India’s hijab dispute reaches its most populous state

JEDDAH: India’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Dr. Ausaf Sayeed, has been appointed to a brand new place as secretary for consular, passport, visa and abroad Indian affairs in his nation’s Ministry of Exterior Affairs.

His new job will likely be based mostly on the ministry’s headquarters in New Delhi. His space of accountability will embody Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Yemen and Iraq. He can even liaise on his nation’s behalf with the Secretariat Normal of the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Arab League and the Maghreb Union.

By way of bureaucratic rating, the brand new job is a promotion because the place is a number of notches above that of ambassador. The appointment was authorised and cleared by the Indian Cupboard on Tuesday.

The place crowns Sayeed’s illustrious diplomatic profession that has included numerous postings, essentially the most outstanding of which included spells as consul basic in Jeddah from August 2004 to July 2008, consul basic in Chicago, and ambassador to the Seychelles, Yemen and, most lately, Saudi Arabia.

Sayeed has accomplished his three-year time period in Saudi Arabia having been named as ambassador to Saudi Arabia in March 2019.

He’s anticipated to take up his new project subsequent month. The identify of his successor in Riyadh has but to be introduced however sources stated the choice course of has begun.

Sayeed is a well-recognized face in Saudi Arabia. Throughout his three years as ambassador he helped to lift India’s profile within the Kingdom as he emphasised the mutual advantages the bilateral relationship can and does carry.

He was answerable for enhancing the picture of his nation, and of Indian professionals, by way of the founding of organizations such because the Saudi-Indian Enterprise Community, the Indo-Saudi Medical Discussion board, and the Saudi-Indian Friendship Society. Throughout his posting in Riyadh, and his earlier one in Jeddah, enormous strides have been taken within the efforts to reinforce the ties between India and Saudi Arabia in a wide range of fields.

One in every of Sayeed’s most excellent achievements got here on the top of the pandemic when he oversaw the gargantuan effort to repatriate Indian nationals from the Kingdom to India, an operation carried out by particular Vande Bharat flights.

Sayeed comes from a household in Hyderabad that has wealthy literary credentials, and was himself a gold medalist on the metropolis’s Osmania College. His father, Awaz Sayeed, was a well known trendy Urdu essayist and short-story author.