Friends,admirers remember Subrahmanyam

Vice President Hamid Ansari,National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon,retired diplomat G Parthasarathy,journalists Shekhar Gupta and Inder Malhotra,and Air Commodore Jasjit Singh were some of the people present at the meeting.

Menon also read out a message from the Prime Minister in which Manmohan Singh described Subrahmanyam as a dear friend and close advisor. The Prime Minister said he always looked forward Subrahmanyams views on security-related matters.

Describing him as a man of great principles,Jasjit Singh said the four years he had spent with Subrahmanyam at the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) had altered the course of his life. Subrahmanyam was the man who had built IDSA over the years,heading it between 1966 and 1975 and returning as director again in 1980. And yet,when he was required to state which institution he was associated with,while accepting an appointment as Nehru Fellow at Cambridge,he had sought permission from Jasjit Singh,his successor at IDSA,to name IDSA as his institute. Singh said he had told Subrahmanyam that the entire IDSA will feel let down if he didnt.

Retired diplomat G Parthasarathy,who has had family ties with Subrahmanyam for decades,said the the best thing about Subrahmanyam was that he always encouraged an independent viewpoint and healthy debates. Parthasarathy said this was reflected in Subrahmanyams family and recalled how he had once visited the family home when Subrahmanyam was engaged in a fierce debate with his grandson. I felt odd to have stepped in to a family argument but I was told this is an everyday affair in the household, he said.

Menon said he had acquired great respect for Subrahmanyam in the very first interaction with him way back in 1972. He said after delivering a lecture on why it was crucial for India not to cut its defence budget,Subrahmanyam had patiently heard him,then a 23-year-old,currently a completely opposite argument.

Editor-in-chief of The Indian Express Shekhar Gupta said he had never been formally associated with him in any capacity but recalled how,because of his own passion about defence related issues,he had grown up reading Subrahmanyams articles hidden in his textbooks. In the eighties,Subrahmanyam was the one who was formulating strategic policies,implementing it and the only one writing about it, he said,adding that the remarkable thing about him was his ability to keep secrets. Subrahmanyam was a columnist with The Sunday Express.

Subrahmanyams son,Sanjay said his father was not an academic but an intellectual. He would always encourage us to think and test us. We could sometimes out-fact him but never out-argue him, he said.