Key Facts about Subrahmanyam Jaishankar

Key Facts about Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India’s Ambassador to the US, was appointed as India’s new Foreign Secretary after an announcement was made on January 28, 2015.

Jaishankar got appointed after a meeting of the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi took place. He replaced Sujatha Singh, whose tenure has been abruptly curtailed by nearly eight months. Here are the 10 Things you shouldn’t miss about him:

1. He is a son of K. Subrahmanyam who was a strategic affairs analyst, commentator, and civil servant and he himself is a is a graduate of St. Stephen’s College at the University of Delhi, and has an M.A. in Political Science and an M.Phil. and PhD in International Relations from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), where he specialised in nuclear diplomacy. So, he can be considered as a qualified figure in foreign strategies.

2. He started his career in Moscow in 1978 and speaks Russian fluently, a skill that hold the capacity of boosting Indo-Russian ties .

3. He is the longest-serving Indian ambassador to China and played pivotal role in reinforcing economic, trade and cultural relations between the two countries.

4. He has with him more than three decades of diplomatic experience where he also has served as press secretary and speech writer for former president of India Shankar Dayal Sharma.

5. He attracted limelight during his tenure as Indian ambassador to the US where he was a negotiator between the US authorities and Indian government to mutually handle the Devyani Khobragade incident. He used his wide contacts with the Washington bureaucracy dealing with South Asia to smooth out the crisis over the Dec 12 arrest and strip search of India’s then consul general in New York, Devyani Khobragade.

6. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar was second of the six ambassadors who presented their credentials to Obama one by one in a traditional ceremony that marks the formal beginning of an ambassador’s service in Washington.

7. He played a key role in negotiating the landmark India-US civil nuclear deal and other initiatives and worked with the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh closely.

8. He has served as India’s ambassador to the Czech Republic, High Commissioner to Singapore and as head of Americas division in the ministry of external affairs.

9. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar first attracted attention of Narendra Modi when he had visited China in 2012. The meetings with important Chinese personalities that Jaishankar fixed for Prime Minister left him amazed.

10 Jaishankar’s first meeting with the US was in 1981, when he was Under Secretary (Americas) and Policy Planning in MEA headquarters. He spent few years there and then joined as a Joint Secretary (Americas) in MEA and remained there for another three years.