Strategic guru K.Subrahmanyam is dead

New Delhi: K. Subrahmanyam, the pre-eminent security and foreign policy thinker who played a key role in shaping government and public thinking on key issues and helped draft India's nuclear doctrine, died here Wednesday, leaving behind many admirers and followers in the country's strategic and diplomatic community.

Subrahmanyam was 82 when he breathed his last Wednesday at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). He had recovered from cancer but then fell victim to lung and cardiac problems from which he did not recover.

He is survived by his wife, three sons and a daughter. His middle son, S. Jaishankar, is Indian ambassador to China.

The most respected voice in India on global security affairs, Subrahmanyam, was at the time of his death, chairman, prime minister's Task Force on Global Strategic Developments. He was also the convenor of the National Security Advisory Board.

A former director of the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), an institute he nurtured and brought to international renown as a think tank on strategic and security matters, he was the doyen of the Indian strategic community and consulted by every government on issues of foreign policy and international security.

He also headed the Kargil review committee and submitted a voluminous report on security lapses and remedies during the 1999 military confrontation between India and Pakistan.

Subrahmanyam also leaves behind a wide network of admirers and friends in the diplomatic and strategic community. His commentaries in newspapers and interviews on television were followed with considerable interest and lent the Indian perspective to important national and international issues impinging on national security.

In his condolence message Vice-President Hamid Ansari described Subrahmanyam "s "one of the key architects of the country's security policy doctrine."

"He was instrumental in sensitising policy makers and citizenry to strategic issues and helping formulation of policy options to tackle them," Ansari, a former diplomat, said in his tribute.

"His regular writings in newspapers simplified complex subjects to the lay public and will be sorely missed," he said.

In his tribute, Ansari pointed out that as convenor of the first National Security Advisory Board, Subrahmanyam was instrumental in the drafting of India's nuclear doctrine.

"His loss is immeasurable. He was a pioneer in nurturing this awareness about national security," Uday Bhaskar, director of National Maritime Foundation, a think tank, who had worked closely with Subrahmanyam for decades, told IANS.

"He represented the first attempt in trying to introduce strategic thinking in India and to think about these issues in an objective and non-partisan way," he said.

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