"Bolt From The Blue": S Jaishankar On Phone Call From PM For Cabinet Post

In an interview with ANI, S 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.

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Defence Production, by former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi soon after she came back to power in 1980 and he was superseded during the Rajiv Gandhi period with someone junior to him becoming the Cabinet Secretary.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

Mr 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 secretary-ship. He became, at that time, probably the youngest Secretary in the Janata government in 1979," he said.