External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar hit out at Congress leader Rahul Gandhi over the Opposition party’s statements on the government’s response to China’s aggression on the LAC in eastern Ladakh.
India’s External Affairs minister S Jaishankar, in an interview with Asian News International (ANI), said his father Dr K Subrahmanyam was removed as Secretary of Defence Production by former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi soon after she came back to power in 1980.
Additionally, he claimed that someone younger than him took over his father’s position as cabinet secretary under the Rajiv Gandhi administration, reports the Times of India.
Jaishankar discussed his transition from the foreign service to politics, stating that he had always hoped to advance to the position of foreign secretary and that his selection to minister in 2019 came as a complete surprise.
The minister also conversed a variety of other topics, such as the accusations made by the Congress, the timing of the BBC documentary on Prime Minister Modi, and India’s relations with China.
Talking about India’s evolving foreign policy, Jaishankar said that India’s global standing is “clearly much higher and quite strong”.
“Strategically, there is much more clarity in our own thinking and operations. We have been able to demonstrate to the world that we are an exceptional international power. On big global issues today, I think the expectation is that India will have an opinion,” the minister said.
According to Jaishankar, “Vaccine Maitri” was the single most important action the nation had taken to boost its reputation abroad.
“During the Covid period, India impacted global consciousness. India was not only a successful producer of vaccines for itself and the world, but also an inventor of vaccines.”
He also spoke about how his father was removed as secretary by the then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
“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.
