A Gold medalist from Delhi University, Prof. Saurabh Kumar has had a distinguished career in diplomacy and academics. Post-retirement from the Indian Foreign Service (IFS), he served on the Faculty of the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore during 2010-20.
In the IFS, he held three Ambassadorial assignments, last as India’s Governor on the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency and Ambassador to the IAEA, UNIDO and the UN Offices in Vienna (and to Austria concurrently). Earlier, in the late nineties, he served as a senior analyst in the Cabinet Secretariat (in its Joint Intelligence Committee, the body charged with preparing policy papers on strategic questions for seniormost decision-makers in Government in a 360 degree, all of Government perspective) and Joint Secretary in the Foreign Service Training Institute.
Prof. Saurabh Kumar’s research work, media commentaries and other writings during his term in the NIAS were primarily on disarmament and international security issues, especially nuclear weapons related ones, and India-China relations and China related subjects, which were his areas of specialization in the IFS.
He was an invited member of the Informal Group on Advancement of the 1988 Rajiv Gandhi Action Plan for Nuclear Weapons Free and Non-violent World chaired by Hon’ble Shri Mani Shankar Aiyar, MP, which was established in December 2010 at the instance of PM Manmohan Singh and which submitted its Report to him in August 2011.
As a free-lance strategic analyst, Prof. Saurabh Kumar’s professional interests are much wider, extending to all systemic issues, whether external or internal, with a bearing on statecraft; the political and other ramifications of the ‘development problematique’ above all. This stems from his encounter with an ideology in command People’s Republic of China early in his diplomatic career in the mid seventies.
He considers the comparative perspective afforded to him by that brush with ‘China watching’, at a time when that country was still in the throes of tumultuous upheavals in the aftermath of radical churning of its State and society in the course of the Cultural Revolution (and as a result of the paradigmatic changes ushered in later, post-1978, as part of the course correction wrought by Deng Xiaoping), to have been a learning experience incompare; an especially edifying one under the mentorship of late President K R Narayanan, who was then the Ambassador to China (and himself a keen student of geo-politics tutored by none other than Harold Laski).
A fluent Chinese speaker, Prof. Saurabh Kumar pioneered the “India in the Chinese Media” project at the NIAS, which featured daily translations of the coverage of India in the Chinese press along with periodic parsing and analyses of the same, during 2015-2021.