Meet 4th man in Modi-Xi-Putin photo: IFS officer who ranked 15 in UPSC exam

At 4.13 pm on Saturday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi shared on X a photograph that shows him holding the hands of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the BRICS leaders’ summit in New Delhi.

The photograph, which sent a message of cooperation among the three world leaders, has a fourth person. This Indian diplomat caught the attention of those watching pictures and videos of the BRICS leaders’ summit over the weekend.

He is 36-year-old Siddharth Babu, a 2017-batch Indian Foreign Service (IFS) officer. Babu ranked 15th in the country in the Union Public Service Commission’s (UPSC) Civil Services Examination for entry to India’s coveted government services.

Babu chose Mandarin while he was at the Foreign Service Institute in Delhi, and underwent training in international relations, negotiations, conduct of foreign policy, protocol and other relevant issues. He lived in China for four years – 2018 to 2022 – where he learnt the language and while working at the Indian embassy in Beijing.

These were the years of the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw very tough lockdowns in China. Babu used his time well by studying Mandarin and China’s history, politics and economy. He went on to complete a Master’s course in translation and interpretation of English to Chinese and Chinese to English at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies in Monterey, California, in the US in 2022.

He graduated in 2024. Babu got a posting in Delhi at the Ministry of External Affairs in 2024, first as an Under Secretary. He is now a Deputy Secretary in the East Asia division in the Ministry of External Affairs. This division looks after India’s relations with China, Japan, South and North Korea.

So, his main diplomatic assignment is relations with these countries. When needed, he also steps in to interpret and translate for the Prime Minister and other key government officials. Shubhajit Roy, Diplomatic Editor at The Indian Express, has been a journalist for more than 27 years now.

Roy joined The Indian Express in October 2003 and has been reporting and writing explainers and analysis on foreign affairs for about 19 years now. Based in Delhi, he has also led the National government and political bureau at The Indian Express in Delhi — a team of reporters who cover the national government and politics for the newspaper.

He has got the Ramnath Goenka Journalism award for Excellence in Journalism ‘2016. He got this award for his coverage of the Holey Bakery attack in Dhaka and its aftermath. He won the Ramnath Goenka Journalism award, 2023, for the second time for his reporting of the Oct 7 attacks on Israel and the war in Gaza.

He also got the IIMCAA Award for the Journalist of the Year, 2022, (Jury’s special mention) for his coverage of the fall of Kabul in August 2021 — he was one of the few Indian journalists in Kabul and the only mainstream newspaper to have covered the Taliban’s capture of power in mid-August, 2021.

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