Lagatar24 Desk
New Delhi, Feb 21: External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar noted that he comes from a family of bureaucrats and that the chance to serve as a union minister came as a complete surprise in 2019.
He added that his father, Dr. K. Subrahmanyam, was replaced as Secretary, Defence Production, by former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi shortly after she regained power in 1980, and that he was replaced as Cabinet Secretary during the Rajiv Gandhi era by someone younger than him.
Jaishankar stated that he had always wanted to be the best officer and advance to the position of Foreign Secretary in an interview with ANI regarding his transition from the foreign service to politics.
From January 2015 until January 2018, Jaishankar held the role of Foreign Secretary. Before, he held important diplomatic posts, including those in China and the United States. One of India’s most well-known national security strategists is his father, K Subrahmanyam, who passed away in 2011.
“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.
“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 He was superseded during the Rajiv Gandhi period for somebody junior to him who became a cabinet secretary.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,” he added.
Jaishankar said he became a Secretary to the government after his father passed away.
