Indira Gandhi removed my father as Union Secretary, says External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar February 21 said that his father Dr K Subrahmanyam was removed as Union Secretary under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and he was superseded during the tenure of Rajiv Gandhi.

K Subrahmanyam was the father of the External Affairs Minister. He was an IAS officer and one of India's most well-known strategic thinkers. He was a towering authority on geopolitics who had the trust of a number of Prime Ministers.

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Jaishankar stated in an interview with ANI, "I wanted to be the best foreign service officer." The best thing you could possibly do, in my opinion, was to become a Foreign Secretary. We were all aware that my father, a bureaucrat, had become a Secretary but had been removed from his secretaryship. There was also, I won’t call it to 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.

He was Secretary, Defense Production, in 1980. He was the first Secretary that Indira Gandhi fired when she won her second term in office in 1980. Jaishankar added, "He was the most knowledgeable person everyone would say on defence."

The External Affairs Minister said his father was a very upright person, and “maybe that caused the problem, I don’t know.”