Vishal V. Sharma was also Modi's officer on special duty in Gujarat, and said to be responsible for his public meetings conducted via holograms.

New Delhi: The Ministry of External Affairs on Thursday announced that India’s next envoy to the UN’s cultural body will be Vishal V. Sharma, a ruling party official who had also been officer on special duty to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he was heading Gujarat.

“Shri Vishal V. Sharma has been appointed as the next Permanent Representative of India to the Permanent Delegation of India to UNESCO, Paris, with the rank of Ambassador, in succession to Shri Jawed Ashraf. He is expected to take up the assignment shortly,” said the MEA press release. A couple of hours after the announcement, foreign secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla posted a congratulatory tweet.

Vishal V. Sharma visiting ICSSR
Vishal V. Sharma visiting ICSSR © ICSSR

Though the foreign secretary posed with Sharma, queries to senior officers about the new ambassador’s credentials drew a blank. Asked who he was, one MEA official told The Wire, “We are trying to find out the same!”

....

A search for his written publications led to an article on the World Hindu News, website, published in April 2015 and titled, “The unappreciated supercomputer Indian Prime Minister”. The name and the description of author matches the biography provided by Sharma in his Twitter account. The article lamented the fact that while Modi had attempted to make bold reforms,1 he had not been appreciated due to negative publicity by opposition parties that led to the roll-back of the land acquisition Bill.

  • 1. “A right analogy would be that Narendra Modi is a supercomputer having to work on an outdated motherboard that is the Indian bureaucratic system. Many feel that Narendra Modi doesn’t have the right team of people who can deliver as fast as the genius in him works. One can also say that Narendra Modi functions @ the speed of light, but his team works at the speed of a steam engine. Neither the government nor the bureaucratic setup appears geared up to generate the kind of velocity, that a leader of the Narendra Modi’s stature deserves. Modi is vibrant, but the system is defunct. Modi is a Ferrari race-car engine, but the tyres are of Maruti 800. Modi is like an Amitabh Bacchan having to work with Devika Rani (no offense to the great actress of the yesteryears).”