R. D. Pradhan

Ram D. Pradhan (27 June 1928 – 31 July 2020) was an Indian Administrative Service officer, from the 1952 batch who served as Union Home Secretary and Governor of Arunachal Pradesh during the Rajiv Gandhi government.

Pradhan played a major role in signing the Assam Accord and the Mizo Accord.

He held Secretary-level positions at the international and national levels in the areas of commerce, defence and home.

He was in service of the government of India for 36 years.

Pradhan was an IAS officer of the 1952 batch who served in the Maharashtra cadre.

He joined as a Bombay State officer.

For the next five years he worked in Gujarat.

He was a Private Secretary to the Union Minister of Defence Y. B. Chavan.

Later, he was an Indian representative diplomat in international trade and commerce in Geneva for ten years.

He held several important positions in the Government of Maharashtra and the Government of India including Home Secretary, Government of Maharashtra, Director General of Shipping in the Government of India, and Chief Secretary, Government of Maharashtra.

Rajiv Gandhi, who was then the General Secretary of the Congress (I) party, was impressed by the work done by Pradhan, who as Chief Secretary of Maharashtra, had promptly handled and provided administrative services during the Bhiwandi communal riots of 1982.

When Rajiv became the Prime Minister in 1984, he invited Pradhan to make his services available to the Government of India.

Pradhan was appointed Union Home Secretary in 1985 and served in that post until his retirement in 1986.

Pradhan worked under Home Ministers S. B. Chavan and Buta Singh, and Minister of State for Home Arun Nehru.

The first major task Pradhan took up as Home Secretary in February 1985, was to assess the political situation in Punjab.

Politics in Punjab had become secessionist in nature and the Akali Dal party was calling for an independent country of Khalistan.

Following the previous Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's ordering of Operation Blue Star to flush out the militants, and her subsequent assassination by her own Sikh bodyguards sympathetic to the Khalistan cause, the situation in Punjab had become tense.

Pradhan suggested re-initialisation of dialogue with the Akali Dal, and as a precursor suggested the replacement of Punjab Governor K.T. Satarawalla, with a person of political background.

Following this, Arjun Singh was made the new Governor of Punjab in March 1985.

Pradhan also suggested involving the former Maharashtra Chief Minister Sharad Pawar in the Punjab negotiations.

Being from Maharashtra himself, Pradhan was aware of the political structure on his home state, and knew of Pawar's abilities, and his added advantage of being a friend of Parkash Singh Badal, one of the Akali strongmen.

Pawar's appointment led the way to his rejoining the Congress (I) from which he had split.

Pawar went on to become a Congress strongman in the Narasimha Rao government.

Pradhan was given the task of assessing the election-readiness of Punjab, and he arranged meetings between jailed student leaders and their mentors to assess the mood of the Punjab youth.

When elections were held in Punjab, the Akali Dal joined the mainstream and was returned as the ruling party.

Pradhan was involved in the implementing of the Punjab accord.

He extended support to the Mathew Commission, set up to decide the Hindi-speaking areas of Punjab to be transferred to Haryana in lieu of Chandigarh which would be permanently transferred to Punjab as part of the accord.

As per the commission's suggestion for a linguistic enumeration of the population of a village called Kandu Khera, the task demanded that the enumeration be fair and peaceful.

Pradhan ordered the deployment of a contingent of Assam Rifles in the village for the safety of the enumerators, and so that political forces did not determine the outcome of the result.

When both the Chief Ministers of Punjab and Haryana showed dissatisfaction with the neutrality of the enumerators, Pradhan selected 30 young IAS officers from non-Hindi speaking areas who successfully performed the enumeration.

It was as per that enumeration that the commission concluded that it could not make any recommendation for a suitable contiguous Hindi-majority area of villages that can be transferred to Haryana.

Following this the Venkataramiah Commission was set up with the same purpose, and Pradhan represented the Central Government in the hearings of the commission.

That commission too could not come up with a solution in time because of a last-minute change of plan by the Bhajan Lal government.

To counter Bhajan Lal's opposition to the commission, he was replaced as Chief Minister by Bansi Lal who agreed to the commission's award.

Following this the Desai Commission was set up to complete the previous commission's work in 24 hours.

Pradhan briefed the commission on the work done by the previous commissions, and provided it with records and figures available with the Home Ministry.

However the commission could not complete its work as its term was extended at the behest of Punjab.

Chandigarh is still a Union Territory shared as a joint capital by the states of Punjab and Haryana.

In December 2008, he was appointed to lead a two-man panel to investigate the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

He died due to age-related ailments on July 31, 2020, aged 92.