External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Tuesday revealed 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Defence Production, by former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi soon after she came back to power in 1980 and he was superseded during the Rajiv Gandhi period with someone junior to him becoming the Cabinet Secretary.

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Jaishankar said this while stating that he belongs to a family of bureaucrats and that the political opportunity as a union minister came as a bolt from the blue in 2019. 

Who was Dr K Subrahmanyam? 

Dr K Subrahmanyam was an IAS officer. He passed away in 2011 and is still regarded as one of India's most prominent national security strategists.

Along with his career as a civil servant and a prominent national security strategist, K Subrahmanyam also chaired the Kargil War Review Committee and championed India’s nuclear deterrence policy. 

After he died in 2011, then-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had lauded K Subrahmanyam's immense contribution. "His work outside the Government is perhaps even more impressive and he spearheaded and developed the field of defence studies in the country,” the then PM had said.

On the other hand, then-Vice President Hamid Ansari had described him as "the doyen of the strategic affairs community in India" and called him "one of the key architects of our security policy doctrine. He was instrumental in sensitising policy makers and citizenry to strategic issues and helping formulation of policy options to tackle them."

For the unversed, K Subrahmanyam was born in January 1929 in Tamil Nadu’s Tiruchirapalli and completed his studies at the Madras Presidency College. After this, he entered the Indian Administrative Service.

He was also the founding Director of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), now the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. In 1999, he also declined from accepting Padma Bhushan saying that bureaucrats and journalists should not accept government awards.

India's Nuclear Doctrine

Under PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee, in 1998, K Subrahmanyam was designated the Convenor of the first National Security Council Advisory Board (NSCAB), which outlined the country’s Draft nuclear doctrine.

Kargil War Review Committee 

In 1999, K Subrahmanyam was established as the Chairman of the Kargil Review Committee. This committee was set up by the government in the aftermath of the war with Pakistan.

What did S Jaishankar say about his father K Subrahmanyam? 

"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, "maybe 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.

For the unversed, S Jaishankar’s brother, IAS officer S Vijay Kumar, is a former Rural Development Secretary of India. He has another brother -historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam.