On Friday, 16 October, Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi directed pointed questions at Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the planned Mumbai meeting between External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, invoking the term "employee" to describe how the encounter had been framed publicly.
In a post on X, Gandhi characterised Rubio's remarks as amounting to an instruction for the Indian prime minister to make his way to Mumbai. The final line of Gandhi's remarks carried the implication that he possessed information about the meeting that he had not yet disclosed, while also putting Modi in a position of having to account for the circumstances around it. No details were offered about what that disclosure might actually contain.
The scheduling of Rubio's meeting with Jaishankar, and the way that announcement was handled, drew competing claims from the Congress party and the government — and Gandhi's comment appeared to be directed at precisely that dispute.
The dispute traced back to remarks delivered at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum on Thursday, where Gor, serving as the US envoy to India, told attendees that Rubio's schedule included meetings with Indian government officials in Mumbai and that Jaishankar was anticipated to travel from Delhi to take part in those talks alongside other officials.
Opposition lawmakers in the Congress raised questions about why word of the Indian external affairs minister's anticipated meeting had come through a US official rather than through the Ministry of External Affairs. Ramesh, who serves as Congress MP and General Secretary for Communications, characterised Gor's comments as deeply out of the ordinary, putting forward the question of why it had fallen to someone outside the MEA's official spokesperson role to publicly announce Jaishankar's scheduled meetings on Indian soil.
Pawan Khera, a Congress member in the Rajya Sabha, raised the matter of why New Delhi was not on Rubio's itinerary and why the foreign minister was set to receive him in Mumbai instead.
A bilateral meeting between Jaishankar and Rubio in Mumbai on 20 October was later verified by the MEA. Agenda items for the talks were listed by the ministry as spanning energy, trade and investment, defence, and emerging technology areas.
Reports from the External Affairs Ministry point to a lack of clarity among its personnel regarding the current state of affairs.
A two-day visit to Mumbai — spanning 19 and 20 October — has been arranged for UAE Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, with Jaishankar set to receive him there. The trip, running from 17 to 22 October, takes Rubio through both India and Uzbekistan as part of a broader regional itinerary. His itinerary within the country takes in Mumbai and the Gujarat city of Jamnagar, where talks with business figures on investment and energy cooperation are on the agenda.
No specific response was provided in Gandhi's post about what kind of explanation he wanted from Modi. At its core, Gandhi's post took aim at how the government had handled the interaction, deploying the term "employee" to highlight what he characterised as an uneven portrayal of the meeting.
