P. N. Haksar

Indian diplomat (1913–1998)

Parmeshwar Narayan Haksar (4 September 1913 – 25 November 1998) was an Indian bureaucrat and diplomat, best known for his two year stint as Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's principal secretary (1971–73). In that role, Haksar was the chief strategist and policy adviser behind his inexperienced prime minister's rise to near absolute power in the mid 1970s. After this he was appointed deputy chairman of the Planning Commission and then the first ever chancellor of New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University. An advocate of centralisation and socialism, he was a Kashmiri Pandit who became Gandhi's closest confidant in her inner coterie of bureaucrats, the so called "Kashmiri mafia". Prior to this, Haksar was a diplomat of the Indian Foreign Service, who served as India's ambassador to Austria and Nigeria.

Haksar was born in 1913, Gujranwala (now in Pakistan) in a Kashmiri Pandit family. He studied Sanskrit at home and obtained an M. Sc. from University of Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh. He went on to study in the London School of Economics. Critics say he was far too close to Soviet ideology. As a student of Allahabad university, he was a resident of Mayo Hall and made frequent visits to the Anand Bhawan, the house of Motilal Nehru. Parmeshwar was a voracious reader of art history and also a connoisseur of paintings.

Haksar had already made his mark as a prominent lawyer in Allahabad, before he was selected in the Indian Foreign Service in 1947, and was close to fellow Kashmiri from Allahabad Jawaharlal Nehru, the latter who would go on to become independent India's first prime minister. A one time student at the London School of Economics, he was a junior colleague of V. K. Krishna Menon at the India League in London. Critics say he was arrogant, occasionally vindictive, uncomfortably close to Soviet thinking and a willing tool of Moscow.

P. N. Haksar served as the India ambassador to Nigeria and Austria. In the 1960s, he also served as a deputy high commissioner in London. Until he vacated the position of Principal Secretary to Indira Gandhi, Haksar exercised significant influence on the formulation of domestic and foreign policies in Raisina Hill. The Prime Minister and her Principal Secretary subsequently fell out because Haksar despised Indira's poorly educated and lacklustre younger son, Sanjay, who aspired to be his mother's successor. It was Sanjay who authorised a police raid on the Haksar family's shop in New Delhi, Pandit Brothers, deliberately humiliating the civil servant. Haksar never forgave Indira. When she returned to power for the second time in 1980, she pleaded with him to resume his former role. To his credit Haksar stood his ground and refused, even at the risk of being persecuted.

Haksar was noted for his strategising on the nationalisation of banks, insurance firms and foreign owned oil companies, the 1971 Indo Soviet Treaty and India's support to the liberation of what would become Bangladesh. He is also the chief architect of the Shimla Agreement with Pakistan, as he was of the creation of the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), India's foreign secret intelligence agency