the website.

Rao noted that by making use of electronic mode of information dissemination such as website, Twitter, Blogspot, and Facebook, the ministry has made a beginning and it has to find its way now and fine tune the process.