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K Shankar Bajpai, India’s former envoy to US, China and Pakistan, dies at 92

Former IFS officer K Shankar Bajpai was born into a family of diplomats, and after serving the country, went on to become a noted academic.

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New Delhi: Former diplomat Katyayani Shankar Bajpai died Sunday at the age of 92. He is survived by his wife and two sons.

Bajpai joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1952, and went on to become India’s ambassador to the United States, China, and Pakistan — three of the most important diplomatic postings for an Indian official.

Popularly known as K. Shankar Bajpai, he was born on 30 March 1928 in Jaipur, Rajasthan, into a family of diplomats. His father, Girija Shankar Bajpai, was a senior diplomat pre- and post-Independence.


Also read: 50% IAS, IFS recruits are children of govt servants. But this is a story of their merit


Education and notable early postings

K.S. Bajpai’s school education took place in Washington, before he earned his Bachelor’s degree in modern history at the University of Oxford, graduating with a Cum Laude distinction in 1949. He went on to do his postgraduation from Ecole des Hautes Etudes Universitaire, Geneva, graduating in the year 1952.

He then joined the IFS and had stints in Turkey (1958) and Pakistan (1962-65).

In 1966, Bajpai accompanied then-Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri to Tashkent for the summit with President Ayub Khan of Pakistan.

Bajpai also played a notable part in the integration of the kingdom of Sikkim into the Union of India — he was posted as India’s political officer there between 1970 and 1974.

His stints as ambassador 

Bajpai was appointed India’s high commissioner to Pakistan, serving from 1976 to 1980, before becoming the ambassador to China (1980 to 1982).

Just before his retirement, he served as ambassador to the USA — from 1984 to 1986.

After retiring in 1986, he taught in various capacities at the University of California, most prominently at its Berkeley campus, and then became First Professor of Non-Western Studies at Brandeis University in Massachusetts in 1992.

In 1994, he founded the Delhi Policy Group (DPG), an independent think-tank which holds its “primary focus on international and strategic issues of critical national interest”. Bajpai also served as chairman of the National Security Advisory Board from 2008 to 2010.


Also read: India wants to be Vishwa Guru but IFS gets too few diplomats to take us there


 

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