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.

A BTech degree, then a plunge

Originally from Kaloor in Kerala’s Kochi, he studied at Nava Nirman Senior Secondary School from 1995 to 2006, and completed Class 12 at Bhavan’s Adarsha Vidyalaya in 2008. Babu then studied mechanical engineering at Mar Athanasius College of Engineering, a government-aided engineering college in Kothamangalam in Kerala. He completed his BTech in 2012. He then worked for an e-commerce firm for more than two years before taking the plunge and starting preparations for the civil services entrance exam. He chose history and political science as his subjects.

He couldn’t clear the all-India examination in his first attempt. Then, in 2017, at the age of 26, he cleared the highly competitive exam with an All India Rank of 15 and opted for the Indian Foreign Service. After he entered the Foreign Service, he studied Mandarin as a compulsory foreign language. Every Indian Foreign Service Officer needs to learn at least one foreign language.

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The years in China

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.