| Biography | Parmeshwar Narayan Haksar (4 September 1913 25 November 1998) was an Indian bureaucrat and diplomat, best known for his six-year stint as Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's principal secretary (196773). In that role, Haksar was the chief strategist 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 "Kashmiri mafia". Prior to this, Haksar was a diplomat of the Indian Foreign Service, who served as ambassador to Austria and Nigeria. |