Hardeep S. Puri

Hardeep S. Puri excelled in academics, student politics and debating at Delhi University as a student, and went on to spend a year as a lecturer at one of the university’s colleges. He then had a distinguished four-decade career in diplomacy, spanning the bilateral and multilateral arena, and held ambassadorial posts in London and Brasilia, and as India’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in both Geneva (2002–05) and New York (2009–13). He is one of the few Indians to have presided over the United Nations Security Council and the first to have chaired its Counter Terrorism Committee. He served as senior vice president at the New York-based International Peace Institute; secretary general of the Independent Commission on Multilateralism in New York; and chairman, Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS). He has been a member of the Council of Ministers since September 2017 and a Cabinet member of the Government of India since July 2019. He is the author of Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos (2016); Delusional Politics: Back to the Future (2019); and Separating the Wheat from the Chaff: Decoding Dominant Narratives (2019).