NEW DELHI: It was 1977. A group of senior bureaucrats were debating the fate of Pakistan president Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Naresh Chandra, former cabinet secretary remembers saying he thought Bhutto would be let off after Saudi Arabia pleaded for his life.
K. Subrahmanyam disagreed. "Zia has no choice but to execute him," he said. He was right.
Subrahmanyam, ("Subbu" to everyone) who died on Wednesday just turned 82. But when faced with his fiercely forceful personality, the last thought in your mind was his age.
Many famous commentators, analysts and strategic experts from around the world have been reduced to gibbering when he successfully cut through their intellectual arguments. As India evolved in the past couple of decades, Subrahmanyam was out there, leading the strategic thought brigade.
"We have lost our foremost strategic analyst," said Ronen Sen, former envoy to the US.
His years as a civil servant, he was secretary, defence production, head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, among others, gave him an intimate knowledge of India's external security matrix. But his reputation was primarily as India's "strategic guru" and that's how he will be remembered.
K. Subrahmanyam never said what you expected him to say.
He could silence your uninformed rambling with a withering look and a caustic remark that was little short of devastating. In the next moment though, he could turn around and graciously acknowledge an intellectual hit. Raja Mohan, journalist, who counted Subrahmanyam as his mentor, said, "Subbu never suffered fools, but equally entertained no rancour or malice". Ronen Sen said, "What I valued was his ability to listen which were a function of his fine human qualities."
He would happily engage you in discussion even if you held a view that was the polar opposite of his. And it didn't matter whether you were the national security adviser or a junior reporter trying to soak in complex strategy.
Subbu was committed to educating Indians about the importance of strategic thought. It led him to drive long distances to talk to JNU students in the 1970s. The same spirit of education prompted him to write reams in major newspapers and lecture at innumerable seminars even when he was quite ill, to teach Indians how to respond to international events.
Inder Malhotra, journalist, and one of Subbu's close buddies recalls how George Tanham, ( RAND Corporation) came to see Subbu when he was doing a study on Indian strategic thought. Subbu told him, "What can I say about something that doesn't exist?" It would take a few more years for Manmohan Singh to articulate the same complaint in despair. That's what Subbu sought to change.
Through his articles and studies he whittled away at Indians' strategic naivete, regarding it as a national weakness.
Swaminathan Aiyar brought in Subrahmanyam as a journalist into The Economic Times. "Many journalists have trouble coming out with even two column ideas in a week, but Subrahmanyam wanted to write almost every day, so wide was his repertoire and so deep his enthusiasm.
I once asked how he came up with so many ideas. He replied "It's easy. I just have to watch CNN or BBC and I get so angry that I have several things to say!"
In 2005, Manmohan Singh commissioned Subrahmanyam to head a task force on India's strategic development. It would be his last official report but it remains a classified document. In an interview to online magazine, Pragati, Subrahmanyam said, "We have not fully thought through the notion of our foreign policy reflecting our rising status.
I have said that knowledge is the currency of power in this century. The task force on global strategic developments that I headed also points out the same."
As the first convener of the newly constituted National Security Advisory Board (NSAB) Subrahmanyam led the effort to formally articulate India's nuclear doctrine, which was formally accepted by the NDA government.
It was
Subrahmanyam who first articulated India's discomfort with the global nuclear regime under NPT, which he believed was unfair and against India's interests, calling it "nuclear apartheid".
One of his self-confessed happier moments of modern Indian history was the 1998 nuclear tests. But six years hence, Subrahmanyam was also the first to endorse a nuclear deal with the US, countering stiff opposition from erstwhile supporters. For all those who had labeled him "pro-Soviet" in earlier years, he was now "Mr USA". Subbu shrugged off all such badges.
He was a democrat at heart, and some of his most difficult years was during Indira Gandhi's emergency. As home secretary, Tamil Nadu, (he was shunted off), Subbu refused to obey a number of her draconian orders. But the same Subbu counted December 16, 1971 when Bangladesh was created, as one of Mrs Gandhi's greatest achievements.
For the last decade, Subrahmanyam battled several debilitating illnesses - dismissively. He would be in hospital one day, and the next, be the first to arrive at a seminar on nuclear deterrence, looking impatient.
C. Uday Bhaskar, who worked with him, recalls having to tell him, "Subbu Sir, please don't come so early. You make everyone uncomfortable."
Personally, Subrahmanyam never much cared for the attributes of the power circle, which is so attractive to many of his peers. He wore his austerity naturally, even once sending his son back home in a bus refusing him a lift in the official car.
Subbu's regret, if he had any, would probably be that the Indian bureaucratic and political system was so ossified as to be impervious to new ideas.
The Kargil Committee Report may have been released but both NDA and UPA governments have sat on 17 annexures __ they contain a wealth of historical evidence about the inside story of India's nuclear weapons programme, as told by the protagonists. Even Manmohan Singh has failed to make public the report of his task force on India's strategic development. As Subbu himself observed, it would take time for India's strategists to take in these ideas. But it will be longer in the absence of the report.
Box:
1. Born January 1929
2. Joined IAS (Tamil Nadu cadre), 1951
3. Deputy Secretary, Ministry of Defence, 1962-65.
4. Rockefeller Fellow in Strategic Studies, London School of Economics, 1966-67.
5. Director, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi, 1968-75.
6. Home Secretary, Tamil Nadu, 1976-77.
7. Chairman, Joint Intelligence Committee and Additional Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat, 1977-79.
8. Secretary (Defence Production), Ministry of Defence, 1979-80.
9. Director, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, 1980-87.
10. Jawaharlal Nehru Visiting Professor, St John's College, Cambridge, UK, 1987-88. Nehru Fellow, 188-90.
11. Consulting Editor, Business and Political Observer, 1990-92.
12. Consulting Editor, the Economic Times, 1992-94. Consluting Editor, The Times of India and The Economic Times, 1994-2004.
13. Member, UN Secretary-General's expert group on the Indian Ocean, 1974.
14. Member, UN intergovernmental exper group on Disarmament and Development, 1980-82.
15. Chairman, UN study group on Nuclear Deterrence, 1986.
16. Convenor, National Security Advisory Board.
17. Chairman, Kargil Review Panel.