Indira removed my father as Union Secretary: S Jaishankar

New Delhi: 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 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Defence Production, by former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi soon after she came back to power in 1980 and he was superseded during the Rajiv Gandhi period with someone junior to him becoming the Cabinet Secretary.

Jaishankar fired back at Rahul Gandhi, who recently suggested that he did not know much about foreign policy and "needed to learn some more". He also hit back at the Congress leader on his frequent criticism of what he describes as the government's "defensive" China policy.

"If I would have to sum up this China thing, please do not buy this narrative that somewhere the government is on the defensive...somewhere we are being accommodative. I ask people if we were being accommodative who sent the Indian Army to the LAC (Line of Actual Control). Rahul Gandhi did not send them. Narendra Modi sent them," Dr Jaishankar said.

"Actual politics" is being conducted "ostensibly as media" by people who do not have the "courage to come into political field," Jaishankar told ANI, alluding to the controversial BBC documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

"Sometime politics of India doesn't even originate in its borders, it comes from outside." "We are not debating just a documentary or a speech that somebody gave in a European city or a newspaper edits somewhere -- we are debating, actually politics, which is being conducted ostensibly as media -- there is a phrase 'war by other means' this is politics by another means -- I mean you will do a hatchet job, you want to do a hatchet job and say this is just another quest for truth which we decided after 20 years to put at this time," he said.