Indira Gandhi removed my father as Union Secretary: EAM Jaishankar

External affairs minister S Jaishankar on Tuesday said that his father Dr K Subrahmanyam was removed as Secretary, Defence Production, by former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi soon after she came back to power in 1980 and he was superseded during the Rajiv Gandhi period with someone junior to him becoming the Cabinet Secretary.

In an interview with ANI, Jaishankar talked about his journey from foreign service to politics and said he had always aspired to be the best officer and get elevated to the post of foreign secretary.Jaishankar was foreign secretary from January 2015 to January 2018 and earlier served in key ambassadorial positions including in China and the United States.

 

His father K Subrahmanyam, who passed away in 2011, is regarded as one of India's most prominent national security strategists."I wanted to be the best foreign service officer. And to my mind, the definition of the best that you could do was to end up as a foreign secretary. In our household, there was also, I won't call it pressure, but we were all conscious of the fact that my father, who was a bureaucrat, had become a Secretary but he was removed from his secretaryship. He became, at that time, probably the youngest Secretary in the Janata government in 1979," Jaishankar said.

"In 1980, he was Secretary, Defence Production. In 1980 when Indira Gandhi was re-elected, he was the first Secretary that she removed. And he was the most knowledgeable person everybody would say on defence," he added.Jaishankar said his father was also a very upright person, "may be that caused the problem, I don't know".

"But the fact was that as a person he saw his own career in bureaucracy, actually kind of stalled. And after that, he never became a Secretary again. He was superseded during the Rajiv Gandhi period for somebody junior to him who became a cabinet secretary. It was something he felt...we rarely spoke about it. So he was very, very proud when my elder brother became secretary," said Dr Jaishankar.

 

 

Jaishankar said he became a Secretary to the government after his father passed away.

"He passed away in 2011, at that time, I had got what you would call Grade 1 which is like a secretary ....like an ambassador. I did not become secretary, I became that after he passed away. For us, at that time the goal was to become secretary. As I said I had achieved that goal. In 2018, I was kind of very happy to walk away into the sunset...but, I ended up walking not into the sunset but into Tata Sons! I was contributing my fair bit there. I liked them, I think they liked me. Then completely as a bolt out of the blue, the political opportunity came. Now the political opportunity for me was something I needed to think about because I was simply not prepared for it....So I did reflect on it briefly...," said Jaishankar when he was asked about his journey from a bureaucrat to a cabinet minister.

Reflecting on the phone call from the Prime Minister inviting him to be part of the 2019 Narendra Modi-led cabinet, Jaishankar said that it did come as a surprise.

 

"It had not crossed my mind, I don't think it had crossed the mind of anybody else in my circle," he said referring to his induction in the union cabinet.

"Once I entered, I must say in all honesty I myself was very unsure. I had watched politicians all my life. One of the things you get to do in foreign service by the way is you actually perhaps much more than the other services is, you see politicians up close because you see them abroad, you are kind of working with them closely, counselling them. So, it's one thing to watch but to actually join politics, to become a cabinet member, to stand for Rajya Sabha, you know when I was selected, I was not even a member of Parliament. So each of these things happened one by one. I slid into it, sometimes without knowing it. You learn by watching others," he added.